householding
householding
We think of “households” as somehow shut away from the world, the preserve of intimate relations and domesticity. We persist in thinking this way despite reams of evidence showing us that households are not self-contained; they are integrated with the rest of society. If the 2008 global housing crisis is any indication, people’s financial values and spending practices within their households may actually drive the global economy.
What if we were to take households as both open and shut to an outside? How do households show their openness in being vulnerable to state discipline and violence, and economic forces of dispossession? How do they show their quality of being shut, such as, through the way they coalesce to provision in the face of disruptive forces, to make strange places homely, or to domesticate wild memories of trauma? Are households in their shut mode isomorphic with the private sphere to which religion is said to have been relegated in secular states? Where do we find religious forces and figures, and moral values at play within households as both swirling around them and providing solace within them?
In this exploration on “householding” as a key term within the Universe of Terms, scholars of India and South Korea, with interests ranging from state violence to religious pilgrimage, examine how their interlocutors come together to “household” in times of disruption. Using the term as a verb puts emphasis on different aspects of the household than the usual one of provisioning, such as placating one’s ancestors or seeking to create model citizens, each of which provides a different perspective on how religiosity, spirituality, morality, and the normative are woven into our everyday.
Why India and South Korea: Contending postcolonialisms
It is curious that there isn’t much scholarship comparing the Indian subcontinent and the Korean peninsula. The oversight is more puzzling when one recounts that both regions have historically been crisscrossed by external forces, and have experienced colonialism and postcolonialism, and more dramatically, the twentieth century partition of its landmass into two antagonistic nation-states (India-Pakistan in the case of India, South Korea-North Korea in the case of Korea). The lack of comparative work on India and Korea may be due to a few factors. India fits more within the classic picture of colonialism, with Britain as a colonizing power located at a great distance from its colonies and with its colonial presence lasting two centuries. In contrast, Korea has historically been caught between numerous Japanese and Chinese empires, with its experiences with these contending powers assimilated within the scope of regional politics in world history accounts. South Korea’s experience of colonialism in a form like British colonial rule in India comes later in its history through US occupation and was relatively short-lived. This experience has also been most often assimilated within the history of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Furthermore, India and South Korea exist in different parts of the psychic map of the world, with India consigned to the status of a large developing nation within the Global South, while South Korea is considered a part of the developed Global North, even though both exist within the same region of the world and share strong economic and political ties.
Here we might consider how racialization is differentially entangled with colonialism, with the white colonizer more amenable to the picture of colonialism, than those from the same region. Yet the history of Japanese colonization of Korea is replete with the racialization of Koreans as backward and in need of colonization for their greater racial betterment and societal good. In contrast China maintained more tributary relations with Korea, allowing it to retain its cultural identity and economic interests.
While there is great scope for Inter-Asian comparisons and connections between the two without having these be routed through the metropoles of London and Washington DC, in this introductory essay we focus only on the specific postcoloniality of each.
Postcolonialism in India is a much studied and theorized condition; its partition into India and Pakistan in 1947 is one of the most enduring topics within postcolonial studies. Partition, as this event is called in short, involved the large-scale transfer of populations between India and Pakistan, with Hindus and Sikhs leaving for India and Muslims for Pakistan. This was the occasion of tremendous violence on both sides, the severing and separation of families, and the emergence of hostile relations between the two governments, most often over areas left with nebulous borders by the British.
In contrast, postcolonialism is a more emergent topic within Korean studies. Scholars in this field are confronting the violence of not just Japanese imperialism, but the violent suppression of attempts at Korean independence carried out under the banner of anti-communism by the US occupying forces and their Korean counterparts. For instance, the uprising by Korean nationals in Jeju Island between 1947–1948 took place to protest the establishment of separate states in the South and North. In a blatant misrecognition of the demand for national self-determination, the US-supported First Republic of Korea violently put down this uprising, claiming it to be motivated by communists supported by China. This red hunt continued from 1947 to 1954. The causes and long term effects of Jeju Sasam, as the event of the uprising and its subsequent massacre is called, is one of the many urgent topics within the field of postcolonial studies in South Korea today.
While the partition of the Korean peninsula, entrenched by the Korean War (1950-1953), is being studied with an eye toward its multifarious causes, making it a less clear-cut story than that of the 1947 Partition of India, what is becoming clear is partition’s widespread impact upon the social fabric that continues into the present. This legacy endures through the remembrance of lives lost and how the outing, shaming, and persecution of those considered communists/collaborators/traitors in the twentieth century affected future generations. Postcolonialism in both contexts is about working through the legacies of the past that clings to the present in apparent and occluded ways.
“householding” in both contexts
In the work gathered here under the term “householding,” our collaborators advance the comparative study of postcolonialisms by offering stories of individuals, communities, and projects in India and South Korea, specifically at times of disruptions. The contributors explore how the past erupts or endures in the present, how the present is beset by old and new complications, and what constitutes the future from these vantages. At the same time, their focus on householding activities permits access to different dimensions of postcoloniality than that of official bequeathment alone, showing how each activity resonates at multiple registers—from the everyday, to the national and developmental, to the ritual and the mythological. We get a sense of myriad efforts at shaping people into moral subjects in the space of households; existing emotional, spiritual, and aesthetic reserves other than those of material assets and state power; and self-organization in relation to others and the creative re-habitation of the given.
householding