Marketing and Social Structure among the Peasantry of the Yŏngsŏ Region of South Korea

Marketing and Social Structure among the Peasantry ofthe Yöngsö Region of South Korea CLARK SORENSEN In anthropology peasants are usually distinguished from "primitive agriculturalists" on the one hand, and "farmers" on the other. They are distinguished from the former because they exist within the context of a complex society with state organization and a division of labor by class. They are not, therefore, mere "subsistence agriculturalists"; they must produce the provisions not only for themselves but also for those nonagricultural classes that provide administrative services and basic manufactures. They are distinguished from the latter because they provide directly for most of their own subsistence needs; they are not primarily entrepreneurs who combine factors of production purchased in a market with the aim of selling their products for cash to purchase their means of subsistence. This does not mean they sell none of their products on the market, nor that they are not interested in profit, but only that their agricultural products are grown first for consumption at home with only the surplus entering the marketing system. In societies with a division of labor by class, not all persons produce what they consume, and different types of specialists may be geographically concentrated. Functionally distinct settlements—religious communities, villages, market towns—emerge that must be knitted together economically by a system of circulation of goods and services. This circulation of goods and services that underpins the class division of labor has historically been accomplished in a variety of waysthrough exaction of taxes or rents by an aristocracy, through administrative collection and allocation of goods and services, or through centrally located markets—but however this is accomplished, it is clear that the peasant villagers are profoundly and directly affected by events 83 84Journal ofKorean Studies far from the fields and orchards that form their immediate environment . Anthropologists, whether studying peasants or primitives, are apt to feel most comfortable with a microsociological approach where a single unit, such as a village, which is small enough to be known intimately in a relatively short time, is taken as a microcosm of the society as a whole. Because of the class division of labor and the geographic separation of peasants from many of the other economically and politically specialized groupings in complex societies, peasants constitute , in the famous phrase of A. L. Kroeber, "part-societies with part-cultures." A single village, or even all villages taken together cannot be a microcosm of the whole in any literal sense. To understand the peasant villagers and the forces that are responsible for their way of life, it is imperative to consider not just the peasant villages themselves , but also the other kinds of settlements and the ways these settlements are linked to one another. That market relations are one means by which complex societies become integrated has, of course, long been recognized by political philosophers, economists, and geographers, but the thinkers in each of these disciplines, having their own preoccupations, have not necessarily exhausted the subject matter. As the institution through which prices are set and the laws of supply and demand operate to motivate economic behavior, markets have long been a major focus of economics . The preoccupation with the price-setting mechanism, the efficiency of different kinds of marketing arrangements, and the maximization of the production of wealth, however, has tended to lead away from interest in the concrete behavior and perceptions of ordinary people, which are the substance of much anthropological research. Economic geographers, working with a theoretical framework based on classical economics, where economic decisions are governed by price in an essentially free market, have worked out a sophisticated body of theory for understanding the economics of location and the spatial arrangement of marketing activity. Like economists, however, they have seldom been inclined to look at the social structure of societies as a whole, or to try to understand the importance of the marketing system and spatial organization to the social stratification found in a society. That, on the other hand, is precisely the kind of question that is liable to interest the anthropologist, and which I propose to address in this paper. THE SETTING YdngsS means "west of the pass" and is used...