The magnus opus of a towering career, Martina Deuchler's new book traces the experiences of the sajok, the hereditary elite of rural Chosŏn Korea. Along with a wide breadth of current Korean-language scholarship, it employs a vast corpus of local documents, literary collections, and gazetteers from Andong in the Kyŏngsang region, and to a lesser extent, Namwŏn in Chŏlla. Divided into five parts, each discussing one stage of the sajok’s emergence and development, the book intertwines several broad historical patterns to argue for the “primacy of socially manipulated and legitimized patterns of hierarchy and dominance” (p. 1) in the premodern period. Among them is how the “descent group,” which once included both affinal and agnatic kin, came to follow a patrilineal model by the mid-Chosŏn period. This evolution was in turn tied to the strategies landed elites used to “defend” against encroaching state power from without and challengers from below (pp. 2–3). The book also intervenes on historiographical debates that embroiled the field over the last few decades, such as the origins of the Chosŏn dynasty (chapter 2), the question of “civil society” (pp. 401–4), the role of slavery, the character of the literati purges, and the divergent manifestations of neo-Confucian-style lineages in Chosŏn Korea and imperial China.

In Deuchler's analysis, social processes strongly inform and even subsume political and intellectual dynamics. Neo-Confucian ideology and the interests of aristocratic descent groups converged in the early Chosŏn to create a political system where the “social constitution of the state apparatus” was paramount (p. 63). Local elites, the sajok originated from these descent groups whose prestige once strongly depended on office-holding, especially at the capital. They moved to rural regions like Andong to build vast agricultural estates, but opportunities for government service gradually diminished for those who lived outside the capital, which required a way to preserve elite status in the face of political marginalization from the center. A transformation of elite male identity from that of “political man” to “cultured man,” as advocated by the seminal neo-Confucian thinker T'oegye Yi Hwang, invested the “pursuit of ‘true learning’ as a vocation befitting the sajok elite” (pp. 183–86). Consequently, local descent groups soon converged with scholarly lineages, which turned scholarly institutions, such as private academies, into sites of power struggle and competition. Such “faction-bound learning,” Deuchler points out, “hampered … a free-flowing national discourse,” and therefore should not be regarded as a “nascent ‘civil society’” (pp. 401–2).

Intellectual practice was one way to secure hereditary elite status. Alongside ward fund associations (tonggye) ensuring collective security and community regulations (hyanggyu) enforcing “behavioral standards” (p. 216), the sajok also established community compacts (hyangyak), which “transform[ed] kin groups and village communities along the societal models expounded in Zhu Xi's works” (p. 161). Meanwhile, the local bureau (yuhyangso) accorded sajok “loci where intracommunity interests were articulated and executed—not necessarily to the benefit of the state” (p. 218). What threatened this pattern of sajok ascendancy established in the early Chosŏn was not the cataclysm of the Imjin War, but the dissipation of land and slaves over generations of split inheritance. This was one proximate cause for the emergence of the “mature localized lineage system” in the late Chosŏn, which Deuchler calls the “most conspicuous product of Korea's Confucianization” (pp. 280–89). It entailed a combination of two institutions, the ritual lineage (chong) and the munjung, an “associational or contractual” organization for grave rites, which represented, respectively, the principles of primogeniture, as outlined in Zhu Xi's Family Rites, and “fraternal solidarity,” a feature of indigenous kinship. The ritual lineage emerged as a response to fragmented inheritance, for it enabled the “consolidation of land in corporately held lineage trusts, sanctioned by the prestige of the ancestral cult” (p. 268). It privileged a senior line of descent (chongson) as its guardian, to the exclusion of affinal kin and the detriment of junior branches. The munjung, however, brought together “a broader range of agnatic kin” hailing from a relatively recent apical ancestor. Absent in Korean ritual handbooks and lacking “scriptural basis,” it nevertheless acted as a “protective umbrella” for the ritual line, “safeguard[ing] the latter's permanence” (p. 287). As Deuchler remarks, “it was not Neo-Confucianism, but the enduring native kinship ideology that kept the ‘elite system’ alive” (p. 408).

The sajok also defended their social prerogatives in various ways, such as by maintaining a local roster (hyangan). Inclusion demonstrated mutual recognition from peers, while exclusion or removal was tantamount to loss of status. The experiences of local functionaries (hyangni) are illustrative. As officers of local government, they were rival claimants to power and influence. They were once included in these rosters, but expulsion effectively checked their social aspirations; rather than intermingling, the sajok and hyangni developed into segregated “parallel societies” (pp. 382–88). The sajok’s own lesser-born kin, the secondary sons (sŏja), also challenged the exclusivity of sajok society, seeking in the wake of a national movement in the eighteenth century to lift the social and political discrimination against them. These challenges, Deuchler argues, did not unravel the social system. Instead, sajok ascendancy ended only through “royal fiat” in the late nineteenth century, which seems to suggest the “political” had finally trumped the “social” (pp. 392–93).

Under the Ancestors' Eyes, a desperately needed contribution to the English-language scholarship on premodern Korea, amply demonstrates the importance of social dynamics for understanding Korea's premodern past. It also presents an authoritative and detailed view from Andong and Namwŏn. As locales with “special meaning” that enjoyed “reputations as socially and culturally sophisticated localities” (p. 84), they featured a density and endurance of elite lineages few other places could rival. The emphasis on two remarkable cases necessarily raises questions. Can their experiences be generalized? We already know that northern provinces such as P'yŏngan exhibited a very different social profile; but what about other southern locales? Do the Andong and Namwŏn sajok represent typical cases, models for emulation, or simply locale-specific strategies? To answer these questions, future research will undoubtedly build on Deuchler's monumental work, which is sure to inspire many to follow in its footsteps.