Heonik kwon biography for kids
Office hours for Professor Heonik Kwon
We are pleased to announce Korean Studies Programme’s Honorary Visiting Professor, Professor Heonik Kwon’s visit this month. With a generous donation from the YWF Foundation, we are able to host Professor Kwon for two weeks. In addition to his teaching activities for this scheme, Professor Kwon will hold open office hours for the Faculty of Arts members and students.
Office: Rm 5.37, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU Centennial Campus.
Date and Time: March 9 (Thur), 15:30-17:20March 10 (Fri), 15:30-17:20March 14 (Tue), 10:30-12:30, 15:30-17:20March 15 (Wed), 10:30-12:30.
Please feel free to stop by in above slots. Below is a short bio of Professor Kwon:
Heonik Kwon is a Senior Research Fellow in Social Science and Distinguished Professor of Social Anthropology, Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He is also part of the Mega-Asia research group at Seoul National University Asia Center. A Fellow of the British Academy, Kwon’s prize-winning previous books include: Ghosts of War in Vietnam (2008), The Other Cold War (2010), and After the Korean War: An Intimate History (2020). His new book is Spirit Power: Politics and Religion in Korea’s American Century (2022, co-authored with Jun Hwan Park).
Kwon grew up in the neighborhood of Camp Walker, one of the United States military bases in South Korea, which was a Japanese air base before 1945. Long interested in everyday life in socialist societies and how the Cold War affected intimate human relations, he has conducted fieldwork both in a small-scale indigenous society (among nomadic reindeer hunter-herders in Far East Siberia, during the last years of the Soviet order) and in sites of large-scale historical upheavals (such as the post-war central Vietnam). More recently, his research has concentrated on memories of the Korean War.
If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Kim, Su Yun (suyunkim@hku.hk).
Latest Audio
time: 13.30 Finnish, 11.30 UK, 18.30 Beijing time, 12 October 2023. Online at zoom, meeting id: 641 887 4740, password: 2023. For those in Rovaniemi: join us in the BOREALIS meeting room on the top floor of the Arctic Centre
We define the Arctic broadly of course, but usually not as broad as reaching all the way down to the Korean Peninsula. But today is an exception, because the speaker is Heonik Kwon – a Cambridge anthropologist born in Korea. Some of us working in the Arctic have got to know through his 1993 Phd from Anthropology in Cambridge “Maps and Actions. Nomadic and Sedentary Space in a Siberian Reindeer Farm”. His work on “The Saddle and the Sledge” focusing on Orochen hunting spirituality and the notion of wild and domestic reindeer. Later he moved on engage with theories of perspectivism and reviewed such currents in anthropological writing starting from Leach, Evans-Pritchard and Mauss.
In today’s lecture he turns to spirituality and fortune-telling in North Korea (at least here we have “north” in the name, as Tim Ingold has once argued “the North is everywhere”). His lecture is organised online today by our former Cambridge colleague Kostas Zorbas, nowadays at Changong University in China, jointly with Prof. Okpyo Moon, a notable anthropologist of Seoul National University.
Here is the abstract of the talk: North Korea is sometimes called a religion-less society, unique in the world. Although there might be certain truth to this argument, especially if considered in the sphere of institutional religions, it also ignores religious experience found at the subaltern level or what is referred to as popular religion in the existing scholarship. This lecture challenges the argument. It will explore the phenomenon of sinjŏm or spirit fortune-telling that today has become an intimate part of everyday life among many North Koreans. Extremely popular at the grassroots lev Heonik Kwon is a Senior Research Fellow in Social Science and Professor of Social Anthropology, Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Born in Seoul, I spent most of my childhood in Daegu in close vicinity to one of the US Eighth Army bases existing in South Korea, Camp Henry. Later I lived and worked in the United States, former Soviet Russia and Vietnam. Within our project team, I am happy to work with an expanding group of eminent and likeminded international scholars from diverse disciplinary and personal backgrounds, but also to be part of a same-age group, together with four other project members, who were all born in the lunar Year of the Tiger, 1962. Some of us in this group take it as something akin to a question of destiny that we have ended up under the same roof of Korean War studies (this war, in fact, broke out in the previous Tiger Year, 1950) and with a shared hope to go beyond the enduring legacy of this painfully formative event of the early Cold War. Whereas my researches are primarily about memories of war in intimate domains, I am keen to learn from innovative studies in international and world history. I am interested in the very concept of the Cold War and in Cold War history as an intellectual question. However, I also take great interest in opening up new horizons of empirical research such as the environmental history of the Cold War and post-Cold War in regional and global contexts. I am trained as an anthropologist, having done fieldwork in a small nomadic community in indigenous Siberia and in villages of central Vietnam before I joined the Korean War studies. I am currently Senior Research Fellow in Social Science and Distinguished Research Professor of Social Anthropology at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and previously taught anthropology at the London School of Economics. I served as an external advisor to the Army of the Republic of Korea for its forensic anthropological taskforce as well as to South Korea̵ .