The Migration and Re-settlement Process of a Clan Group in Korea

Abstract

Since the 1970s dam construction in the rural areas of South Korea has formed a major part of government works. This has contributed greatly to the control of water resources, but has also resulted in many involuntary or forced migrations of people from inundated areas. In many studies of the villages lost to dam construction, whether undertaken by geographers, cultural anthropologists, or folklorists, the central concern has been on the ethnology of the former settlement and on the pattern of removal. Other important aspects such as the process of re-settlement, adaption and acculturation of the migrants to their new homes have so far tended to be overlooked.This paper explores the re-settlement process, adaptive strategies, and acculturation of a migrant clan in South Korea. Steward's (1955) cultural core model is applied with respect to the adaptation of migrants to their new communities. The study area is the village of Ilsun-ri in Heapyung-myun, Sunsan County, Kyungpook Province. This village was occupied by migrants from the Chonju Ryu clan in 1987, with most of them coming from several clan villages which were lost in the course of construction of the Imha Dam. Particular attention was paid in this study to villagers from Musil, a native place of the Chonju Ryu clan. Fieldwork took the form of participant observation during January and February, 1991. At that time there were 66 households in Ilsun-ri, and the population was 192.In Section II the cognative structure of the villagers is outlined, followed in Sections III-IV by an examination of villagers occupations, customs, and their adaptive mechanism to their new environment. The main features of this adaptation process can be summarized as follows:These migrants made a collective decision to move in the hope that cultural shock would be lessened and the homogeneity of the clan would be maintained. Since the family heads were mostly middle-aged, and ranked in economic terms in the 'middleclass', the group adapted well to their new milieux.Before migration the Chonju Ryu villagers depended on subsistence agriculture, using manual labour and farm animals, for their livelihood. After migration, the villagers had to cope with many changes in agricultural environment, including climate and quality of arable land. They were also introduced to farm mechanization and improved methods of transportation. It was therefore necessary to switch to production of commercial crops in order for them to remain economically self-reliant. Accordingly, the traditional pattern of labour exchange transformed into one of functional cooperation. Also, some villagers became free to seek employment at the nearby Kumi industrial complex. As a result, the life style of the villagers has become more varied after the migration.Despite these changes, the villagers were able to maintain their traditional ancestral worship practices and Confucian value system. For example, the villagers brought with them symbolic buildings and structures, such as Chongga, Sadang, and Chongja, to set up in the new village. These structures were re-erected in the same spatial arrangement as in the old village, giving full regard to the geomantic traditions of Pung-su and their positions relative to the surrounding mountains and rivers. All this can be viewed as a kind of defensive reaction to new external influences and surrounds, but it is also clear that a necessary part of the villagers adaptive strategy was affirmation of their common ancestral heritage.Finally, it is clear that while the migrants accommodated rapidly the new agricultural technologies and methods of cooperative organization, they maintained many cultural factors related to clan identity. Although the former spirit of cooperation and internal cohesion outwardly appears to have weakened in the village, the migrants have displayed an adaptive mechanism of selective acceptance of new things