Donald Leslie Baker

This dissertation explores Korean female virgins’ practice of autonomy and their ability to confront oppression that was present in Confucian society and the Catholic Church during the late 18th and 19th centuries in Chosǒn, Korea. The adoption of the Catholic notion of virginity and the establishment of the nascent Catholic Church in Chosǒn, Korea allowed Korean women to escape the demands of forced arranged marriages during the late 18th century. Korean Catholic women confronted opposition from their families and persecution from society for choosing a religious life of perpetual virginity. Another challenge began when French missionaries from the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris (hereafter MEP) arrived in 1836 and attempted to control Korean virgins by prohibiting them from practicing perpetual virginity autonomously and imposing strict regulations. As a result, Korean virgins developed new forms of subjectivity by valuing the development and realization of the self and practicing renunciation based on Catholic teachings. Therefore, they considered themselves to be Christian virgins without the approval or recognition of the Church. Although it seemed that they were subordinate to the authority of the Church and clergy, in reality, Korean virgins resisted their authority and achieved freedom by practicing Foucauldian ethical subjectivity. Korean virgins’ resistance and agency were ignored by Korean historians throughout the 20th century. The general understanding was that Korean virgins were part of the modernization (i.e., women’s liberation and gender equality) that Catholicism brought to Chosǒn, Korea throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. However, this dissertation challenges this line of thinking and suggests that the Catholic Church did not liberate Korean women from patriarchal oppression or create gender equity for Korean women before the 20th century. Instead, their resistance to clerical controls and the development of a new form of subjectivity shows that Korean Catholic women replaced Confucian patriarchy with Catholic patriarchy, thus emphasizing the authority of the Church and its priests.

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Yun Hyu was a seventeenth-century scholar-official of the Chosŏn Dynasty. Although he never took the civil service exams, he held office under three different Chosŏn Kings. Yun Hyu is mostly known for his involvement in the so-called Rites Controversy over the mourning of King Hyojong, and for his Socratian execution, by poison. Past studies of Yun Hyu suggested a variety of reasons for the controversial treatment he received. In this work I argue that we should think of Yun Hyu as a religious thinker. Reading Yun Hyu as a theologian allow us to appreciate the dramatic implications of his thought and understand the strong reaction of his peers and opponents. To do so I first present Yun Hyu’s life and work in the context of his time and society, namely the seventeenth-century Neo-Confucian factions. This is Yun Hyu’s most complete biography in English to date. It is followed by a close reading of his most influential texts. I have divided Yun Hyu’s writings into three subjects to represent the main aspects of his religious thought: Sacred texts, divinity and the afterlife. In each chapter I attempt to introduce Yun Hyu’s original thought and contributions but also demonstrate how a religious reading of his writing sheds some light on his motives. Finally, I conclude by discussing the religiousness of Neo-Confucianism, demonstrating how it is implemented in the case of Chosŏn in general and Yun Hyu specifically. In particular I demonstrate that a cognitive and evolutionary approach to religion has much to offer us in the way of understanding the motives and agenda of premodern people.

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This study argues that language and literacy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1895-1925) were formed through several interactive processes, including the development of “modern” literature and writing styles, processes of translation, dictionary compilation, and the circulation and functioning of language ideologies and discourses on linguistic modernity. Because Japanese engaged with the above processes vis-à-vis Western languages before Korean, Korean intellectuals found in the Japanese language a ready-made model for reform and modernization. Western notions of linguistic modernity—what modern language and literature “ought to be”—as well as the inundation of Korean with Japanese terms due to Korea’s late engagement with dictionary compilation and translation resulted in a Korean language that increasingly came to resemble Japanese. This facilitated the shift to higher Japanese literacy when combined with a colonial curriculum aimed at truncated Korean literacy and expansive Japanese. The convergence of the above processes with the political will engendered in education policy during a period of instability and flux in the orthographical development of Korean from that encoded in Literary Sinitic (hanmun) to Sino-Korean Mixed Script (kukhanmun) combined to lay the foundations for a shift from semi-literacy in Korean to literacy in Japanese, with Korean acting as a transitional literacy, and the sinograph (hancha) functioning as a mediating agent. Whereas pre-colonial language textbooks from various educational streams represented alternative pronouncements on vernacular literacy as well as laboratories for vernacular-cosmopolitan differentiation, Japanese-produced textbooks codified the official vision of colonial literacy, demonstrating a continued commitment to Mixed-Script orthography, directing the gradual diminution of Literary Sinitic, employing the sinograph as a diachronic and translingual mediating agent, and actualizing bilingual literacy transitioning.

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This thesis explores the history and memory of three incidents of massacres committed by South Korean government forces during the Korean civil war (1948-1953) against alleged "communists"—the Cheju Incident, the National Guidance League Incident, and the Kŏch'ang Incident. These three episodes were part of a broader "politicide" that was organized and facilitated by the nascent South Korean National Security State. Drawing from sources unearthed by the South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the National Committee for the Investigation of the Truth about the Cheju 4.3 Incident, and various bereaved family associations, this dissertation demonstrates that this politicide was rooted in processes of anticommunist ideological consolidation and state building that were predicated upon the obliteration of the "communist" other, in the context of a fratricidal civil war. From 1953 to 1960, in the aftermath of this period of mass violence, survivors and bereaved families were subjected to legal, economic, and social discrimination from the state, which threatened these families with "social death". Most profoundly, state prohibitions on the burial and mourning of "communists" engendered a social crises within these communities. However, some families were granted the right to mourn, and through the construction of mass graves honouring the victims, these families articulated an alternative identity than that imposed by the anticommunist state: one that was rooted in the notion of a unified bereaved subject. In 1960, the authoritarian First Republic collapsed, leading to a brief period of liberation. In this context, victims formed Bereaved Family Associations. Through petitions, advertisements, private and public mourning practices, and the establishment of "truth" committees, the Bereaved Family Associations offered a radical rethinking of the Korean War past. The lynchpin of this strategy was an alternative nationalist narrative in which the alleged "communists" were reconceived as patriotic martyrs for a not-yet-authored unified democratic state. However, in the wake of the military coup of May 16, 1961, these efforts were brutally repressed, as the military junta arrested and tortured the Bereaved Family Associations' leadership, destroyed monuments dedicated the atrocities' victims, and desecrated the mass graves built to honour the spirits of the dead.

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The present work examines the attempt of Chŏngjo, King of Korea from 1776 to 1800, to shift the balance of power in late Chosŏn Korea in favor of the crown. It examines the official court records, the King’s official writings, and the recent discovery of Chŏngjo’s “secret” letters to high official and ostensible enemy Sim Hwan-ji, using them to illustrate how the King navigated the labyrinthine webs of power. Chapter 1 lays the groundwork of late Chosŏn history and examines Chŏngjo’s legitimacy issues arising from the death of his father. Chapter 2 deals with political philosophy, as Chŏngjo struggled with the aristocracy over the proper interpretation of Neo-Confucian ideology. Chapter 3 addresses how Chŏngjo dealt with the various power groups at court. After looking at his early struggles with the machinations of Hong Kuk-gyŏng, it examines the intrigues against his half-brother Prince Ŭn-ŏn, his aunt Princess Hwawŏn, and his uncle Hong In-han, and reveals how the King sought to protect royal relatives to preserve the majesty of the royal clan and to dispel any pretensions his mother’s family may have had of dominating the throne. The chapter then turns to Chŏngjo’s handling of the major political factions and his subtle refinement of the Policy of Impartiality. Chapter 4 looks at Chŏngjo’s efforts to institute a system to perpetuate royal power. After briefly examining his struggles with the bureaucracy over a key government position, the chapter investigates his creation of two new administrative organs to strengthen royal power: a system to train future administrators in his own particular throne-centered interpretation of Confucianism, the ch’ogye munsin, and a locus of power outside the traditional bureaucratic ladder, the Royal Library. Chapter 5 addresses Chŏngjo’s military reforms. After gutting the established military organizations, he set up a new army under the command of his personally-selected governor in the city of Suwŏn, headquartered at the newly-constructed Illustrious Fortress. The sixth and final chapter concludes with an assessment of Chŏngjo’s reforms: He was largely successful in creating space for royal autonomy during his lifetime but was largely unsuccessful in perpetuating that power beyond his reign.

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This thesis aims to show the wide spectrum of Korean shamanism, not only by exploring a body of images of Korean shamanism that has been established on the level of academic discourse, but also by illustrating the practices of modern shamans and clients. I mean by the words “a wide spectrum of Korean shamanism” that there are multiple images and realities subsumed under the title of Korean shamanism. Not only negatively associated concepts, such as “superstition,” “magic,” “primitive” and so on, but also positive images coexist on the contemporary spectrum of Korean shamanism. Those images do not remain limited to academia, but also shape the reality of Korean shamanism, having been appropriated by governmental policies as well as by shamans themselves. I call it “looping effects between images and realities” in Korean shamanism. In order to show the looping effect in Korean shamanism, I first analyze the historical development of the shamanism-image which has been configured within official discourses in specific intellectual and social contexts. Various identifications and classifications of Korean shamanism are placed along the spectrum of Korean shamanism anchored by two extreme images, “the negative image” and “the positive one.” I will then show how those images of Korean shamanism affect Korean shamans’ identity-making process and even the reconfiguration of Korean shamanism itself. Here, academic discourses are perceived as one constituent of contemporary Korean shamanism. As another factor in the formation of the plural realities of Korean shamanism, I suggest the dynamic relationship between shaman and client. For over one hundred years, Koreans have experienced radical changes in the realms of spirituality and materiality. In accordance with these changes, many fundamental values, such as modern scientific rationalism and the religious worldview, have competed with each other. In this circumstance, Korean shamans try to enforce a shamanic worldview through ritual activities, and their ritual activities are reorganized according to their contemporary clients’ various desires which reflect specific situations. In conclusion, in this dissertation, I contend that all these feedback processes, between images and realities and between shaman and client, have constructed the plurality of Korean shamanism.

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My dissertation focuses on the violence associated with two Korean Catholics from the late Chosŏn dynasty. My first subject, Alexius Hwang Sayŏng, wrote a letter during the anti-Catholic suppression of 1801 to the bishop of Beijing proposing that a Western armada invade Korea to force the Chosŏn state to tolerate Catholicism, only to be arrested and executed for treason. In 1909, my second subject, Thomas An Chunggŭn, assassinated Itō Hirobumi, the first resident-general of Korea, in hopes that his death would lead to the restoration of Korean independence. Through the study of their writings, interrogation reports, court records, public pronouncements, newspapers, missionary letters and journals, I reveal the different types of violence they sought to justify, suffered, and were reacting to. While Hwang and Neo-Confucian officials both believed that violence could be legitimately deployed in order to actualize the worldviews mandated by their respective religions, the centrality of religion had largely been eclipsed by the secular ideologies of nationalism, Social-Darwinism, and Pan-Asianism, by An’s time. This situation led to a struggle within and between An and foreign missionaries over the proper relationship between nation, state, and religion, and eventually to An’s decision to kill Itō for both religious and secular reasons, even as the Catholic Church forbade violent resistance to Japan’s colonial project. Through a comparison of the violence associated with Hwang and An, I show that religion can both encourage and discourage violence at the same time, and that its influence can be shaped, magnified, or diminished by secular worldviews, proving the difficulty in simply labeling violence as “religious” or “secular,” and the essentially ambiguous nature of violence. I therefore propose that, in contravention to scholars who argue that religion is somehow more violent than secular ideologies, it is not so much whether a type of violence can be labeled as secular or religious, but the contents of that worldview, its relationship with other worldviews within an individual, and the historical context in which it is actualized, that is more important in determining its propensity for violence.

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