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1 1 Considerations on Death in the Korean Context Michael J. Pettid and Charlotte Horlyck You can know the next world only after you die.1 In the prime of his life, Prince Myŏngwŏn [1491–1563] became ill and died. After three days he awoke and told this story: At first my body was in great pain, but gradually that subsided and I was calm. Through a crack in the window I was able to go outside. There was a wide and endless desolate plain, but suddenly upon arriving at one spot I could hear the sound of a p’iri [flute] and a drum being struck. As I approached, a shaman bade me to come forward, but I hesitated; a gathering of ghosts rebuked me and said, “As a recently dead spirit, you are compelled to take part in these rites,” while blocking my return path. At the edge of the grounds I was offered several wraps of mixed rice and millet rolled in oak leaves. However, I was angry and refused to eat them. As such, I awoke and was living again. Prince Myŏngwŏn spoke to his children, “When one dies, the body is of no use whatsoever, and there is no need to build a strong grave with lime. However, spirits still can eat, so you must always hold ancestor rites with great diligence.”2 In reading the above narrative, recorded in an early seventeenth-century work called Ŏu yadam (於于野談 Unofficial narratives by Ŏu), what can we take of the worldviews and practical processes surrounding death in the early to middle Chosŏn period? There seems to be a clear acceptance of a life of some sort after death but also an idea that death does not sever relationships with the living. This narrative also reveals an understanding of death that does not necessarily fully conform to the ideas found in Confucian ideology and instead offers a much more syncretic view of 2 / Michael J. Pettid and Charlotte Horlyck life after death. Yet the final lines recall the importance of ancestor rites, a pillar of Confucian belief, and thus offer a didactic message to readers of the importance of honoring the dead. In short, the narrative is a blend of several ideas and practices associated with death and the next life, echoing multilayered perspectives and practical approaches to death that formed part of society in both premodern and modern Korea. The very fact of the inevitability of death makes it an extremely important aspect of human life. We cannot avoid, no matter how we might try, the fate that all humans eventually experience. Yet the termination of bodily functioning is only one part of the specter surrounding death. Though modern medicine has brought into question how biological death may be defined, it can be argued that death is fixed in time and that it constitutes a permanent state.3 Interdisciplinary studies on death have, however, shown that physical death is only one stage in a temporal series of social reframings of the dead, who may transmute into a ghost, ancestor, benevolent spirit, or another mode of being that is continuously reappropriated by the living. The ways in which death is conceptualized and legitimized by the living constitutes several, often temporal, stages, including treatments of the body and construction of the burial site, as well as mourning and ancestral rites. Death socially reframes the living as it changes the relationships of the living with the living, and the living with the dead. As Robert Hertz noted over a century ago, the physiological phenomena are not the whole of death but are rather a part of a complex mass of beliefs, emotions, and activities that create a distinctive character.4 Treatments of the dead are not only driven by theoretical issues rooted in different worldviews but also prompted by practical considerations of a more universal nature. This is demonstrated by several published case studies from earlier and present-day societies around the world. Maurice Bloch’s research on the Merina people of Madagascar, for example, shows that funerary procedures consist, on the one hand, of practical concerns of how to deal with pollution and, on the other, of emotional concerns of how to overcome sorrow.5 The divergences of the logics of death and its associated panoply of practices are clearly infinite, and a core objective of this volume is to draw out the manifestations of different mortuary practices and understandings of death over time...

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