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Chapter 6. The Changing Family Cycle
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CHAPTER 6 The Changing Family Cycle The Classic of Poetry says: Oh Father! You gave life to me. Oh Mother! You raised me. Poor, poor parents who suffered so in caring for me. I want to repay that deep parental grace, but the high heavens are infinite. The master said: To be filial is to serve one's parents. When living with them be respectful. When providing for them, make them happy. When they are sick, comfort them. At their funeral, wail for them. At their sacrifices, be reverent. As we have seen in previous chapters, the Sangongni household is a unit of production and consumption. It is also a unit of reproduction. If, as we have contended, the householders of the village try to produce household needs on household land with household labor, then the principles that govern the entry and exit of members to the household , interacting with demographic parameters, determine the size and composition of the household labor supply, and thus affect the efficiency of household production. Since the household organization generated by the interaction of the principles of household structure with concrete circumstances must be suitable for providing the needs of household members, we would expect villagers to modify their reproductive and other family strategies in light of local conditions. Modernization theorists have generally expected the forces of industrialization and urbanization to lead to the convergence of traditional family systems on a "conjugal" model similar to that found in the West (Goode 1963:10; Ember and Ember 1983:334). Japan, where the traditional corporate stem family, the ie, was abolished as a legal entity in 1947, and where the frequency of stem family households has been falling steadily since World War II (Fukutake 1982: 159 160 The Changing Family Cycle 124) has come closest to confirming these expectations in the Far East. Statistical analysis of patterns of household organization, however, can be misleading. In a stem family system such as that of Japan, for example, the proportion of conjugal families is partially a consequence of the proportion of younger sons born twenty to thirty years before who must form branch households, as well as of the age at marriage of successors and the age of death of their parents. Changing frequencies of household type may reflect demographic rather than structural change. Large-scale surveys, moreover, are seldom able to distinguish residental households from economic and legal families (d. Kim Namje 1985). Diversified families with a unified economy but dispersed residence, thus, may be treated as independent households. Recent detailed work on rural Japanese families, in fact, has revealed that many of the features of the traditional household succession system are still being retained (R. J. Smith 1978:55). Studies of Hong Kong (Salaff 1981) and Taiwan (Harrell 1981; Gallin and Gallin 1982), have shown Chinese joint families positively thriving under industrial conditions as well. In Sangongni, too, complex family organization does not seem to be disappearing. Modifications of patterns of household organization have been largely the result of changing demographic patterns, and changing strategies of household labor allocation, rather than changing principles of household structure. For the peasants of Sangongni, the household is not simply an economic universe, it is also an ethical universe. Rural Koreans tend to think of the principles that structure their households as preeminently moral principles that, whatever their practical usefulness, are worth upholding in and of themselves. Since there are several ways that peasant households can be organized in a rice-growing economy, including both the patrilineal stem households of Korea, the patrilineal joint households of China, as well as the bilateral housholds of Southeast Asia, the principles that structure household organization cannot be derived solely from economic analysis. They have to be studied in their own right. The two quotes that open this chapter, the first from an eighthcentury B.C. poem in the Chinese Classic of Poetry (Sht jlng)1 and the second from the fifth century B.C. Classic of Filial Piety (Xiao jlng), open the section on filial piety in a primer used in Sangongni's traditional school of Chinese classics, or sodang. This primer, known as Exempla for Illuminating the Mind (Myong Sim Pogam), is a collection of aphorisms in classical Chinese that epitomizes the traditional [18.232.113.65] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:16 GMT) The Changing Family Cycle 161 Confucian values, which to a large extent govern village behavior to this day. In traditional times, in spite of the Korean language having...