The Formation and Practice of Local Knowledge in Ascribing Meaning to Mass Killing : Records of a Patrilineal Descent Group of Civilian Deaths and Missing Persons Related to the Jeju April 3 Events

<p>Among societies that are the focus of modern anthropological fieldwork, there exists an unprecedented experience of dramatic catastrophic change. Formerly, small societies formed through isolation and autonomy at the rims of larger nation-states are famous for often having directly experienced civil war, civil insurrection, and religious and ethnic conflict, and have even been subject to large-scale massacres and systematic human rights violations. For modern anthropologists doing fieldwork in such societies, it is probably impossible to pursue research without developing any connection to the experiences of the societies and the people that live in them, which have been subject to such destructive and unreasonable massacres. Modern anthropological activity is deeply involved with an awareness of the problems of how to approach such experiences, as well as the restoration of usurped rights and violated justice, and the healing of and the formation of compromise within such a shattered society. Making use of genealogical records for the civilian deaths and missing persons related to the massacre, this paper aims to express the tragedy and memory that close relatives experienced through the provision of social and cultural significance by those who experienced severe, politically violent conflict. It also aims to consider how those people devised means and were resourceful in overcoming state authority arising within that process, and the conflict with it. As far as that meaning is concerned, I wish to focus on those exploring the possibility of a recovery of the shattered community and of its recreation, particularly on the actions of a single generation of the bereaved families. I do that for the sake of directly looking at the practical activities of those attempting to reposition the deaths of their relatives in a way allowing them to sense usefulness in their existence, while alternatively cooperating and resisting the great power extending from above, which attempts to reinterpret the many deaths for the legitimacy of the state. This paper thus studies that theme, using as a resource the April 3 events occurring on Jeju Island, a remote island off the Korean peninsula, amidst the process of Korea's having been liberated from colonialism, only to be immediately thrust into the Cold War and then finally to be divided in two. More specifically, using as actual examples the meaning ascribed to the deaths by blood relatives, I will examine the records of deaths and missing persons as recorded in their removals from census records (jejeokdeungbon), genealogy books (jokbo), and grave inscriptions (myobi) collected through my fieldwork. Those media do not stop at a historical description of a single family; rather, I intend to examine them from the viewpoint of the meaning ascribed to the deaths as written by a single generation of bereaved families, from a personal perspective, as part of their postmortem management. As a result of that analysis, discrepancies can be identified in the consistency of the death records among the removals from census records, genealogy books, and grave inscriptions of civilian deaths during the Jeju April 3 events. In the first place, the following characteristics can be read from the census records. First, those people are noted as"deceased"in the records, through the filing of death registrations regarding missing persons. Second, the notation of the date and time of death in the census records, regardless of whether the person was confirmed alive or not, dissembles that there was no relationship with past events. Nearly all the dates and times of death in Table 1 include dates and times that attempt to avoid those events (officially, from March 1, 1947, to September 21, 1954), and in particular the period in which the massacres were concentrated, caused by the strongly repressive strategies of the South Korean government</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>