UNESCO Jokbo?

I’ll admit most readers are not following goings on in the world of Korean jokbo — a kind of genealogical record — but things are happening. The most important issue is Korea’s preparation to apply for UNESCO recognition of Korean jokbo and enlist it in the Memory of the World program.

Korea has received UNESCO recognition in three categories: World Heritage, which includes physical monuments, archaeological sites and cultural landscapes; Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, covering living practices and traditions; and Memory of the World, which oversees documents and archival collections.

Jokbo would fit into the third category, Memory of the World, where we find the Hunmin Jeongeum documents that helped codify the Korean alphabet, the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty, the Tripitaka Koreana and the 718 titles included in the Confucian Printing Woodblocks collection, as well as modern documents concerning the Saemaul Movement and the May 18th Democratic Uprising in Gwangju for a total of 21 recognized collections.

Jokbo is both historical and contemporary, bridging the current gap between the old and the recent.

Jokbo is uniquely Korean. While the tradition came from China and is recorded mostly in Chinese script, the Korean method of record keeping is different from that of China. The most significant difference is the way women are recorded.

Jokbo is sometimes categorized as an all-male document. However, while seemingly true on the surface, if we look at most jokbo recordings, we find that the women are not excluded but are included in full detail and perhaps more than any other kind of genealogical document in the world. For example, in the West, sources for family history research include a scattering of documents like birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates and census records. To find a grandmother or a grandfather takes a large amount of research through numerous sources.

In Korea, everything is in the jokbo. The record of the men is more complete because the record includes the complete set of relationships of the man. Although the jokbo has a total record for the man, the woman’s record is more detailed than any single document one would use for genealogical research in the West. The woman’s data usually has information on her marriage and her natal family — including her birth and death data, her burial records and a record of her father and often her grandfather, great grandfather, and even maternal grandfather. That is a tremendous amount of data — much much more that you would find in a Western source like a birth certificate, a marriage certificate or a death certificate.

We have smashed the myth that the jokbo is only a man’s record. Not only does the jokbo contain core data about women and their relationships, including father, husband and children, it always includes the designation of which branch of a given surname she is from: Gimhae Kim, Miryang Bak, Andong Gwon, etc. This is where Korean jokbo is superior to the Chinese documents, in which women are not traceable. They are presented by surname, but not in a way that can be traced. All Korean women can be found in both the jokbo of their husband, but also in their natal jokbo, with notations indicating who they married.

Critics who focus on the lack of information about women in jokbo often point out that they are not listed by their own given name. This is true, but they are still listed and can be identified by their father’s name, their husband’s name and their children’s names. In fact, there is a term “samjong” to indicate that women should obey their father, then their husband and later their son. Yes, yes, that’s not the modern idea of free and equal treatment, but it is a genealogical record that is better than most in the world.

Korea should not disparage the treatment of women in the jokbo but celebrate the fact that so much data is recorded in them. It’s not fair to hold premodern people accountable and condemn them by the standards of the modern, democratic world.

I, for one, welcome UNESCO recognition of jokbo as a uniquely Korean contribution to the Memory of the World program. I hope the application is successful and that Korean jokbo get the recognition deserved on an international scale.

Mark Peterson (frogoutsidethewell@gmail.com) is a professor emeritus of Korean studies at Brigham Young University in Utah. The views expressed here are his own.