An Anthropological Exploration of Totalitarianism

爱荷华大学人类学教授索尼娅·杨将研究极权主义背景下文化和人格是如何发展和保持的。芮以世界上最与世隔绝的极权政权之一朝鲜为背景，探讨了这一点。这项研究追求三个具体目标：(1)将朝鲜置于现有人类学知识的背景下；(2)使保障朝鲜人民与领导人之间联系的机制变得易懂；(3)探索朝鲜的中介概念，重点是自我概念。研究采用多语言、多媒体、混合方法，通过对朝鲜语、日语和英语三种语言的书面和视听材料进行全面的调查和分析，并结合对朝鲜难民的访谈。该项目将通过探索在这些社会中使极权主义合理化和维持极权主义的文化逻辑，促进对极权主义的人类学和更广泛的社会科学理解。该项目有助于我们了解我们对世界上一个我们知之甚少的地区的了解，这个拥有核武器的国家与美国之间经历了半个多世纪的敌对行动，该项目大大有助于改善国家安全。人类学中最著名的早期文化和个性研究是关于二战期间日本的分水岭研究，这些研究在二战期间和战后对美国政府都产生了巨大的影响。

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.