The session, “Domestic Materiality in Korea and Beyond,” examines the mutual relationship between people and things in (re-)defining domesticity. Domestic space is a key site for manifestations of materiality within everyday practices and of their effects on gender, family and cultural identities. How is domesticity represented in material form and in physical practice? What role do objects and their usage play in producing, reinforcing, and challenging domesticity? Is there material evidence linking women/men and domesticity, and if so, how did those links work in practice and in discourse? How do things become co-agents in (re-)defining boundaries of the domestic realm? To explore these questions, the three papers gathered for this session will use texts ranging from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries, and will focus on tobacco, calligraphy, and household manuals respectively as a subject of study for materiality and domesticity in Korea and its interactions and knowledge exchanges with the West, China, and beyond.

Tobacco arrived in Korea at the turn of the seventeenth century and preserved in the journey was also a peculiar association with the female body: originating from a Native American legend, the Portuguese word tabaco became the Korean tamp’ago, “Lady Tamp’a” or “Phlegm Clearing Lady.” Yet, operating within a patriarchal, Neo-Confucian society, tobacco underwent revisions to fit the male elites’ ideals of ritual, hierarchy, and gender relations. And as women—both young and old, elite and slave—enjoyed tobacco, the body of the female smoker also became a contentious site of power production. From its originating legend in Native America to writings by both male and female elites including Ladies Kim Hoyŏnjae (1681–1722) and Yi Pinghŏgak (1759–1824) in Chosŏn Korea, our first paper will explore discussions of the medicinal and culinary utility of tobacco in these writings. The paper will argue that tobacco served as a “boundary object” that made and remade the nature of Chosŏn domesticity.

The second paper demonstrates that vernacular Korean calligraphic performance constituted a curious form of domestic materiality in the Chosŏn palace. The decorum that regulated the life of the royal family prescribed regimented performances, such as daily greetings, which were offered in person or in writing. Letters of greeting (munan), when including women at least on one side of the exchange, were transcribed in exquisite palace-style calligraphy. Despite the primacy of sinographs (Chinese characters) as a written script, especially for male elites, most Korean kings—unlike their elite male contemporaries—cultivated refined vernacular Korean brushwork. As empowered addressees, royal women demanded this particular scriptural decorum, which emphasized their gender as well as their royal status, and this elevated vernacular Korean writing to the level of state importance. Using historical annals, extant royal letter anthologies, palace records and palace memoirs, our second paper will argue that in the case of Chosŏn, palace style calligraphy materialized a person’s position within the filial hierarchy of political-familial relations.

Our third paper will explore how material culture reshaped the concept of domestic life at the turn of the twentieth century in Korea when kajŏng (the home) emerged as an important setting for Korea’s modernization. Numerous editions of household manuals, commonly entitled kajŏng pogam (A Precious Mirror for the Home), emerged in the 1910s and covered a range of subjects including botany, medicine, cooking, and even an almanac. The manuals often emphasized the superiority of injo (man-made) products and showed how the science of creating man-made products gained validity as practical knowledge for Korean homes. Inspired by the descriptive diversity and thematic scope of these household manuals, this paper explores how old and new sciences both competed and coexisted in early twentieth-century Korea.

With these three papers and by examining the diversity of expectations, investments, and adjustments that everyday objects and mundane practices entail, this session aims to explore various ways in which domesticity and everyday lives constitute an essential but overlooked social and cultural process.