Content area
Full text
The Anthropology of Korea: East Asian Perspectives. Mutsuhiko Shima and Roger L. Janelli, eds. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 1998. 237 pp.
In this volume, the editors bring together eleven papers presented at the Seventeenth Taniguchi International Symposium in the summer of 1993. While there has been continued anthropological interest in Korea, there have been few English language anthologies dedicated to Korean ethnography. The papers in this volume attempt to examine the current status of anthropological research in Korea. Given the scope of this task, it is not surprising that the papers cover a wide topical sweep, ranging from shamanistic rituals for the dead to human relationships in a modern conglomerate, and from community leadership under Japanese colonial rule to the re-creation of Confucian culture. Despite topical dysjunctures that can make reading from beginning to end difficult, the editors of this volume provide a succinct introduction and order the papers for topical coherence. Arranged from historical to current issues, these papers not only challenge previous work by offering more complicated analyses of Korean social structure, they also explore the complexity of reproducing and maintaining Korean "traditions" in the contemporary context.
The first three papers in this volume examine the relationship between Confucian ideology and Korean social systems. The first two articles take an historical perspective to the issue while the third reflects a contemporary consideration. Focusing on Chosun dynasty legal codes and court cases, when Confucianism was adopted as Korea's official creed, Hesung Chun Koh illustrates the ways in which legal proceedings reflect the strains of integrating Confucian ideas imported from China into indigenous Korean family practices. Koh's careful study of the penal system and criminal punishments suggests that in the eighteenth century Koreans did not adopt Chinese law and customs to the extent once believed, and that legal codes remained distinctly Korean despite official decree. Shima Mutsuhiko considers the ways in which notions of descent group are crafted and recrafted by clan members. In...