생애사적 맥락을 통해 본 전통지식으로서의 민간요법 －단절과 변화, 지속의 메커니즘－

Abstract

The oral records of the Cheongun villagers on the ordeal of a shrine might be a typical example of local history detached from a capital centered history, people’s history emerged from the bottom and an oral history of being transmitted solely by people’s memories without record. Especially, since the moving and damage of the shrines of worshipping a god and a village god were the incident which an absentee landlord and the Japanese Empire intervened in, it gave a profound sense of hurt to the villagers. When the same incident occurred repeatedly for the shrine of worshipping a goddess afterwards, the villagers resisted against it desperately even with excrements. However, they couldn’t beat a rich and influential family. Though this incident was not recorded, it cleary remained in the villagers’ memory and has been represented orally for generations in the village. Accordingly, these oral records might be a history of the collective memories relevant to the villagers’ resistance against the ordeal of the shrine of worshipping the village god. The family of Cheongsong Sim has been a meritorious family since the Joseon Dynasty, was at the peak of its wealth especially in the era of the Korean Empire and in the beginning of the Japanese Empire and was a so-called manseokggun(a person who owns fields yielding ten thousand seok of rice). Most of the villagers were the tenant farmers of the family. Therefore, the political conflicts between the government and people, the social conflicts between the gentry and the peasant, the economic conflicts between the rich and the poor were embedded in this incident in which a landlord and tenants confronted. At least until the period of the Japanese Empire, this village had been in the inferior structure of not beating the Sim family politically, socially, and economically. The results of the two incidents that the shrine of worshipping a god was transferred and the shrine of worshipping a goddess was covered with the graves of the Sim family prove it clearly. Such an inferior structure is what even narrators unanimously focus on. The attentions of the narrators’ memories and their voices especially lie on the parts of the villagers’ resistance with excrements and their punishments against the family through the deed of building a castle with prickles. This proves that an oral history is searching for meanings. Another aspect verified from the process of representing people’s memories is the fact that people focus their attention on the structure of the incidents rather than the details. The villagers state stories as if the two stories of having a time gab of seventy years occurred in the contemporary time. The same structure of the two incidents, which a landlord and tenant farmers confronted each other through the medium of the deed of changing a shrine into a grave, has the possibilities of having furthered the structure of people’s memories. Here, their oral statements of the incidents obtain an archetype of a reversible narrative not a definitive chronicle. On the one hand, in the case of the incident for the shrine of worshipping a god in the middle of the 19th century, people removed the energy of the deprived old place of the shrine and established “myth-making” of changing the new place into rather “a holy place”, by utilizing the symbol of a “bird” and the narrative tradition. These ways of representing people’s memories give the status of confrontational memories and confrontational narratives to oral narratives since narrators never finalize as the tragic narratives for the defeated incidents in the real life. In addition, the metaphor like “skirt gentleman”(chime or chima yangban) and the proverb like “sneeze in the Sim’s house” are worthy of paying attention to as the social representation of people’s memories conducted in their everyday life.