Jueun Lee

Over the past decade, South Korea has seen a rapid increase in the number of dead bodies that are labelled muyŏn’go—a combination of mu (no) and yŏn’go (relation), rendering the dead “relationless.” In the face of this phenomenon, this project asks two central questions. What does it mean to be relationless in death? How and why do certain bodies get classified as such? Rather than taking the state of relationlessness for granted, this project examines the deeply unequal processes in which dead bodies are categorized in terms of social relations. Through a twelve-month ethnographic fieldwork at a muyŏn’go funeral-support organization in Seoul, the project illuminates how death becomes a crucial moment in which relations are required to be made explicit despite their actual messiness, and how the category of muyŏn’go itself becomes a site of struggle in which different notions of relatedness compete. I propose that posthumous relationlessness in Korea has less to do with the actual absence of social relations per se, but more to do with the institutionalized biases in the ways relations are required to be maintained and made legible by the state after death—namely, the political processes of relating and unrelating dead bodies.