Department of Anthropology, Seoul National University
Abstract
In this paper I analyze what bier–bearers did for the village community,
mainly based on the fieldwork interviews carried out in southern Gyeonggi
area. Focused on the bier–shouldering practice, those interviews illuminate the
role of the inferiors (sangnom 常–, hain 下人, and jungin 中人) who resided in
the social border area of the village community. It was their job to perform the
lowly work both in ritual and ordinary practices, so they could not escape from
social disdain. I begin this article by tracing how sachon gye (四寸契), one of the
modern rural organizations for bier–bearing, developed and elucidate its social
and cultural meanings, which were consistently under the influence of the
yangban-commoner relationship. I then extend the analysis to outline a number
of incidents in the southern Gyeonggi area. The final section classifies the
southern Gyeonggi cases into two sociohistorical groups to discuss the social and
cultural meanings of the abolition of the discriminatory bier–shouldering practices
and address debates about immunity and the other community
