The Informal Life Politics of Community-based Organic Farming Movements in South Korea

This thesis presents the history of the organic farming movement in South Korea as an example that shows the significance of community as an alternative polity. The key questions I examine in the thesis are: In what contexts did organic farming become political? How has politics been defined and practiced in the organic farming movement? To explore these questions, I focus on the history of two of the most important organic farming movement groups in South Korea: Chongnonghoe, an organic farming movement group created in 1976, and Hansalim, the first organic cooperative, created in 1986. Chongnonghoe started organic farming as a social movement based on self-sufficient farming communities autonomous from the military government's Green Revolution project in the 1970s, and Hansalim expanded the movement by introducing consumer-supported agriculture (CSA) to deal with the decline of rural communities and the liberalisation of the food system in the 1980s. By examining the origins and the ideological aspects of the communal tradition in the organic farming movement, I argue that organic farming is a community-based social movement embedded in the tradition of community as an alternative space. I show how organic farming communities serve as alternative spaces - spaces of living politics (or informal life politics) where people enact communal self-help to solve the challenges of their livelihood by themselves. For Chongnonghoe, this communal space took the form of self-sufficient farms inspired by the Danish-style rural movement of the 1920s, in which Korean Christian nationalists endeavoured to build autonomous communities under Japanese colonial rule. In the case of Hansalim, the 'urban-rural community' of consumers and organic farmers presented community as an alternative within the capitalist social formation. By showing the vibrancy of small-scale communities as alternative polities in the organic farming movement, I demonstrate the resilience of such communities as sites of living politics, which repeatedly emerges and fades as people strive to deal with challenges caused by the dominance of the nation-state and the capitalist market. This work on the history of the organic farming movement expands the scope of religious and social movement history in rural Korea, and opens new perspectives for exploring the significant social changes in Korean society achieved by people's small-scale but widespread communal efforts