Over the Mountains are Mountains: Korean Peasant Households and Their Adaptations to Rapid Industrialization (review)

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142BOOK REVIEWS Over the Mountains are Mountains: Korean Peasant Households and TheirAdaptations to RapidIndustrialization, by Clark W. Sorensen. Korean Studies of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988. ? + 308 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $25 cloth. As the echoes of the Seoul Summer Olympics die away, we return to the more enduring pastime of trying to understand the trials and tribulations ("cross one mountain, and there is another ahead") of the average Korean. With Sorensen's book we have a valuable contribution to a growing recent literature on rural Korea, and several welcome studies on Korean women. Sorensen, an anthropologist and linguist with geographic training, views the value system as social structure, and social organization as the ways in which those values are realized in daily life. His book is organized around a systems analysis of the energy inputs into the two systems that make up any Korean rural household: the outer system of the male (fields) and the inner system of the female (kitchen and houselot). The author presents a complicated chart of the farming system to show the feedback loops, each of which he discusses in fascinating ethnographic detail. This is combined with a simpler analysis of the kitchen system (simpler because the author is a man?), to produce a really precedent-breaking view of the entire rural household system. His labor and nutritional accounting are welcome additions to the anthropological and area studies literature. Yet the author's net is more widely cast. He shows how decisions on education in town for a teenaged boy, or migration temporarily to a city, were intimately related to the labor calculus of the farm families as they responded in 1977 and in 1983 to higher incomes and somewhat greater availability of land. When Sorensen arrived in San'gongni in late 1976, he found that the traditional rural way of life lived on only in the memories of the elderly. His book deals with his earlier long visit, when the transitional stage to a market economy was beginning, and again when it was in full spate in 1983, after he had written his doctoral dissertation . He was able to glimpse on this latter visit the start of the mechanization stage, when hand tractors were used by some farmers, and a rice transplanter had been promised by the agricultural cooperative for the 1984 season. Each of these three stages is discussed in local and wider contexts, in a stretch of fine exposition . And of especial interest are a section on diet (pp. 93-105) and a section on "Customs that Tend to Mitigate the Seasonality of the Diet" (pp. 1 1 1-1 18). The important matter of migration, both to and from cities, is mentioned in many places, but is capsulated on pages 189-204, which ought to be required reading for those who think that social change means nothing more than a headlong rush to the cities of Korea. The broader theoretical framework of this volume relates to the rural ecology studies of A. V. Chayanov, a Soviet economist whose 1925 work is too little known. Sorensen maintains a running dialogue with Chayanov, pointing out a BOOK REVIEWS143 few false starts, but in general expanding upon Chayanov's approach in imaginative ways. The reader comes away from Over the Mountains are Mountains with a deeper understanding of the complexity of life in rural Korea, and with a feeling that rural people act rationally (that is, in values-preserving ways) under a variety of circumstances. The author ends with a statement that most Korea scholars would strongly agree with: If the social organization of the villages is shaped and constrained by present-day socioeconomic forces, it is also shaped and constrained by past socioeconomic forces. History is . . . indispensable for understanding adaptation to the environment and other functional relationships that traditionally have been studied in a synchronic framework, (p. 242) Forrest R. Pitts University of Hawaii Religion andRitual in Korean Society, edited by Laurel Kendall and Griffin Dix. Korea Research Monograph No. 12. Berkeley : Center for Korean Studies, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 1987. 223 pp. Index, glossary. $15...