essay
The New Year's ritual and village social structure
Religion and ritual in Korean society • Berkeley, Calif. • Published In 1987 • Pages: 93-117
By: Dix, Griffin.
AbstractBrief abstract written by HRAF anthropologists who have done the subject indexing for the document
In this article, Dix examines a little studied villagewide ritual which is common across rural Korea: the annual offering to the village's protective deity--in this specific case, the Mountain Spirit (Sansin)--during the first month of the lunar new year. The first two days of the New Year's ceremony involves a restrained Confucian offering to ancestors and elders. On the third day, a cooked half of a bull's head (cow's head if the Mountain Spirit is female) is offered to the Mountain Spirit at its shrine on the mountainside. That night the other half of the head is offered raw at a shrine at the entrance to the village. The next few days a farmer's band, comprised mostly of young male laborers, go from house to house to play music and dance, in order to exorcise dangerous spirits, a service for which they demand food and drink. Dix argues that the ritual ostensibly serves village solidarity by demarcating status differences in the village and inverting them, if only for a few days. According to Dix, the escapades of the farmer's band is a way for low status laborers to get recognition from the landlord class (YANGBAN) for their year-long contribution to the community, only then is village harmony restored.
- SubjectsDocument-level OCM identifiers given by the anthropology subject indexers at HRAF
- Status, role, and prestige
- Community structure
- Religious beliefs
- Prayers and sacrifices
- Purification and atonement
- Organized ceremonial
- cultureCulture name from the Outline of World Cultures (OWC)
- Korea
- HRAF PubDateThe date HRAF published the document
- 1998
- RegionThe area the document pertains to
- Asia
- Sub RegionThe more specific area the document pertains to, which is located within the Region
- East Asia
- Document TypeMay include journal articles, essays, collections of essays, monographs, or chapters/parts of monographs
- essay
- Evaluation
- Creator TypeThe type of person writing the document, e.g. Ethnographer, Missionary, Archaeologist, Folklorist, Linguist, Indigenous Person, and so on.
- Ethnologist
- Document Rating A ranking done by HRAF anthropologists based on the strength of the source material on a scale of 1 to 5, as follows: 1 - poor; 2 - fair; 3 - good, useful data, but not uniformly excellent; 4 - excellent secondary data; 5 - excellent primary data.
- 5: Excellent Primary Data
- AnalystThe HRAF anthropologist who subject indexed the document and prepared other materials for the eHRAF culture/tradition collection
- Ian Skoggard ; 1997
- Field DateThe date the researcher conducted the fieldwork or archival research that produced the document
- 1975
- Coverage DateThe date or dates that the information in the document pertains to
- 1392-1975
- Coverage PlaceLocation of the research culture or tradition (often a smaller unit such as a band, community, or archaeological site)
- Republic of Korea
- NotesAdditional notes
- Griffin Dix
- Includes bibliographical references
- LCCNLibrary of Congress Control Number
- 86082390
- LCSHLibrary of Congress Subject Headings
- Koreans