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The video document, Janitor when it was first discovered by me was a twelve hours documentary series. The five video-tapes were in a cardboard box labeled “classified material”, with a North Korean government seal across the top. The locals had different versions about the exact origins of the filmmaker with speculations ranging from it being a work of an amateur, a former North Korean intelligence officer that had been in the South for several years undercover; while others believed it was an itinerant video artist from Sweden, an adoptee now traveling with a neutral Swedish passport, who was tracing the whereabouts of her birth parents. Others claimed it was an outcome of video classes for the blind Chinese Korean community, funded by a well-meaning Japanese construction company that was involved in the development of the coastal area. Apparently, many countries have confidential eyes on the Twomen river delta, since the area is a quiet mine for profit being rich in minerals, gold, diamond, and oil.
The original material contained hours of interviews with female South Korean subjects, from the working class sector. The recorded personal accounts indicate the fact that the North was not only in contact with the proletariat in the South, but they had established friendships to the extent that it had become networks of trust. The interviews were centered on labor conditions of the janitorial occupation, and tapes number 4 and 5 contained detailed analysis of the types of trash found in different public institutions. One can deduce that the North, despite its‘ public image as an isolated, hermit kingdom, was in fact well-versed in the development history of the Korean peninsula as a whole.
A mysterious message was scribbled on the label of tape number 3, “They were good women”. At the time I was too preoccupied removing the mold that caked the tapes, and suppressing the gag reflex from inhaling too much of the local “fresh air“ which was foul, with saturated smells of local cuisine that evolved around eating rotten vegetables that had been fermenting for three years or more. It wasn‘t until I was safely back in the pristine laboratory of my University back in Sweden that the two words, “good“ and “women“ weighed heavily on my conscience. Apparently the interviewed were good and they were women. Women in the only sense of the word that matters, the one defined by a quiet passage from an ancient Korean text on friendship and social etiquette that stated, “To be brave, to keep one‘s word, and to be generous.”
As a linguistic anthropologist, I was traveling along the length of the Twomen River, comparing dialects of Chinese Korean migrant laborers, Russian Korean sex workers, and Chinese, Russian, Korean creolization of Han language to investigate whether linguistic and body language had any effect on the development of National Character and how it constructed local “common sense”. Collecting human data involves bonding with your subject objects, and nothing establishes this bond faster than drinking the local brew and downing the local grub. Months of imbibing a local poison called “100 year old Chinese Piss“ soon revealed to me the impossibility of my project. There was no logic to understand and contain into neat theories the structure of this bastardized language, since it is one born from centuries of linguistic miscegenation among Chinese, Russian and Korean, a potent interbreeding of indecipherable communication tools based mainly around having a steel plate across your face and particularly the jaw that was set into a grimace that foreigners often misinterpret to be smiles of politeness.The Han language spoken in the Twomen river delta had retrieved every anachronism in the Sinitic, Slavonic, and Ural-Altaic language group, reorganizing the outdated forms that multiplied the intricacies of grammar that hierarchically morphed itself depending on how formal, casual or antagonistic the relation was. For example, to say “I Love You”, one had to say “Mmm“ that involved controlled breathing in through one nostril and out the other. This is a phrase I, after years of living and studying the language, still have problems saying properly. Apparently, the way I pronounce “Mmm“ means, “I need to vomit so please pass me the bucket.” It‘s a good thing that this is a phrase I do not need to use so frequently in my work. My ex-wife who in the early stages of my research accompanied me to this area was often repulsed by the local customs and meant to say “Mmm“ for a quick delivery of bucket to contain her bile, but mispronounced it to say “mmm“ “I Love You”, thus incurring many misunderstood admirers that were left heartbroken when she vomited into their hands.
Since the true mechanisms behind their linguistic logic, resisted Western anthropological categorization I tried to tackle their visual logic by teaching an introduction to Eastern Anthropological Perspectives course to my graduate students in University of Barbaria. The pedagogical administrators within the University learned long ago that the best way to force both masters and pupils to research a subject is to pair up two parties that had no foreknowledge about the subject and to sign a contract of agreement to both teach and learn it.
Twomen is naturally isolated from the world due to its‘ topography with mountain ranges that crisscross the area to form a tight lattice, with altitudes ranging between 1400 to 2000 meter above sea level, coupled with a harsh climate that hosts Northwestern winds from Siberia making it difficult for electrical and communication wiring to be installed. Recent economic hardships have made it difficult for the University to allocate proper funding for library acquisitions, thus further limiting its‘ contact with the outside. What trickles in through these natural and economic barricades are often obsolete technologies and ideas, no longer in vogue in the developed worlds. Don‘t forget, this area has a high percentage of people that are born blind. Hence without being aware of the Western philosophical terminology and traditions, University of Barbaria became a paradoxical institution, graduating staunch believers and practitioners of what French philosopher, Jacques Ranciere calls “the ignorant school master.” Ranciere, tells the history of Professor Joseph Jacotot, who in 1830s proclaimed a scandalous pedagogy wherein the uneducated were able to educate themselves without a master‘s guidance, and the masters in return could teach subjects which they did not themselves know. The blind were leading the blind to see and thus procreate more blind people that could see.
