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North Korea The Traditional Family and Kinship
Filial piety (hyo in Korean; xiao in Chinese),
the first of the Five Relationships defined by Mencius, had
traditionally been the normative foundation of Korean family
life. Historically, the Korean family was patrilineal. The most
important concern of the family group was to produce a male heir
to carry on the family line and to perform ancestor rituals in
the household and at the family gravesite. The first son
customarily assumed leadership of the family after his father's
death and inherited his father's house and a greater portion of
land than his younger brothers. His birthright enabled him to
carry out the ritually prescribed obligations to the family
ancestors.
The special reverence shown to ancestors was both a social
ethic and a religion. Koreas were taught that deceased family
members did not pass into oblivion, to a remote afterlife, or, as
Buddhists believed, to rebirth as humans or animals in some
remote place; rather, they remained, in spiritual form, securely
within the family circle. Even in the early 1990s, the presence
of the deceased is intensely real and personal for traditionally
minded Koreans. Fear of death is blunted by the consoling thought
that even in the grave one will be cared for by one's own people.
Succeeding generations are obligated to remember the deceased in
a yearly cycle of rituals and ceremonies.
The purpose of marriage was to produce a male heir, not to
provide mutual companionship and support for husband and wife,
even though this sometimes happened. Marriages were arranged. A
go-between or matchmaker, usually a middle-aged woman, carried on
the negotiations between the two families involved; because of a
very strict law on exogamy, these two families sometimes did not
know each other and often lived in different communities. The
bride and groom met for the first time at the marriage ceremony,
a practice that was gradually abandoned in urban areas before
World War II.
The traditional Korean kinship system, defined in terms of
different obligations in relation to the reverence shown to
ancestors, was complex. Anthropologists generally view it in
terms of four separate levels, beginning with the household at
the lowest level and reaching to the clan, which included many
geographically dispersed members. The household,
chip or jip (see Glossary),
consisted of a husband and wife, their
children, and, if the husband was the eldest son, his parents.
The eldest son's household, the stem family, was known as the
"big house" (k'nchip, or k' njip); that of each of
the younger sons, a branch family containing husband, wife, and
children only, was known as a "little house" (chag nchip,
or chag njip). It was through the stem family of the eldest son
that the main line of descent was traced from generation to
generation.
The second level of kinship was the "mourning group"
(changnye), which consisted of all those descendants of a
common patrilineal forebear up to four generations back. Its role
was to organize ceremonies at gravesites. These included the
reading of a formal message by the eldest male descendant of the
changnye progenitor and the offering of elaborate and
attractive dishes to the ancestral spirits.
Similar rituals were carried out at the third level of
kinship organization, the lineage,
p'a (see Glossary). A
lineage might comprise only a handful of households, or hundreds
or even thousands of households. The lineage was responsible for
rites to ancestors of the fifth generation or above, performed at
a common gravesite. During the Chosn Dynasty, the lineage
commonly possessed land, gravesites, and buildings. Croplands
were allocated to support the ancestral ceremonies. The
p'a also performed other functions--aiding poor or
distressed lineage members, educating children at schools
maintained by the p'a, and supervising the behavior of
younger lineage members. Because most people living in a single
village were members of a common lineage during the Chosn
Dynasty, the p'a performed many social services at the
local level that, in the 1990s, are provided by state-run
schools, public security organs, and the state system of clinics
and hospitals.
The fourth and most inclusive kinship organization was the
clan or, more accurately, the surname origin group
(tongsng). Members of the same munjung (extended
family) shared both a surname and origins in the generally remote
past. For example, the Chnju Yi, who originated in Chnju in
North Chlla Province (in contemporary South Korea), claimed, and
continue to claim, as their progenitor the founder of the Chosn
Dynasty, Yi Sng-gye. Unlike members of smaller kinship groups,
however, they often lacked strong feelings of solidarity. In many
if not most cases, the real function of the surname origin group
was to define groups of permissible marriage partners. The strict
rule of exogamy prohibited marriage between people from the same
tongsng and tongbon (ancestral origin) even if
their closest common ancestors had lived centuries earlier.
Confuciansts regarded this prohibition, which originated during
the Chosn Dynasty, as a sign of Korea's civilized status; they
believed that only barbarians married within their own clan or
kin group.
Data as of June 1993
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