Studies the hunt, animals and how regional dynamics informed local cultural practices on the Korean peninsula
- Elucidates the significance of the peninsula in regional and Eurasian history through detailing and navigating animals and the hunt, themes scholarship has overlooked.
- Reframes the struggle between a kingship and a powerful bureaucracy competing for authority over an expanding state in the shifting geopolitics of Northeast Asia at the advent of the Little Ice Age.
- Explores political and military contacts across Northeast Asia through Korean encounters with Yuan Mongols, Ming Chinese, Jurchen tribes, and Japanese on Tsushima and pirates along the coasts, all in the context of hunts, hunting grounds, and wild beasts.
- Rereads the primary sources with an eye on animals and the hunt, including neglected sources such as a fifteenth-century manuscript on falcons and falconry.
- Draws upon secondary sources across the fields of animal studies, zoology, geography, biology, and more, including forays into the larger topic of human-animal affairs and environmental history.
- Studies the circulation of ideas and intellectual contacts across the region, such as the cultural flows of Buddhism, Neo-Confucianism, and folk and shaman beliefs related to animals and hunting.
This book focuses on the transitional period in late Koryŏ and early Chosŏn dynasty Korea from the 1270s until 1506, situating the Korean peninsula in relations to the neighbouring Mongol Empire and Ming Dynasty China. During this period, Korean statesmen expanded their influence over people and the environment. Human-animal relations became increasingly significant to politics, national security, and elite identities.
Animals, both wild and domestic, were used in ritual sacrifices, submitted as tax tribute, exchanged in regional trade, and most significantly, hunted. Royal proponents of the hunt, as a facet of political and military legitimacy, were contested by a small but vocal group of officials. These vocal elites attempted to circumscribe royal authority by co-opting hunting through Confucian laws and rites, either by regulating the practice to a state ritual at best, or, at worst, considering it a barbaric exercise not befitting of the royal family. While kings defied the narrow Confucian views on governance that elevated book learning over martial skills, these tensions revealed how the meaning of political power and authority were shaped. Attention to animals and hunting depicts how a multiplicity of cultural references—Sinic, Korean, Northeast Asian, and steppeland—existed in tension with each other and served as a battleground for defining politics, society, and ritual. Kallander argues that rather than mere resources, animals were a site over which power struggles were waged.