A History of Korea (51 page)

The secondary status groups

One of the enduringly fascinating features of Korean civilization since the beginning has been the commanding influence of social status in determining both social interaction and structure. And perhaps the most compelling manifestation of the Korean social hierarchy was the emergence, in the mid-Chos
n, of the secondary status groups. To a far greater extent than the hereditary aristocracy or commoner peasantry, which were not significantly different from their counterparts elsewhere in the premodern world, the secondary status groups embodied Chos
n Korea’s systematic integration of political power with the delineation of ascriptive social privilege.

Five secondary status groups, who collectively constituted a hallmark of late Chos
n society, came into distinctive form beginning in the post-invasions recovery period of the seventeenth century: the lineages of technical officials, such as the family of Lady Chang; the hereditary clerks of local government who descended from local elites of the Kory
era; the many concubine descendants, who constituted one of the largest
social categories in the late Chos
n period; the local elites of the northern provinces, victimized by a regional bias with origins deep in Korean history; and the military officials who, in an earlier era (however briefly), stood as equals to their civilian counterparts. Though originating under different circumstances, these secondary status groups all suffered discrimination both socially and politically, and hence embodied the core principle linking hereditary social status to political power, or, to be more precise, to bureaucratic eligibility. Their existence as sub-aristocratic groups, in other words, both determined and was determined by their lower possibilities for gaining government office.

The secondary status groups acted as a kind of buffer between the ruling aristocracy and the majority mass of commoners. Hence they embodied the complicated mixture of the rock-solid principle of hereditary status and the sporadic possibilities for some social mobility in the mid- to late-Chos
n. They had a foot in the realms of both the ruling class, with whom most of them had an ancestral connection before being sloughed off into secondary status, and the ruled, with whom they could commiserate about the injustices of the system. They represented, then, the Chos
n social structure in its full range of characteristics, from the dominant Confucian ethos and socioeconomic system to popular culture and sentiment (
Chapter 12
). And therein lay the latency of their historical significance: while they absorbed social conventions and internalized the Confucian orthodoxy, as time passed they demonstrated an increasing desire for social recognition and privilege, which remained largely thwarted until the modern era.