An Anthropological Exploration of Totalitarianism

爱荷华州大学人类学教授索尼娅·梁将研究极权主义背景下文化和人格是如何发展和维持的。梁博士在朝鲜的背景下探讨了这一点，朝鲜是世界上最封闭的极权主义政权之一。本研究的三个具体目标是：（1）将朝鲜置于现有人类学知识的背景下;（2）使朝鲜人民与领导人之间的联系机制变得可理解;（3）探索朝鲜的主体概念，重点是自我概念。本研究采用多语言、多媒体、混合方法，通过对朝鲜、日本、英国三种语言的书面和视听资料进行综合调查和分析，并结合对朝鲜难民的访谈。该项目将有助于人类学和更广泛的社会科学的极权主义的理解，通过探索文化逻辑，用于合理化和维持它在这些社会。 该项目有助于我们了解世界上我们所知甚少的一个地区，一个与美国有着半个多世纪敌对关系的核武器国家，它大大有助于改善国家安全。人类学中最著名的早期文化和人格研究是第二次世界大战期间对日本的分水岭研究，它在战争期间和战后对美国政府产生了巨大的影响。

Sonia Ryang, professor of anthropology in the University of Iowa, will undertake research on how culture and personality are developed and maintained in totalitarian contexts. Dr. Ryang explores this in the context of North Korea, one of the most reclusive totalitarian regimes in the world. Three specific aims are pursued in this research: (1) to place North Korea in the context of currently existing anthropological knowledge; (2) to render the mechanism that secures the connection between the people and the leader in North Korea intelligible; (3) to explore the concept of agency, with the focus on the concept of self, in North Korea. The research involves multi-lingual, multi-media, and mixed-method approach by comprehensively surveying and analyzing written and audio-visual materials in three languages of Korean, Japanese and English, combined with interviews with North Korean refugees. The project will contribute to anthropological and broader social scientific understandings of totalitarianism by exploring the cultural logics that are used to rationalize and sustain it within these societies. In contributing to our understanding of a part of the world that we know very little about, a nuclear-armed nation with whom the United States has had over a half-century of hostilities, the project contributes significantly to improving national security. The most famous of the early culture and personality studies in anthropology were watershed studies of Japan during World War II, which were enormously influential to the U.S. Government both during and after the war.