Historical Anthropological Research on Korean Familliies: the cases of slave families during the Chosun dynasty period

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The aim of the present project is to include the people of the lowest social strata, the slaves, in the historical research of Korean family structure during the Chosun Dynasty period, which in turn will shed new lights on the household organizations of the higher strata, or the owners of the slaves. The data analyzed in this project are household registers from Taegu area between 1690 and 1753.The following is the summary of new findings of this project.1. The high frequency of intermarriage between the lower strata of the commoners and the slaves indicate that, although legally differentiated, they do not seem to have been clearly segregated from each other in their social relationships.2. Still, the households of slaves who lived outside of the households of their owners were clearly much less stable than their commoner counterparts in terms of residence in the same locality as well as in household reproduction over generations.3. The sex-ratios of the registered slaves are obviousl … More y unbalanced for any of the years when household registers were prepared, indicating that male slaves tended to be missing from the records. However, focusing on the names of their parents, which are also recorded, slaves, both living within and outside of the households oftheir masters, contracted reasonably stable marital relationships.4. While the period under investigation corresponds to one during which household organization of the commoners began to show emphasis towards patrilineal composition, kinship ties among the slaves, particularly among those living within the households of their masters, show strong matrilineal bias, reflecting the new law that dictated that the legal status of children should follow that of the mothers.5. The enduring relationships spanning over more than five generations that emerge between the masters and some of the slaves, as well as the treatment of slaves who return in their old age after long periods of escape, and also cases of slave parents fleeing while leaving their infant children in their masters' households, seem to indicate that master-slave relationships may not have been one of simple dominance and subjection but also had a tint of mutual dependence that may approach one of moral economy, a point that needs further explorations. Less