Bier-bearing Inferiors and the Skin of the Community in Modern and Contemporary Village Society: Cases from Southern Gyeonggi Province

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.