Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (47 page)

The city partially subsidizes homeless shelters, which are run by about a hundred different welfare agencies connected to the city government. Although some civil groups volunteered to open shelters, the city did not fully address the difficulties that arose from the lack of experience of these groups with bureaucratic structures. For example, when Reverend Kang found a place for her shelter and needed to contract a yearly rent with the owner,
19
the city was not cooperative in providing the rental fee in the time that had been promised. Following the proper channels (
chŏlch’a
) of bureaucratic process would have resulted in six months of delay,
20
So Reverend Kang had to go to various levels of local governments to ask if they could assist with this problem. However, none of the officials in the city (
sich’ŏng
), district (
kuch’ŏng
),
and
ward (
tongsamuso
) offices was able to help. As Reverend Kang interpreted the situation:

I do not think that all of these city, district, and ward office officials had decided not to help us. But, unfortunately, the ward office managers, who best understood the situation we were in, did not have enough authority to exert control over this issue [
unsin ŭi p’ogi chopta
]. And the city officials who had the power just did not understand the difficulty. (Interview with Reverend Kang, spring 1998)

Although the city had invited civil activists to help manage homeless issues in the name of a “partnership between a GO and an NGO,” a liberal technology of social engineering, they were not necessarily equivalent in the power structure. Civil activists tended to experience more inconvenience than did governmental officials in this unprecedented working relationship, especially when civil activists became subjects of financing and auditing. The state’s administrative authority was not lessened despite its delegation of responsibility to civil agencies and the downsizing of the number of governmental employees as compared to the previous interventionist state regime. The various levels of government were, in a sense, contracting out homeless service provision while retaining control over these operations in a “flexibilization” of government.

In addition to difficulties occasioned by unequal power dynamics, Reverend Kang faced more fundamental barriers in making government officials understand the diverse needs of homeless women: For example, her concerns for women as mothers came into direct conflict with the maternalist policies of city officials. Homeless women who had to leave their children at home suffered from “mother-aches” (
emi pyŏng
).
21
They became even more psychologically distressed when they stayed together with homeless women who had their children with them. Reverend Kang asked city officials if she could run separate shelters for women who were alone and for those who had their children with them, either as two adjacent units in a building or through spatial segregation by room. However, the city did not allow her to do this; rather, it pathologized these women as members of the long-term homeless (
purangin
) undeserving of welfare benefits. She saw these women as proper mothers, but this conflicted with the views of city officials who viewed them as women who had left their children.

Reverend
Kang noted a further gendered impasse in the city officials’ understanding of homeless women’s needs. Their measure for determining how many homeless people should be assigned per shelter was inaccurate because they based this on the needs of healthy men who merely needed a place to sleep and eat when they returned to the shelter from a day at work.
22
Many homeless women also had a desire to work, but they needed to rest and recover their health first. They required a recovery and rehabilitation shelter (
chahwal/chaehwal shimpt’ŏ
) that could provide them with care appropriate to their needs.

Reverend Kang’s rationale was based on an understanding that most homeless women living a street life needed psychological care. They had strong egos and had lost the ability of expressing emotional feeling. They also needed specialized care for women’s reproductive health. Many had damaged reproductive systems from exposure to the cold while living on the street.
23
To motivate and prepare these women to work for a living, Reverend Kang recommended that the government provide coordinated services for psychological and physical recovery. In pursuit of this goal, she was able to draw on special funds available for homeless people by mobilizing governmental discourse of “rehabilitation” and “employability.”

On the one hand, Reverend Kang contested the workfare regime’s gendered valuation of employability and the negative effects of its maternalist biases. She advocated the provision of psychological services, recovery shelters, and education for children who were with their mothers in the shelters. On the other hand, her endorsement of “desire to work” resulted in excluding street life as an independent way of living. In pursuing governmental financial support for a recovery shelter, she inadvertently reproduced the ideology that homeless people can be supported only when they demonstrate their productive and reproductive value within the norm of the heterosexual family and a gendered division of labor.

Reverend Kang’s location of “proper” motherhood within the imaginary of a normative family institution converged with the broader social concern for family breakdown that intensified during the Asian Debt Crisis. Her family experience with a brother who had become schizophrenic after police torture sheds a light on both her personal itinerary in understanding the family as the primary welfare institution for South Korean individuals and its link to the historical context of developmental regimes. She agreed with the Korean welfare system, in which the family functions as the primary
institution
of responsibility for social and individual well-being (particularly psychological well-being, for which public awareness is very low). But, at the same time, she urged social support for individuals who cannot or do not want to rely on their families.

Reverend Kang’s reference to family is not necessarily contradictory to her aim of encouraging social accountability for individual well-being. Rather, it was symptomatic of liberal ideas among civil activists that burgeoned after the democraticization movement of 1987 and culminated in the social management of the Asian Debt Crisis. By relying so heavily on the ideal of a normative family institution as the foundation for social crisis management, she intensified the effects of neoliberal governmentality. She employed a discourse of crisis no less than did governmental officials as a device to orchestrate urgent social governing. These social agents, including civil activists as well as city officials who use crisis discourse for emergency social governing, are what I call crisis knowledge brokers.
24

Locating Myself

As a researcher working for the city government while also making it the object of ethnographic inquiry as a feminist anthropologist, in what ways might I also have been complicit with practices of liberal social governing? I was not a distanced producer of knowledge but actively involved in the making of social policy. I was both a state subject and a state agent: I received a workfare subsidy as a worker in the Public Works Program, and at the same time I was a state-sponsored researcher.

I first became interested in this problem when I observed that many unmarried women in their twenties and thirties who had lost their jobs during the Asian Debt Crisis did not get financial support from the government. When I approached government officials with a proposal to do this study, although they agreed on the need for more research on homelessness, they were reluctant to hire a new research team in a time of downsizing. They were both doubtful and scornful about my suggestion that a research team might be a part of a Public Works Program. They could not imagine that qualified researchers with academic degrees would agree to take on minimum-wage jobs, given the stigma attached to workers in this program. Nonetheless, I volunteered to be the first, and this was how I came to be
registered
in the state unemployment office under the new category: “unemployed person with higher education” (
kohaknŏk sirŏpcha
).

Throughout my research, I questioned (and continue to question) how to employ a critical perspective without reproducing the hegemonic ideology of the intellectual’s representational power over a disadvantaged group. How might intellectuals reinforce constructions of neoliberalism, even when it is their intention to deconstruct it? In attempting to redress the invisibility of homeless women in the eyes of social welfare workers, there is no guarantee that this would lead to positive consequences. Many homeless women I met in South Korea did not want to be exposed to public view, even though they were in great need of resources. What risks would I be taking in crossing the ethical boundaries between activist and academic modes of intellectual practice? Would I diminish my integrity as a critical thinker and actor, or was it an inevitable element of my integrity? In the realization that I am not outside a system of neoliberal social governing, at times I find that I am consciously complicit with macrolevel institutions. At another level, my pursuit of social justice must be held in balance with a need to keep my life manageable. I am unavoidably supporting through my practice the institutional administration of neoliberal social governing to which I belong (for example, in classrooms, departments, and universities).

Anthropological knowledge is critical for people’s ability to understand how their own fragmented liberal reasoning interacts with shifting political technologies related to governmental institutions. One final story about the temporary research team that I was working for and their reflections on the epistemological issues that arose in the application of ethnographic methods in nonacademic contexts is a good illustration of this. A research methods workshop was held in a corner of the Labor Policy Division office of Seoul City. Because the corner could not be easily seen from the outside, it was a hidden refuge and a safe space where we could talk freely.

One of the vivid memories that I have from that corner seminar was the moment I introduced the issue of the “native anthropologist” to address the problems of the dichotomy of objective and subjective positions for information gathering and the baggage of Enlightenment ideas of rationality. The team members, however, were much more interested in the dilemmas of the position of “native anthropologist” as it applied to their own lives in considering the limits of objective methodology. They were self-conscious that many of their friends from college would be suspicious of what they were
doing
in the state bureaucracy that had been historically the machinery of undemocratic state governance and oppressive actions against civil activism. The blurred position of “native anthropologist” reminded them of a critical question: whether their positions as semiofficial governmental researchers could positively affect the lives of the people they studied and the marginal groups among the unemployed, such as women, youth, the homeless, and those with disabilities. It was sometimes hard for them to separate themselves from the objects of their research because they themselves were unemployed working-class youth and/or women and, in some cases, living with disabilities.

Some of them made peace with their positions as state agents by focusing on the practical necessity of earning a living. Others attempted to assert their rights to be served by the state through being acknowledged as public works project workers. Nolja, who had long experience working in the Public Work Program, considered the team to be a rare politically strategic space to make some good changes in governmental policies on women’s unemployment or at least an independent space to create a communication route between governmental personnel and nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations, and, in particular, local grassroots groups:

In general, the meaning of the team for having created a new space for feminist policies seems to be waning; instead it seems that the primary meaning of the team is as a way of living for the individual. Because this team consists of “only young girls” [
ŏrin yŏjaaedŭl
], we are out of the authority loop for making policies. Nonetheless, we feel some rewards from doing this job. It is because we get more stubborn [
ogi
] for proving that we can do things despite the fact that we are young women [wearing a proud smile].
We are still enduring
—
we have not been beaten
[that is, either by the city officials or by the experts of SCCUP].

We are producing knowledge that will be used somewhere ultimately. Mr. To also cited our research content in his report to the subcommittee [SCYWU]. No matter how much he nags us, we know he uses our work often in his own. Although he does not treat us well, we have won this bureaucracy and office struggle as a result. In the future, I will be proud of recalling our work.
My strategy is subservience. . . . We shall see who ultimately wins. This strategy makes me feel like a tightrope walker, but still it is worthy because it creates a space for competition
. [Interview with Nolja, January 2000, my emphasis]

During
the second round of research on “Underemployed and Partially Self-Employed Young People,” our questioning of the boundary between researcher and “native” stirred the team members most. When they were in the field, they said, they were tempted to “go native” rather than maintaining a distance from their subjects as researchers.

Sometimes it was because their research subjects were the social group that they most identified with themselves (that is, underemployed or unemployed youth). Other times it was because their subjects were the subaltern working class poor (
minjung
) whom South Korean political activists have long considered to be the most exploited by the capitalist economy and suppressed by the military dictatorship. Team members tended to consider these people as most deserving of compensation and benefits from the society, and they felt guilty for not being able to help them more directly. However, when the team researched underemployed youth, middle-aged unemployed housewives, and runaway teen workers, they thought that paying more attention to these marginal groups among the unemployed addressed the need to diversify the category of “deserving” welfare citizenship.