Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea: From Ancient to Contemporary Times ed. by Charlotte Horlyck and Michael J. Pettid (review)

Death is universal. We have all experienced the death of someone close to us. And we all are well aware that we will eventually die as well. Like finding a way to put food in our belly and finding a friend or partner to share the ups and downs of life with, dealing with death is an integral part of human life. All organized societies have had to come up with ways to deal with death. However, not only do we see different ways of dealing with death among different cultural communities, we can also see different ways of dealing with death within the same cultural community, especially when that community changes over time.

The most common way to deal with death is to deny its finality. We do that, first of all, by lavishing attention on the lifeless body as though the person we are going to bury is still around to appreciate that attention. Another way we deny the reality of death is to continue to interact with the dead after they have left their bodies behind, to envision them as still alive in some sense in an invisible realm, or by assuming that they can continue somehow to influence what is happening in the world of the living. To help us interact with those who have permanently left us, we create visible reminders of those who are no longer visible themselves. Those reminders may be monuments or they may be a spirit tablet, a simple grave, or an urn containing their ashes. In some cases a written record of the life they lived or a collection of items they produced suffice. In any case, those whose lives were touched by the person who has left this world try to minimize the impact of their loss by thinking of them as still present in their lives. This begins in the immediate aftermath of death, with rituals of preparing the lifeless body for disposal one way or another, but can continue for years or even, in the case of individuals who have had a particularly significant impact on the people and society they left behind, for decades or centuries.

Charlotte Horlyck and Michael Pettid have bundled together in this volume ten chapters by eight different authors, including themselves, analyzing different ways Koreans have dealt with death and the dead over the centuries. Their book covers death from how the body is treated in the immediate aftermath of its loss of vitality to how that body is disposed of to how the dead person who inhabited that body is remembered afterward. A key unifying principle of the various chapters is the influence of religion on Korean notions of the dead. The different authors each focus their attention on one of the religions present on the peninsula, be it shamanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, or Christianity, but they are all sophisticated enough to recognize that these religious labels often represent differences more important to scholars and other outside observers than to those actually dealing with the emotional impact of the death of a loved one.

Even though Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea covers all the major religions in Korea, the editors make it clear that they did not intend to provide a comprehensive account of death and its place in Korean culture from pre-history to the present day. Instead, they present snapshots of different Korean approaches to mourning and remembering the dead over the centuries, drawing on archaeological, literary, and modern observations. Readers should not expect this book to provide a definitive account in English on death, mourning, and the afterlife in Korea (though it is the first book on that topic in English to cover such a wide range of responses to death). Rather, it should be taken as a stimulus to further research...