| This study looks into the transformation of farmers' living spaces during the period of rapid industrialization in 1970s South Korea. Under the name of the New Village Movement, the Park Chung Hee government conducted diverse reconstruction and renovation projects to alter the residential environment of rural areas. While delving deeply into this specific event and period in Korean history, the main focus of this study is not fixed on the New Village Movement itself, nor on a particular person or agrarian policy. The purpose of this study is to capture the dynamics and relationships between capital and living spaces in the detailed historical context of the New Village Movement. This project of examination is further guided by the overarching argument that the reconfiguration process of farmers' daily living spaces played a central role in renewing and reconfiguring unequal exchange relationships between the countryside and the city, thereby assisting the growth of manufacturing capital.;Chapter 1 focuses on South Korean Land Reform in 1950 and its concomitant agro-economic conditions in the 1950s and 1960s, which explained farmers' post-war poverty and industrial demand for rural reformation. The subsequent chapters of this study trace the rural New Village Movement of the 1970s and its focus on roof replacement (Chapter 2), house construction (Chapter 3), interior designing (Chapter 4), and village relocation (Chapter 5). Each chapter also pays close attention to the process by which the new rural spaces under transformation were filled with particular commodities such as slate, cement, televisions, and rice. Small-landed farmers, growing industrial capital, and the developmentalist state reflected their different desires and expectations respectively through the new rural spaces and commodities. Tracking all those dynamics, this study emphasizes the centrality of exchange relationship between agriculture and manufacturing or between the countryside and the city in understanding the historicity of the New Village Movement. |
