Korean Local Society over Five Hundred Years : Social Tradition in a Long Time Perspective

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The project has been an interdisciplinary one to examine the development of social tradition in one local society in Korea with a time perspective of give hundred years starting in the sixteenth century. Project participants included anthropologists, historians, a geographer and a specialist in pedagogical history. The focal question has been how the social tradition was formed during the latter half of the Choson dynasty, ahd its influence on the social development during and after the colonial period. The research has been conducted in Wolbe district in the western part of the city of Taegu.The district is located on an alluvial fan. Geographer Lee Ch'eol-woo examined the natural geographic conditions of the district and points out that the locations of hamlets, which remained basically the same since the seventeenth century up the 1970's, are determined by availability of water. He also traces the changing industrial conditions and development of new residential areas that came with … More urbanization since 1980's.Economic historian Miyajima Hiroshi examined the land registers of 1721, and analyzed the patterns of land holdings and how they had changed over the proceeding century. His argument touches upon one of the controversial points over the developments of social classes during the Choson period.Shima Mutsuhiko traced the long-term changes and continuities of the social composition of the district by combining analyzes of Choson-period household registers and written genealogies with fieldwork among the contemporary residents. He focused on three levels of social organizations, i.e.hamlets, patrilineal kin groups, and households. The analyzes reveal unexpectedly rapidrate of turnover in terms of kin groups and households during the Choson period, underlining the significance of those few kin groups that succeeded in remaining and composing the core of the local social structure.Furukawa Noriko took up for her research a private school that was founded during the colonial period. She combined archival research and interviews with those who were involved in the school and their descendants to retrieve the course of development of the school and analyzed the relationship of private schools with the policies of the colonial government.Wolbe district was incorporated in the City of Taegu in 1980. The urban development program that the city government designed and implemented brought about a drastic change in the district. The hamlets that existed in almost the same locations at least for more than four hundred years have disappeared while most members of the long-standing kin groups have either been dislocated or have left the district. We see here the symbolic end of one era based on small-holder mode of production with patrilineal kinship orientation that started in the aftermath of Japanese invasion during the end of the sixteenth century. Less