Premodern Korea Research Articles

Ideas on Chi-u in Pre-modern Korea

Ideas on Chi-u in Pre-modern Korea

The biological standard of living in pre-modern Korea: Determinants of height of militia recruits during the Chosŏn dynasty

This paper extends the research on the biological standard of living in the Korean peninsula back to pre-modern times. Drawing on militia rosters of the Chosŏn Dynasty from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, we tentatively conclude that the final height of Korean men during this period was 166cm and thus slightly above that of modern North Korean men (165cm). On the other hand, the average height of modern South Korean men is 172cm, 6cm more than what we tentatively estimate for pre-modern Korean men. Regression analysis of the height of pre-modern Korean men finds that un-free Koreans (“slaves”) were significantly shorter by about 0.6–0.7cm than commoners, whereas the average height of recruits suffering from smallpox did not differ significantly from that of other recruits. Moreover, regional, as opposed to birth-dummy, variables account, and to a significant degree, for most of the differences in height. Whether or not this is a result of socioeconomic differences across provinces or a result of other regionally-varying factors remains an open question.

“From Modernity to the Middle Kingdom” : Recent Development in the Historical Research on Premodern Korean Science

This article examines recent development in the history of science in premodern Korea. The main focus will be on examining the process of how the researchers’ interest has changed from that in evaluating the degrees of ‘modernity’ in premodern Korean science to the issue of scientific relationship between China and Korea in the premodern period. While examining the debates on those two issues, this paper proposes several shortcomings that were found in the ways of how researchers formulated their main arguments and that blocked the possibilities for a more fruitful interaction between researchers of different opinions. Those shortcomings include historians’ confusion between actors’ categories and their own ones, and their naive application of such simplistic binaries as “modern/premodern” and “progressive/conservative” to historical actors’ ideas and practices.

Under the ancestors' eyes: kinship, status, and locality in premodern Korea

Under the Ancestors Eyes presents a new approach to Korean social history by focusing on the origin and development of the indigenous descent group. Martina Deuchler maintains that the surprising continuity of the descent-group model gave the ruling elite cohesion and stability and enabled it to retain power from the early Silla (fifth century) to the late nineteenth century. This argument, underpinned by a fresh interpretation of the late-fourteenth-century Kory -Chos n transition, illuminates the role of Neo-Confucianism as an ideological and political device through which the elite regained and maintained dominance during the Chos n period. Neo-Confucianism as espoused in Korea did not level the social hierarchy but instead tended to sustain the status system. In the late Chos n, it also provided ritual models for the lineage-building with which local elites sustained their preeminence vis-a-vis an intrusive state. Though Neo-Confucianism has often been blamed for the rigidity of late Chos n society, it was actually the enduring native kinship ideology that preserved the strict social-status system. By utilizing historical and social anthropological methodology and analyzing a wealth of diverse materials, Deuchler highlights Korea s distinctive elevation of the social over the political.

Veiling of Korean Women: The Neo-Confucian Influence in Comparison to the Veiling of Muslim Women

The phenomenon of veiling of women in Muslim culture also occurred in pre-modern Korea. Sseugae, a type of veil, was worn by noble women in Korea during the Yi Dynasty to conceal their faces. In a society, strictly ruled by the Confucian philosophy and ideals, women’s outdoor activities were extremely restricted. Noble ladies traveled by human-carried palanquin, colorfully draped and protected from viewing by strangers, wearing veils of different types denoting their noble statuses. In this paper I will present who among the Korean women were expected to wear what types of veils in which circumstances. I will describe how the Confucianism permeated and dictated the value system and social morals of the early Korean society. I will also describe the highly stratified Korean societal structure in which women in various stations were expected to behave according to their fathers’ or husbands’ statuses and to dress differently including their headdresses. The significance of this paper will be in examining the cultural aspects of women having had to wear veils in a paternalistic, patriarchal and hierarchical society with pervasive Confucius ideological and moral standards. I will also review the historical transformation of the practice of women wearing veils as Korea, as a nation, and her traditional society evolved into modernity, painfully and forcibly, largely under external pressures and influences. My conclusion will show the significance in the customs of dressing and veiling in Korea in comparison to those of the Muslim women in different countries of the region within the cultural, political, and religious contexts.

In Pursuit of Truth and Justice: The State of the Field of Chosŏn Legal History

In Pursuit of Truth and Justice:The State of the Field of Chosŏn Legal History Kang Hyeok Hweon (bio) On a sweltering summer day in 1867, the magistrate of Chunghwa County in Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) began a special investigation into the rumored murder of an unnamed woman, the mother of Kim Chiryong and his two brothers.1 Suspecting a concealed murder, he gathered witnesses in situ and interrogated their complicity. The Kim brothers, the story goes, were itinerant “singing boys” (ch’angdong 唱童) who had found temporary lodging in a remote village. One night, they faced a local ruffian named Yun Myŏngp’ae who drunkenly demanded their performance and quarreled with their elderly, ailing mother. The next morning, the mother passed. Despite the investigation, the cause of Mrs. Kim’s death was elusive. Suspiciously, the village leaders did not report it to authorities, and by the time the magistrate had begun probing, long gone were the brothers and the body of the deceased. While “truth” remained at large, “justice” was administered regardless. Despite escaping murder charges, Yun was imprisoned for ruffian behavior while other “disorderly elements” (nanyu 亂類) in town received beatings. This case, as recounted in the inquest records of Chunghwa County, [End Page 219] poses various questions: without plaintiffs and a confident “truth,” how and why was “justice” administered in the village? How did the performance of justice relate to local governance and its aims at maintaining social order? What was the logic of Chosŏn legal practice? Answers to these questions in turn funnel out to the booming field of legal and socio-legal history in Chosŏn studies. Publications on Chosŏn’s legal system have burgeoned during the last decade. In Korean scholarship, Chŏng Kŭngsik and Hong Sunmin probed proliferation patterns of legal texts and revisited Chosŏn’s evolving “rule of law” as manifestations of royal power and personality.2 Complementing the study of legal governance, scholars such as Kim Ho and Sim Chaeu discovered inquest records as important materials for examining social structure and mentalité in the late Chosŏn.3 Starting in 2012, Western academia also bustled with successive publications on legal history.4 Articles by Anders Karlsson, for [End Page 220] instance, studied the relations between penal law and governance, arguing that after the seventeenth century the Chosŏn deployed corporal and capital punishment in response to changing demographics and border situations. Draconian punishment, as shown, constituted a crucial “supplement to sagacious kingship and Confucian statecraft” and continued into the late Chosŏn despite reforms and debates about the relative role of penal rectification and moral edification in judiciary practice.5 Importantly, Karlsson revisits the legal arena as a site of ideology construction, and examines the role of body politics in Chosŏn’s mode of governance and power production. Due to space constraints, this review essay focuses on American historiography, specifically on two book-length studies with particular attention to their methodology and historiographical niche. Namely, three scholars sharing the surname of Kim—Sun Joo Kim, Jungwon Kim, and Jisoo Kim—have advanced the field of Chosŏn legal history by probing how non-elites and women exercised agency as full legal subjects in premodern Korea. Collectively, they explore the underlying logic of Chosŏn’s judicial system, and clarify the role of status and gender in legal practice. Within Western academia, they also complement William Shaw’s pioneering work, which revealed the complex practice of criminal law in the late Chosŏn: continuing Shaw’s spirit, they dispel any lingering myth that the dynasty ruled only by moral suasion rather than law.6 The impact of this sub-disciplinary boom also percolates outside the confines of legal history. It constitutes a methodological intervention against the Great Tradition school of Chosŏn history,7 which stressed the overarching [End Page 221] impact of ideology and the educated elite, and assumed that Neo-Confucianism defined the Chosŏn state and society in toto. Instead of gazing at the dynasty from the top, the three Kims underscore instead the varied, microscopic realities of the marginalized, as reflected in their use of primary sources such as inquest records and...

Nation, Subculture, and Queer Representation: The Film Male Kisaeng and the Politics of Gender and Sexuality in 1960s South Korea

A t A l l m A n w i t h A m u s c u l A r body loves knitting, needlework, and doing laundry. Inspiring the abhorrence of his company president due to his effeminacy, he is fired. Working in a kisaeng house in female masquerade to make ends meet, he eventually becomes its most popular entertainer. Still beset with guilt over his “immoral” lifestyle, he abandons his newfound profession to marry his girlfriend and begin a proper life as a cosmetics salesman. This is the storyline of the comedy film Namja kisaeng (Male kisaeng). This film, part of a boom in the genre of comedy films in the late 1960s, relies on the audience’s immediate recognition of the kisaeng figure—a female entertainer in premodern Korea who served men—in 1969, just when the kisaeng was transforming into a hostess who worked in bars during the day and as a prostitute at night. Its director, Sim U-sop, who directed over thirty films between 1968 and 1970, was particularly prolific in this genre. Many of his films went on to set box-office records, particularly Namja singmo (Male maid), which attracted over 120,000 people in its first two weeks of screening in Seoul and saved the famous but financially struggling Shin Film from bankruptcy. Despite these films’ technical flaws and stock plot elements (typically focusing on poor and

Ditching 'Diglossia': Describing Ecologies of the Spoken and Inscribed in Pre-modern Korea

Ditching 'Diglossia': Describing Ecologies of the Spoken and Inscribed in Pre-modern Korea

Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea: From Ancient to Contemporary Times ed. by Charlotte Horlyck and Michael J. Pettid

Reviewed by: Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea: From Ancient to Contemporary Times ed. by Charlotte Horlyck and Michael J. Pettid Hyang A Lee Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea: From Ancient to Contemporary Times edited by Charlotte Horlyck and Michael J. Pettid. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014. 265pp. As Philippe Ariès and Norbert Elias have shown, personal and societal attitudes towards death have gradually changed in the course of history. Although their research dealt only with Western societies, their thesis indeed holds true for all societies, including Korea. Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea is an edited volume of ten essays about how Koreans have historically dealt with death and how mortuary rites have changed. The concept of mortuary rites here covers all aspects of death from the treatment and burial of the body to the burial sites, ceremonies, rituals, and the afterlife. This book effectively presents both change and continuity in Koreans’ attitudes to death in Korean history from the Greater Silla Kingdom to present times. Compared to Western societies where Christianity, whether in the form of Catholicism or Protestantism, was the dominant religion over a long period of time, East Asia and Korea experienced a comparatively varied religious outlook, which was subject to change as the ruling regime changed. As the editors of this volume also point out, different focal belief systems constructed Koreans’ worldviews and influenced their consciousness and lives over time. They include shamanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, geomancy and Christianity. These belief systems intermingled over time and contributed to a syncretic religious worldview in premodern Korea. However, Koreans’ consciousness of death and practices dealing with death are not influenced solely by these religious worldviews. The introduction of modern Western medicine and the modern [End Page 331] knowledge system was another great axis to affect aspects of death in modern and contemporary Korea. This edited volume covers all these aspects. While subtitled “From ancient to contemporary times,” the book does not present a chronological development. Instead, the chapters are grouped under the themes of body (part I), disposal (part II), ancestral worship and rites (part III) and afterlife (part IV). Each part consists of two to three essays covering different historical eras. Part I deals with the treatment of the dead body both in the premodern and the modern period. By examining Buddhist cremation rites in Greater Silla and Koryŏ, Sem Vermeersch tackles our widespread misunderstanding about the Buddhist impact on death in those periods. Using archeological materials and historical records, Vermeersch refutes the notion that cremation was the dominant burial practice in Greater Silla and Koryŏ. According to him, cremation was but one of the different ways in which people treated the dead body. The association between Buddhist identity and cremation was realized only amongst a limited part of the elite after the mid-eleventh century. This chapter forms a suitable introduction to the volume in so far that it shows through diachronic analysis that an important feature of mortuary rites is their resistance to change. In contrast, the second chapter of this part deals with contemporary changes in mortuary rites. John DiMoia, drawing upon the Minnesota Project conducted by the University of Minnesota and Seoul National University from 1956 to 1962, explores how modern medicine hospitalized the treatment of the dead body in Korea. The “emergence of the hospital as a site for death represented a shift from the past, and in part the funeral hall was designed to ease this transition.” (p. 70) He provides an interesting analysis of the funeral hall as a medium of transition from the past (tradition) to the present in dealing with the dead body. However, his treatment of the historical development of cremation before the 1950s is too sketchy. Also, cremation was not introduced in the 1930s as he writes (p. 70), but in 1912, when the colonial authorities first legislated burial rules. Part II contains two articles dealing with the disposal of the bodily remains in the Koryŏ dynasty and contemporary Korea. Resonating with Vermeersch’s arguments, Charlotte Horlyck presents a variety of ways to dispose the dead body in the Koryŏ period. This depended on individual circumstances, which is in...

Mechanism of the China's Hegemony in the Relationship between pre-Modern Korea and China:'Complex Game' of Conflicts and Cooperations

Mechanism of the China's Hegemony in the Relationship between pre-Modern Korea and China:'Complex Game' of Conflicts and Cooperations

Images of the future in South Korea

This paper examines and interprets the images of the future in both the pre-modern and modern era in South Korea. Future images in premodern Korea depended on social and political status. The ruling class had a Confucian utopia based on remote places and the golden age of ancient Chinese regimes. On the other hand, the oppressed, denied the Confucian ideal society, sought a classless society without oppression. In modern Korean society, five alternative images of the future can be identified: (a) becoming a developed country, (b) apocalyptic discourse, (c) national unification, (d) advanced information society, and (e) feminist visions. Unlike the future images from pre-modern Korea, those in Korea's modern era reject the ideal past, imaginary present, and radically different future. Instead, the images focus on a long-term, future-oriented vision and address the various dimensions of the feasible transformation of its current society.

Introduction to Shin Dong Wu’s Hong Gildong

Introduction to Shin Dong Wu’s Hong Gildong Minsoo Kang (bio) Shin Dong Wu (1936–1994) was the most important South Korean comic book artist of his time, and his work Hong Gildong was his most influential work. Shin was born in the northern province of Hamgyeong but moved to Seoul when he was eleven years old.1 During the Korean War, his family became one of many that were tragically separated, with his mother and some of his siblings ending up in the South and the rest in the North. In the post-war period, he made his debut as a comic artist in 1956 and had his first success with the 1958 work Geomho Nalssaendori (Swordsman Nalssaendori, meaning Fast One), which narrates the deeds of a boy warrior in pre-modern Korea. After that he produced works in many different genres, including traditional martial adventure, historical drama, incidental comedy, science fiction, Westerns, and stories of schoolchildren. His most celebrated work first appeared in February, 1965 under the title Punguna Hong Gildong (Hong Gildong, hero of troubled times) as a serial cartoon in the newspaper Joseon Ilbo’s publication for youths, Sonyeon Joseon Ilbo. It ran for four years in some 1,200 installments. [End Page 325] His version of the story generally follows the beginning of the original literary work, of a frustrated secondary son of a nobleman leaving home after an attempt on his life by his stepmother. But the narrative becomes wholly original after that, especially in the introduction of new characters like Hong’s sidekick Chadol Bawi (Sturdy Rock), a love interest named Gopdani (Pretty One), his martial arts teacher Master Baekun (White Cloud), and a villain named Lord Eom Gajin (Has Cruelty or One Who Possesses). In 1967, Shin’s brother, Shin Dong Heon, a pioneering animation artist who specialized in television advertisements, made history by directing the country’s first full-length animated film, Hong Gildong, with original art and script by Shin Dong Wu based on his comic strip. It was a successful enterprise, the second-highest-grossing movie of the year. In 1968, Shin Dong Wu began to publish a lightly edited version of his work in a collected book format in eight volumes. Shin Dong Wu’s Hong Gildong, as he appeared in comics and in film, was not only popular at the time of his appearance but has also become a source of childhood nostalgia for many Koreans. The importance of Shin’s work in contemporary popular culture also lies in the fact that the picture Shin has drawn of the hero has become his definitive image, even though it is only a slightly adjusted version of his earlier creation Swordsman Nalssaendori. Even today, the character is imagined by most Koreans as Shin depicted him—a sturdy young boy dressed in a blue vest-coat and a small bamboo hat over a white headscarf. What follows is the first part of the initial volume of the 1968 book version of Shin’s Hong Gildong, with the dialogue translated into English by myself. Special thanks to Heinz Insu Fenkl for editing the translation and lettering the words into the images. [End Page 326] Minsoo Kang Minsoo Kang is an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. He is the author of the history book Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination (Harvard UP, 2011) and the short story collection Of Tales and Enigmas (Prime, 2007). He is currently writing a book on Hong Gildong in Korean history and culture. Footnotes 1. For a brief sketch of Shin Dong Wu’s life and career, see Yi Yongcheol, “‘Hong Gildong gwa Chadolbawi ro wangguk eul seun manhwaga, Shin Dong Wu” in Shin Dong Wu Collection (Seoul: Bucheon manhwa jeongbo center, 2007), 8–15. Copyright © 2013 President and Fellows of Harvard College

Finding God in the Classics: The Theistic Confucianism of Dasan Jeong Yagyong

Dasan Jeong Yagyong (1762–1836) is regarded in South Korea today as one of pre-modern Korea’s best philosophers. This article examines one of the reasons he is so respected. He modified traditional Korean Confucian moral philosophy to include notions of human nature as desires rather than innate virtue, the importance of free will rather than mere determination, and the existence of a Lord Above as a necessary incentive to proper behavior. Though he supported these changes to traditional Korean Confucian philosophy with references to the Classics and his own personal moral experience, observers have noticed the possibility of Western influence on his thinking. He is thus hailed by Koreans as a cross-cultural philosopher, an example of how Koreans can borrow from the West while nonetheless remaining authentically Korean.

The Comparative Study on the tactics of pre-modern Japan and Korea in 16~17th Century

The Comparative Study on the tactics of pre-modern Japan and Korea in 16~17th Century

How communist is North Korea? From the birth to the death of Marxist ideas of human rights

This article focuses on the Marxist characteristics of North Korea in its interpretation of human rights. The author's main argument is that many Marxist features pre-existed in Korea. Complying with Marxist orthodoxy, North Korea is fundamentally hostile to the notion of human rights in capitalist society, which existed in the pre-modern Donghak (Eastern Learning) ideology. Rights are strictly contingent upon one's class status in North Korea. However, the peasants' rebellion in pre-modern Korea was based on class consciousness against the ruling class. The supremacy of collective interests sees individual claims for human rights as selfish egoism, which was prevalent in Confucian ethics. The prioritization of subsistence rights and material welfare over civil and political rights was also the foremost important duty of the benevolent Confucian king. Finally, unlike Marx's reluctant use of the language of ‘duties’, rights are the offspring of citizens' duties in North Korean human rights discourse.

Counterbalancing Egalitarian Benevolence: A History of Interpretations of Zhang Zai’s Western Inscription in Song China and Joseon Korea

The objective of my work is to explore the history of philosophical discourses initiated by Zhang Zai’s Western Inscription within the Neo-Confucian tradition in Song China and in Joseon Korea. Particularly, it concerns the ground-breaking process of reinterpreting the inscription, through which the founders of the Neo-Confucian tradition?Cheng Hao, Cheng Yi, and Zhu Xi?rendered benevolence as egalitarian and ultimately sought to locate an equilibrium between this egalitarian ideal and the non-egalitarian settings of pre-modern China and Korea. My work also shows how the conception of liyi fenshu 理一分殊 (“the unity of principle and the difference in application”) was initially conceived, specifically, in order to counterbalance this idealistic view of benevolence with more realistic aspects of differentiations and discriminations by resorting to the concept of righteousness. In the last three chapters, I contrast this process during the formative stage of Neo-Confucianism with the brief history of the interpretations of the inscription from late Goryeo through the end of Joseon.

Old archives in pre-modern Korea: the documentation of peoples' lives

The ‘old archives’ documenting the interaction of individuals with government survive in large numbers in Korea. Although suffering substantial losses in the past, more than a million such items dating mainly between 1392 and 1910 survive in Korean archives and libraries. Although they can be difficult to interpret, they are now being increasingly studied and they provide a valuable resource for the student of pre-modern Korea particularly in the areas of social and economic history. The majority of these private records relate to property, inheritance and the right to buy and sell privileges. Many deal with slavery which was widespread. In addition the records provide evidence of the sophisticated recordkeeping practices of the Joseon dynasty. The very existence of such systems contradicts the view promulgated during the Japanese colonial period of pre-modern Korea as a primitive, stagnant and irregular society, a view once used to justify that colonization process.

A survey of data sources for studies of family and population in Korean history

Compared to China and Japan, family and population studies of pre-modern Korea have not been widely available to scholars outside Korea. As a necessary step to increase scholarship in Korean historical demography, we introduce major historical materials currently available in Korea as useful for historical studies, summarizing demographic variables provided, the type of population covered, and the historical period referred in those historical materials. In particular, we focus on genealogies and household registers that provide demographic information of Korean population before the 20th century. We describe major features of those Korean materials as demographic sources, highlighting similarities and differences as compared to corresponding Chinese historical materials. Korean historical data showing their unique features, along with comparability with other East Asian data, have potential to expand the field of historical demography in East Asia.

Law and Custom under the Chosŏn Dynasty and Colonial Korea: A Comparative Perspective

A number of Korean legal historians have argued that Chosŏn Korea had a tradition of customary law and that it was suppressed and distorted by the Japanese during the colonial period. But a comparison of Korean “custom” with that in late medieval France, where the legal concept of customary law developed, reveals that custom as a judicial norm was absent in premodern Korea. The Korean “customary law” that has been postulated as a true source of private law in Korean historiography was the invention of the Japanese colonial jurists. The Japanese collected Korea's popular usages that were supposed to serve as an antecedent for a modern civil law, and colonial judges employed the legal instrument of custom in reordering Korean practices into a modern civil legal framework. In colonial Korea, custom played the role of an intermediary regime between tradition and the demands of modern civil law.

Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan ? Edited by Dorothy Ko, Jahyun Kim Haboush, and Joan R. Piggott

Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan ? Edited by Dorothy Ko, Jahyun Kim Haboush, and Joan R. Piggott