Animal agency has been gaining momentum in historical studies over the past decade, as it encourages a reconceptualization of the environmental embeddedness of human societies and their politics. With George Kallander’s Human–Animal Relations and the Hunt in Korea and Northeast Asia, that animal turn has finally arrived for premodern Korean history in English. Kallander sets his sights on big game: he maps the Korean Peninsula’s human–animal relations onto the Goryeo–Joseon political transition and the Neo-Confucian transformation of the 13th–16th centuries. The book argues that Goryeo’s involvement with the Mongol Empire forged a relationship with wild animals and hunting on the peninsula that helped pillar the revival of the royal institution. The royal hunting and game-gifting practices that arose allowed kings to bond with Mongol overlords-cum-family and assert their own monarchical authority at home over the bureaucracy. That set of human–animal relationships was then fundamentally challenged by Joseon’s activist Neo-Confucian officials who sought to check royal authority by limiting the movements of the royal person, subjugating animal bodies to Confucian ritual needs, and transforming wild spaces into agro-ecologies in the agrarian state. Animal bodies and their environments were thus sites of contestation as the peninsula morphed into an early modern bureaucratic state dominated by hereditary yangban elites.
The book begins with a bestiary of the hunt on the Korean Peninsula, a useful summary for readers who are not familiar with the hunted fauna of the pre-modern period. The book is then divided into two large parts: Goryeo-era (918–1392) and early Joseon-era (1392–1506) developments. The Goryeo section, by far the shorter of the two, advances the idea that contact and alliance with the Mongols meant the royal institution adopted more frequent hunting as a political tool, in sync with Mongol political practice, which solidified royal authority and symbolized its martial character by cultivating extra-bureaucratic relationships outside the capital. This developed a martial identity for royal rulership that would carry on into the Joseon period. The following section on Joseon examines how the Neo-Confucian transformation affected human–animal, and indeed ruler–animal relations on the peninsula. Kallander further links the politically stabilizing adoption of Neo-Confucianism in Joseon–Ming relations to the more critical attitudes of the growing legion of Confucian bureaucrats toward the royal hunt and its disruption of agriculture, the heart of the Neo-Confucian agrarian state. Critical attitudes became more overt efforts by the bureaucracy to limit royal participation in the hunt while codifying state ritual that used animal bodies. Yet, small and large-scale royal hunting showed remarkable longevity into the 15th century with the practice of using hunts to explore contested borderland spaces, the orchestration of massive gangmu hunts that increased military preparedness, and the organization of more modest private hunts for family and courtiers, all of which upheld martial monarchical authority. Kallander shows that these all became sites of contestation for Neo-Confucian bureaucrats to limit the sovereign’s movement and military involvement beyond the capital. In that process state-sanctioned ritual hunting transformed animals into objects of tribute-trade obligations that further eroded royal authority. The dénouement highlights how Neo-Confucian efforts peaked as pressures on animal populations from Confucian ritual use, medicinal needs in treating disease, and habitat impacts from agro-ecological change conflated with the hunting excesses of King Yeonsangun (r. 1495–1506) to effectively end intensive royal hunting practices inaugurated in the Mongol era. The conclusion posits that “[d]ecisions that the state made to promote agricultural production, the expansion of the human population and farming settlements, the continual centralisation of authority, and… the expansion of Confucian rites all impacted how people interacted with animals…”, leading to the ultimate disappearance of the large-scale hunt (273). Intriguingly, Kallander also asserts that military unpreparedness prior to the Imjin War (1592–1598) was influenced by this Neo-Confucian erosion of the royal hunt (277).
Kallander’s chief historiographical contribution is placing animal agency front and centre for late Goryeo and early Joseon. Rarely are animals dealt with as a topic in their own right for premodern Korea. Rather, it has been in the field of Chinese history where animals have been more fully integrated. Environmental historians like David Bello and Jonathan Schlesinger both have examined how animals and their ecologies came under new epistemic and regulatory regimes as the Qing Empire expanded and conspicuously consumed animals in its imperial praxis (Bello Reference Bello2016; Schlesinger Reference Schlesinger2017). Kallander uniquely attempts to show how the Mongol Empire’s hunting practice as part of elite politics and sociability renewed interest in the activity in Goryeo. As Bello and Schlesinger demonstrated for the Qing, scarcity also became the mother of increased regulation for the state. The author shows that the state regulation of animal resources was a function of contrasting Confucian and royal rulership imperatives. The influential and emergent Confucian officials viewed hunting as useful because it provided sacrificial bodies for state and even private ritual, whereas royal scions sought to preserve areas of game for royal hunts that emphasized the masculinity and martial vigour of the ruling house (124–136).
That power struggle between an emergent Confucian bureaucracy and received monarchic authority is at the heart of the book. The author has meticulously collected evidence from the Goryeosa, Goryeosa jeolyo and Joseon sillok to show how kings and Confucian officials clashed over how wild animals should be used. Kallander usefully exposes how officialdom was not unanimous in their understanding of the proper relationship between animals, the king, and the state, nor in condemnation of the hunt between Goryeo and Joseon. The split in official opinion was most clear in the case of gangmu hunts, but seemingly also for hunts near royal burial sites (110–112; 118; 141–2; 173–84; 206; 274). Ultimately, the dogged determination of Neo-Confucians to pursue the transformation of government and society won out and hunting activities were curtailed by the 16th century.
A further strength of the work is its intervention in the history of Joseon ritual vis-à-vis animal lives, dispelling any notion that Neo-Confucianism was an environmentally conservationist regime. Kallander closely analyzes state, diplomatic and even private ritual practices to show how the fervent adoption of Neo-Confucianism sought to regulate hunting practices previously focused on entertainment and homosocial monarchic authority at the beginning of the dynasty. Rather, hunting and animal bodies were to service the new Confucian metaphysics of state ritual curated by yangban bureaucrats. Ultimately, the expansion of the ritual corpus spiked demand for animal bodies and strained their populations, forcing a transition to the use of domesticated instead of wild animals (135–136). Moreover, Confucian statecraft’s emphasis on agrarianism and the subsequent expansion of cultivated land impacted animal populations by reducing wild spaces, a process the author terms “slow-motion ecological imperialism” (3–5; 10; 105–106; 223; 272–3; 275). What Kallander highlights is the ecological price of Korea’s Neo-Confucian transformation, and so brings the work in line with other studies of religion’s impact on environments and animals, such as Johan Elverskog’s recent study on Buddhism (Elverskog Reference Elverskog2020).
The study also distinctively uses animals and the hunt to understand Joseon’s borderland history. Joseon’s environmental history at the borders has been studied through the lens of ginseng in the Qing period (Kim Reference Kim2017). Again, the work by Bello and Schlesinger on the Qing Empire’s Manchurian and Mongolian borderlands has demonstrated how early modern imperial expansion inculcated a new set of environmental relations that had specific impacts on animal life. Kallander shows how Joseon similarly expanded into Yalu and Tumen watersheds with the fall of the Mongol Empire and contested hunting grounds with Jurchens indigenous to the region (104–6). As southern areas increasingly came under population stress and animal populations declined, the Joseon state and its subjects looked to border areas to live, hunt, and even farm. The author shows how the Yalu borderlands became a contested space where Joseon, Jurchen, and even Chinese hunters crossed borders to pursue game. Attempts to regulate or ban crossings proved ineffective. Moreover, borderlands became a space for intermixing and a source for the state’s security anxieties. Kallander includes here encounters on coasts and islands with Japanese raiders who were similarly looking for game and provides a more holistic approach to continental and maritime border environments (151–163). Thus, thinking through animal agency compels a revisitation of the nature of Joseon–Jurchen relations in the pre-Qing period as a function of state expansion, changing environments, and migration.
However, alongside these broad successes, the book struggles to meaningfully integrate climate change into the equation of human–animal relations. Kallander initially introduces a transition from a warmer Medieval Climate Anomaly to the cooler climes of the Little Ice Age as impactful. In that process, the climate was destabilized and abnormal weather events occurred (101–106). However, the author’s focus is almost totally on Joseon as drawn from the sillok, with little comment on climate during Goryeo (106). Yet, by the 13th century Goryeo was already experiencing the damaging vagaries of climate transition (Molnar Reference Molnar2023). More importantly, Kallander does not link these comments on climatic history closely to records on animal populations or specific legal regulations that he mentions thereafter. Instead, climate transition is left to hum in the background as ritual and political struggles foreground the following discussions. We are told that a cooling climate complicated animal-centered engagements between Joseon and Jurchen peoples in the northern border, but are left to imagine the particulars (151), while climate for the royal gangmu hunt seems to have meant cancellation owing to cold weather or desultory agricultural conditions (176–8; 201). These and other incidents are often described as bad weather in the text, but indexed as climate, when the two should not necessarily be conflated given the evidence presented. Difficult as it is to integrate paleoclimatic data, tighter discussion with specific climate phenomena, such as the Spörer Minimum (c.1460–1540), a globally noted trough in solar radiation and temperature or records of climate-destabilizing volcanism in the 15th century, could have helped the argument for the cold impacting royal hunting activities (Atwell Reference Atwell2001). Triangulation with specific evidence from the Ming Chinese context could have further bolstered the argument (Brook Reference Brook2017). Also critical for understanding any dynamic between hunting and climate change is animal migration, an important animal response to the Little Ice Age temperature fluctuations that would have further impacted established hunting patterns (Grove Reference Grove2019). Moreover, the turn toward state-curated softwood forests from medieval hardwood that John Lee has brought to our attention, for instance, could have further complicated the concept of climate change here (Lee Reference Lee2017, Reference Lee2018). Surely, such a transition in flora would have equally impacted the fauna so central to the book.
The use of the term “neo-nomadic ethos” is also troubling. Kallander glosses this as “a martial identity rooted in the violence of the previous century and the martial masculinity, a neo-nomadic ethos, that re-emerged during the Mongol Yuan–KoryÅ� alliance” (15) where “the king held power over the realm including wild beasts” (88). Such a definition leaves students of Inner Asian history somewhat perplexed. “Nomadism” as an operative concept in Inner Asian history is problematic as it misleadingly implies continuous movement or the wandering of the uncivilized other, constructed in opposition to civilized agrarian sedentism (Sneath Reference Sneath2007). “Neo” suggests there was some sort of disjuncture in Inner Asian pastoralism or even the re-adoption of a new form of “nomadism” by Goryeo, both of which to my knowledge are not true. Moreover, mobile pastoral peoples did not have a monopoly on the idea that the sovereign had dominion over fauna; Thomas Allsen and David M. Robinson in this vein have shown that hunting as a practice of martial rulership was a Eurasian phenomenon, not particular to the Mongols (Allsen Reference Allsen2006; Robinson Reference Robinson2013). Although the oppositional symmetry of “neo-nomadic” and “neo-Confucian” is alluring, it approaches the reproduction of problematic conceptual binaries of nomadic–barbarian/Confucian sedentism-civilized that, as Kallander’s own evidence shows, do not easily track onto contentious court debates regarding the hunt.
Despite these drawbacks, Kallander’s most recent addition to the field of premodern Korean history is a valuable foray into the history of human–animal relations on the peninsula. Kallander shows that it is both possible and desirable to recontextualize the received political narrative of the expanding early modern bureaucratic state within late Goryeo and early Joseon animal–environmental history. In the fine tradition of John Duncan, that revision further parses (dis)continuity between Mongol-affiliated late Goryeo and the transition to the Joseon state. Although the book tries to do too much at times, occasionally leaving the reader with more questions than answers, it serves to stimulate interest in the possibilities for premodern Korean environmental history and its incorporation into more global narratives of animals and their worlds.
