Worldly ecologies: Landscape, history, and environmental politics on Jeju Island

Shin, Jeongsu

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121268 Copy

Description

Title

Worldly ecologies: Landscape, history, and environmental politics on Jeju Island

Author(s)

Shin, Jeongsu

Issue Date

2023-07-17

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Orta, Andrew

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Orta, Andrew

Committee Member(s)

• Greenberg, Jessica R
• Moodie, Ellen
• Govindrajan, Radhika
• Kim, Eleana

Department of Study

Anthropology

Discipline

Anthropology

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

Human-Nature Relations, Place-making, Historical Narratives, Environment Anthropology, Multispecies Ethnography, East Asian Studies

Abstract

My doctoral dissertation, titled Worldly Ecologies: Landscape, History, and Environmental Politics on Jeju Island, examines the politics of intersectional ecology through ethnographic research with scientists, environmental activists, government officials, and natives of Jeju Island, located along Korea’s far-southern periphery. Over the past thirty years, Jeju Island has been a site of intense contests between development efforts aimed at establishing Jeju as the “Hawai’i of Asia” and a global free economic zone, and environmentalists dedicated to preserving the island’s “endangered” native culture and natural environment. I examine how Jeju Islanders engage with environmental conservationists and the ecological concepts of relatedness, endemism, and uniqueness as they seek to preserve and salvage the island’s indigeneity in the face of endangerment. My research addresses the following three questions: 1) How have contemporary political debates and research about Jeju Island’s ecology shaped islanders’ sense of identity and their experiences of the Jeju landscape? 2) How does the contemporary ecology of Jeju Island reflect the intertwined world-making of human and nonhuman agencies through Jeju’s complex position at the periphery of the Korean nation yet at the center of a long history of imperial, colonial, and global economic and political developments? 3) What does the case of Jeju tell us about the global circulation of policies and practices of environmental care and stewardship? By answering these questions, my study examines models and practices for environmental stewardship that interweaves contradictory needs, scales, and experiences. In doing so, my study follows Jeju Islanders’ expressions of cultural identity and historical consciousness, through which they attend to the landscapes as historical archives bearing traces of colonialism, massacres, and globalization. My dissertation builds on scholarship in environmental anthropology and humanistic studies of the environment, focusing on the rubrics of landscape and history. As scholars have pointed out, every landscape is made and unmade in the conjunctures of human and nonhuman trajectories (Cronon 1992; Govindrajan 2018, Kosek 2006; Olwig 1984, 2019; Raffles 2002; Scott 2008; Tsing 2015, 2017). In this vein, natural landscapes are rediscovered as social landscapes that embody alternative histories, memories, and cultural specificity (Gordillo 2014; Mathews 2018; Ogden 2011; Stoetzer 2018; Stoler 2013; Trouillot 2001, 2003; Tsing 2005;). By engaging with ethnographies of multispecies world-making, my research examines how communities mobilize history and shape a politics of justice and an ethics of care, in coordination with their environment, as they seek to identify an ideal Jejuness fixed in time and space. Based on two summers of preliminary fieldwork (2014 and 2015), 24 months of intensive ethnographic research (2016-2018), additional follow-up research (summer and winter of 2019 and summer of 2022), my study chronicles how Jeju Islanders work to secure the future of Jeju Island’s indigenous ecological legacy by caring for endemic and rare species and the indigenous landscapes. During field research, I was immersed in the lives of Jeju scientists, officials, villagers, and environmental conservationists who have been caught up in an intense contest between development and environmentalism over the past thirty years. By drawing on anthropology, multispecies ethnography, political ecology, East Asian history, and feminist science and technology studies, my research describes how people on the island recollect their past by nurturing intimacy with their natural environment and landscape. It also addresses how Jeju Islanders try to secure the future of Jeju Island’s indigeneity by caring for rare endemic species and Jejuesque indigenous landscapes at the nation’s periphery. In doing so, I argue that Jeju ontology, as a multispecies affair, is a profoundly political, social, and historically specific response to shared experiences of exploitation and displacement. Ultimately, I understand environmentalism on Jeju Island as a discursive expression of their desire to decolonize Jeju Island.

Graduation Semester

2023-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Jeongsu Shin

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