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NORTH KOREA: Beyond Charismatic Politics. Asia/Pacific/Perspectives. By Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2012. xii, 219 pp. (B&W illus.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0- 7425-5679-9.
More than fifty years after its foundation, North Korea continues to command the attention of scholars and elude current paradigms and theories of social development. Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung's North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics endeavours to call some of these paradigms into question through an engaging analysis of the country's changing socio-political system. Drawing on Max Weber's notion of charismatic authority, the two anthropologists set out to resolve why the North Korean case of charismatic revolutionary rule seems to defy the Weberian model, which assigns it a role of historical ephemerality.
The study is largely concerned with the issue of what Weber calls routinization of political charisma and hereditary transfer of personal charismatic authority from one political leader to another. In trying to understand how this process played out in the North Korean scenario, the authors employ Clifford Geertz's concept of the theatre state, originally applied to the analysis of a traditional polity, in their effort to extend it to modern revolutionary states such as North Korea. In fact, Kwon and Chung are following in the steps of Wada Haruki, who was the first to apply Geertz's notion of the theatre state to North Korea. Our authors, however, emphasize that the idea must be situated "more squarely in the context of what Weber calls conflicts between personal and hereditary charisma" in order to grasp its full implications for...