Stone Fighting, Violence and Culture in Korea, East Asia and the World

Talk by Felix Siegmund, professor of Premodern Korean Philology, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.

“Stone fighting” (sǒkchǒn 石戰), a traditional event in which opposing teams battled each other with stones and blunt weapons, was practice in Chosǒn Korea (1392-1910), but dates back to a much earlier time. It was deeply at odds with the Confucian morals of the Chosǒn state. 

While stone fighting can be explained well in the paradigms of carnivals or theories of social events, code-switching is the broader paradigm and thus better suited for comparative usage. 

Funder: EPEL Program of the Association for Korean Studies in Europe (AKSE)