Agungi (Fireplace), Firewood, Deities, and Householding
Agungi (Fireplace), Firewood, Deities, and Householding
by Sumin Myung
The photograph below (Figure 1) captures an ordinary, tranquil moment: a child trying to light a fire in a traditional Korean kitchen. However, the circumstances in the picture may not be so ordinary, as it was taken by a United Nations (UN) officer during the Korean War (1950–53). This image, captioned “A child lighting the fire under a cooking pot in the kitchen of an orphanage,” offers a glimpse into everyday life during this tumultuous and violent period. While the photographer and exact date of the image remain unknown, the photograph was taken as part of a group tour to a newly-built orphanage in Jeonju, South Korea. This group of experts included a few foreign officers from international organizations, such as the UN Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA) and the UN Civil Assistance Corps Korea (UNCACK), as well as fifteen officers from the South Korean government. The little child in the picture was assigned one of the most important daily tasks at the orphanage: preparing meals for the other children and adult staff.
And let us consider another photograph (Figure 2) taken by a US military officer in 1952. The picture captures another ordinary moment during the Korean War. Here, two Korean women are huddled in a kitchen trying to light a fire much like the child in Figure 1. Behind the women is a pile of dry twigs and leaves, likely scavenged from the nearby forests. The image is also accompanied by a caption: “Korean women build fire in stove of their new home in the village of Pyong Il Chon, Korea. The village, completely destroyed by the war, is being rebuilt with the aid of UNCACK.” Other images of Pyong Il Chon in the NARA (National Archives and Records Administration) collection mostly record outdoor, public activities, such as preparing kimchi (a Korean culinary staple) or operating manual rice mills, indicative of the “successful” reconstruction of South Korean villages during the Korean War. Images of kitchens or fireplaces, such as Figures 1 and 2, are quite rare in the collection.
It is unlikely that the UN and US officers who visited these sites during the Korean War had a deep understanding of Korean domestic life or culinary culture. However, I believe that they were able to immediately grasp the significance of fireplaces, kitchens, and gendered labor in the reconstruction of Korean households. As classicists and anthropologists have shown, fireplaces have been at the center of domestic life around the world for millennia, and Korean fireplaces are not exceptional in this regard. Nevertheless, of note is that the photographers all placed fireplaces at the center of the frame as women or children attempted to light a fire to feed and heat up the household.
The traditional fireplace, called agungi in Korean, was common across the Korean peninsula. Agungi was mainly used to cook daily hot meals in large pots (sot) throughout the year. The heated air from agungi would also circulate under kudŭl, a traditional floor heating system made largely of locally available materials such as stone and clay, which provided household residents with life-sustaining warmth especially on freezing winter days (Figure 3). Perhaps the foreign officials in the 1950s noticed that kitchens, especially fireplaces, were the center of Korean households where culinary and thermal intimacies were fueled and transmuted. Figures 1, 2, and 3 all foreground the mundane yet critical role of agungi in sustaining people’s day-to-day lives even in the midst of political upheaval and massive violence during the Korean War.
In the words of anthropologist Brad Weiss, “the use of fire and cooking in a kitchen is of greater consequence for establishing attachments to a household than is merely residing in the actual house.” Indeed, agungi has a distinct cultural, religious, and ontological status in the traditional Korean household. Such attachments are not limited to human residents. Most notably, Jowang, one of the most prominent household deities in Korean indigenous religion, was known to oversee agungi and fire in traditional Korean kitchens. This divine spirit of domestic fire was deeply associated with everyday rituals for household fortune, disaster prevention, and the well-being of offspring, and it was the subject of various gendered ceremonies throughout the Korean peninsula. On such occasions, Jowang was offered various substances, including fresh water, rice, rice cakes, or fruits, depending on availability and local culinary cultures (Figure 4). In short, agungi was not only a material place for cooking and heating for the household, but also a symbolic and religious locus that provided a sense of coherence and mutual enrichment for its inhabitants, including humans and household deities.
Agungi also blurs the distinction between the interior and the exterior of the household, serving as an in-between space where the material and the symbolic/semiotic are recast through the work of fire. Unlike other more private spaces in traditional Korean houses such as the inner bedroom (anbang), the kitchen is a semi-open, liminal space. Materials found outdoors, such as firewood, leaves, water, and food materials, constantly enter the kitchen and then undergo thermal metamorphosis through everyday labor that exploits fire in agungi for various domestic purposes. As media scholar John Peters Durham suggests, “Fire makes matter malleable, turning ores into tools, cold climates into warm ones, darkness into day. … Like all media, human fire is an ensemble of natural elements and cultural techniques.” Such malleability of matter, mediated and afforded by agungi fire, goes beyond inducing physicochemical change. Agungi fire also energizes practical, symbolic, and religious transformations that not only define but also animate the collective dwelling and well-being of the traditional Korean household. Jowang, the household deity who oversees the kitchen and agungi, is known to enable and sometimes thwart (when things go sour) this socio-ecological alchemy.
The traditional kitchen later became a conduit for new perspectives and interventions from the South Korean developmental state. Whereas in the 1950s UN and US officers had entered kitchens to oversee the wartime rehabilitation of domestic life, in the 1970s technocrats and scientists entered kitchens more aggressively to make Korean households conform to the national schemes and narratives of development. As seen in Figure 5, taken in 1972, the traditional kitchen and agungi shifted from being the symbolic sites of household reconstruction to the target of state-led household improvement projects.
In the summer of 2023, I interviewed Dr. Sangho Ju (pseudonym), a respected forest scientist who retired in the early 2010s. He summarized the projects of the National Forestry Experiment Station (NFES) back in the 1970s: “Another NFES project was to improve agungi. The old agungi was quite large. It required a lot of firewood, burned out quickly, and was difficult to control. But just replacing agungi can save 30 percent of the fuel usage. The NFES made a total of 9.9 million agungi units. Since there were about 2.5 million rural households at the time, each household received about four units. So, almost every household had their hearths replaced. This happened from 1973 to 1978.” As Dr. Ju described, scientists and engineers at the NFES worked to reduce domestic firewood consumption by increasing the thermal efficiency of traditional agungi through structural optimization (Figure 6).
The new type of agungi was introduced when a nationwide reforestation project led by the authoritarian government was underway in the 1970s. The national reforestation project is often hailed as a historic success in numerous official documents. The reforestation project involved planting billions of trees in forests devastated by war and imperialism. Under the banner of forest regeneration, the state-led initiatives also drastically restricted communal access to village forests for firewood. Rural residents were only allowed to collect firewood and leaves from government-designated and locally managed “fuel forests” (yŏllyorim). These interventions implemented various forms of social control and environmental rule at the household level, by taking control over the everyday use of agungi and firewood. In doing so, the Korean government rendered domestic energy use as a calculable entity, which legitimized both domestic spaces and village forests as sites for intervention by scientists and technical advisors.
Beginning in the late 1970s, however, even the improved agungi started to give way to stoves that increasingly relied on briquettes, oil, and petroleum gas. This shift marked a critical transition in the household energy regime from “green carbon” to “black carbon.” It also intensified carbon consumption in Korean kitchens. Households that had previously relied on nearby village forests for firewood were integrated into a state-led, carbon-intensive industry that contributed to the post-1945 upward trend in atmospheric carbon dioxide on a planetary scale. In turn, the long-standing connections between village forests and domestic spaces through agungi fires began to disintegrate. Everyday rituals dedicated to Jowang also began to decline rapidly.
Moreover, as anthropologists Heonik Kwon and Jun Hwan Park explore in great detail, the 1960s and 1970s were a particularly difficult time for the practitioners of Korean indigenous religion, which included household deities and village shamans, due to state intervention and the aggressive advancement of Korean evangelical Christianity that “relegated indigenous religious culture to superstition and thereby cast it out of the legitimate public realm of religious plurality” in the pursuit of rapid modernization. This marginalization of indigenous religion paralleled the state’s agenda to modernize household infrastructure. As families shifted from gathering firewood to utilizing imported fossil fuels, they became disconnected from both the material and spiritual ecologies that had traditionally sustained agungi. The dual transformation of energy sources and religious systems fundamentally restructured Korean domestic life by altering long-established connections between households, local environments, and indigenous cosmologies.
The story I have told should not be read simply as another variation on the much-rehearsed narrative of modernization and dis/re-enchantment in postcolonial and post-total war South Korea. I suggest instead that the religious, material, and social transformations experienced by Korean households during the second half of the twentieth century constitute an essential part of modernization and contemporary life. Moreover, such unfolding of modernity through the household has not yet reached its denouement. Although agungi, firewood, and deities have largely disappeared from everyday life, domestic fireplaces remain a primary target of state intervention in the midst of anthropogenic climate change. Much like the heated debates over the energy sources of kitchen stoves in New York City or the burgeoning international projects to provide solar-powered stoves in developing countries, the Korean government seeks to reduce carbon emissions from domestic activities such as cooking and heating by replacing carbon-intensive energy sources with renewable ones—including forest biomass. In this rapidly changing world, the story of agungi reminds us that domestic fireplaces are never merely mundane objects or loci, but rather dynamic sites where ecological relations, religious systems, and state power continue to converge and seek to transform.
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