This study reexamines the roles and challenges of legal officials within the judicial system during the reign of King Chongjo (r. 1776-1800). Despite their minor status in the bureaucratic hierarchy, legal officials played a crucial role as intermediaries in applying the law, including interpreting statutes, drafting legal documents, and offering advice on judicial matters. However, their specific duties and responsibilities within the judicial system have been largely unexplored. To address this gap, this study focuses on King Chongjos' reign, which provides a particularly rich body of judicial records concerning legal officials. Among these are twenty-seven documented cases in which legal officials were disciplined for failing to fulfill their duties. These cases offer a unique opportunity to examine the expectations placed on legal officials and the specific roles they were required to perform. By analyzing the legal regulations outlining the status and responsibilities of legal officials, as well as the twenty-seven cases in which they faced severe punishment for inadequate performance, this paper brings the overlooked presence of legal officials to the forefront of legal history research.
This paper examines Ham Sokhons' philosophy of ssial through the lens of civil religion, highlighting its prophetic characteristics. Civil religion, a concept first coined by Rousseau and later rejuvenated by Bellah, is a conceptual framework of collective belief or an underlying narrative structure that builds and sustains the sacred identity of a political community. The study posits that the political and historical thoughts of Ham Sokhon (1901-1989), a key figure in Koreas' intellectual and political history, exemplify an imagination of civil religion through his articulation of collective selfawareness and communal identity. By exploring Hams' extensive literary contributions, including Queen of Suffering: A Spiritual History of Korea and other important essays on religion and politics, this paper delineates four dimensions of his civil religion: (1) a religious understanding of the self and politics, (2) acting as a jeremiad to encourage moral reflection, (3) reinterpreting crises through soteriological narratives, and (4) presenting a cosmopolitan spirit that is relevant in a pluralistic society. Through a selective analysis of Hams' work, this study aims to elucidate the core messages of Hams' thought regarding the self, politics, and community, ultimately demonstrating the enduring significance of his vision in contemporary discussions of community consciousness.
The sinking of MV Sewol, on April 16, 2014, claimed 304 lives, 250 of whom were high school students on afield trip to Jeju Island. The activist movement in the Sewol Disasters' wake, calling for remembrance of the victims, investigation into the Disaster, and accountability, has witnessed mobilization on a scale unprecedented for post-disaster activism in Korea, and continues to this day. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork among the bereaved families of Sewol Disaster victims and allied activists, this article considers Sewol activism as an instantiation of the shifting tenors and tactics of political action. Focusing on the heterogeneity of its constituents, the softer, cultural modes of resistance through which the movement is diffused, and how the boundary between "citizens" and "activists" has been blurred, this article proposes a refined understanding of what it means to "act" in the political arena of contemporary South Korea.
This piece studies one of the most well-known events in the North Korean state historical narrative: the Battle of Pochonbo. The battle, or, speaking more precisely, the raid, was a 1937 attack of a border hamlet orchestrated by Communist Party of Chinas' armed resistance groups in Manchukuo. One of the organizers of the raid was Kim Il Sung, who was made the leader of North Korea eight and a half years later. This caused the importance of the skirmish to be elevated to extreme levels by Pyongyang. This piece reconstructs the actual events that occurred in Pochonbo on the night of the raid and traces the evolution of the North Korean false narrative of the skirmish.
This article examines the evolving discourse on cart transport in late Choson Korea, focusing on its use for embassy missions to Beijing during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Early advocates of expanded cart use for embassy missions emphasized its practical advantages over horse-led palanquins. Over time, however, the rationale for promoting cart use shifted from easing the logistical burdens on local society to curbing the harmful influence of horse minders and safeguarding both state and local interests. Despite these arguments, Choson court officials remained cautious, voicing concerns about the potential adverse effects of cart transport on the livelihoods of horse minders. The debate over the adoption of carts for embassy missions was thus shaped not merely by considerations of efficiency, but by assessments of their broader socioeconomic implications for border communities. Ultimately, the discourse on cart use for embassy missions reflected a growing recognition within the Choson state that its transport infrastructure was intricately entangled with local interests and practices. This recognition underscores the limits of state capacity to implement logistical reforms unilaterally and reveals a gradual, if reluctant, acknowledgment of local agency in shaping transport infrastructure in late Choson Korea.
This memorial article extends conventional tributes to Carter Eckerts' contributions to Korean history and Korean Studies, using personal, analogical, and multidisciplinary perspectives to examine the empirical foundations and analytical tendencies of his scholarship. Engaging with Eckerts' two touchstone books, this essay examines his drive for archival research, stemming from an awareness that he was not "a man who knew too much,"but rather "a man who knew he did not know too much." This intellectual curiosity and humility produced significant empirical contributions and deep engagement with works in Korean and Japanese. For methodology and analysis, his implicit explanations and inductive approach meant the linkages between his data and arguments were occasionally opaque, leading to varied readings of his works. The richness ofEckerts' empirical scholarship, however, is a vital lodestar magnifying the complexities of historical inquiry and memory, especially amid Fordist academic production and large language-model-generated data. Ultimately, this essay encourages an appreciation of Eckerts' intellectual legacy through his awareness of the limits of his knowledge, rather than the usual metrics of scholarly accomplishment and institution-building.
This study empirically analyzes how homeownership and wealth accumulation through homeownership affect perceptions of belonging to the middle class. The study also examines how this perception affects attitudes toward the expansion of public welfare spending. The study finds that individuals in Korean society do not perceive themselves as middle class based on homeownership alone, suggesting that asset size may play a crucial role in middle-class identification along with homeownership status. These findings suggest that the standard for middle-class status, a position that enjoys a stable standard of living, is becoming increasingly higher in Korean society. Furthermore, the results of a mediation effect model analysis reveal that those who perceive themselves as middle class are more likely to perceive themselves as well-prepared for potential risks in the future. Therefore, it can be inferred that they are more likely to have a negative attitude toward the expansion of public welfare spending.
This article investigates American and South Korean efforts to shift domestic fuel use from firewood to fossil fuels in the 1950s, and how building transportation routes around the Taebaek Coalfield-the mining heartland of South Korea-contributed to this transition. After the Korean War, excessive biomass fuel use in households-which accounted for 97 percent of household fuel-was expected to obliterate South Koreas' entire forest stock and collapse its agriculture. As fuel transition emerged as an imperative to tackle South Koreas' environmental crisis, this paper argues that delivering coal to households and building energy transportation routes became a focal point of South Koreas' modern statecraft. The first part of this article demonstrates that South Koreas' abundant anthracite, previously regarded as a source for industrialization, was developed as the energy source for household fuel transition by the South Korean and US governments. In the second part, this article highlights the various forms of labor mobilization-including corv & eacute;e, conscripts, and forced labor-that built the energy transportation routes-railroads and roads across the steep Taebaek Highlands-to open new mines and resolve transportation bottlenecks. Through this draconian labor exploitation, I argue that the authoritarian regime sought to establish its legitimacy by supplying cheap household fuel to urban residents. This article also argues that the construction of these "coal highways" was key to South Koreas' transition to fossil fuels and ushered in its Anthropocene.
This article examines cases involving suspicious deaths of women and allegations of female suicide in inquest records from the last decades of the Choson period (1392- 1910). Discourses on female suicide in the late Choson traditionally revolved around the chastity ideology and several exemplary scenarios: suicide by widows to follow their husbands in death, by victims of sexual assault, and in response to accusations of sexual impropriety. While scholars have shown that the realities of female suicide during this period went well beyond the domain of chastity, they have usually examined these cases under the assumption that a voluntary act of suicide had taken place. Suicides in the late Choson, however, were routinely subject to judicial scrutiny, and when they involved women, were especially fraught with the possibility of concealed foul play or coercion. This article interrogates how officials handled allegations of female suicide as well as questions of legal culpability in contentious cases. I show how suicide determinations relied on narratives of female grievance both within and beyond the chastity framework, and implicated multiple stakeholders-inquest officials, relatives of the deceased, and the accused along with their families-whose interests did not usually align and who told competing stories. Hence, these cases reveal the complex calculus involved in constructing narratives of female suicide in the late Choson, and underscore the justice-oriented discourses, apart from the virtue discourses, that informed such narratives.
This introduction commemorates the intellectual legacy of JaHyun Kim Haboush by reflecting on her contributions to the study of Chosŏn Korea and outlining the central themes of this special thematic issue, “Paradoxes of Gender Politics.” Haboush’s scholarship challenged static interpretations of Confucian ideology and encouraged a historiography grounded in critical inquiry, vernacular voices, and emotional nuance. The introduction highlights her commitment to writing an “interesting” history—one that problematizes dominant narratives and expands Korean studies into broader global conversations. It also provides a biographical sketch of Haboush’s career and pedagogical influence, particularly her mentorship of a new generation of Chosŏn scholars. This introduction situates the essays in this collection within the context of Haboush’s vision, emphasizing how each contribution interrogates the complexities of gender, status, and power in late Chosŏn Korea by examining the tensions between ideology and practice, as well as norm and experience. In doing so, the collection honors Haboush’s call for a Korean historiography that is intellectually “interesting” and provocative.
The article discusses how courtesan performances were involved in constructing the theatrical dimension of royal power in Choson by focusing on the banquet to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Lady Hyegyong (Hyegyong Kung Hong Ssi(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic)(sic), 1735-1815), King Chongjos' (sic)(sic) (r. 1776-1800) mother, which followed the royal procession of King Chongjo to the mausoleum of his father, Prince Sado (Sado seja (sic)(sic)(sic) (sic), 1735-1762), located in Suwon (sic)(sic) in Kyonggi (sic) (sic) Province. The major works of courtesan court performances in royal banquets of Choson enacted narratives in which courtesans played the roles of mediators who delivered auspicious objects from the divine world to the king. Courtesans were able to stage the unorthodox divine kingship, paradoxically because they were constructed as dehumanized liminal figures in state slavery practices and thus shared nonhuman qualities with the kings who were imagined as elevated liminal figures in divine kingship. The political implications of courtesan performances simultaneously were made equivocal, as some works of performance were focused on providing gendered entertainment to the audience. The sexualized bodies of courtesans on the stages of state rites therefore produced a sexualized form of royal sovereignty that preserved the traces of the primordial violence that constituted absolute kingship.
Panel discussion at the conference "Gender, Language, and Emotions in Choson Korea: In Commemoration of JaHyun Kim Haboush's Scholarship and Teaching," George Washington University, Washington, DC, May 7, 2022
This article examines the emotional regime of the late Choson palace through how anger is portrayed in The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong. Written by Lady Hyegyong (1735- 1815), the wife of the ill-fated Crown Prince Sado and the mother of King Chongjo, the Memoirs recollect deeply traumatic events, ones that left deep scars and lingering grudges in the royal family and beyond. Drawing on William Reddys' concept of "emotional regimes," this article identifies five normative rules governing anger expression in the late Choson palace: restraint, empathy, protocol, circumstance, and obligation, all of which can be traced through the semantic and contextual analysis of anger-related vocabulary in the Memoirs and contextualized within Confucian ideas of emotional regulation and their moral implications. Together, these rules show anger expression to be a socially encoded and politically consequential act, often stratified along lines of hierarchy and gender. Whereas male royals, especially King Yongjo, frequently displayed anger as righteous indignation or an expression of royal authority, his subordinates-whether the women in the palace or even his own crown prince- were compelled to internalize their emotions or express them obliquely, suffering the psychological toll of their suppression.
This article examines cultural devaluation and gender bias in literary accounts of Choson yangban women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that documents from the period, written by yangban men, distorted the image of women, otherized them, and described them in contradictory terms. Work assigned to the domain of women-termed "womens' chores" in the record-is described in the written record in terms of duty rather than labor and in terms of inborn talent rather than acquired learning. Womens' social interactions were presented in the language of anonymity, collectivity, and non-place, and they were not allocated social space. This image served as the basis for the modern conception of yangban women, with its accompanying further distortions and limitations, as represented by such phrases as "wise mother, good wife," "wifely support," and "severing natal ties upon marriage." These concepts developed after the end of Choson and perpetuated contradictions in the portrayal of yangban women by privileging Neo-Confucian, patriarchal ideals of womanhood over their actual lived experiences, the latter being consequently excluded from history, culture, and written records both in Choson and well into the modern period.
Crucial to the operations of the Korean court, palace women possessed special status during the history of this institution: the marriage prohibition placed them outside the traditional kinship network, and their lives, in contrast to those of most other women, were defined by the professional skills they acquired through service. This article conjures palace women as unlikely subjects of Korean colonial modernity-the early twentieth-century transformation of the capitalist public scene that opened limited pathways for womens' self-fashioning and public role. Dismissed from service after a series of colonial palace reforms in the early twentieth century, palace women remained unable to forge independent professional identities, in stark contrast to other palace workers, such as painters or female entertainers. Using the scant available archive- palace womens' petitions, diaries, and contemporary newspaper reportage-this article maps the trajectory of former palace servants across the terrain of colonial gender politics. The extant petitions submitted by palace women constitute an especially revealing site for understanding their self-perception and self-presentation. The lives of palace women-unconventional in the traditional kinship society-constitute another paradox in the context of womens' modern education and professionalization in the early twentieth century.
