An ethics of duty in the absence of hope: bereaved family activism in the aftermath of the Sewol ferry disaster

Families bereaved by the Sewol Ferry Disaster, who have been campaigning for truth, accountability, and memorialisation in South Korea since 2014, are not driven by hope. While they widely acknowledge their activism to be effectively thwarted by conditions that exceed them, the bereaved of Sewol continue to populate the everyday with a ceaseless flow of actions, however minute they may seem in the grand scheme of things. I suggest that the concept of duty refines and supplements our understanding of activism that continues in spite of hopeless circumstances. In conversation with the anthropology of hope, I propose an understanding of activist projects not defined exclusively by teleology but also by infinitude.