This highly anticipated, invaluable multidisciplinary volume is the first comprehensive English-language study on the subject of death in Korean history. Examining the place of death within a broad cultural and historical context, Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea not only validates death as the crucial window into Korea's past but also opens up several avenues of inquiry, which in turn reveal the complex junctions of belief systems, policies, rituals, and emotions in relation to death. As in other cultures, dying, death, and the dead have been powerful features in Korean society. Aiming at elucidating the “multilayered perspectives and practical approaches to death that formed part of society in both premodern and modern Korea” (p. 2), each chapter in this volume points to divergences in the logic of dealing with death as well as to the temporal and spatial evolution of “mortuary rites” at various moments in Korean history. At the same time, this volume emphasizes the coexistence of different belief systems within a given community and a certain continuity of practices over a long history, for, as the editors rightly note, “there are basic ideas or beliefs that cut across social class, gender, and economic wherewithal and that have influenced or continue to influence how death is perceived” (p. 7). This book therefore complicates our linear view of death and enriches the conventional understanding of mortuary rites in Korean historiography.
The volume consists of nine chapters that deploy a variety of methods and concepts as well as a wide range of primary sources. Spanning the Greater Silla Kingdom (668–935) to twentieth-century Korea, the chapters are organized not simply in chronological order but according to four major themes related to death: death of the body, disposal of the body, ancestor worship and rites, and the afterlife. Interestingly, however, all chapters eventually touch upon the four themes at some point, just as they also appreciate the inseparable yet shifting relationship between the living and the dead manifested in various belief systems and rituals throughout history.
Revisiting the reception of Buddhism and its impact on burial practice in medieval Korea, the first chapter, by Sem Vermeersch, investigates the introduction and development of cremation on the Korea peninsula, and provides a surprising alternative interpretation of the cremation practices overseen by people at that time. Drawing on inscriptional, textual, and archeological evidence wherever possible, it departs from the general perception that cremation was the single popular, common burial practice, due to heavy Buddhist influence, thus stressing the great variability in dealing with the dead and its multifarious religious influence during that period.
Charlotte Horlyck's chapter, with more focus on archeological finds, discusses how diverse burial practices coexisted under different religious worldviews during the Koryŏ period (918–1392). Death, embedded in life, is one of the many sites at which social representations and conflicts occur, and Horlyck's study further highlights how “technologies of death” (p. 104) also configured the social hierarchy in terms of the taxonomy of space and objects.
The legal enforcement of Confucian rituals promulgated in the early Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) then reshaped, though gradually, the landscape of mortuary practices as well as the ongoing relationship between the world of the living and the world of the dead through “ancestor veneration” (p. 156). Examining the new approaches to the afterlife that emerged in Chosŏn society, Milan Hjetmanek's chapter discusses how mutual dependence between the living and the dead “shifted in a direction that intermeshed the two worlds far more closely than before” (p. 165), as revealed in the physical significance of the corpse and a demand for space. However, the state-sanctioned orthodoxy could not fully govern one's inner, realistic life, as Gregory Evon demonstrates in his intriguing chapter on the neo-Confucian scholar Kim Man-jung (1632–92) and his Buddhist-influenced A Nine Cloud Dream.
Continuing with this syncretic nature of the belief systems still working under the Confucian Chosŏn state, Michael Pettid's insightful chapter tries to answer why shamanistic rites continued to survive. Delving into the specific components of shamanistic death rituals, especially in the case of a “bad” death, Pettid argues that the shamanistic worldview, in addition to filling an emotional gap for the living, “helped explain death and the afterlife” (p. 140)—fundamental topics that Confucianism did not address. Pettid further examines perceptions of death and the afterlife popularly envisioned via the plethora of literary records on the idea of ghosts that reflected “both the shamanic notion of retribution and the Buddhist ideal of cause and effect” (p. 117) powerfully subscribed to in premodern Korea.
Addressing the arrival of another heterodox religion, Catholicism, in the eighteenth century, Franklin Rausch's chapter then sheds important light on the changing Korean perception of the afterlife through Catholics’ dealing with ancestor worship and presents “filial martyrdom” as cases in which those involved “envision heaven as a place of family union and martyrdom as a filial act” (p. 215).
As much as these chapters suggest death as a communal concern, spreading beyond the individual to one's family and the wider community, two fascinating chapters by John DiMoia and Guy Podoler treat the diseased body and its disposal in a modern paradigm. DiMoia's study highlights “the acceptance of the body as a tool for biomedical research” (p. 60) in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a grounding factor that led to the new space of the mortuary (funeral hall) within a hospital complex, subsequently shifting Koreans' views on the body. Guy Podoler's research takes the National Cemetery, newly founded in postwar Korea, as a nationalist text, and as another highly symbolic and visible burial site for selected dead bodies, thus elucidating the use of death to protect or maintain the legitimacy of the South Korean nation.
Overall, this rich volume of original studies expands and deepens our understanding of death as a focal point in Korean culture that has long been contested by multiple religious beliefs and ideologies. It lays a solid foundation from which to ask any further research questions related to death, and will be of great value to scholars and students with an interest in premodern and modern Korea.
