Ancestor Worship and Korean Society

Roger L. Janelli and Dawnhee Yim Janelli are anthropologists, and this Stanford University Press book is their ethnographic study of ancestor worship practice within Korean society, based on direct fieldwork in a Korean village. Its strength is that it grounds its account of ancestor rites in observed practice within one specific studied community, giving concrete ethnographic detail rather than a generalized textbook description of Korean ancestor worship. Its limit is that it describes the specific community and period of the Janellis' fieldwork, so a claim about ancestor worship practice in a different region of Korea, or in the considerably changed practice of recent decades, needs a source matched to that different context.