노동의 기억과 공립석탄박물관의 공적 재현에 관한 연구

Abstract

This study personally visited the representative ‘public coal museum’ in Korea and analyzed the public representation of labor memory. The concepts of ‘romanticization’ and ‘objectification’ were used as a method of sociological analysis of images, and each museum’s facilities and experience programs were analyzed from the point of view of case analysis. The ‘public coal museum’ is a meaningful space where we can judge how Korean society publicly interprets and reproduces the memories of the past industrialization era. Museums have publicity in charge of collection, exhibition, and education of a specific theme through all physical elements, exhibitions, and reproductions. Moreover, when it comes to ‘public’, its purpose is to realize public values through the input of public funds. According to this social promise, visitors have a high level of expectations and trust in public museum exhibitions and representations. As a result of the study, the ‘coal’ industry in the three museums and related memories and representations were mainly used as materials for ‘regional tourism’. Various and complex memories of the industrialization era were represented as ‘romanticized poverty’ and ‘objectified labor’, and as a result, they were reduced to a resource for ‘vitalization of local tourism’. This study critically analyzed this and sought the direction of improvement. The three public coal museums have important experience assets, such as basic physical space, minimum required manpower, various experiences over the past 20 years since their establishment, and some trial and error. However, it is difficult to judge that it has secured enough data and faithfully reproduced the culture in relation to the memory of life in the region, especially the memory of labor. Above all, in the process of concentrating exhibitions and representations for tourism activation, there are cases in which the memory of the history and labor of the region is diluted, and the cultural reproductions tend to romanticize and objectify the daily life and labor of the region. In the future, if the coal industry in the coal mining area and its labor and daily memories are interpreted from a more complex and multi-layered perspective, the three public coal museums will function as meaningful spaces that fully contain the history and labor memories of the region.