Better Life, Better Nature: The Politics of Ethical Interaction in a Korean Buddhist Return-to-the-Farm Village

Abstract

My dissertation project explores the ethical politics in a Buddhist return-to-the-farm village in South Korea, where diverse sociopolitical perspectives clash in everyday interaction. After the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, a local Buddhist temple initiated a return-to-the-farm movement as a critique towards capitalistic hierarchy and destruction. Drawing on the Buddhist notion of interrelatedness among all sentient beings, the Buddhist temple provided philosophical foundation as well as lands for organic farming. In their pursuit of egalitarian ideals, many educated urbanites who are politically progressive have migrated to the village, finding affinity between their political stance and Buddhist ideology. While these newcomers migrated to the village for an alternative way of life, they didn’t move into a social vacuum but entered another social world where local residents had cultivated their own norms. The local elders who have been marginalized in the national developmental scheme remain politically conservative, seeking capitalistic profits and emphasizing kin-based hierarchy. My project asks, how do these diverse groups of people negotiate their differences and get to live together in the same village? The two groups’ different stances are practiced through their ways of speaking and ways of farming. While locals address one another drawing on extended kin terms and use chemicals for farming, newcomers come up with more egalitarian ways to address one another and practice organic farming. Locals criticize newcomers as not respecting local traditions and not taking care of agricultural fields so that weed seeds would be blown to locals’ fields. On the other hand, newcomers criticize locals as not democratic and not taking care of the earth in global crisis. In other words, the return-to-the-farm village became a dynamic locus where different ideas about a “better life” and “better nature” are proposed and challenge one another. However, as they live and farm next to one another, they get to understand others’ contexts and learn to appropriate others’ perspectives. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in the return-to-the-farm village from 2018 to 2020, I examine how different groups of villagers navigate their ethical boundaries and learn to live together, through which they cultivate ethical awareness beyond their own. By learning to see one’s own ethics from the other’s ethical perspectives, they cultivate meta-ethics through everyday interaction. By acknowledging the other as meaningful interlocutors, they learn to engage the lives of different others. As such, my ethnography presents ethical creativity and possibility through which diverse perspectives co-exist.