Organizer and Chair: JaHyun Kim Haboush, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Discussants: Michael Kalton, University of Washington, Tacoma; JaHyun Kim Haboush, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
In this panel, we will to examine the concepts of public and private as they were represented in the discourse on institutions and rituals in later Choson Korea. The binary of public and private, both as spheres of activity and as criteria for moral evaluation, was frequently employed in discussions concerning the relationship between the state and society, family and community, regional and central forces. This panel is formed with the belief that we will gain much insight into the rhetorical and institutional practices of Choson Korea by investigating how the binary of public and private was conceptualized and utilized in the discourses of Confucian and popular religious, that is hegemonic and non-hegemonic, institutions and rituals, and how the changing definitions of the binary impacted the practices of these institutions and rituals.
In her paper, Martina Deuchler posits family and polity as sites of negotiation between the private and public spheres. In this framework, "community" is seen as a space which falls between them. Thus, the community not only exhibits aspects of both the public and the private, but also emerges as a space of contestation over which the central government and local residents clashed. From examples of community compact (hyangyak) rituals in the Andong area, she will demonstrate the way in which the interests of these opposing agencies were negotiated and redrawn.
Milan Hejmanek, on the other hand, will concentrate on private academies (sowon) as site of contestation between the state and local power. He will discuss the increasing tension between the central government and the local elite over the question of who possessed the authority to decide on enshrinement and how this was pursued in the rhetoric of the public and the private.
The last paper will discuss the meaning of this binary as it was applied in popular religious rituals. In "Popular or Private: Shamanic Rituals in Choson Korea," Boudewijn Walraven posits that the "popular" was classified as private both as a sphere of activity and as a moral barometer, and he examines how this dichotomy influenced the practice of shamanic rituals in the wider social framework of gender and class.
Martina Deuchler, University of London
This paper will argue that in Choson Korea one of the most significant boundaries separating "public" and "private" was drawn between kinship and polity, as outlined in the Great Learning. There individual and "family" (ka)—the kin group in the widest sense—are represented as the "private" realm upon which the "public" realm of the state and ultimately the world rested. In simpler terms, for most landed elites in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Korea the polity meant in the first instance the "community" (hyang) in which they lived. Here they had to establish and maintain "public" order that would serve their "private" interests. Although it was nominally the task of the local magistrate to secure law and order in his realm, it was usually the local elite who was credited (for example, in local gazetteers) with exercising a "civilizatory" influence over the crude and uneducated peasantry.
The Chinese-inspired community compact (hyangyak) was the ideal means through which the elite could carry into effect its civilizatory role, that is, to apply essentially familial norms and values to the larger community beyond kinship boundaries. With the ritual enactment of rules similar to those operable within kin groups, the compacts straddled the boundary between the private sphere of kin and the larger non-kin public sphere. In a sense, thus, the compacts as administered by the elite tended to create "semi-private" realms. Although the administrators of the compacts were anxious to stress the state-supportive, that is "public," function of the compacts, the ambiguous nature of these documents often led to a tension and even outright conflict between government authorities and local residents.
It was in the latter part of the dynasty that the character of the compacts changed significantly as local magistrates tried to take over their control, and village communities tended to convert them into economic self-help instruments. In both cases, the compacts’ original purpose was subverted, and, by becoming entirely "public" institutions, they were no longer supported by local elites.
Specific evidence will be given from the Andong area.
Milan G. Hejtmanek, Harvard University
In the fourth month of 1741, a brooding and determined Yongjo issued a startling order, enforced nationwide: all private Confucian shrines and their associated academies (sowon) built without state permission since 1741 were to be destroyed; literati who had been leaders in the construction of such shrines were to be banned from government examinations for five years, and provincial governors who had allowed such construction were to have their warrants of office stripped, while local magistrates deemed culpable for illegal shrine building were to be criminally indicted. Eventually shrines at more than 170 sites were marked for leveling and officials were dispatched from the capital to oversee the process.
Yongjo’s action may have been unprecedented in scale, but it drew upon a century of growing anxiety in the court over local construction of Confucian shrines, dating from the reign of Injo. By 1657 Hyojong ordered the first razing of shrines, a practice that became common during the reign of Sukchong. At first the contention was over the moral worthiness of individual candidates for enshrinement, but by the late seventeenth century the very process of shrine building itself came under sustained official attack.
This paper examines the 1741 destruction of shrines by Yongjo, traces the development of state hostility toward all new shrine construction, and proposes an understanding of court attitudes in the 18th century toward Confucian shrines as mirroring a major shift of moral authority away from rural Confucian literati to the capital elite.
Boudewijn Walraven, Leiden University
During the Choson period, rituals performed by shamans were increasingly suppressed as heterodox and uncivilized. They were less and less seen as having a place and function within the public liturgical structures of the state, and those who continued to rely on shamans were regarded by the elite as serving their selfish, private interests. The meaning of the categories of "public" and "private" implied a value judgment (the public, kong, being superior to the private, sa) and obviously was culturally constructed. Ancestor worship, which was performed within a closed group, to us may seem a "private" affair, but in Choson Korea was a matter of public concern. By contrast, apparently public rituals of village communities below the administrative level where the central government was represented were not included in the legal codes, and accordingly should, I would argue, be considered as private rather than public.
If the forms of religious ritual that usually are referred to as "popular" or "shamanistic" are examined from the perspective of the opposition between the public and the private, their common characteristic turns out to be that they did not agree with the ideology of the male members of the elite who identified with the central government structure. There was a great variety in the nature, purposes and patrons of such rituals. They might be performed on behalf of women belonging to the royal court (for which reason the label "popular" hardly would fit) and would not necessarily involve shamans (so that it makes little sense to call them "shamanic"). The Choson classification into public and private was morally biased, but reflected the social categories of "popular" and "shamanic." It also offers a suitable framework to study the practical accommodations between different systems of ritual practice and belief.