Under the Ancestor’s Eyes: Kinship, Status and Locality in Pre-Modern Korea. By Martina Deuchler. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015. xviii, 609 pp [ISBN: 9780674504301]

Abstract

Martina Deuchler’s Under Ancestors’ Eyes: Kinship, Status and Locality in Pre-Modern Korea, is a vast and ambitious work that seeks to explore the development of kinship – and the persistent importance of kinship and inherited social status – in pre-modern Korea from the early Silla dynasty to 1894. The bulk of the book, which is concerned with Andong and Namwŏn from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth, makes extensive use of documents from aristocratic sajok household of those areas to reconstruct the development of sajok status during the Chosŏn period. She works with the ambitious goal of tracing a “native kinship ideology” that placed the social maintenance of aristocratic social status above court politics. As she writes in the conclusion: “The indigenous kinship ideology, with its celebration of status hierarchy and status exclusivity, ran like a red thread through Korea’s history from early Silla to the late nineteenth century” (408). The book is organized into five parts, each divided into several chapters. Part I, “Foundations” (15-76), explores the trajectory of a hereditary