Basic Kinship Terms: Christian Relations, Chronotopic Formulations, and a Korean Confrontation of Language

• Published in: Anthropological quarterly Vol. 88; no. 2; pp. 305 - 336
• Main Author: Harkness, Nicholas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research 01.04.2015; Institute for Ethnographic Research
• Subjects: Address forms; Christianity; Christians; Chronotope; Civil War; Conflict; Cultural anthropology; Deixis; Ethnography; Honorifics; Kinship; Kinship terminology; Korean language; Language; Modern society; Narratives; Pragmatics; Pragmatism; Protestants; Simmel, Georg (1858-1918); Social Change; Social sciences; Society; South Korea; Space; SPECIAL COLLECTION: KINSHIP CHRONOTOPES; Speeches; Spirituality; South Korea
• ISSN: 0003-5491; 1534-1518; 1534-1518
• DOI: 10.1353/anq.2015.0025

This ethnographic analysis of the pragmatic links among forms of address, honorifics, and narratives of spiritual maturity clarifies a conflict between two Christian models of social change in South Korea: absolute social rupture and transcendence, and progressive shifts in social orientation and institutional self-location. The focus is on a Protestant proposal for all Korean Christians to address one another with the terms hyŏngje-nim (brother) and chamae-nim (sister). While these terms promised to combine the intimacy of siblinghood with the clear marking of Christian status, they generally had the interactional effect of establishing distance where there was to be closeness and lowering where there was to be esteem. Furthermore, a simplification of address to these two basic kinship terms threatened to establish an ascetic mode of pragmatics that would override the intricate formal coding and indexing of status differentiation by the enregistered honorifics of Korean. Combined, these limited forms of address and the severe restriction of social deixis generated yet further conflict between different chronotopic formulations of social relations, namely between the narrative timespace internal to specific kinds of Korean social relations, and the generalized external narrative timespace of modern Korean Christian society at large.