Drugs and Political Subjecthood
Dangerous Delights: Drugs and the Politics of Smoking in Korea
The inspiration for my second project emerged while I was writing the dissertation chapter on the memorialization and rehabilitation of Im Kyǒngǒp, a general who served during the Manchu invasions of Korea. A very strange murder occurred in a Seoul tobacco shop where a storyteller was performing the Tale of Im Kyŏngŏp about a half-century after the general’s disgraceful death. An unnamed audience member, swept away by the storyteller’s performance as the Tale’s villain, grabbed a large tobacco knife and hacked him to death.
Curiosity about the setting led to further questions: who were the clientele in an urban tobacco shop? Were these shops like teahouses, serving as ‘third space’ social spaces for leisurely consumption and, possibly, political discourse? And what exactly was the cultural significance of smoking and how was this practice socially bounded?
Tobacco is a compelling subject of scholarship in Korean history for the following reasons: a) its sheer ubiquity in late Chosŏn Korea, and b) the research window that it offers as a recognizably foreign and novel good that became omnipresent within a generation. Using four types of primary sources (visual representations, literati essays, smoking material culture (e.g. pipes), government documents), the first half of the project reads the development of connoisseurship and the construction of hierarchies of consumption in order to examine how Chosŏn people navigated shifting status boundaries.
Ultimately, my work is shaped by the need to make certain interventions in the Korean studies field, and so, it emphasizes a reorientation in how we approach Chosŏn status (often on hereditary/legalistic lines: chungin, yangban, nobi, etc.). Hence, this project explores how particular identity differences were privileged and reproduced in the production and consumption of commodities. For instance: how might an urban woman exhibit her understanding of her more sophisticated social position through a particular tobacco practice, and how could that same act blur the boundaries that yangban men were seeking to map onto this novel consumption?
Tobacco is the unifying thread in this project, but I contextualize the curating of tobacco practice against two bodies of literature—first, a larger premodern tradition of alcohol connoisseurship, and secondly, the regulatory discourse concerning opium at the turn of the 20th century. In modern parlance, these are all psychoactive substances; in the Chosŏn period, critics alternately discouraged and encouraged the consumption of these goods as they were perceived as valuable medicines, social lubricants, appetite enhancers, and sometimes, study aids.
Dangerous Delights: Drinking, Smoking, and ‘Disreputable’ Consumption in Korea is a six-chapter book. Like my earlier work, this project subverts the artificial epistemic turn-of-the-century premodern/modern divide in the historiography of Korea. Hence, the second half of this work is dedicated to a) examining the continuities and discontinuities in comparing Chosŏn, colonial, and postwar state monopolies of psychoactive substances, b) the nexus of medicalization, addiction, and governmentality, as well as c) the contradictions in “patriotic smoking” and recent anti-tobacco public health initiatives.
Two rounds of externally funded international research were conducted in 2011, 2012; three rounds of domestic research at the Harvard-Yenching Library and the Library of Congress were completed in the same period. A draft of “’One Mind,’ One People under Nicotine” and other articles/chapters are available at the "Writing" menu link.
A smoking tiger is a common motif in Chosǒn art. "When tigers used to smoke" is a euphemism for "long, long ago."