The Everyday Lives of North Koreans

책 소개

Studies Series 09-03 조정아 외 The economic crisis endured by North Koreans in the mid-1990s was a major event that shook their lives to the very core. Since then, North Koreans have turned to a variety of new survival strategies in order to accommodate the results of the crises - the extraordinary occurrences of famine, poverty, and threats to their safety - into their everyday lives. The crisis resulted in an absence of the state, which was filled by the market. With this, a new market spontaneously developed and emerged, whereby North Koreans carried out productive activities in order to maintain their livelihood. Furthermore, the ways and methods of eating, dressing, living, and resting, as well as the people’s relationships to the state, to their families, and to their neighbors, along with their habits of thinking, deciding, and communicating, all underwent a major overhaul. The changes experienced by the North Koreans in their everyday lives, which have been subsequently interpreted, enlarged, and transformed by the people, are directly connected to the changes in North Korea’s larger state system and structure. Action and structure meet in the things we do in our everyday lives. Structural conditions, which define the actions of individuals, operate in our everyday world, and it is this everyday world where individuals interpret the institutions and rules that both control our actions and transform them, through the interaction of compromise and conflict. In this process, actors are not just subordinate to the structure. They appropriate their everyday world in their own way. Micro-power exists in our everyday lives and, at the same time, individuals can confront this power and retaliate with their own form of micro-resistance. The subject does not remain inactive or isolated in the realm of everyday life. Rather, the tension and irony of dominance and resistance are represented in this sphere. In this way, the everyday world is where the micro conditions that allow structure to be reproduced and transformed are put in place. To take a holistic look at North Korean society, which has been undergoing changes recently, it is necessary to look at more than just the political discourse or changes in North Korea’s systems; it is also important to focus on the “actual lives” of the people. By reconstructing the actual experiences of the North Koreans and by understanding the interaction of political power and dominant relations in the realm of actual reality, we can understand the essence of the dynamic changes seen in North Korean society today, which seem trapped by static ideological discourse or political power.

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