한국에서 근대적 역사 개념의 탄생

Abstract

This study purports to examine how the modern concept of history in the Europe was accepted and which role it has played in Korean society. ‘Yoksa歷史’ is a native word which was adopted by Japanese as a translation of ‘History' in the late 19th century. It features a double implications which are both ’record of past events' and ‘past events themselves'. This is the modern concept of history. In Korea, the traditional concept of history was also used to mean ‘record of past events’ in order to learn lessons from the good and evil of past events. This meaning of history suffered gradual change since the 1880s. Above all, the concept of history was changed to mean ‘fatherland history’ and the loanword ‘yoksa’ was introduced. A traditional word ‘saki史記’ was used to mean the English word ‘History’ by 1900, since then it handed over to the word ‘yoksa’. After 1906, ‘yoksa’, meaning ‘the past events themselves’, was finally accepted as an ordinary language in Korea just like in modern Europe. In addition, it was used to mean an abstract and universal substantial being, implying the meaning of ‘the whole of past and present’. After all, its meaning was extended to a ‘national history’, combined with the tradition of complying ‘history of a dynasty’ by 1908. In this respect, the year 1906 marks the birth of modern concept of history in Korea. ‘Yoksa’, as a modern concept, incorporates all the kingdoms and dynasties since Old Choson into a unified stream and compelled historians to write histories until contemporary events. It was utilized to build a nation by stimulating various elements of a nation state such as patriotism, fatherland spirits, notion of the same ethnic, and progressive spirit. And it was not until 1908 that the theory of national spirit, which was accepted through Liang qi-chao, prevailed over as a main stream of historiography. The theory of national spirit mobilized the Korean people to recover the sovereignty of the nation, emphasizing the history of such Northern kingdoms as Tankun Choson, Puyeo, Kokuryeo, Korea which defeated the foreign powers. Nevertheless, it expanded nationalistic way of thinking, the freedom of the Korean state or nation instead of an individual's freedom, a concept of unconditional equality instead of everybody's independence as an inevitable heritage of the Korean people.