The Emotional Spectrum of the ‘Yangban-owner’ about the Servants and the Network Physicality : Focusing on the Emotional Investigation and ‘Disease/Death’ Records of Shaemirok

This article analyzes the emotions and attitudes of yangban (elite literati) toward nobi (servants) based on the records related to nobi described in Oh Himun’s diary, Shaemirok, using the concept of emotional spectrum, and compares and analyzes the yangban’s attitudes and emotional representations toward nobi’s illness and death with those of yangban families. In doing so, it clarifies, through a textual interpretation methodology, that the nobi’s owners in the Chosǒn Dynasty formed connections in everyday, experiential, and emotional dimensions and constituted network-physicality. In the Chosǒn era, nobi were not merely auxiliary and objectified tools that helped the daily lives of their masters, the yangban, but rather served as an archived ‘device’ that maintained and connected the physical daily lives, information, ethics, manners, and emotions of the yangban (family). The feelings of the yangban as master toward nobi overlapped to some extent with the emotional reactions toward family or relatives, and were often expressed as empathetic feelings based on universal human homogeneity, but they were also expressed as feelings of hierarchy depending on social status and moral factors. The subject of emotions, yangban as owner of nobi, showed a tendency to secure the legitimacy of emotional expression by exercising moral and ethical judgment regarding the nobi’s breach of contract, non-performance of obligations or promises, delay in work, fraud, running away, lying, rudeness, impoliteness, and unsanitary behavior. Because the yangban shared their daily lives and life times with nobi, their feelings toward nobi were complex and mixed, with heterogeneous or ambivalent feelings intersecting. The nobles had complex feelings for the nobi they had spent a long time with, and they tended to integrate these feelings with their sense of care and responsibility as nobi owners. This study aims to deepen and expand the scope of Chosǒn history and culture by understanding the realistic and emotional dimension of the relationship between nobi and yangban as their owner that could not be approached solely through political, ideological, and academic understanding of the same status and gender as male yangban, by elucidating the reality of the network physicality that operated between nobi and yangban-owner, focusing on the emotional records that the masters recognized, experienced, and reproduced regarding nobi.