Beyond the Dichotomy of Success and Failure: Making Activism Meaningful in South Korea and France

ABSTRACT

First deployed in the 1970s, prefiguration has recently gained traction among ethnographers of political action as a descriptor for activist practices that foreground participatory democracy, horizontality, and direct action, as seen in social movements like Occupy Wall Street. Notably, ethnographers have come to understand these prefigurative‐inspired, present‐oriented movements as departures from “traditional” social movements, which are often institutionalized via trade unions, associations, and cooperatives, and primarily driven by preestablished, future‐oriented goals. We suggest that this dichotomy, unintentionally reinforced by anthropological scholarship, has a broader analytical implication: It prevents ethnographers from seeing both goal‐oriented and prefigurative practices as equally constitutive of any form of activism. We draw on ethnographies of two seemingly future‐oriented movements typically read as failures: activism led by families bereaved by the Sewŏl Ferry disaster in South Korea and by Esperanto speakers in France. We propose that, while these movements’ long‐term goals remain indefinitely out of reach, their activists have found additional sources of meaning that sustain their long‐term commitment. Understanding activism as a continuous meaning‐making process, rather than a means to an end, would allow ethnographers to understand why such engagements persist. This requires, we argue, venturing beyond the dichotomies of success–failure and prefigurative–traditional.