The Dynamics of Elite Domination in Early Modern Korea

One of the major themes in the history of early modern Korea are the ways sajok 士族 aristocrats responded to the peculiar lack of de jure protection of social status (Deuchler 2015a, 397). In Chosŏn (1392–1910), aristocratic status depended on the prestige attached to service in yangban officialdom—that is, the civil and military branches of the central bureaucracy. For an aristocratic house to be recognized as such, at least one male heir had to pass the competitive high-level civil or military examinations and be appointed to one of the eighteen ranks of yangban offices. Before the late sixteenth century, a relatively open regime allowed some upward mobility and the flow of provincials into the capital. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, local sajok aristocrats faced severely limited access to central yangban offices and thus devised alternative strategies of status retention. They created associations and rosters that excluded outsiders, for example, and promoted ideological and cultural activities that distinguished the local sajok from the common folk. Martina Deuchler’s Under the Ancestors’ Eyes: Kinship, Status, and Locality in Premodern Korea examines this historical process in relation to the persistence of what she calls “kinship ideology” in premodern Korea. To an extent, this book continues to explore the societal impact of what she refers to interchangeably as “Confucian,” “patrilineal descent,” and “agnatic” ideology in her 1992 work The Confucian Transformation of Korea: A Study of Society and Ideology. The notion of “kinship ideology” is an extension of this perspective. Deuchler holds that the Korean reading of Confucian philosophy and ritual canon—putatively stricter and more literal than the Chinese reading—provided sajok aristocrats with a powerful means of defending the local and regional status quo. The ideological restructuring of sajok households according to the principles of patrilineal organization allocated extra material resources to the main heir for ritual obligations, abolished uxorilocal marriage, and excluded women from inheritance, among other changes. Such cultural practices added another layer of social distinction at a time when the sajok Javier CHA Leiden University The Dynamics of Elite Domination in Early Modern Korea (Review Essay)