A marginalized group’s land ownership and cultural costs of legitimation

Abstract

How does a culturally marginalized group legitimize their land ownership, and how does successful legitimation inadvertently undermine their culture? While existing studies have explored how marginalized groups strategically utilize dominant mainstream culture, they often overlook multiple layers within it and leveraging these layers can lead to unintended effects on marginalized groups’ culture. Considering marginalized groups’ culture as encompassing values, beliefs, and behaviors, I focus on a peasant kin group in rural Korea and examine how they legitimize the communal values of their culture by legalizing their centuries-long collective ownership of the land through utilizing different layers of the dominant culture, such as agnatic primogeniture and modernization. Yet, at the same time, their successful efforts to legitimate the collective land ownership marginalize their culture of community stability. Through content analysis of multi-year observations and interviews, my findings provide nuanced understanding of marginalized groups’ agency, by highlighting the layered nature of dominant culture as a potential source of undermining their culture.