Korean Families Yesterday and Today

Korean Families Yesterday and Today
Author: Hyunjoon Park
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2020-02-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0472054384

Korean families have changed significantly during the last few decades in their composition, structure, attitudes, and function. Delayed and forgone marriage, fertility decline, and rising divorce rates are just a few examples of changes that Korean families have experienced at a rapid pace, more dramatic than in many other contemporary societies. Moreover, the increase of marriages between Korean men and foreign women has further diversified Korean families. Yet traditional norms and attitudes toward gender and family continue to shape Korean men and women’s family behaviors. Korean Families Yesterday and Today portrays diverse aspects of the contemporary Korean families and, by explicitly or implicitly situating contemporary families within a comparative historical perspective, reveal how the past of Korean families evolved into their current shapes. While the study of families can be approached in many different angles, our lens focuses on families with children or young adults who are about to forge family through marriage and other means. This focus reflects that delayed marriage and declined fertility are two sweeping demographic trends in Korea, affecting family formation. Moreover, “intensive” parenting has characterized Korean young parents and therefore, examining change and persistence in parenting provides important clues for family change in Korea. This volume should be of interest not only to readers who are interested in Korea but also to those who want to understand broad family changes in East Asia in comparative perspective.

Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society

Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society
Author: Youna Kim
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 612
Release: 2016-12-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317337212

The Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society is an accessible and interdisciplinary resource that explores the formation and transformation of Korean culture and society. Each chapter provides a comprehensive and thought-provoking overview on key topics, including: compressed modernity, religion, educational migration, social class and inequality, popular culture, digitalisation, diasporic cultures and cosmopolitanism. These topics are thoroughly explored by an international team of Korea experts, who provide historical context, examine key issues and debates, and highlight emerging questions in order to set the research agenda for the near future. Providing an interdisciplinary overview of Korean culture and society, this Handbook is an essential read for undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well scholars in Korean Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, and Asian Studies in general.

Disrupting Kinship

Disrupting Kinship
Author: Kimberly D. McKee
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2019-03-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252051122

Since the Korean War began, Western families have adopted more than 200,000 Korean children. Two-thirds of these adoptees found homes in the United States. The majority joined white families and in the process forged a new kind of transnational and transracial kinship. Kimberly D. McKee examines the growth of the neocolonial, multi-million-dollar global industry that shaped these families—a system she identifies as the transnational adoption industrial complex. As she shows, an alliance of the South Korean welfare state, orphanages, adoption agencies, and American immigration laws powered transnational adoption between the two countries. Adoption became a tool to supplement an inadequate social safety net for South Korea's unwed mothers and low-income families. At the same time, it commodified children, building a market that allowed Americans to create families at the expense of loving, biological ties between Koreans. McKee also looks at how Christian Americanism, South Korean welfare policy, and other facets of adoption interact with and disrupt American perceptions of nation, citizenship, belonging, family, and ethnic identity.

Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea

Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea
Author: Ksenia Chizhova
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231547471

The lineage novel flourished in Korea from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. These vast works unfold genealogically, tracing the lives of several generations. New storylines, often written by different authors, follow the lives of the descendants of the original protagonists, offering encyclopedic accounts of domestic life cycles and relationships. Elite women transcribed these texts—which span tens and even hundreds of volumes—in exquisite vernacular calligraphy and transmitted them through generations in their families. In Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea, Ksenia Chizhova foregrounds lineage novels and the domestic world in which they were read to recast the social transformations of Chosŏn Korea and the development of early modern Korean literature. She demonstrates women’s centrality to the creation of elite vernacular Korean practices and argues that domestic-focused genres such as lineage novels, commemorative texts, and family tales shed light on the emergence and perpetuation of patrilineal kinship structures. The proliferation of kinship narratives in the Chosŏn period illuminates the changing affective contours of familial bonds and how the domestic space functioned as a site of their everyday experience. Drawing on an archive of women-centered elite vernacular texts, Chizhova uncovers the structures of feelings and conceptions of selfhood beneath official genealogies and legal statutes, revealing that kinship is as much a textual as a social practice. Shedding new light on Korean literary history and questions of Korea’s modernity, this book also offers a broader lens on the global rise of the novel.

Under the Ancestors’ Eyes

Under the Ancestors’ Eyes
Author: Martina Deuchler
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 631
Release: 2020-05-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1684175534

Under the Ancestors’ Eyes presents a new approach to Korean social history by focusing on the origin and development of the indigenous descent group. Martina Deuchler maintains that the surprising continuity of the descent-group model gave the ruling elite cohesion and stability and enabled it to retain power from the early Silla (fifth century) to the late nineteenth century. This argument, underpinned by a fresh interpretation of the late-fourteenth-century Koryŏ-Chosŏn transition, illuminates the role of Neo-Confucianism as an ideological and political device through which the elite regained and maintained dominance during the Chosŏn period. Neo-Confucianism as espoused in Korea did not level the social hierarchy but instead tended to sustain the status system. In the late Chosŏn, it also provided ritual models for the lineage-building with which local elites sustained their preeminence vis-à-vis an intrusive state. Though Neo-Confucianism has often been blamed for the rigidity of late Chosŏn society, it was actually the enduring native kinship ideology that preserved the strict social-status system. By utilizing historical and social anthropological methodology and analyzing a wealth of diverse materials, Deuchler highlights Korea’s distinctive elevation of the social over the political.

Korean Language in Culture and Society

Korean Language in Culture and Society
Author: Ho-min Sohn
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2005-12-31
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780824826949

Intended as a companion to the popular KLEAR Textbooks in Korean Language series and designed and edited by a leading Korean linguist, this is the first volume of its kind to treat specifically the critical role of language in Korean culture and society. An introductory chapter provides the framework of the volume, defining language, culture, and society and their interrelatedness and presenting an overview of the Korean language vis-à-vis its culture and society from evolutionary and dynamic perspectives. Early on, contributors examine the invention and use of the Korean alphabet, South Korea’s "standard language" vs. North Korea’s "cultured language," and Korean in contact with Chinese and Japanese. Several topics representative of Korean socio-cultural vocabulary (sound symbolic words, proverbs, calendar-related terms, kinship terms, slang expressions) are discussed, followed by a consideration of Korean honorifics and other related issues. Two chapters on Korean media, one on advertisements and the other a comparative analysis of television ads in Korea, Japan, and the U.S., follow. Finally, contributors look at salient features of the language, narrative structure, and dialectal variation. All chapters are accompanied by a set of student questions and a useful bibliography. A beginning level of proficiency in Korean is sufficient to digest the Korean examples with facility, making this volume accessible to a wide range of students. Contributors: Andrew S. Byon, Sungdai Cho, Young-A Cho, Young-mee Y. Cho, Miho Choo, Shin Ja J. Hwang, Ross King, Haejin Elizabeth Koh, Jeyseon Lee, Douglas Ling, Duk-Soo Park, Yong-Yae Park, S. Robert Ramsey, Carol Schulz, Ho-min Sohn, Susan Strauss, Hye-Sook Wang, Jaehoon Yeon.