풍속·문화론적 (문학) 연구와 개념사의 접속, 일상개념 연구를 위한 試論

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss the research methodology of German conceptual history, and attempt to find the way to combine conceptual studies and the Korean cultural studies. German conceptual history is a research field that explores a concept’s process of modernization by considering the political and social environment around the modernization. This field regards a concept not only as reflecting a society but also as an active component in a social movement. There are two distinctive case studies in this field: one is the work of Reinhart Koselleck and the other is the study of Rolf Reichardt. Koselleck addressed how important contemporary political and historical concepts underwent modernization in the past, while Reichardt, on the other hand, focused on the limited period around the French revolution archeologically, and attempted to determine what kind of concepts were used in that period and how those concepts had changed due to the revolutionary movement. The latter's archeological study shared similar method with some Korean case studies in the field of cultural studies, which examined how specific terms, such as ‘love’, ‘children’, and ‘taste’, had changed, and contributed to the new cultural environment. They were similar to such methodology as the archeological approach, the inductive extraction of concepts, and the exploration of the active effect of language upon social movements. Korean case studies have been considered as a prominent research field, but have also been criticized because of the difficulties in creating a systemic meaning in that they examined specific segments of culture, mixed up with so many things, such as institutions, discourse, ideology, material construction, socio-political composition, and so forth. In this vein, I would propose the effectiveness of conceptual history to organize the complex procedure around the segmented cultural fields and suggest opening the field of cultural concept studies. In addition, I suggest developing a more articulated methodology to establish the field of cultural conceptual history research in Korea, as follows: statistical analysis to verify the objectivity of data, examination of language movement among East Asians, as well as the relationship between Asia and the West, investigation of the interrelationship among contingent concepts and conceptual systems, the systemic ombination of synchronic and diachronic analysis, inquiry into the rhetorical context where the language is expressed, and the systemic organization of those separate processes.