In this talk, anthropologist Eleana Kim discusses her fieldwork in the Korean Demilitarized Zone, which has often been referred to as the “most heavily militarized border in the world.” The unresolved war between the two Koreas has been ongoing since the formal end of the Korean War in 1953. For more than 70 years, the zone has been a de facto protected area, off limits to human habitation, and is now celebrated as a site of rare biodiversity. This talk complicates the conventional narrative about the DMZ that frequently frames its nature as an unexpected outcome of war and discusses what we can learn from a closer look at its actually existing ecologies and the people who study them. Rather than the symbolic narrative of an accidental sanctuary, Kim shows instead the importance of recognizing its “nature" as materially and ecologically vulnerable to the effects of militarization, capitalism, and climate change.

Reception to follow. This event is in conjunction with the “How We Rebuild” exhibition on display through Dec. 19. This exhibit is a program of ExhibitsUSA, a national division of Mid-America Arts Alliance and The National Endowment for the Arts.

Eleana Kim is a sociocultural anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine. She specializes in kinship, human/nonhuman ecologies, migration, and the senses, with a regional focus on contemporary South Korea. She is the author of two award-winning books, Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoption and the Politics of Belonging (2010) and Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the Korean DMZ (2022), both of which were published by Duke University Press. She is also the co-editor, with environmental historians David Fedman and Albert Park, of Forces of Nature: New Perspectives on Korean Environments (Cornell University Press, 2023). She teaches courses on anthropological theory, kinship, migration, transnational Korea, and the senses.