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Paper presented at the 121st American Ethnological Society annual meeting, Portland, Oregon, March 2528, 1999. "‘Husband Is to Wife as Heaven Is to Earth’: Nature and Culture in Sex/Gender Relations in Korean Society” Chunghee Sarah Soh, Ph.D. San Francisco State University Sherry Ortner's article entitled “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” is perhaps the best known anthropological attempt to explain the “universality of female subordination” by conceptualizing female to male relations in terms of the nature/culture dichotomy à la Levi-Straussian structuralism. First published in 1972, the article was republished two years later in the edited volume, Woman, Culture, and Society (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974), which became a cornerstone of feminist anthropology. It is one of the best remembered texts of my graduate days in the 1980s and I was rather surprised to find that it was still being used as the main text for The Anthropology of Women class taught by a Women Studies instructor at San Francisco State University in the fall 1994 semester when I joined the University. (I might add here that at my institution the course, Anthropology of Women, is cross-listed by the Departments of Anthropology and Women Studies, and the two departments take turns in offering the course each semester. So, when I taught the same course in the spring 1995, I adopted Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective, a 1993 volume edited by Caroline Brettell and Carolyn Sargent. In the next semester, I noted with mixed feelings the disappearance of Woman, Culture, and Society from the syllabus of my colleague in Women Studies, who adopted the same text as mine.) As many of you may know, the volume contains among others two more seminal articles, one by Michelle Rosaldo and the other by Nancy Chodorow, both of whom “Nature and Culture in Sex/Gender Relations in Korean Society” (Soh 1999) Page 2 attempted to theorize the secondary status of women in society as a universal, pancultural fact. Michelle Rosaldo, in her essay, "Woman, Culture and Society: A Theoretical Overview," regarded the universal dichotomy between the "identification of women with domestic life and of men with public life" as the underlying structural framework that supported women's subordinate position in society in terms of power and authority. Nancy Chodorow's article, "Family Structure and Feminine Personality," posited that women acquire feminine psychic characteristics due to universal female socialization experiences and that the feminine personality characteristics—such as personalism and particularism—were devalued in comparison with the masculine personality characterized by objectivism and abstraction. These two articles together with Ortner's received a lot of attention and generated heated discussions. Some found their analyses persuasive while others were critical of their universalist assumptions and dichotomous approaches to women's roles, statuses, and personality characteristics. Based on ethnographic research on Korean culture and society, I found Rosaldo’s analysis the most convincing among the three universalist acccounts of women’s secondary status in society. In traditional Korea, which was a highly stratified society organized under the patrilineal kinship system, the division of workspace by sex along the domestic/public sphere distinction resulted in the inverse relationship between women’s social status and public roles. There were only four service jobs available for women in the public sphere: those of a shaman, medicine woman, courtesan, and palace woman. My study of women in Korean politics has reported the lack of the so-called widow’s succession in the Korean political history, which I interpreted as an illustration of the strength of the patrilineal bloodline and the “Nature and Culture in Sex/Gender Relations in Korean Society” (Soh 1999) Page 3 sexual division of labor in Korean society. The arguments by Chodorow and Ortner were less applicable in the Korean case. In considering the impact of family structure on feminine personality, for example, I have hypothesized the influence of the father in the daughter’s acquisition of androgyny by discussing the phenomena of the “absent father” and the “nurturant father with egalitarian worldview” based on my study of women legislators in South Korea. This paper problematizes the simplistic conception of nature in Ortner’s article and reconsiders the oppositional concepts of nature/culture in the anthropological interpretations of gender roles and relations. In contrast to Ortner's dichotomous linkages of nature to female versus culture to male, I argue that in the traditional Korean discourse on sex/gender relations, the relationship between the concepts of nature and culture is not oppositional but encompassed in hierarchical but complementary manners. That is, culture is immanent in nature by marking or inscribing the components of nature such as heaven and earth as male and female reflecting the cultural gender order, thereby appropriating nature to illustrate and to reinforce the hegemonic Confucian ideology of male superiority. In contrast, in contemporary South Korean society, I suggest that nature is culturally tamed in the political processes of consolidating democratization by legislating the principle of gender equality and the emerging feminist concept of “women's rights as human rights” for both domestic and public lives. In the first half of the paper, I will analyze the instances of what I may call the “naturalization of culture” or culture in nature, by examining the idiomatic phrases and axiomatic expressions in the Korean discourses on sex/gender roles and relations that make use of the items or components of nature to support the Confucian ideology of male “Nature and Culture in Sex/Gender Relations in Korean Society” (Soh 1999) Page 4 superiority in heterosexual relations. In the second half of the paper, I will explore the dynamics of culture change in the patterns of sex/gender relations in contemporary South Korean society where democratic ideology of gender equity and the concept of human rights are deployed by feminist activists to change the traditional patterns of sex/gender relations through legislation in order to bring about more egalitarian relations between men and women. Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature Now, before discussing the Korean case, I should mention here that the written languages of China, Korea, and Japan, as the members of a common Confucian culture region in East Asia, all use the Chinese ideographs, and that the Chinese character for sex, which is pronounced song in Korean (sei in Japanese; xing in Chinese), refers primarily to the biological and physiological dimensions. As a result, the dimension of socially constructed sex differences, i.e., the concept of gender, is obscured and the lack of the term gender has contributed to the popular understanding of gender inequity as an inevitable consequence of natural sex differences. In South Korea, as far as I know, the terminological discussion of the sex/gender distinction in printed media first appeared in 1995 on the occasion of the World Women's Conference in Beijing. For example, Chosun Ilbo, a major vernacular daily, featured a special article on the Beijing Conference on August 25, the day before my departure from field research in Seoul back to the States. The article was generally informative but in it I found a confusing explanation of the differences between the two terms of sex and gender. As an anthropologist specializing in the issues of gender and sexuality, I felt it my duty to write a short piece that explicated the analytical distinction between sex and “Nature and Culture in Sex/Gender Relations in Korean Society” (Soh 1999) Page 5 gender. In it I also introduced the concept of a third gender, and suggested inventive new terms, saengsong (“biological sex”) and munsong (“cultural sex”) for the Korean language. It was published in the September 12 issue of Chosun Ilbo, but the Korean language still lacks the term for gender. In comparison, in Japan, they have adopted the English term, gender, while in China, they have added a character for distinction to the character for sex in their attempt to denote the concept of gender. The point here is that the lack of the term, gender, in the languages of the Confucian cultures is symbolically of great significance for our discussion. I suggest that it has contributed to the generalized view of ‘anatomy is destiny,’ thereby naturalizing the problem of socially constructed gender discrimination. Now going back to Ortner’s conceptualization of nature in opposition to culture and the linkages of nature to female and of culture to male, one might criticize it for being a Western and rather masculine conception of nature and gender. In the Korean worldview, human beings as organisms originate from nature and return to it at the end of life, and as such humans are in nature and part of nature. Social functional arrangement of the sexual division of labor (such as men’s role in warfare and women’s role in childrearing) has been perceived as a natural consequence of sex differences in physiological characteristics. Even the unequal power and prestige relations between husband and wife are naturalized by metaphoric expressions such as “Husband is to wife as heaven is to earth.” Both heaven and earth are, of course, part of nature and yet earth takes a secondary position to heaven in the Korean mind. From the Korean cultural perspective, Heaven as the abode of ancestral spirits and other supernatural beings is “Nature and Culture in Sex/Gender Relations in Korean Society” (Soh 1999) Page 6 “naturally” aligned with male, while earth as the field from which humans obtain fresh fruits and vegetables may appear “naturally” linked to female. For the purpose of this paper, I define culture as core values, beliefs, and patterns of behavior shared by the majority of the members of society. In Korean culture, binary oppositions are familiar features of classificatory thinking, and the Taoist principles of yin and yang serve as fundamental sources for medical diagnoses, moral discourses, as well as philosophical and poetic musings. As Sherry Ortner has noted, yin, the female principle, and yang, the male principle, are given equal weight in the ideology of Taoism. However, to suggest, as Ortner has,1 that maleness and femaleness are equally valued in the general ideology of Chinese culture is a mistake. For one thing, Taosim as philosophy is only one component of Chinese culture in which Confucianism as political ideology has exerted much greater influence over the general patterns of social relations. And Korean society is recognized as the most Confucian among the three East Asian countries. Thus, despite the equal weight of heaven and earth in terms of the yin/yang principles in Taoism, in practice, especially in the context of gender relations, yin, the female principle, has been secondary to yang, the male principle, in the symbolism of power and prestige. In the metaphors of procreation, for example, male as the provider of the “seed” is more valued than female as the field (earth) in which the seed will grow. In the agrarian worldview of human reproduction, it is the seed, i.e., the male, which is attributed to be the generator of life. It is in this cultural context that a phrase of a song says, “Father has given birth to me and Mother has raised me.” The symbolism encoded in the ritualized announcement of the birth of a baby in Korean society again utilizes natural items to “Nature and Culture in Sex/Gender Relations in Korean Society” (Soh 1999) Page 7 make a symbolic statement of the sex of the baby. When a baby is born, the entrance door of the house is decorated by a straw rope, which hangs across the top of the door. If the baby is a boy, red peppers and small rectangular shaped charcoal pieces will be inserted in the rope. If it is a girl, the rope will have only the charcoal pieces. The festive color of red peppers symbolizing the boy’s penis will be missing in the straw birth ropes for baby girls. I have given the above discussions of Korean cultural ideologies and practices as ethnographic examples of “nature in culture” rather than “nature versus culture”: That is, nature is culturally marked to illustrate and to support the hegemonic ideology of male superiority. My analysis of the Korean case points to the intertwined relationship between nature and culture in the construction of gender power relations, complicating anthropological interpretations of the concepts of nature and culture in theoretical understandings of their impact on sex/gender relations. Culture over Nature Let me now turn to the competing ways in which culture exerts control over nature in traditional versus in contemporary Korean society. “Women turn into foxes when three days pass by without their having been beaten up,” (Yŏja-nŭn sahŭl-man mae-rŭl an-mazado yŏu-ga toenda.) is a well-known Korean old saying that rationalizes domestic violence in the form of wife battering. The saying is commonly used in the context of a newly married couple. The folk belief is that husband needs to tame wife in order to establish proper power relations in the conjugal life. Here, we see the Korean version of Ortner’s analytical linkage of women to nature—in this case, women in the image of wily foxes and the linkage of men to culture “Nature and Culture in Sex/Gender Relations in Korean Society” (Soh 1999) Page 8 in the image of controllers of unruly nature, as husbands batter wives to “tame” or domesticate them. It is only from the late 1980s that the issues of the culture of violence against women have been discussed as a serious social problem. Until then, the naturalization of gender relations in Korean traditional culture has prevailed over the democratic ideology of gender equality stipulated in the South Korean Constitution. Well-educated and belonging to the upper-middle class, a devout Buddhist widow in her mid-seventies in Seoul, for example, would blurt out “You should pray to be born male in your next life!” to any discussions or complaints of gender discrimination by her women friends. In contrast, some women of her own generation have been leading the “comfort women” movement for redress on behalf of the survivors. They have defined as sexual slavery the forced prostitution thrusted upon young females of colonized Korea (1910-1945) to serve the military of imperial Japan during the Second World War. The Korean women leaders demand Japan to recognize its legal responsibility for the war crimes of gross violations of women’s human rights and to offer official compensation to the survivors. In fact, in contemporary Korean society, which is characterized by a dualistic structure of gender ideology deriving from the historical legacy of Confucianism and from the modern adoption of the democratic institutions, a culture war has raged for decades in the legislative arena. From the 1950s to early 1990s, the battle was fought mainly over the revision of the Family Law by women’s organizations against the traditional forces of opposition symbolized by the National Association of Confucians. The 1998 revised law of citizenship exemplifies one of the latest victories of gender egalitarianism over traditional masculinist culture by stipulating the principle of “Nature and Culture in Sex/Gender Relations in Korean Society” (Soh 1999) Page 9 bilaterality--in place of the traditional practice of patrilineality--in conferring Korean citizenship to children of international marriages (Han’guk Ilbo 6/24//98). Most remarkable legislative achievements of late are the revised Equal Employment Law that includes stipulations against sexual harassment at workplace with stiff fines for violators and the special law against Domestic Violence that allows women to bring charges against their husbands for the first time in Korean legal history. Conclusion To conclude, the Korean case partially supports Ortner’s analysis but also complicates the relationships between the concepts of nature and culture in the gender ideology and relations. It demonstrates the primacy of ideology and the significance of terminology in the particular configuration of the relationship between the concepts of nature and culture in mapping and sustaining the patriarchal patterns of gender relations in specific cultural contexts. It also indicates the impact of social activism in the legislative arena that helps in the processes of culture change toward more egalitarian gender relations in a society characterized by structural dualism. Endnote Ortner, Sherry. 1996. “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” In Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture, pp. 21-42. Boston: Beacon Press. 1