This thesis aims to This thesis aims to research the documents concerning funeral customs and ceremonies, especially its characteristics and its cultural meanings. It will be helpful for understanding the traditional funeral ceremony.
The category of documents concerning funeral customs and ceremony comprise of the Gukjoohlyejyi, Jujagajye, Jipsabunjeonggi, Sinjongrok, Jogaekrok, Bujogi, Jangtaekji, and Bokcha etc. But some documents are lack of the value of research because of their formality and simplicity. For this reason, I study on sorts of Jogaekrok and Bujogi. These documents, Jogaekrok is the list of persons visited for condolence and Bujogi is the list of money and goods for condolence, tell us the phase of funeral processing.
But still those documents are not collected and arranged. On this research, I verified serveral facts that these are mostly written from the 17th century to the early 20th century and those are more than 90 books. The title and consistence of these documents are diverse. Generally it called Jogaekrok but it also called Wimunrok, Aegamrok, Jomunrok, Jowirok etc. And the consistence of these are four kinds, for examples the list of name, the list of goods and money, the list of name, money and goods, and the manual of funeral ceremony, the list of name, goods and money. It means that the circumstance of each funeral make differ the name and consistence of funeral documents.
These documents involves several cultural meaning. First, It could be concrete and specific data about traditional funeral ceremony. Second, it also be brought to the social-structure of traditional Korean society based on the list of name written in documents. Third, it could be possible to compare funeral customs and ceremonies with other rite of passages, marrage, the coming of age ceremony etc.
Now, it just begins the research on the documents of funeral customs and ceremonies. So it should be continued studying on documents concerning funeral.