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Sandra Fahy
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Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea (Contemporary Asia in the World) Paperback – December 18, 2018

by Sandra Fahy (Author)
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 5 ratings
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Marching Through Suffering is a deeply personal portrait of the ravages of famine and totalitarian politics in modern North Korea since the 1990s. Featuring interviews with more than thirty North Koreans who defected to Seoul and Tokyo, the book explores the subjective experience of the nation's famine and its citizens' social and psychological strategies for coping with the regime.

These oral testimonies show how ordinary North Koreans, from farmers and soldiers to students and diplomats, framed the mounting struggles and deaths surrounding them as the famine progressed. Following the development of the disaster, North Koreans deployed complex discursive strategies to rationalize the horror and hardship in their lives, practices that maintained citizens' loyalty to the regime during the famine and continue to sustain its rule today. Casting North Koreans as a diverse people with a vast capacity for adaptation rather than as a monolithic entity passively enduring oppression, Marching Through Suffering positions personal history as key to the interpretation of political violence.
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  1. Part of series
    Contemporary Asia in the World
  2. Print length
    272 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Columbia University Press
  5. Publication date
    December 18, 2018
  6. Dimensions
    5.5 x 0.7 x 8.5 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    0231171358
  8. ISBN-13
    978-0231171359
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Marching Through Suffering is a really moving book. It is partly the subject matter, to be sure, but it is also Sandra Fahy's sensitivity to what her subjects are saying and their psychological state. That is what ethnography should be doing for us. -- Stephan Haggard, University of California, San Diego

Sandra Fahy offers a unique, penetrating, and informative ethnography of one of the most opaque societies in modern history. Few scholars have sought to understand the humanity that survives, and sometimes thrives in its own way, beneath the oppressive state structure―an important contribution to the expert literature, yet accessible to the general reader. -- Victor Cha, Georgetown University

This book is an extraordinary contribution to the famine literature. Sandra Fahy's analysis of the North Korea famine draws extensively on her interviews with survivors, which gives this narrative a unique depth and credibility. These personal accounts lift the veil of secrecy and reveal North Koreans as real people with a healthily skeptical sense of humor, even in extreme adversity, not as mute shadow-puppets mindlessly manipulated by their dour leaders. No book I have ever read conveys the mundane horror of a famine so vividly, while retaining academic rigor and advancing our understanding of this famine's complex causes and consequences. -- Stephen Devereux, Institute of Development Studies, author of Theories of Famine and editor of The New Famines

Subtly and sensitively, the author examines how people tried to cope with and make sense of their lives as they ran out of food in a society where words such as famine and starvation were taboo. ― Times Literary Supplement

A rich study of coping, resilience, hope, loss, and transition. ― Human Rights Review

Sandra Fahy's, Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea, makes an original contribution to the literature on the 1990s famine in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. -- David Hawk ― Human Rights Quarterly

Sandra Fahy's fascinating work... achieves something of much depth and empirical utility to the scholar. ― Pacific Affairs

Fascinating... An important work that helps provide a far more nuanced view of the complexities of life in North Korea than that found in the media. ― CHOICE

What emerges is a people-centered story, a tale that empowers rather than victimizes. It is, the reviewers unequivocally conclude, a harrowing but powerful read. ― Sino NK

With its nuanced understanding of North Koreans and elegant prose, Fahy's work will certainly find a place on the syllabi of many future coures on North Korea. ― BAKS Papers

If you want to know why the human rights agenda matters, read this book and be reminded how complexly damaging state-led deprivation and oppression can be. ― Peterson Institute for International Economics

About the Author

Sandra Fahy is associate professor of anthropology at Sophia University in Tokyo. She is also the author of Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record (Columbia, 2019).

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Columbia University Press; Reprint edition (December 18, 2018)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0231171358
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0231171359
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 5 ratings

About the author

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Sandra Fahy

Sandra Fahy

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Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and the Graduate Program in Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo Japan.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
5 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

William R. Harrison
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2018
Verified Purchase
Insight into North Korean mind-set beyond what I have read or seen in any other publication or documentary.
One person found this helpful
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Ron L
3.0 out of 5 stars Needs an editor
Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2017
Verified Purchase
If you want to be informed regarding North Korea, “Marching though Suffering” is worth reading, focusing as it does on the famine rather than North Korea in general. But it is a strange book, seeming to wander between being a dissertation and some sort of Po-Mo examination of the issues at hand. And badly in need of an editor regardless.
As a dissertation rather than a book, the author wants to make sure the examiners get the point, so, as circus-tent evangelicals are wont to do, she tells us what she’s gonna tell us, then she tells us, and then she tells us what she told us.
Every subject is examined to the point where there is no meaningful aspect remaining unexamined and often enough the reader is presented with some aspects far beyond any meaningful connection to the subject. Are we reading for information or perhaps is the author trying to show she is capable of finding import where none others would? It doesn’t help in an answer to that question that the book is repetitive, both in simply failed proof-reading (pgs 151-152) and I lack of editorial supervision (Pg 185, Victor Cha). There are more examples…
But here are reasons I found to like the book:
Pg 57: There was an attempted coup, which, not surprisingly went nowhere. I did not know there was one.
Pg 66: “Intellectuals” were more often the victims of starvation as they didn’t wish to sully their hands in pursuit of filthy lucre, which tells you something about “intellectuals” in NK and possibly elsewhere.
Pg 77: China is seen as a wealthy nation.
Pg 89: The introduction of the concept of “performance speech”; that collection of lies and circumlocution which is required to exist in a hell-hole such as North Korea.
Pg 131: The Nork government “[failed] to provide a legal means of sustaining life”. This is one of the most important comments in the entire book: The NK government made starvation the only legal option to the population.
There are more and some quite as insightful such as the “legal means” or “performance speech” comments. But you can see the list above covers a bit more than half the book, and in between those (rare) insights, you are given (Pg 101) “The accounts point to a human need, regardless of conditions, to articulate observed incongruities and receive confirmation of what is observed”, which I’m pretty sure means folks are pleased when others agree with them.
On the same page, the reader finds:
“An active participation in ambiguous, rather than direct, forms of articulation that “affords the opportunity for realizing that an accepted pattern has no necessity” and that the “particular ordering of experience may be arbitrary and subjective.”
Unfortunately, there are far more of such comments. It makes for a difficult read.
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Jessica
4.0 out of 5 stars fantastic anecdotes and updated interviews
Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2016
Verified Purchase
Her argument is kinda hard to grasp because she's glosses over some of her main points so quickly! :((( But otherwise, fantastic anecdotes and updated interviews. Very good insight; definitely recommend!
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars A moving analysis of North Korea's famine
Reviewed in the United States on January 16, 2016
Much has been written about the economic and political debacle of the famine that may have killed up to one million North Koreans in the mid-nineties. Fahy's book brings us the voices of those who somehow managed to survive the ordeal. This is a notable achievement in itself, but Fahy also weaves together a philosophical/anthropological analysis of the the North Korean people's experience of the famine. Marching Through Suffering is also extremely well-written, with flourishes that stay in one's mind long after putting it down: "The art of knowing what not to know grew commonplace in North Korea."

Marching Through Suffering is highly recommended for scholars of North Korea, but also for those who want to understand what people are capable of in the face of incredible challenges.
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Top reviews from other countries

Markus Bell
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 1, 2016
Verified Purchase
excellent!
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