202Journal ofKorean Studies Over the Mountains Are Mountains: Korean Peasant Households and Their Adaptations to Rapid Industrialization. By Clark W. Sorensen. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988. Pp. x, 308. Illus., appendix, notes, bibliog., index. $25. Anthropologists used to assume, at least tacitly, that village studies yielded an intimate window upon the Korean past, and that this was their primary value. But anthropologists, be they Korean or foreign, can no longer harbor a static notion of unchanged rural life when the rural landscape and the lives of one's informants are significandy altered between one field trip and the next. In 1960, nearly 60 percent of the Korean population was composed of farmers and nearly 70 percent of the population lived outside major urban areas. By 1980, the farm population was less than 30 percent ofthe total. In the volume under review, Clark W. Sorensen takes the process ofchange, and its consequences, as the focus of his inquiry, offering a villagers'eye view ofthe processes that have so swiftly transformed Korea from a nation of peasants into an industrial economy. The work is based on a year of intensive fieldwork in 1977 in the relatively isolated and poor mountain village of San'gongni, in the east coast province of Kangwön, and a return visit in the summer of 1983, combined with a thoughtful reading ofthe literature on Korean development. Between the two visits, material conditions had improved , and agricultural production was increasingly sophisticated. Mechanization had not fully replaced the labor lost to urban migration , but because of the improvements in rice production, villagers could now abandon their less productive upland fields. Contrasts observed during Sorensen's two trips underscored trends already well underway at the time of his first visit. While Sorensen's own experience of San'gongni spans five years, he casts his ethnographic gaze back across the memories of older villagers to a time when the combined labor of fathers and brothers was required to extract a meager crop from sparse parcels of land, and the seemingly endless labor of women kept these large, complex households fed and clothed. Sorensen asks if the rural ramifications of massive urban migration, labor shortage, more land, a cash economy , and a rising standard of living have fundamentally altered the social organization of village life. Most significantly, he asks, and argues in the affirmative, ifit is possible to speak ofthe "Korean family" as a consistent social structure weathering, indeed facilitating, pro- Book Reviews203 found changes in all dimensions of social and economic life. His aim is to demonstrate that, in the face of massive out-migration and changes in agricultural technology, "the requirements of the household and its structural integration have acted as a force that has molded the villagers' adaptations to modern life every bit as much as the changes in their circumstances" (p.42), that changes in domestic organization "have been largely ones of strategy rather than of social structure" (ibid.). Sorensen develops his argument in counterpoint to Kautsky's and Chayanov's grim predictions that the intrusion of capitalist market relations into the countryside would result in "proletarianization" of the peasantry and a deterioration of prior social relationships. More generally, he takes issue with Marxist analysis and with the cultural ecology ofJulian Steward for assuming the primacy of technology and through it, "the social division of. labor and the distribution ofthe means ofproduction, which in turn condition social organization and cultures" (p.23). But these are straw men. Does anyone, outside a course in economic anthropology, still read Kautsky, Chayanov , and Steward? Sorensen's study of the Korean family is more nearly in line with the work ofMyron Cohen,1 and Burton Pasternak2 who have described the Chinese chia as a resilient institution accommodating varied ecological and economic circumstances as it moves through its own developmental cycle punctuated by births, marriages, succession, aging, and death. Like these studies, and in a manner first outlined by Chayanov, Sorensen describes the strategies of peasant households as a balance of consumption needs, land, and labor supply. "Rational choices" prompted the farming of unproductive upland fields in earlier decades of scarce land and abundant labor and prompted their abandonment when it became...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Jul 1, 1993
Bradley H Baltensperger 
Open Access