| Relics of pre-Confucian social organisation in Jeju-do? | |
|---|---|
| Tweet Topic Started: Jun 15 2018, 04:15:36 PM (30 Views) | |
| black man | Jun 15 2018, 04:15:36 PM Post #1 |
|
The Right Hand
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
|
Cho Haejoang wrote an essay on the people in Yong Dong village (in eastern Jeju-do) visited in 1976 and 1978. The villagers practiced both farming and diving (p. 26). Households could be virilocal as well as uxorilocal but generally tended to be matrivicinal. I.e., the village as a whole was rather endogamous (p. 27). Like matrilineal communities in island SE Asia, the more matrifocal households in Yong Dong were inhabited by relatively well-off women (p. 28). The chesa type of ceremony was organised by patrilineal relatives (like brothers) or 'sworn brothers' (p. 28) who could have more than 150 guests (p. 26). Men met, performed Confucian rituals, are and conversed with women being excluded. The special meaning of rituals more elaborated than in mainland Korea could have emphasised the historical importance of patrilineages having interlinked Jeju-do with mainland Korea. In this sense, the absence of men having worked in mainland Korea might indicate gender parallelism rather than matrifocality. Then again, men memorised both male and female ancestors despite of the context of patrilineal social networks if to emphasise bilaterality (pp. 26-7). So one might speculate whether bilineal descent could have been the norm like possibly among mainland Koreans in between more ancient and more recent phases of Korean history. Interestingly, Cho's description of the men in Yong Dong village (pp. 28-30) resembles the descriptions of 20th century Mosuo men according to popular media and early modern Nivkh men according to Shternberg. However, that doesn't necessarily mean any archetypical similarities: the Mosuo are still partly matrilineal people living within a landlocked region. And the social organisation of the Nivkhs along the Amur river has been altered during the past centuries due to Manchu-Tungus and Russian influences. By contrast, the men of Jeju-do were maybe originally fishermen who spent lots of time separated from their wives and children via the sea. And they could have started with irrigation farming together with Confucian practices like Cho seems to suggest (p. 31). So how 'natural' was the mutual avoidance of men and women which resembled what could be observed in 20the century matrilineal Mosuo as well? Plus, could it have been that archaic and/or coincidental that men having worked outside of the matrivicinal sphere of their families remind you of both 20th early modern Mosuo and early modern Nivkhs? Perhaps what these people in three different parts of Asia had in common was primarily that external sources of income divided the sexes. I.e., gender parallelism could have been caused by economic and political centres to which men from the peripheries gravitated. And apart from that, Jeju-do might have had gender parallelism before due to fishermen having left their homes for extended periods of time. But that would have been a special factor concerning Jeju-do only. Source: Cho Haejoang 1979: "Neither dominance" |
![]() |
|
| 1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous) | |
| « Previous Topic · Korean · Next Topic » |





![]](http://z6.ifrm.com/static/1/pip_r.png)


