Hawai‘i Studies on Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press; Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawai‘i, 2014. xi, 265 pp. (Figures.) US$48.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3968-0.
Although it may not be a topic we prefer to dwell on, death is an integral part of human life; beliefs and practices related to death and the dead are an important part of any culture. Consequently a rounded view of a culture is impossible if views of mortality and the afterlife are ignored. Yet in spite of this, the editors of this volume note, for Korea there has been no focused treatment of the matter in English, even if the subject inevitably comes up in accounts of Korea’s religions. They aim to rectify this situation and “provide insight into how death was dealt with on the peninsula” and to “offer a comparative platform from which East Asian approaches to death and disposal [of the dead] can be viewed” (2) by presenting nine chapters that deal with historical, anthropological, archaeological and literary aspects of mortuary culture from the seventh century to the present.
The book is not organized by period, but thematically, in four parts. The first part is entitled “The Body” and contains two chapters, “Death and Burial in Medieval Korea, The Buddhist Legacy” by Sem Vermeersch and “Making Death ‘Modern’” by John DiMoia. Vermeersch concludes, unexpectedly, that the introduction of Buddhism did not necessarily result in cremation instead of burial for Buddhist monks. DiMoia examines how in the 1950s American doctors working in Korea contributed to a reappraisal of the body “as a valuable tool for medical learning”(63). He also devotes attention to the emergence in the 1960s of mortuaries at hospitals, which mourners would come to visit, a modernized form of an older tradition. The second part, which might very well have included the chapter by Vermeersch, is about the disposal of the dead body. Here Charlotte Horlyck, on the basis of archeological discoveries, surveys the amazingly varied ways to dispose of a body between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. A completely different approach characterizes the following chapter by Guy Podoler, who analyzes a narrative about the nation in the National Cemetery in present-day Seoul, which by its inclusion of some persons and exclusion of others presents a thinly veiled political statement. In part 3, Michael Pettid examines shamanic rituals in the Chosŏn period (1392–1910), a time when these rituals, which arguably represent the indigenous religion of the peninsula, were heavily criticized by the Confucian elite. Nevertheless they continued to play a role even in the lives of the ruling class, particularly when premature or violent death needed to be dealt with. In a chapter that is rather brief but full of curious detail from Chosŏn sources like a sixteenth-century diary or the obituary of a noble lady, Milan Hejtmanek shows how the Confucian demand that descendants of the elite yangban class perform frequent and laborious rituals for the ancestors of up to four generations and ideally spend three years at the graveside of their parents substantially changed the lives of the yangban. He also points out, however, that enforced idleness during periods of mourning, when men had to withdraw from all official positions, offered opportunities for affirming social ties. Part 4 deals in three chapters with conceptions of the afterlife. The first chapter in this section, again by Michael Pettid, examines representations of ghosts in the Koryŏ (918–1392) and Chosŏn periods, drawing from a variety of sources, including works of fiction. Pettid makes the valid point that the existence of ghosts was recognized by Confucians and Buddhists as well as shamans, but is less attentive to differences in the views that various groups had of those who resided on the other side, with Confucians, for instance, less inclined to believe in a permanent existence after death. Some attention to the theories of Korean Neo-Confucians about the unstable nature of ghosts would have been welcome here. The next chapter, by Gregory Evon, examines Buddhist ideas about death and rebirth in the novel Kuunmong (The Nine Cloud Dream) by Kim Manjung (1637–1692), who as a proper yangban had enjoyed a sound Confucian education, which might have predisposed him negatively toward Buddhism. Recent research has made clear that Kim’s interest in Buddhism was somewhat less unusual among yangban than Evon suggests, but the chapter is an excellent reminder that where attitudes to death in the actual practice of Korean life were concerned one should not strictly compartmentalize Confucianism, Buddhism and shamanism. The final chapter by Franklin Rausch addresses a newcomer on the religious scene, Catholicism, introduced in the Chosŏn period through contacts with missionaries in Beijing, and examines views on heaven and martyrdom of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century converts. Rausch concludes that a “distinctly Catholic vision of the afterlife” emerged that inspired believers to choose to die rather than deny their faith when the government tried to suppress the new religion. (227)
The contributions to the volume are all of high quality and it presents several new insights. As it is the first work in English on the topic, covers a vast time span, and also is rather short, it should not come as a surprise that certain aspects may seem underrepresented. In its totality the book is biased toward the pre-modern period, with only two chapters about the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, offering two radically different approaches and a rather narrow focus. Podoler’s chapter, for instance, might have been accompanied by a chapter on self-immolation as a gesture of protest, of which the most famous example is Chŏn T’aeil’s setting fire to himself in 1970 to draw attention to the miserable conditions in the sweatshops of the Seoul garment industry, a gesture that galvanized an entire generation of dissidents. For the pre-modern period, the extremely popular belief in the Buddhist paradise of Amitābha (which may have facilitated belief in a Christian paradise) is mentioned only tangentially (and the words “rebirth” and “reincarnation” are missing from the index). But that does not detract from the value of the book as a stimulating investigation of an area of human life that is of undeniable salience.
Boudewijn Walraven
Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea