Youjoung Kim

YOUJOUNG KIM, then a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, was awarded funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Law and State-Surveillance of Kinship: Bureaucratic Procedures of Jeju 4.3 Incident Special Act in South Korea,” supervised by Dr. Clara Han. This twelve-month ethnographic research was undertaken in South Korea (Jeju and Seoul) and Japan (Osaka) to examine whether the bureaucratic technologies of state administration deployed in the institutional apparatus of victimhood have the effect of reanimating state surveillance of kinship. For the primary data collection, this research employed archival research, introductory/semi-structured interviews, and participant observation through repeated visits over time with interlocutors who have suffered the deaths of intimate kin during the violence of Jeju 4.3. The research method privileged close documentation of how people navigated the state decision on their victimhood in the kin network and how they negotiated with one another over kinship obligations to the dead while managing familial tensions among the living kin. Through this approach, this research explored: 1) the bureaucratic procedures that are used to adjudicate cases that establish the legal status of victims and bereaved family members; 2) the ways in which the descendants of the people killed in the massacres mobilize evidence and negotiate among dispersed kin about decisions to petition for victim status or to appeal when such status is denied; 3) the ways in which ritual practices bear the imprint of the state’s decision to grant or deny victimhood.