BR Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity

Project MUSE - <i>Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity</i> (review)



Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity (review)
Linda S. Lewis


From: Korean Studies
Volume 21,1997
pp. 145-148 | 10.1353/ks.1997.0005
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

BOOK REVIEWS145 146KOREAN STUDIES, VOL. 21

her deception in using him for political purposes. Kajiyama thus reveals his hopes for the reconciliation of the two nations. It is no wonder that these stories were warmly received in both Korea and Japan. "The Remembered Shadow of the Yi Dynasty" was nominated for Japan's prestigious Naoki Prize in 1963. Both "The Remembered Shadow of the Yi Dynasty" and "The Clan Records" were made into highly acclaimed Korean-made movies in 1967 and 1978, respectively. Yoshiko Dykstra has now made them accessible to English-speakers in an excellent, sensitive, and accurate translation. Chizuko T. Allen University of Hawai'i Getting Married in Korea: OfGender, Morality, and Modernity, by Laurel Kendall. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. 272 pp. $45.00 cloth, $17.00 paper. Getting Married in Korea is aboutjust that—how matches are made, wedding rites are conducted, and families finance and carry out the requisite exchange of ceremonial goods. But it also is about much more. As Kendall tells us, weddings "yield a commentary on gender, status, national identity, and the social good" (19). In this book we learn a great deal about the changing roles of Korean women, young and old, in a society rapidly transformed in the late twentieth century by industrial capitalism and the emergence of a full-blown consumer culture. Getting Married in Korea is divided into three sections that focus on different aspects of the marriage process: "Ceremony," "Courtship," and "Exchange ". Each section, in turn, is divided into two chapters that skillfully weave together with anthropological analysis an impressive mix of ethnographic description , personal narrative, historical contextualization, and meticulous review of the relevant scholarly literature. Kendall at times seems unnecessarily defensive that this rich and wide-ranging text is not based on a single fieldwork experience, in a particular ethnographic present. Instead, she has drawn on a core of informant narratives from interviews conducted with 29 largely working class newlywed couples, supplemented by conversations with matchmakers, and enriched by the self- reflexive responses of those who helped her with her research on weddings, in the Korea of the 1 980s and early 1 990s. These "heterogloss voices" (20) are presented against a formidable array of other material, reflecting Kendall's own decades of experience as an anthropologist of Korea. In the first section, "Ceremony," Kendall traces the history and practice of Confucian wedding rites, and their evolution into notions of what consti- tutes a "proper" Korean wedding. 

The secular "new style" wedding (described in detail in chapter 2) emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in opposition to the "old style" Confucian wedding, which was associated with patriarchal familism ; "in symbolic counterpart," Kendall notes, "The ritual structure of the new wedding celebrates conjugality" (66), rather than family authority. In turn, the "traditional" wedding of the 1990s now stands in opposition to the reinscribed "Western" wedding. This new "traditional" wedding implies a "self-conscious, selective reclamation of the past" (81) and as such transforms, in contemporary Korea, "a rite of kinship into an austere celebration of national identity" (76). These two oppositions (old/new, Western/traditional), says Kendall, "reflect two distinct moments in recent Korean history" (53). Thus, although Korean weddings may have a fixed structure, they also "may be regarded as objects of cultural production transacted upon shifting ground" (51). It is the "shifting ground" of historical change and its reflection in how Koreans meet and marry that Kendall sets out to explore in the rest of the book. In "Courtship," Kendall first examines changing courtship practices, particularly the evolution of a feminine ideal in the context of the marriage market. In the past, a bride's suitability was demonstrated by a sample of her needlecraft, not by the beauty of her face. A groom was measured by his position in his family, and not his ability to earn a living. Changing ideals of desirability , Kendall tells us, reflect Korea's transition to an urbanized industrial society and changes in the role of the wife, from a productive member of an extended household, to the manager of domestic consumption in an urban middle class family whose life style is determined by the husband...