Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan

What is a mountain? According to Maya Stiller's study of elite travel during the late Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910), Mount Kŭmgang in Northern Kangwŏn Province of modern-day North Korea was a performative locus for the articulation of elite identity through travel, landscape carving, and intertextual exchange. A prized site of pilgrimage, which was originally accessible only to the most established elites, Mount Kŭmgang gradually became a key location for socially profitable memory making even for those who did not pass the prestigious civil service examination, achieve a successful government career, or could fully claim elite status.Stiller's focus on rock inscriptions centers this genre of writing as an important source material for the understanding of elite image politics during the Chosŏn dynasty. Writing had been a crucial vehicle for the creation of literati identity in premodern Korea, but Stiller's work takes us beyond the well-known genres of the literary collection, genealogy, and commemorative literature. And while the graffiti itself does not carry much information apart from the inscriber's name, its strategic placement provides an eloquent testimony to the politics of descent and agnatic status claims.The laborious process of disentangling this episodic archive is itself worth note. To make full sense of the clustered names engraved in stone, these carvings are matched with “thousands of royal palace records, government examination rosters, stele inscriptions, genealogical charts, and travel accounts” (75). The inscriptions are also introduced in the context of other records about Kŭmgang travel: travelogues, songs, board games, and paintings, which are taken outside of the usual “true-view” discussion that has dominated the study of the visual depictions of the famous mountain.Outside the genealogical information of the mountain graffiti—which record generations of agnatic kin who travel to Kŭmgang and leave their names in memory of completing this prestigious and costly journey—the carvings are presented as historically malleable material objects. The readers learn about the conscious aesthetic choices of the carvers: the calligraphic styles, locations, and the size of letters that influence the meaning of the inscription. The inscriptions are guided by an implicit social decorum of “not inscribing pretentiously large signatures or irreverently caring over previous travelers' names” (79), though persons with high government positions have license to break this rule.The historical change in the pattern of name carving follows the evolution of the status system: the inscriptions start to appear in quantity in the early eighteenth century, when patrilineality is solidified as the ground for exclusive status claims. The number of inscriptions grows in size when local monks begin offering paid carving services that extend the access to privileged memory sites to non-bureaucrats who originally had the prerogative over corvee services, and we get an inkling of how monetization of economy begins to influence claims to status. The second expansion in the number of inscriptions occurs in the late eighteenth century when travelers start exploring the more difficult and adventurous routes in Outer Kŭmgang—by that time, travel to the mountain becomes a coveted means of embodying elite identity through travel as performance.The book is composed of an introduction, brief conclusion, and four chapters. Chapter 1 reconstructs the logistics of Mount Kŭmgang travel, including the available modes of transportation, costs, the list of services provided by the local monasteries, and the elites' attitude toward travel and name carving. Chapter 2 contextualizes the development of Mount Kŭmgang into a “memory site” through a practice in which the elites created kinship textuality—a series of generational exchanges in which descendants responded to the inscriptions of their elders carved at particular sites. These memory sites, in turn, became validated after gaining recognition in the proliferating travel literature. This literature, further, solidified the elite prerogative of landscape naming. Chapter 3 casts Mount Kŭmgang into a social battleground, where various groups vie for prestige. A particular token of this struggle is the emergence of associative clusters carved by lower elites, who did not have enough resources within the kin group to create agnatic clusters of inscriptions. Chapter 4, finally, considers the so-called recumbent travel that picks up in the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries—“an expansion of popular attention to Kŭmgangsan's cultural geography that did not require physical travel” (110). This chapter reconstructs the depiction of Mount Kŭmgang in paintings, atlases and annotated maps, journey songs, board games, and literature puzzles.If the book tends toward the descriptive, especially in the last chapter, it nevertheless provides a rich, texturized account of elite travel and politics of social distinction. The unique and hard-to-access archive of mountain graffiti is presented thoughtfully and solidly as it becomes a suggestive meeting ground for art history—which is invited to look beyond its usual scope—and social history that makes a shift in its geographic coverage, moving from established regional centers dominated by particular elite groups toward a site that draws travelers from the whole of Korea. Meticulously researched and innovative in its approach, this book is a most welcome addition to the study of premodern Korea

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Carving · Context (archaeology) · Elite · Literature · Performative utterance · Political science · Politics · Asian Culture and Media Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law