Material evidence of funerary rituals is one of our main windows into the past. Especially in societies without a written culture, burials form one of the most important archaeological witnesses to past society. For medieval Korea,¹ there is only a very modest corpus of useful textual material for Koryo, and even less for Greater Silla. Conversely, there is more archaeological evidence for Silla than for Koryo. Given this paucity of source material, it is simply impossible to write the kind of intimate portrayal of how medieval people faced death that is possible for France or Japan.² How Silla or Koryo...

In 1956, the arrival of a team of medical consultants from the University of Minnesota (UMN) marked a major transition at Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH), which was then in the midst of a comprehensive overhaul of its physical infrastructure (1954–1957), along with related changes to its pedagogical practice.¹ Among the concerns raised almost immediately were practices governing the routine care of patients, with Korean families permitted to reside on-site temporarily with their ailing family members—providing for basic necessities, including food and laundry—allowing hospital staff members to concentrate their limited resources on meeting the needs of health...

When King T’aejo (r. 918–943), the first ruler of Koryo, died, his remains were interred in a small chamber built for the purpose in the mountains west of Kaesong, the capital of the new kingdom. Made of stone slabs and covered with a small earth mound, the interior of the tomb bore murals depicting the Four Guardian Animals (四神sasin) alongside paintings of pine, plum, and bamboo—the so-called Three Friends of Winter symbolizing longevity and perseverance. Its exterior was encircled by stone slabs with carvings of the twelve zodiac animals, while stone sculptures of officials and tigers were...

“Insofar as the knowledge of death cannot be avoided in any society,” writes sociologist and theologian Peter L. Berger, “legitimations of the reality of the social worldin the face of death[emphasis in original] are decisive requirements in any society.”¹ Accordingly, this chapter explores the way that the notion of death is linked to what has become central to the reality of sociopolitical orders worldwide: nationalism.

Nationalism is understood here as “an ideological movement for attaining and maintaining identity, unity, and autonomy of a social group some of whose members deem it to constitute an actual or potential nation,”²...

Trying to identify precisely which practices in Korean funerary rites might be labeled as shamanic is not an easy task because of the syncretic nature of religious practices and customs in premodern Korea. We find significant overlap and mixing of what might be termed shamanic practices with those of Buddhism, geomancy, and, by the late Choson, even Confucianism. While this might pose a difficulty for the present-day researcher, for Koreans of premodern times it had no such effect since it was simply how people lived. Nonetheless, at some level the amalgam of practices can be separated somewhat and we can...

Shivering in the freshly fallen snow on a mountainside near Seoul in the early spring of 1536, gloomily contemplating the viscous, decomposing remains of his father’s corpse as he and his kinsmen performed an elaborate reburial, Yi Mun-gǒn (李文楗 1494–1567) con fided to his diary his sense of squeamishness as he redressed the body and placed it in a new coffin: “I could scarcely bear to move my hand forward, but what choice did I have?”¹

That day proved an exhausting climax to months of tedious preparation, involving the careful supervision of the selection of wood for the coffin...

Undoubtedly death is one of the few universals of all human societies, and because of the finality of this event, it has been an occasion that is most commonly approached with feelings of dread and the unknowable. Given the significance of death to humans, an understanding of how societies conceive of death, the afterlife, and what might occur to the dead can reveal much about how a given society understands its place in the cosmos. Particularly interesting are those beliefs concerning the condition of persons after death, specifically, the nature and function of ghosts (kwisin鬼神).

There are numerous accounts...

According to the Sǒp’o yǒnbo (西浦年譜 Biographical chronology of Sǒp’o, i.e., Kim Man-jung 金萬重, 1637–1692), in the late spring of 1692, Kim learned that several of his friends had recently died. He and they had been exiled at the same time, and he was then growing sicker day by day, coughing up blood, when he sent his cousin what was, in effect, a farewell letter.¹ In it, he sketched his illness (incurable, he accurately guessed) and explained that after he had learned of the deaths of his friends, life seemed to be a dream. But he contrasted this vague...

“[Trying to suppress Catholicism] is like hitting ashes with a club. The more you strike, the more they rise up. Though the King wants to put a stop to it, in the end, there is nothing that can be done.”¹ These words, spoken by Yi Ka-hwan (1742–1801), a former Catholic whose household contained numerous believers in the new religion, would prove to be true.² Despite numerous government persecutions in which Catholics were tortured and killed, this religious community continued to rebuild itself with the help of Chinese and French missionaries. While it is not clear to what Yi attributed...