2023, Vol.56, No.

Religions of Korea 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.52

pISSN : 1738-3617 / eISSN : 3022-5558
https://journal.kci.go.kr/krel

The concept of ‘community’ seems to be less persuasive in the current era of the new Cold War, globalization, and multiculturalism. Thus, this article suggests ‘symbiont’ as a concept to replace it. And also it argues that in an era of global crisis such as climate change, the concept of ‘Earth symbiont’ should be newly introduced. Lastly, although the term Earth symbiont is not used, we can find similar concepts in Lovelock’s theory and South Korea’s ecological movement, i.e. Gaia and Hansallim. Gaia theory and Hansalim movement can be evaluated as a theoretical model and a practical movement of the Earth symbiont. The concept of ‘symbiont’ mentioned here is borrowed from the theory of biologist Lynn Margulis, who is credited with “rewriting the history of evolution.” In this article, based on Margulis’s theory, I would like to propose symbiont as an ontology required in the era of climate change and ecological crisis. Furthermore, based on Thomas Berry’s concept of ‘Earth Community’, I’d like to propose a new ‘Earth Symbiont’ concept. Next, as specific examples, I will examine the concept of ‘Gaia’, a new earth concept born in the West in the 1970s, and the concept of ‘Hansallim’, born in Korea in the late 1980s.

This paper aimed to propose the concept of a ‘Northeast Asian Symbiont’ in a context where tension exists due to the importance of economic cooperation in the Northeast Asia region and the enduring politics of memory and a winner-takes-all logic. The concept of ‘Northeast Asian Symbiont’ presented in this paper is a reinterpretation of the biological concept of symbiosis, intending to reposition it as an assemblage of entanglements through the connections of diverse entities, moving beyond the nation/ethnicity-centric Northeast Asia. To achieve this, first, the paper traces the development of discourse in the East Asian community and the concepts of community employed, which have consistently been narratives of imposing a homogeneous and uniform identity through violence. Second, it explores the possibility of discourse on the topic of a Northeast Asian Symbiont through biological and philosophical discussions of symbiosis. Third, it emphasizes, through Roberto Esposito’s Communitas theory, that a community is not formed through a sense of identity but rather through gift-giving and mutual obligations. Finally, it investigates what it means to live together base on discussions by postmodern and anthropocene philosophers and explores the direction that ideas of solidarity and cooperation shuld take. This paper aims to present a new discourse on the future of the Northeast Asia region and to contribute to the exploration of a new paradigm for solidarity and peace in the Northeast Asia region.

This study is a re-reading of Donna Haraway’s The Camille Stories as a feminist storytelling for living in this era of climate catastrophe. The severity of this climate problem is increasing exponentially from year to year that even the prudent report of the IPCC, in which more than 200 countries participate, calls for urgent measures for this. Thus, although there are discourses that call for ‘emergency power’ to cope with this ‘emergency situation’ or discourses that present science and technology as saviors, they are mostly stories of apocalypse and salvation in a linear time, and stories of heroes. In Haraway’s The Camille Stories, on the other hand, what unfold in a multi-layered time are radical kin-making that breaks with the necessity of reproduction, cooperative practice of cross-species work and play, becoming-with the souls of the dead, mourning for irreparable loss, and affirming the precarity of life. This is not a story about a hero going to war but a story about a carrier bag that even a hero on the road must carry. This climate catastrophe is an event where our habitability on this planet is being called into question, and the fight to protect our habitat is important. But Haraway’s feminist storytelling tells us that the fight is not everything, and not even the most important thing. It is about resisting the reduction of history to the story of fights between master and slave and raising the voices of nonhuman and human that have been silenced by the fight narratives. The Camille Stories is about reshaping our everyday lives when we can no longer hope for a savior and when the promise of progress becomes unreliable, and it is not a story of immortal posthuman but a compost story where dying is as important as living.