Politics of Geumgansan Tourism : Sovereignty in Contestation

Abstract

Focusing on the role of Geumgangsan tourism in North and South Korean relations, this paper attempts to test a widely accepted belief that tourism contributes to peace and reconciliation among nations, specifically, peace and reconciliation of the Korean peninsula. I will show that what many tourism researchers say about tourism as a diplomatic barometer of the closeness and affinity among nations is just one side of the story. In fact, tourism in international diplomatic relations is an arena of contestation and cooperation where different states compete, negotiate, exchange, manipulate, and maneuver cultural meanings and representations to find its place in the complex and changing international political order. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze how divided states, North and South Koreas, use the structure of tourist control found in Geumgangsan tourism to fight over the nature of the nation in an attempt to reposition each other’s existence as sovereign states in the transitional post Cold War period. This study is an attempt to engage in political anthropology of tourism which considers tourism as a complex and multi-layered process or practice of culture contact that influences much broader social processes that bring about social, cultural, and political changes in both host and guest societies. Specifically, this paper focuses on tourism’s role in the process of coherence building carried out by a dual political organization, one nation divided into two competing states. The very fact that two rival states are engaged in the process of redefining the constitution of its meaningful subjects, one nation or people, reveals a contradictory relation of contestation and cooperation. Using the ethnographic data I collected during my doctoral field work in 2003-2004, I attempt to explain how divided states, in a framework of tourism, articulate their own sovereignties through exercising control over the territory and the tourists. The discussion begins with an investigation of the political and historical background of Geumgangsan tourism and its politico-cultural significance; it then analyzes the structure of tourist control where the principle of territorial sovereignty is most vulnerable, therefore frequently violated and at the same time most transparently asserted as necessary. In Guemgangsan tourism, the contestation of sovereignty over the tourists and site is carried out in two levels of tourist control; institutional and practical.