[KS] Origin of term "자연부락"?

Frank Hoffmann hoffmann at koreanstudies.com
Thu Jun 30 00:22:44 EDT 2016


Part II:

Looked a little further into this .... Shin Gi-Wook thematized that in 
his article on "Agrarianism: A Critique of Colonial Modernity in Korea" 
(1999):
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/179429
He is giving a single reference to that term as used by KOREAN 
romantic, agrarian nationalists in 1931 (within that "agrarianism" 
movement (p. 799). I still doubt it was anything like a popular term 
though.

What I am missing from this otherwise very informative article -- from 
the point of view of intellectual history -- is some sort of tracking 
of where that whole movement came from, what roots it has. Eitarō 
Suzuki 鈴木榮太郎, often introduced as the "pioneer of Japanese rural 
and urban sociology," used a similar 
term in 1940: _shizen mura_ 自然村, which closely resembles 자연 마을, 
but both mean basically the same. 
  https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jsr/63/3/63_424/_article

In any case, as the old fascist proverb says, Tutte le strade portano a 
Berlino, all roads lead to Berlin -- it looks to me as if the whole 
concept for the definition of "natural village" and "village community" 
originates in German NS concepts of "Dorfgemeinschaft" (village 
community). At the very latest by the late 1930s this and related 
concepts were widely read and adapted in Japan by sociologists and 
anthropologists. If you take a stroll through older issues of UNESCO's 
_Korea Journal_ and look at articles by e.g. Lee Man-gap (who published 
widely in English ... I am not familiar with other Korean sociologists 
from the 1960s and 70s, as this is not my turf), you will see that many 
texts come close to one-to-one translations of those concepts -- 
one-to-one, but having travelled there in two steps, first from Germany 
to Japan, then to Korea. These ideas and concepts, of course, were not 
exactly invented by the Nazis ... and 
you sure also find them in earlier decades in Britain, or a little 
later in national China and elsewhere. Yet, with the growth of fascism 
in the 1920s and the 1930s they got a huge boost. 

Now, the understanding and the definition of terms evolves over time. 
And that is how such a term can be seen as representing "nationalist 
left" as well as "fascist-nationalist" ideas also. See e.g. the take on 
it within Minjung historiography (see below article about that). 

David Nemeth, but you've probably already seen that, thematizes the 
term in his chapter in the wonderful volume _Sitings_ (Hawaii UP 2008).


Best,
Frank



--------------------------------------
Frank Hoffmann
http://koreanstudies.com


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