Deux fêtes de village en Corée
Authors: Deschamps Christian 
Published: March 2010

The Korean village as a basic sociological unit is held together by religious festivals (tongje) celebrated at regular, mostly annual, intervals. Two villages in the south-west of Korea are presented as typical examples. The first, Kuryong, is an agricultural community located at the foot of a mountain. The second village, Suri, is situated on an island off the west coast of the Korean peninsula. Its inhabitants live mostly on fishing and the gathering of seaweed.

Both villages hold an annual festival at the beginning of the lunar year. The protective deity feasted in the agricultural village is at the same time the deity of a mountain east of the village — a feature not uncommon in Korea. The festival is conducted by six officiants who are male representatives of the community selected a few days prior to the ceremony. The central rite consists in the offering of incense, wine and food to the deity, accompanied by numerous prostrations and prayers for protection of the village. Ritual purity is strictly observed and women are excluded from the ceremony. The community participates only in a final reunion.

A very similar ceremony is found in the village on the island. However, in Suri, the ceremony of offerings and prayer to the protective deity — residing on top of the island hill — is only one part, called sangdangje, of a larger festival. The other part, hadangje, takes place on the beach. Women play an active role, all villagers participate and a large part of the ceremony consists of improvisation and merry-making. The deity being feasted is the dragon king present in the form of a puppet. The villagers approach him with offerings of wine and money and the deity, through a spokesman, gives words of praise or admonition in an improvised dialogue with the fishermen. A strong sexual symbolism and much spontaneity characterize the festival in which no taboos of purity are observed. At the end, the dragon king is sent off into the sea in a small boat bearing impurities and misfortune away.

Comparing these two village festivals, it appears that they belong to two entirely different types. The first, with its strong emphasis on ritual purity and fixed ritual procedure, is related to Confucian ancestor worship and was introduced in the villages by the educated elite. In contrast to this, the second festival seems to be much older and to have a popular and indigenous origin. Traces of similar festivals held in the same region during the first centuries A.D. can already be found in the San-kuo chih.

What Christian Deschamps describes here for Korea is of great interest to historians of Chinese religion. The ceremony of sending off the Dragon King's boat, as practiced in the Suri village, resembles the Chinese Pestilence King Exorcism still practiced in Taiwan as well as in mainland China (see Kenneth Dean's report in this issue of the Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, p. 203). The tension between indigenous cults and the Confucian administrators who try to replace these festivals with their official rites is a phenomenon well known throughout Chinese history. Jean Lévi's study (in this issue, p. 81) throws new light on these perennial efforts of the Chinese government to "civilise" local customs.