Making Peace With Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the Korean DMZ by Eleana Kim's (review)

Abstract

E Kim’s Making Peace With Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the Korean DMZ (2022) explores what it means, conceptually and practically, to exist peacefully in a more-than-human world. While Kim’s pursuit of this question is profoundly grounded in the specificities of her fieldsite– the citizen-habitable ecologies south of the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)–her analysis speaks to circumstances well-beyond the Korean Peninsula and informs many timely debates across the fields of anthropology, science and technology studies, and environmental humanities. More specifically, it is a must read for those interested in the topics of territoriality, militarization, political ecology, multispecies ethnography, infrastructure, the Anthropocene, and a growing literature that emphasizes the role of nature and environmentalism in South Korean political imaginaries. Making Peace With Nature begins with what many within and beyond the Korean peninsula find to be a profound paradox: despite being one of the most heavily fortified and militarized spaces in the world, the Korean DMZ has become a site of ecological flourishment and home to a plethora of globally significant biodiversity. While Kim admits that she herself was inspired, at least in part, to conduct ethnographic fieldwork surrounding the DMZ due to intrigue associated with this paradox, her encounters with more-than-human life throughout this region lay bare both the intellectual foreclosures and physical harms associated with such framing. At its core, Kim argues, the force of this alleged paradox rests upon an ahistorical logic that holds two ostensibly universal categories in productive and harmonious tension, namely, ecology and war, which Kim further glosses as the foundational anthropological categories of nature and culture. In this way, beyond merely marking the physical extents of North and South Korea, Kim shows that the DMZ, in its myriad imagined and