The Other Cold War

Columbia Studies in International and Global History

by Heonik Kwon

In this conceptually bold project, Heonik Kwon uses anthropology to interrogate the cold war's cultural and historical narratives. Adopting a truly panoramic view of local politics and international events, he challenges the notion that the cold war was a global struggle fought uniformly around the world and that the end of the war marked a radical, universal rupture in modern history.

Incorporating comparative ethnographic study into a thorough analysis of the period, Kwon upends cherished ideas about the global and their hold on contemporary social science. His narrative describes the slow decomposition of a complex social and political order involving a number of local and culturally creative processes. While the nations of Europe and North America experienced the cold war as a time of "long peace," postcolonial nations entered a different reality altogether, characterized by vicious civil wars and other exceptional forms of violence. Arguing that these events should be integrated into any account of the era, Kwon captures the first sociocultural portrait of the cold war in all its subtlety and diversity.

Genres: Politics, History, Anthropology

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Professor Heonik Kwon received his PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. He is currently a senior research fellow at Trinity College in the University of Cambridge. Prior to his current appointment, Prof. Kwon taught at the London School of Economics and Edinburgh University. Prof. Kwon’s scholarship is primarily based in his training as an anthropologist, but his work has far-reaching implications for such disciplines history, sociology and political science. His doctoral research investigated hunter-gatherer societies in northern Sakhalin, and his subsequent research has looked at how people deal with the war and memory in Vietnam and the Koreas. This work uses ethnographic techniques to look at the rituals that war’s survivors use to deal with the aftermath of violence and loss. He has also done innovative work on the Cold War, subverting the grand ideological narrative that is familiar in the West and taking the perspective of the postcolonial nations, where local conditions led to a much different experience. He has also collaborated on work involving the role that art has played in sustaining the dynastic politics of North Korea. Prof. Kwon is currently working with scholars from the US, the UK and South Korea on a project entitled Beyond the Korean War. The goal of this interdisciplinary project is to re-conceptualise contemporary Korean history.

Prof. Kwon is a prolific writer with several prize-winning books to his credit, including After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai, for which he was awarded the 2008 Clifford Geertz prize, and Ghosts of War in Vietnam for which he received the 2009 George McT. Kahin Book Prize.

Reviews

[John Hansen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not one of my favorites. Reads like an historiographical essay on the Cold War, and is primarily theoretical. The takeaway is to account for the fact that the Cold War was a "hot" war in the conflicts that arose and/or were supported by the US and USSR, but I've never read a study on the Cold War that was so lifeless.

[!Tæmbuŝu]

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