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This work explores what it means to be modern and what it means to be Korean in a culture where courtship and marriage are often the crucible in which notions of gender and class are cast and recast. Touching on a number of important issues—identity, romantic love, women’s work, marriage negotiations, and wedding ceremonies—Laurel Kendall gives us a new appreciation for how Koreans have adapted this pivotal social practice to the astounding changes of the past century.
Kendall attended her first Korean wedding in 1970, soon after she arrived in the country with the Peace Corps. Years later, as a seasoned anthropologist, she began interviewing both working-class and middle-class couples, matchmakers, purveyors of dowry goods, and proprietors of wedding halls. She consulted etiquette handbooks and women’s magazines and analyzed cartoons, photographs, and weddings themselves. The result is an engaging account of how marriage matches are made, how families proceed through the rites, how they finance ceremonies and elaborate exchanges of ritual goods, and how these practices are integral to the construction of adult identities and notions of ideal women and men. The book is also a reflection on what it means to write “Korea” in a complex and ever changing social milieu.
- Sales Rank: #1079925 in Books
- Published on: 1996-05-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .80" w x 6.00" l, .92 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 269 pages
From the Back Cover
This book is and is not about Korean weddings. It explores the meaning and importance of getting married in late-twentieth-century Korea, but it is also concerned with weddings as flash points of argument about the past and the present, about the desirability of women and men, and about what it means to be Korean in a shifting and intensely commodified milieu.
About the Author
Laurel Kendall is Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History. Her previous books include Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life (1985) and The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman: Of Tales and the Telling of Tales (1988).
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Discovering Korea Through Its Weddings
By Etienne RP
Laurel Kendall first came to Korea in the early 1970s as a Peace Corps volunteer. She returned in 1976 as a graduate student observing ancestor rituals (yotamkut) in rural households and healing ceremonies (kut) by female mediums (mansin, mudang, posal). In 1983, she began a project on weddings by attending marriage ceremonies in the wedding halls of a small town located near the village where she conducted her first fieldwork. Between 1983 and 1985, during several trips to Korea, she interviewed a sample of about thirty couples as well as members of their families in long, semi-structured interviews. She asked newly-wed couples how they met with each other, how they dealt with their future parents-in-law, how they financed ceremonies and what kind of gifts they exchanged. In subsequent years, she continued to accumulate data by monitoring how marriage was discussed in the popular media and in everyday conversations. She also visited regularly her first host family and witnessed how her Omoni’s three daughters got married. She also researched in history books and ethnographic archives how marriage had evolved since the Joseon period and through the tumultuous twentieth century. Getting Married in Korea, published in 1996, is the result of this accumulated experience and observations.
Studying weddings is a classic in cultural anthropology. Weddings are rites of passage or ceremonies of initiation by which the groom and the bride change social status and enter full membership in society. They reflect alliance strategies between two families or lineages who contract relations of mutual support and reciprocity. Some anthropologists see marriages as part of a general theory of exchange in which women are treated as property, being given to other men to cement group relations and foster structures of social networks. When groups exchange women on a regular basis, they create a debtor/creditor relationship which must be balanced through the “repayment” of wives, either directly or in the next generation. Other feminist scholars argue that unions and wedding ceremonies perpetuate the subordination of women and are replete with sexist imagery. Wedding tradition are rooted in patriarchy, as when the father of the bride walks her down the aisle and gives her away to the groom. Folklorists see in weddings a rich repository of social customs and traditions that give privileged access to a culture. For anthropologists, observing weddings and asking questions about marriage is an easy way to do fieldwork.
Laurel Kendall covers all these aspects in her study of how people get married in Korea. The book combines aspects of a classic ethnography, with descriptions of rites and practices that stand in sharp contrast with nuptial practices in Western societies, and elements of a postmodern inclination that characterized the discipline of anthropology during the 1970s and 1980s. She is careful to point out that she does not describe Korean weddings per se, but specific ceremonies situated in time and place and involving people belonging to a certain milieu. Wedding practices are always diverse and contested by people who have different views on what a proper marriage should be like. But there are also homogenizing factors that impose order and bring uniformity to the diversity of practices. One such factor is the wedding industry evolving around banquet halls, professional services and specialized magazines that propose a limited set of options among which the couple will choose its own formula. Another factor is the expectation of families and entourage of the couple, who may refer to their own experience or to local traditions, invented or not. Yet another factor is the role of the state, which in the authoritarian context of the 1980s took the form of official guidelines and etiquette codes that aimed at limiting excessive expenses and prohibiting practices seen as wasteful. Indeed, the interest of the anthropologist in her topic was itself framed by such state concerns, and her initial study was to measure the various costs and economic transactions associated with marriage rituals.
As Kendall confesses it, attending her first wedding in Korea was a depressing experience. On the surface, there was nothing specifically Korean in the ceremony. It took place in a wedding hall where the soon-to-be-wed couple and their party of family and colleagues were bumping against the guests of other parties. The whole scene reminded her of an intercity bus terminal. The groom and the bride wore Western attire, and the whole ceremony mimicked a traditional church wedding while erasing the religious element. The anthropologist wished she could attend a “real” Korean wedding which, according to her Korean informers, was still performed “in the countryside.” Weddings as celebrated in wedding halls were a wholly commodified enterprise. The organizers offered a package deal that included the use of the ceremonial hall, pianist, photographer, a rented dress and veil, gloves and flowers for the bridal party, and a beauty parlor session for the bride.
On closer inspection, however, the anthropologist observed some peculiarities. As elsewhere in Asia, guests presented cash envelopes to a clerk at the entrance desk who registered the amount of their monetary donations. It was said that cash gifts were also collected at the workplace and handed out directly to the groom, for fear the parents kept the money for themselves. A list of the government’s “prohibition against empty ceremonies and vulgar ostentation” hung in the front office next to a display of wedding portraits. A young man served as an announcer (sahoe) and guided the attendees to a sequence of procedures set in the Family Ritual Code published by the government and detailed in etiquette books. The author notes that the adherence to a preordained script echoed the Confucian insistence on proper ritual or ye (Chinese li), while the intervention of an authoritarian state reminded her that Confucian traditions were reinvented and mobilized by the state to serve a national project of developmentalism. Another culturally marked agent was the churye or master of ceremony, a dignified figure who delivered a long speech to the couple as they were about to enter a life-long commitment. The churye also performed the role of clergy and declared the couple united by the bond of marriage.
Patriarchy makes itself felt in Korean weddings, even more so than in their Western model. Korean patrilocal traditions enhance the pathos of “raising a daughter and giving her away.” When they bend forward to greet each other, the bride is (or was) instructed to bow just a bit more deeply than the husband. Up until the 1970s, brides were enjoined not to smile on their wedding day lest their first child be a girl. The churye speech as analyzed by Kendall is full of references to a Confucian ideology reconfigured to suit a conservative social philosophy. For the groom, marriage is the day he “puts up his hair and becomes an adult.” An unmarried man, even though he is not a boy, is socially not a man and remains treated like a boy. For the bride, marriage marks her entrance into her husband’s kin group and the severing of the links with her own family. This is symbolized by the pyebaek ceremony immediately following the Western-style wedding, in which the bride changes her clothes for a neo-traditional hanbok costume and, accompanied by the groom also clad as a yangban from dynastic times, bows with a full kow-tow to her parents-in-law to get acceptance into her new family. The author is careful to note that each genuflection is rewarded by a cash envelope or cholgap. The pyebaek ceremony also involves offerings of cups of wine, and a fertility rite by which the stepmother casts handfuls of dates and chestnuts on the bride’s long sleeves while wishing for many grandchildren.
In fact, pyebaek ceremonies are a fairly recent phenomenon. Wedding halls began to offer special rooms for the pyebaek only in the 1970s. Before that, the formal greeting to the parents-in-law took place at home and did not involve elaborate costuming. There are many traditional customs that are resurfacing in modern wedding rituals. The Confucian wedding rite was a yangban custom and was heavily formalized. The procedures were declaimed in arcane Sino-Korean. During the reforms of the fourteenth and fifteenth century now identified as the introduction of “Neo-Confucianism,” scholars versed in the Chinese tradition sought to restore the moral order of a lost golden age. The adopted Chu Hsi’s Family Rituals as a manual of ritual practice that would be accessible to all, reach and poor alike. The notion that good rituals make better people stems from Korea’s Neo-Confucian heritage. The correct performance of critical passage rites was thought to foster a well-run social order. The Christian missionaries who introduced new style wedding or sinsik fought against this Confucian tradition; but like the Chinese scholars from the fourteenth century, they saw Christian marriage as an instrument of family reform. Likewise, young intellectuals from the end of the nineteenth century began to advocate marriage on the basis of personal choice and mutual understanding as opposed to the blind marriages negotiated by families, when the groom first had a peek of his bride during the wedding ceremony. These young patriots also advocated education for women, and soon put forward the model of “wise mothers, good wives” (hyonmo yangcho) who were supposed to serve the nation in times of Japanese imperialism.
We now see a return of traditional weddings in places like the Korea House or other touristic sites, where onlookers can glimpse the groom and the bride in traditional attire. Souvenir shops sell wooden wedding ducks that are offered by the groom as a sign of fidelity. More guests wear the national dress of hanbok. This embrace of a more “Korean” style of wedding coincided with a swelling of national pride starting in the 1980s. It was accompanied by the repelling of the Family Ritual Code and its “prohibitions on empty formalities and vulgar ostentation.” The average cost of wedding skyrocketed: it went from 8 to 18 million won between 1985 and 1990 (it surpassed 50 million in 2013). Another ritual that underwent a revival is the bride’s family sending “ritual silk” (yedan, yemul) in the form of clothing for the groom and his immediate family, originally to test the bride’s skills at stitching and embroidering. The groom’s side would respond with comparable gift to the bride when they send the gift box, on or near the eve of the wedding. When the groom’s friends bring the gift box (ham) containing the marriage contract and betrothal gifts, they bargain and banter with the bride’s family in the hope of extorting from them a large “delivery fee” (hamgap) that will be spent on the evening’s celebration. In turn, the friends of the bride would sometimes “sell” her bouquet on the wedding day to the gift box bearers for a “flower fee” (kkotkap). Some scholars argue these rituals are new customs, or invented traditions; others describe the gift box delivery as carnival inversion of the social order by which subordinates and kinsmen would claim a share of the wedding’s spoils.
Some critics describe Korea’s modern history as a long march towards gender equality and women’s “liberation.” The opposition between an enlightened “now” versus a repressive “then” is often illustrated by the passage from “arranged” marriage (chungmae kyorhon) to “love” marriage (yonae kyorhon). For Laurel Kendall, the reality is more complex. First, matchmaking has not disappeared from the scene. Far from it: it has even spread to new sectors of society and taken new forms, such as computer matching services or marriage bureaus. The wicked matchmaker or “Madam Ttu” (named after a character in a novel by Park Wan-seo) is a figure of popular folklore. Many marriages fit into an intermediate category, half “love” and half “matchmade”. The very fact that a friend or relative often “introduces” the couple blurs the boundaries and rigid categorizations. Second, for “love” marriage as for “matchmade”, young women stand at a particular disadvantage. Marriage in Korea is a buyer’s market: men of “good groom material” (chohun sillanggam) are hard to find, and “good men” are in a position to set exacting terms in matchmaking. At the arranged meeting, as in a job interview, a woman is under tremendous pressure to convey a positive impression of her looks and personality in a brief period of time and under awkward circumstances. In love and romance, the situation is more balanced, but young women still stand at a disadvantage when it comes to asserting their freedom and independence.
As mentioned, this book was published in 1996, based on research that took place in the early eighties. The modern reader cannot fail to contrast the “then” and the “now”. Korea has changed a lot during the past four decades, and so have marriage, courtship, and matrimony. Korea was then a marriage country: as Kendall wrote, “marriage under the old Korean system was almost as certain as death,” and women who were still single in their late twenties were under considerable pressure to marry. Now four in ten South Korean adults are unmarried, the highest share among the 34 OECD countries. The mean age at which women marry has risen from 25 in 1995 to 30 today. In Seoul, over a third of women with degrees are single. Doing fieldwork in a working-class neighborhood, Kendall met couples who registered their marriage long before they could afford a proper wedding ceremony, which was thus delayed until the household had accumulated sufficient savings. Now it is said that some couples have a wedding ceremony before registering their marriage, waiting a few months for fear their union could end in a divorce, as is the case with one in three marriages in Korea. And yet some distinctive customs remain. Korean couples have a particular way to do romance, as evidenced in the television drama series that are watched all over Asia. Getting Married in Korea is still a fascinating topic for all people interested in learning more about Korea’s society and culture.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Learn about Korean society
By W Boudville
An at times funny read of the intersection of two cultures. One is the modern consumerist culture, that has taken firm hold in South Korea since the 1980s. The other is a traditional Confucian morality steeped in centuries of lore.
Kendall studies this through the ingenious choice of marriages. Here, the Confucian traditions often appear in the form of arranged marriages. Yet she shows how young couples persistently try to sidestep this format.
Along the way, a non-Korean reader is also rewarded by many insights into Korean society. Things that an outsider who does not speak the language would simply miss.
6 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
interesting case study in sociology, not Korean culture
By A Customer
this book is not for someone who would be interested into a systematic and quick introduction to Korean wedding customs.
The elements presented are of the case study type, showing the evolutions over time of a Korean family sampled for a PhD thesis. interesting for another scholarly work, it isn't so much for someone interested in understanding Korean marriage customs. Bits and pieces can be collected and summarised by oneself. This book is about "sociology", not "culture" per se.
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