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Modernization and Filial Piety in Rural Korea
| Article
# : |
17393 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1990 |
4,861 Words |
| Author
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Clark W. Sorensen
Clark W. Sorensen is assistant professor in the Jackson School
of International Studies at the University of Washington. He
has been studying the rural Korean village he calls Toennae
since 1986. |
A traveler taking a country bus inland from Masan, an industrial port on Korea's south coast, will traverse traffic-clogged highways, bustling markets, and acre after acre of vinyl greenhouses. In these greenhouses are grown fruit and vegetables for the markets of Masan and Pusan, the nearby port of some four million inhabitants through which most of Korea's international trade passes. Thirty minutes out of town, however, one can meander through peaceful country villages, seemingly unchanged from time immemorial.
Alongside a country byway leading to the village to Toennae* stands an old gate surrounded by a fence. Inside the gate is a plaque with a long inscription in hanmun, the classical Chinese that was used for all official purposes in Korea until the late nineteenth century. Built in a traditional Chinese-derived style, the gate is old enough to make one wonder whether it had been the entrance to some building, now disappeared. In fact, this particular gate has always stood in isolation by the side of the road. It is an example of a hyojamun, a type of gate built during the Chosön Dynasty (1392-1910) to commemorate an act of filial piety.
Traveling past the gate into the village, one finds several imposing ancestral halls set among the farmhouses nestled into the hillside. These halls, normally empty, are used seasonally by the members of lineages that originated in the village to worship distant patrilineal ancestors. In the past, when virtually everybody in Korea was either a farmer or a landlord who lived off farm rents, and relations to kin defined one's social position, sons and brothers tried to remain in their native place. Over the generations most Korean villages had come to be dominated by the patrilineal descendants of an ancestor who entered the village hundreds of years before - in other words, by the members of lineages.
Descendants of the man commemorated in the gate near Toennae still live in the village. In 1986 I collected the story from one of them, who himself was renowned in the area for his exemplary filial piety. He narrated:
In olden days there was a fifth-generation grandfather [a man in the fifth generation from the founding of the village] who lived in the ravine called "Over the Wall." He received a prize for filial piety from the state. When this grandfather was camped by the side of his father's mountain tomb in order to do proper mourning, his wife thought his living there over the three months of winter a terrible hardship. Her constant looking over the wall of her courtyard toward the
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