Beyond the dichotomy of success and failure: making activism meaningful in social movements in South Korea and France

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.