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Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea* : Taking an Issue of Sattelzeit

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Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea* : Taking an Issue of Sattelzeit Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea* : Taking an Issue of Sattelzeit Seung-cheol SONG** This article is aimed to call for reconsideration of the idea of Sattelzeit used in the Hallym Academy of Sciences’ conceptual history project. As the project started under the heavy influence of earlier German and French projects, it teems with an assortment of ideas borrowed from the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and the Handbuch politische-sozialer Grund- begriffe in Frankreich, 1680-1820, and Sattelzeit is one of the key concept, borrowed from the German scholarship and reset in the Korean historical circumstances. This Sattelzeit, set ‘tentatively’ between the mid-19th and mid-20th century at the start of the project, has worked as a guideline for contributors to the Hallym Academy’s basic concept monograph series, and most contributors kept to the guideline. However, judging from the more than ten monographs published, adherence to the guidelines turned out to vary considerably from person to person, and some contributors suggested that as much attention should be paid to the post-liberation period as a source of conceptual transactions. To resolve the issue of an appropriate Korean framework, this article first sets up three conditions or conjunctures that are presumed to make approaches of conceptual history discourse more rewarding than others. Then, it endeavors to support its hypothesis by * This work was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government(NRF-2007-361-AM0001). ** Hallym University 168 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA providing the history of semantic transactions of the concept ‘realism’ from the late 1920s to the present. conceptual history, division system, national literature, naturalism, realism, Sattelzeit. Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 169 1 Around six years ago, the Hallym Academy of Sciences (HAS) set out on a ten-year research program titled ‘Project for the Intercommunication 1 of East Asian Basic Concepts.’ With a considerable portion of its grant funded by the Korea Research Foundation, the program may be succinctly defined as aspiring to a Northeast Asian equivalent to Rheinhardt Koselleck’s Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe or Lucian Hölsher’s European 2 Lexicon Project ─ the latter being yet to be formally proposed. As can be seen from its title, the Project, by emphasizing ‘inter- communication,’ has sought to identify and chart the semantic changes of the ‘basic concepts’ that have played, and will continue to play, key roles in the formation of three East Asian countries: Korea, Japan and China. Earlier, in 2005, the Academy had begun an originary project for publication of The Historico-Philosophical Encyclopedia of the Basic Concepts of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Korea. Academics involved in this earlier project thought that the irregular and anachronistic use of basic concepts with no precise understanding of their meanings was responsible for much confusion in Korean humanities and social 1 This Project is hereafter abbreviated to ‘the Project.’ 2 Lucian Hölsher looks forward to the project: “So coming back to the idea of an European Political Lexicon I guess that we all agree, that it is the main purpose of such a project, to represent and develop the variety and richness of many national cultures within Europe – not in order to perpetuate the former animosity of political and cultural warfare within Europe, but in order to form our common European future on the basis of very different national experiences. We have to know from one another, f.i. concerning political and cultural centralisation what makes French people hopeful, but Germans anxious; we have to know, why English people like to rely on individual autonomy and local self government, whereas many Eastern societies lived better with patriarchal systems, why ….” Hölsher (2003), p.4. 170 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA sciences. This initial research program now looks modest in its aim, and even naive in its belief that the meanings of a concept could be generally agreed through meticulous research. Two years later, however, it was developed into a wider project about conceptual history in Korea, grounded on the premise that such confusions might be resolved by examining the way that concepts have been imported, translated and negotiated by Korean society at specific historical conjunctures since the beginning of modernity. In fact, it is hardly surprising that the earlier project was expanded both in its coverage of the subject matter and its methodology. First, the project was enlarged to cover the whole Northeast-Asian region; however, this widening of perspective was already implicit in the initial program, given that almost all of the basic concepts are of Western origin, but have reached Korea via Japan and China. Along with the widening of coverage came the creation of a new enterprise: going far beyond its original modest aim to promote academic accuracy by minimizing conceptual misuses, the project now sought to understand the roles those key concepts have played in the formation of East Asian modernity. The following is abstracted from the Project proposal, slightly revised to assist readers not familiar with the Korean academic atmosphere. The Intercommunication of Basic East Asian Concepts takes as its study basic concepts that have played crucial roles in the fields of disciplines, society and everyday life since the modern period of the three East-Asian countries, and it aims: (1) to analyse the distinct ways in which those concepts have been accepted, translated, transformed, and naturalized, in terms of diverse units of analysis, such as nation, region, class, sex, race, etc. (2) to understand other groups of people, and extend communicative competence through the analysis of differences, thereby seeking the genuine Conjunctures in the Conceptual History of Korea 171 3 mutual development of the East Asian region. (3) to bring into focus the ardent struggles of East Asians to cope with modernity during the period of Western imperialistic expansion. (4) additionally, to accomplish the dual mission of ‘coping with and getting over modernity’ as an intellectual practice of East Asians, allowing them to move away from intolerant kinds of nationalism and toward postmodernity, in 4 the context of ongoing globalization. Looking back over the past six years with the benefit of hindsight, there is no question that the Project has been a success; it has produced dozens of monographs on the basic concepts and another dozen translations, including entries from Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, as well as several readers’ compendia commentaries or expositions; not to mention the extramural benefits ─ an enhanced public awareness of conceptual history. Despite these achievements and the continuing interest shown by East Asian as well as Korean scholars, however, the Project has yet to truly obtain its academic citizenship and is still struggling to stand securely on its own feet. Of course, six years is too short a time to make much of a mark upon the established academic world, and other explanations can be suggested for the lack of recognition so far ─ notably that this initiative was undertaken by a local institution in a heavily centralized academic atmosphere. But these circumstantial factors are less fundamental than the uncertainties and unresolved issues to be found within the Project itself and its publications, the foremost among them arising from its essential incompleteness, due to the lack of a distinct methodology suitable for the types and objects of its research. If a new initiative calls for 3 Therefore, it can be said that the Project is an intellectual endeavor to promote solidarity within East Asia through the recognition of differences, as may be the case with European Lexicon Project. 4 Hallym Academy of Sciences (2007), p.6. 172 CONCEPTS AND CONTEXTS IN EAST ASIA a new methodology, then an appropriate analytical model should be produced from within the Project. But the Korean project was basically an emulation of a European one, and it teems with an untidy assortment of ideas borrowed from the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe and the Handbuch politische-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, 1680-1820. One of the key concepts flowing from the German scholarship is the idea of Sattelzeit, which Koselleck defined as a period of transition between a premodern and a modern society. In the German case this period ran from 1750 to 1850 or 1870, during which time a number of key concepts crucial to the political and social formation of the German-speaking world underwent major linguistic transformations involving temporalization, democratization, 5 ideologization, and politicization. Being an initiative of different time and space, the Project should have created a methodology of its own or reappropriated the borrowed one to make it suitable for the Northeast Asian social and cultural circumstances. As so much was predicated on the prior scholarship of German conceptual history, however, the project adopted Koselleck’s idea of Sattelzeit and reset the timeframe to be 1850 to 1950, which in the Northeast Asian case was the key transitional period during which the relevant concepts, mostly imported together with some residual ones, were presumed to have undergone semantic transactions in the form of selective appropriation and negotiation. In a locus like the Korean Peninsula characterized by yangjeol chejae (兩截體制) the period crucial to the
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