Description: Following his prizewinning studies of the Vietnam War, renowned anthropologist Heonik Kwon presents this ground-breaking study of the Korean War's enduring legacies seen through the realm of intimate human experience. Kwon boldly reclaims kinship as a vital category in historical and political enquiry and probes the grey zone between the modern and the traditional (and between the civil and the social) in the lived reality of Korea's civil war and the Cold War more broadly. With captivating historical detail and innovative conceptual frames, Kwon's moving, creative analysis provides fresh insights into the Korean conflict, civil war and reconciliation, history and memory and critical political theory.
Brief description: Heonik Kwon is Senior Research Fellow in Social Science and Professor of Anthropology at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the author of The Other Cold War (Cambridge, 2010), Ghosts of War in Vietnam (Cambridge, 2008) and After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (2006).
Review Quotes: '... After the Korean War stands as one of the most innovative treatments of the Korean War to appear in recent years ... It is Kwon's capacity to look at the Korean War in a way that also sheds light on some of the other horrors of the modern era that makes his work such a compelling and valuable contribution.' Gregg A. Brazinsky, Acta Koreana