Forgetting korean agency in the transnational cold war

Abstract

The transnational Cold War involved a host of knowledge projects linking the United States, Japan, South Korea, and sometimes other locations in a variety of complex ways. The argument of this chapter is that at several important moments over the course of this long history the participation of Korean actors in these projects evinced a tendency to be structurally forgotten. The causes of this occlusion were themselves multi-agentive; this chapter aims to document and explore dimensions of this “conspiracy of amnesia.” As a specific example illustrating this larger phenomenon, the chapter focuses on one of the more famous social science projects of the Korean War. In December 1950, during a dynamic phase of the conflict between the first and second North Korean occupations of Seoul and areas south, a team of social scientists under contract to the US Air Force’s Human Resources Research Institute was dispatched to Korea in order to study modalities of the (ostensible) “Sovietization” that had taken place in parts of South Korea temporarily under DPRK control. They were met by Korean helpers, “research assistants”—but the term belies the status of these members of the team who in private correspondence were also described as “the cream of [South] Korean social scientists.” A close reading of internal documents from this project reveals that this Korean participation contributed not only data and translation but aspects of the conceptual framing of the results in ways not fully acknowledged, an elision that had both contingent and strategic aspects.