“In Ashes, Patriots Return Home”: The Transnational Lives and Deaths of South Korean Diasporic Cremains

• In Event: The Transnational Lives of Dead Bodies (Co-sponsored by Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section)

Abstract

Focusing on the transnational circuits linking South Korea and the Korean American diaspora, this paper explores the returning of human ashes (cremains) as practices that unsettle and renegotiate transnational boundaries and ties. Based on qualitative interviews, ethnography and auto-ethnography, it examines how rites of return reveal and reconfigure the transnational “hauntings” of Confucian traditions of filial piety, shamanistic practices of ancestor worship, Buddhist understandings of rebirth, and Weberian understandings of the “Protestant ethic” and capitalist values. This study also also shows the gendered labor, class resources and constructions of race, ethnicity and nationality that shape the emotional and embodied management of transnational familial ties, as well as nationalist constructions of diasporic subjects as simultaneously “patriots” and “traitors,” that are invoked through the transnational lives and afterlives of human ashes.

Author

• Miliann Kang, University of Massachusetts, Amherst