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KOREAN STUDIES
REVIEW
Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality,
and Modernity, by Laurel Kendall. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996. xiii, 259 pp. (ISBN 0-520-20198-1 cloth; ISBN 0-520-20200-7
paper).
Reviewed by Timothy R.
Tangherlini
University of California, Los Angeles
Kendall's most recent work is among her very best. In it, she
interrogates the social and cultural processes attending contemporary
weddings in Korea. As with her explorations of Korean shamanism,
Kendall focuses primarily on the role of women in Korean society.
However, the volume is anything but a rumination on the difficulties
facing women in a Confucian-informed society. Rather, her work is an
intriguing and nuanced exploration of the negotiation of gender
politics in a rapidly changing late capitalist society. Kendall does
not concentrate solely on the contemporary, however, and she is well
attuned to the historical development of wedding traditions during
the past several centuries. The result of her investigations into
Korean weddings is nothing short of an anthropological tour-de-force.
Through the examination of particular stories of specific individuals
read against a backdrop of economic and political change, Kendall
masterfully situates her engaging discussions of weddings and
marriage in Korea at the crossroads of anthropology, sociology,
history and folklore.
She begins her work with what she labels a "Confessional
Introduction." Her detailed account of her personal relationship to
the field situation, as well as to many of her informants, coupled to
her own problematizing of the entire field of ethnographic writing
serves two purposes. First, the personal descriptions bring what
might seem a distant fieldwork site into clearer focus--Korea is
not exoticized, and her position is not privileged. Second, Kendall's
musings on the role of the ethnographer reveal her clear
understanding of the problems associated with the ethnographic
process--particularly when it is a Western woman writing about
non-Western women. Using a Korean proverb as a guide, Kendall plunges
into what is without doubt one of the most discussed topics in Korea,
namely getting married.
The remainder of the work is broken into three main
sections--Ceremony, Courtship, Exchange--each consisting of two
chapters. The section on Ceremony focuses on both a historical
overview of wedding ceremonies in Korea, as well as a detailed
analysis of contemporary wedding ceremonies in Korea. Any casual
visitor to Korea in the past twenty years or so has doubtlessly
encountered the enormous commercial wedding halls that dot the urban
landscape of any reasonably sized city. Inside the walls of these
extraordinary facilities, one finds giant reception halls as well as
large ceremonial halls where "Western style" weddings are carried out
with extraordinary precision and efficiency so as not to result in a
back-up of wedding parties. In smaller rooms tucked away on higher
levels, an element of the traditional style wedding is performed,
namely the p'yebaek, where the bride greets her new family. In
these
wedding halls, the present meets an imagined notion of the past.
Kendall provides an amusing and detailed description of one such
wedding, and it is this wedding--held in an unexceptional hall in an
unexceptional suburb of Seoul--that enables the remainder of her
discussion.
Kendall notes that, despite a will to fixity, Korean wedding
practices do not conform to a general notion of wedding ritual
derived from written texts and learned tradition. Rather, weddings
are dynamic cultural expressions that are constantly changing based
on the participants' own negotiation of cultural processes and their
position within that unsteady terrain. In her third chapter, Kendall
focuses on contemporary weddings in the context of modernization,
exploring both the historical dimensions of weddings (and the broader
concept of marriage) as well as their contemporaneous expression in
the rapidly modernizing Korea of the 1970s and 1980s. Setting up the
opposition of the "modern wedding" and the "traditional wedding," and
the various concessions made to each type of wedding during the past
thirty years, Kendall reveals how the wedding ceremony itself is one
subjected to debate, negotiation and frequent reinterpretation. In an
interesting discussion of the relationship between politics and
ritual, she expertly shows the effect of national policy, such as the
1969 Family Ritual Code (Kajông ûirye
chunch'ik), on ritual form, and
explores how wedding ceremonies ultimately became incorporated into
the national identity rhetoric of the late 1980s.
In the second section of the work, Courtship, Kendall steps back
from the actual wedding ceremony and traces the path that eventually
brings a couple to the altar. A great deal of anthropological ink has
been spilled concerning the economic and political implications of
marriage, yet Kendall manages to add an important contemporary
example to this otherwise well-described field. With wonderful
ethnographic acumen, she details the concept of both arranged
marriages (chungmae kyôrhon), love marriages
(yônae kyôrhon) as well
as the half-and-half marriages. She also details some of the
attendant practices, such as the arranged meeting (massôn),
and
reveals some of the tensions and difficulties that women experience
as they go through this difficult process. It is in this chapter that
a glance toward the male side of the process would have greatly
helped round out this study, since it seems likely that equally
interesting considerations, concerns, fears and anxieties are
expressed on the male side of the ethnographic equation.
Kendall's fifth chapter is among her strongest, and her frequent
appeal to personal experience narratives makes for an engaging
consideration of aspects of arranged marriages. Among the most
intriguing figures Kendall discusses here is that of the
professional, yet unlicensed, matchmaker--the Madame Ttu. Stories of
good and bad matchmakers are an integral part of contemporary
Korean folklore and clearly illuminate many of the concerns that
mothers and their marriage-age daughters have concerning the process
of finding a suitable groom. Kendall properly suggests that these
stories "reveal women as enmeshed in the pragmatics of making
marriages, not only as skillful matchmakers, but as mothers who set
the process in motion and who effect the complex exchanges of proper
weddings" (150). It would, of course, have been interesting to
collect similar stories about matchmaking from men.
The final section of the work focuses on the various exchanges
that are so crucial to the Korean wedding. Kendall focuses primarily
on the economic burden many of these exchanges pose for both lower
and middle class families (and even upper class families, given the
rumored excesses of some of these exchanges). Kendall details these
various exchanges: those of household goods (honsu); gifts of
clothing and jewelry between the bride and groom (yedan,
ch'edan and
p'aemul); gifts given to the significant kin of the groom
(yedan);
gifts of cash from the groom's kin to the bride (cholgap), and
from
the bride's family to the groom's friends (hamgap); and exchanges
of
food and wine between the two families (sangsu) (166). Among the
exchanges that Kendall explores in greatest detail are those of
ritual silk, given by the bride to the groom's significant kin, and
the negotiation of the purchase price of the gift box (hamgap)
delivered on the night before the wedding to the bride's house by
friends of the groom. Indeed, her final chapter is dedicated to a
wonderful economic anthropological consideration of the obligations
and expectations of the various parties to the transaction of the
gift box price. It is also in this chapter that considerations of the
groom and his friends--the male side of getting married in
Korea--receive attention.
Kendall's work provides an exceptionally detailed analysis of
women's concerns surrounding the ever-changing cultural complex of
weddings in Korea. Her work will clearly appeal to those interested
in Korean studies, as she expertly incorporates considerations of
politics, sociology, anthropology, folklore and history. The work is
also a significant addition to the ever growing literature on women's
issues in Korea (as well as East Asia and the world, for that
matter). Kendall's work will likely have general appeal to
anthropologists and folklorists who work in other geographic regions,
although folklorists will doubtlessly cringe at her rather
conservative use of the term "folklore." In short, Kendall's book is
an ethnographic masterpiece that is destined to become a classic in
the field of Korean studies.
Citation:
Tangherlini, Timothy R. 1998
Review of Laurel Kendall, Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender,
Morality, and Modernity (1996)
Korean Studies Review 1998, no. 6
Electronic file: http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr98-06.htm
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