Informed by history

For those few who don’t think history is important, and for those who do as well, I thought today I would recap some of the historical issues that I’ve been looking at in this column to see how they inform our lives and decisions in present-day Korea.

I’ve written a lot about Confucianism and how many of the negative views that some people hold about Confucianism can be transformed by an understanding of the role Confucianism played in Korean history — not recent history, but earlier, pre-18th-century history. We see that it is only the history of the last three hundred years of Confucian practice in Korea that Confucianism has taken on the male-dominant perspective oppressing females that many are critical of in the philosophy.

History teaches us that Confucian principles can apply to the modern world in an egalitarian way like they did for a thousand years in Korea, from the Three Kingdoms Period to the 18th century — a time when sons and daughters inherited equally, where they hosted ancestor ceremonies on a rotational basis, including the daughters, and where the jokbo (genealogy) was not a “men-only” document.

In reference to jokbo, recently I have speculated that the jokbo of the future will be more equal and balanced between the genders like it was in the early Joseon period where male and female ancestors were all included in the “palgojodo,” the chart of the eight great, great grandparents.

That method of reckoning ancestors was not male only, but included all the mothers’ and grandmothers’ lines equally, like the genealogical charts used is the West, in Europe and America. It may have looked like I was “advocating” that Korea expand its view of ancestors, and maybe my position seemed that I was advocating a more balanced way of researching one’s ancestors.

But more than telling Korea what it should do, I was observing and predicting that in the current age, the male dominated features of society are disappearing, and equality and balance between the genders is on its way in. That includes the new jokbo — the same as the old jokbo of the time in Korea before the oppressive male dominance started in the late 17th century.

Ancestor ceremonies that were once a major feature of Korean society, seem to be less important these days, many people are telling me. But here, too, understanding history and looking back at a time when ancestors “included” the female lines, we can see a path forward that includes grandmothers beyond simply being recognized as the wives of the male ancestors, and we see potentially more participation in the actual ceremonies by living women today. I can predict that Korea’s ancestor ceremonies will continue to change and be less a matter of the male ancestors and more a matter of all ancestors — male and female, grandfathers and grandmothers.

With the lessening of the emphasis on the male line, and with many families without a male heir, female members of the family will play a greater role — as heirs, as officiators at the ceremonies, in jokbo records, as family heads in the hojeok (the government household registry). We will enter an age of gender equality. More women these days are active in significant areas of society. It was once thought that areas of female dominance might include education and medicine.

But now I understand that more and more women are competing in government service by passing the civil service exam and the foreign service exams. The vice consul of the San Francisco Consulate, a woman, informed me that in recent years, as many as 70% of the incoming members of the Ministry of Foreign

Affairs are women. That means that as these junior foreign service officers mature in rank, we will soon see a corps of diplomats, ambassadors and consuls general who will be predominantly women.

For those traditionalists who think that men should dominate society, an examination of Korea’s history shows that women had equality in many areas prior to the Chinese-style changes in society in the late 17th century — changes that brought in complete male dominance under an interpretation of Confucianism that was really more Chinese than the kind of Confucianism that had been in Korea for 1,000 years. Women inherited property, bought and sold property, hosted the new family upon marriage (jangga gada), took turns hosting the ancestor ceremonies, and more. The area they did not move in was politics, by taking the government exams that gave access to political power.

In today’s world, that too has changed. Women can take the exams. Women can be appointed to government offices. One remaining bastion of male dominance is that of elected office. But with all these other changes afoot, elected office will not be far behind. We had one female president, but the numbers of women in the national assembly are low, though growing steadily — now at 19 percent.

It’s a whole new world out there. Some of it — such as women being active in the political circle — is truly new, but history tells us that much of it is the same. In regards to gender equality, in many ways, “we’ve been here before.”

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.