“Agriculture is the foundation of the world,” it said, and in the sense that most of the production that supported all classes of Korean society was agricultural production, this was literally true in Korea. As late as 1960, agriculture, forestry, and fisheries accounted for almost two-fifths of the gross national product—twice as much as industry (Mason et al. 1980:100)—and Korea was fundamentally a society of peasants. Almost 60 percent of the people of Korea were farmers and more than 70 percent of the population lived outside the major urban areas. Urban traditions and urban life were still tainted by their association with the Japanese who had dominated city life during the recently ended colonial period. The problems of Korea were the problems of the peasant, and to understand Korea one had to understand the rural villages. The words that Yi Kwangsu, Korea's foremost prewar novelist, put in the mouth of Hŏ Sung, the protagonist of his 1933 novel, Soil, were still apropos: “If you say Korea, aren't the peasant masses 80 percent of the population? Isn't food, too, the most important of life's materials, with clothing coming next? When you look at it like this, and speak of those peasants over there, aren't they the root of the Korean people? Their trunk?” (Yi Kwangsu 1975:60)

In the decade following the Korean War many of South Korea's rural districts held over one thousand persons per square kilometer. Sangongni, being in a mountain district, was less densely settled than many other Korean districts of the time. In the township in which the village is situated, population densities ran around seventy-five persons per square kilometer. The density per square kilometer of agricultural land, on the other hand, came to around one thousand persons. Informants say Sangongni had some 150 households, which would have included about nine hundred residents. Some 90 percent of the villagers made their living by farming, but holdings were small and productivity much lower than it is today. The average household holding of riceland could not have been much more than one-third of a hectare and of rainfall field only slightly more. Improved seed and commercial fertilizers were once again just becoming available at prices farmers could afford after the disruptions of the first years after liberation and of the Korean War, but production could barely keep up with population growth. At prevailing levels of productivity—about 2.2 metric tons per hectare for unhusked rice and perhaps 700 kilograms per hectare for the major rainfall field crops such as barley, millet, and sorghum (United Nations Korea Reconstruction Agency 1954:88–89)—a farmer with a small holding of perhaps two-thirds of a hectare could count on producing just barely enough food to feed himself and his family. Some 80 percent of his production was consumed at home and money, that scarce commodity, was used only to pay taxes and buy a few tools. Many householders experienced periods of hunger—especially in the spring when their rice was consumed and the barley was not yet ready for harvest. Those who owned little or no land had to make ends meet through day labor, handicrafts, or animal husbandry. Some, driven by hunger, would harvest crops before they were ripe, parch the grain, and eat it.

Chang and his fellow villagers were almost totally self-sufficient. Like most other Korean villagers of his time, Chang would have marketed only about 20 to 30 percent of his crop and consumed the rest (Han’guk ŭnhaeng 1958:I-125). He was only peripherally concerned with affairs outside his village and household. This was probably just as well, however, because agricultural prices were depressed. It was hard to get ahead by any means. Being so close to the subsistence margin meant that even a moderate fall in crop yields due to drought or blight, or a small fall in crop prices assumed major proportions. Most people considered themselves lucky to make it from one crisis to the next. People had a proverb for life: san kŏnnŏ san itta; over the mountains are mountains; as soon as you overcome one crisis, the next one looms.

In 1983, Sangongni was still a peasant village, and almost 90 percent of the villagers still made their living primarily by farming, but it was not the Sangongni of a generation ago. Fields were still reaped with sickles, but threshing, winnowing, and husking were all done mechanically. There were only 97 households in the village, and 397 people. Average farm size had risen to 1.36 hectares. High-yield strains of rice were routinely sprouted in plastic greenhouses before being set out in fields with ample inputs of fertilizer and pesticide. Yields for rice and other crops had risen to among the highest in the world. Chang and his fellow villagers could routinely expect yields of 5.4 metric tons or more per hectare of unhusked rice and 1.8 metric tons per hectare of grain crops on rainfall fields. At least three-quarters of what he produced was over and above what he needed for subsistence and entered the circulation system of the Korean economy. Although the villagers were still self-sufficient in food staples such as rice, barley, and major vegetables, other foods such as noodles, liquor, meat, and fruits were regularly purchased at the local periodic markets. Since most of the crop was marketed, crop prices were a vital concern. They all needed money for electricity, phone calls, fertilizer, pesticides, pumps, clothes, and school fees for the education they had to provide their children if they were going to succeed in today's Korea.

The villagers of Sangongni have a higher standard of living than ever before, but they are also more dependent upon outside forces than ever before.² They depend upon the local branch of the Agricultural Cooperative Federation to provide them with improved seed, fertilizer, agricultural chemicals, agricultural machinery, and to effectively market their crops. To keep their competitive position in village and national agriculture they must constantly improve their techniques, so they need to be able to read the agricultural pamphlets put out by Agricultural Guidance Office about improved farming practices and new crops. Such a large proportion of their crop is marketed that they now must watch agricultural prices closely and make a guess as to which crops, both those controlled by the government and those allowed to fluctuate with international markets, will be the most profitable. They adjust their cropping patterns now, so that they can maximize their income when they dispose of their crop. They also must make decisions, at the prodding of the government, about how to spend their time and money for village improvements made under the auspices of the New Village Movement.

Today, Korea is predominantly an urban-industrial society. Two-thirds of the population live in cities and agriculture accounts for less than one-fifth of the national GNP. Those who have remained in the countryside have substantially improved their standard of living. Even the poorest households are equipped with televisions and radios that link them to town and provide them with national and international news. With the rural exodus that began in the sixties and continues only slightly abated in the eighties, villagers have brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, or cousins living in Seoul or Ch’unch’ŏn. No longer can a farmer assume that his children will make a living on the land. Most families have a representative in the city, and constant circulation between town and country of people and goods knits the country together. If he can't make it in the country, perhaps a man can in the city. The opposite is also true, as the occasional returnee from the city will attest. Children can sometimes get factory jobs, and the remittances from these can be used to put a sibling through school or to buy a new parcel of land. The villagers of Sangongni have been ineluctably drawn into Korea's new urban-industrial future.

What has brought about this tremendous change in rural life? How is it that only Korea and Taiwan, of the nonpetroleum-exporting, developing countries, have been able to sustain growth rates of more than 7.0 percent for a generation and aspire to the ranks of the developed countries? The “Korean miracle,” of course, has not gone unnoticed in the world press or in academia. Over the past few years, economists and others have diligently searched for its causes and consequences. A recent series of books on Korean development,³ for example, has included volumes on foreign trade and aid, urbanization, rural development, education, modernization, and entrepreneurship. The outlines of Korean development are now fairly well known. Industrialization was achieved through the creation of export-oriented large industries financed, in large part, with foreign capital. Agriculture provided little of the capital for growth and, rather than leading development, lagged behind until finally stimulated by expanded urban markets, raised government price supports, and increasing supplies of key inputs such as improved seed and fertilizer (Ban, Moon, and Perkins 1980:3–10). But all along, the rural villages were supplying the labor for the growth of industries and of cities.

These facts are well known, but their importance for village social structure has been inadequately dealt with. We know from statistical studies that changes have taken place in rural Korea. We know, for example, that the living standard has risen, that people are better educated, that farms are larger and population smaller. We know that there has been a massive rural to urban migration for the past twenty years, and we can even make a guess as to who the migrants have been, judging from the continuous aging of the rural population. The meaning of these changes for rural social organization is more difficult to fathom, however. Has rural social organization been fundamentally altered? Are the important rural social units—the family, lineage, hamlet, and village—organized on different principles than when Chang was in his prime?

The nature of changes in village organization during a period of rapid development forms the core of this study. The power of urbanization and industrialization to promote social mobilization and transform society from “traditional” to “modern,” of course, is one of the classic themes of the social sciences from the time of Marx, Tönnies, and Weber to Parsons and Eisenstadt. Whatever the causes of industrialization, for example, we know that a result is a tremendous increase in the division of labor, a constant and increasing substitution of mechanical for manual or draft labor, an increase in employment for wages in large, bureaucratically run factories, the creation of a need for technically trained managers, and a tremendous expansion of the importance of market relations in all parts of society. All of these innovations in production are seen by most social theorists as potent forces promoting change from traditional social relations based on multistranded ties of kinship and inherited status to more single-purpose social relations based on “rational” or utilitarian considerations such as merit, efficiency, or profit (Potter 1968). Modern means of transportation, moreover, allow the concentration of industrial, commercial, financial, administrative, and communication facilities in central places so that cities become the place of residence of the largest proportion of the population. Urban residence exposes people to large, heterogeneous populations, and an extremely specialized and competitive occupational structure where social mobility is possible, and utility and efficiency at a premium (Wirth 1938). Urbanization, thus, is seen along with industrialization as a potent force breaking down traditional classes and modes of social interaction based on kinship and traditional status, and a force promoting the impersonal, single-purpose, utilitarian, social relations thought to be characteristic of modern societies.

With the rapid industrialization and urbanization of Korea, then, we expect to find radical changes in Korean society, but in a rural village like Sangongni, we run into a contradiction: those social forces that are often thought to be the cause of change in modern industrial societies are, by and large, absent. When we look at the industrialization of South Korea as a whole, of course, we find indeed that the division of labor has increased, wage labor has become predominant, the market has expanded, a need for technicians has increased, and utilitarian relations that give relatively little consideration to traditional status and kinship norms are used. Although this is true of Korea as a whole, it is not true of Sangongni. Unlike what has been reported for more accessible villages in Korea (Janelli and Janelli 1982:19; Kendall 1985:48), and unlike what has been reported for former pure farming and fishing villages in Japan (Dore 1978:93; Norbeck 1978:264; R. J. Smith 1978:114–29) and generally in Taiwan (Harrell 1981; Gallin and Gallin 1982; Hu 1983), Sangongni has not experienced a growth in wage labor or the influx of local small-scale industry. What is true of industrialization, moreover, is also true of urbanization. Sangongni has been profoundly affected by migration out of the village, but those who leave for urban jobs stay permanently in the city. Returnees are too few as yet to profoundly affect local social relations. Although Sangongni and villages like it have provided the population that has streamed into the cities during Korea's industrialization, none of the characteristics of the city that are thought to transform the social relations of traditional villagers—large size, heterogeneous population, impersonality, a complex and competitive division of labor—even remotely apply to a village like Sangongni. If modernization is thought of as social mobilization—raising one's standard of living, using mechanical sources of motive power, using the telephone, responding to the mass media, and acquiring modern education—then indeed Sangongni is modernizing, but insofar as modernization requires as a mechanism of transformation a direct contact with those characteristics of industrialization and urbanization outlined above, it should be absent from rural villages like Sangongni.

Because of the national integration of economy and society, however, the influence of industrialization cannot be confined simply to those persons who participate in wage labor and urban life. Even in the past, Korea's villages were not totally self-sufficient, but were affected by developments in the larger society. Some of the surplus that was generated by peasant farmers was siphoned off to enter the national circulation system. Both before and during the Japanese colonial period (1910–45), some peasant production was marketed directly by producers or used to pay taxes, though the largest amount of produce that entered the circulation system was paid as share rent to landlords and marketed by them. In addition to the small number of urban merchants, professionals, and bureaucrats, there was a large landlord class whose subsistence depended on peasant labor (Gragert 1982; H. K. Lee 1936). Korea, thus, was already a stratified society with a division of labor by class. Not all persons produced what they consumed, and different types of specialists tended to be geographically concentrated. Functionally distinct settlements—religious communities, agricultural villages, market towns, cities—had already emerged and were knitted together economically by the circulation of goods and services. Agricultural villages like Sangongni were specialized subunits of a larger whole. The recent industrialization of Korea has intensified this national division of labor. Now there are more types of settlement and many more specialized interdependent niches in the socioeconomic order, but Sangongni's niche has remained much the same: provision of raw agricultural materials—primarily subsistence materials—for the maintenance of villagers and a portion of the other more specialized classes of society.

The consequences for rural life of the differentiation and integration of society in which villages such as Sangongni are part of a national and international division of labor united through market relations has been an important element of those few works that have attempted a comprehensive analysis of the effect of capitalist industrialization on peasant farmers. Taking their cue from elements of the works of Marx and Engels (Marx and Engels 1955; Marx 1969), such writers as Kautsky (1899) and Lenin (1964) have elaborated an integrated theory of how peasant societies should be transformed during capitalist modernization and development. These theories focus on the changes in rural class structure that should follow the development of commodity production and the integration of peasant farms into national and international markets. Kautsky, for example, thought the destruction of household handicraft production by competition from more efficient industrial enterprises would force peasants to purchase on the market what they formerly produced at home. This, along with increased taxes caused by gentry and landlords who themselves would require more money for the purchase of new manufactures, would force peasants to switch from production for home use to the production of agricultural commodities for sale on the market to earn money. Penetration of the market into peasant societies, however, would make farmers prey to price fluctuations and the manipulation of middlemen. Their greater need for money would force them to increase the scale of their agriculture to survive, but land would often not be available. Instead, sons and daughters, who no longer would have winter employment in handicrafts, would become surplus and would have to migrate from the farm to become wage laborers. Back on the farm this would create seasonal shortages of labor that could only be overcome by hiring temporary wage workers.

The ultimate result of this market participation would be the penetration of capitalist relations of production, based on the contradiction between ownership of the means of production and wage labor, into the countryside where they had not existed before. Only those relatively large landowners who would be able to increase the scale of their agriculture through the use of hired labor would be able to successfully switch to commodity production. The middle and small peasants who relied on their own family labor would not be able to produce on a scale large enough to support themselves, and, faltering more with each successive agricultural crisis, would fall prey to moneylenders and eventually lose their land. No longer controlling means of production, these peasants would become “proletarianized”—would have to live by selling their labor to capitalists in either a rural or urban setting. The industrialization of the cities, then, would lead to increasing differentiation between rural entrepreneurs who cultivate cash crops using hired labor, and peasant proletarians who, having lost their land, would have no choice but to supply the wage labor for these commercial agricultural enterprises.

Certain of these processes first noticed in Europe in the nineteenth century have also been apparent in Sangongni and other Korean villages during Korea's recent rapid industrialization. Handicrafts, which had already been receding in importance during the early years of this century, are now almost totally absent, though most women over fifty can still recall weaving in their youth. There has been greater and greater participation in the market as people develop more income and urban tastes. A massive migration of farmers to the city, where many of them have become wage workers, has led to a fall in rural population and a decrease in family size as surplus sons and daughters have sought employment outside the family farm. Many people have shifted from exclusive reliance on subsistence crops to more remunerative cash crops, and this has been accompanied by a gradual increase in farm size.

In other respects, however, the change in the social organization of Korean villages like Sangongni does not conform to the expectations of Kautsky's model. Although the class structure of Korea as a whole and of S...