Continuity through Change in Korean Family/Household Structure : An Essay in Historical Anthropology

抄録

Korean kinship institutions underwent a profound transformation during the latter half of the Choson dynasty period (1392-1910), and out of these changes emerged the major features that characterize the so-called traditional Korean kinship system. Taking the anthropological model of Korean families proposed during the 1970s as the point of departure, the present paper traces the composition of households since the late seventeenth century by analyzing the household registers of Taegu region in the southeastern part of the Korean peninsula. The paper shows how drastic and profound the changes were. At the same time, it tries to ascertain what survived the transformation: the fundamental stem family structure of the households and women's positions as wives and mothers in them. In the final section of the paper, an attempt is made to assess the influence of Confucianism in this transformational process.