지역문화 연구와 인문공동체 모델 －강원도 천주교－전쟁 담론을 중심으로－

Abstract

This paper, as a method of research on regional culture, avoids the dichotomous concept of the center-periphery and regional identities and proposes the Humanities Community Model as an alternative. Regional culture studies have shown the tendency of securing local identities from the perspective of dichotomy that divides the center and the surroundings, along with the center’s viewpoint of peripheral areas. Yet, the dichotomous perspective on the center and the periphery risks of cultural universalism, while the concept of local identity is likely to be trapped by cultural relativism related to centralism. Cultural universalism argues that universal culture with common values is constantly represented as its variations in other individual cultures. However, this coincides with an invasive mainstream logic based on the idea of irreversible duality of the center and surroundings. Meanwhile, cultural relativism or culturalism claims that various individual cultures with identity have their own uniqueness or particularities. This position that individual cultures have invulnerable characteristics is not only a simple counter logic against the universal culture implicitly assumed also a certain variant of hegemonism connected to the dichotomy of the center and the periphery. With this binarity and its relevant dilemma, local culture is sometimes overwhelmed by local hegemonism against that of the center, thereby imitating mainstream logic, or is just immersed in sentimental emphasis on obsecure local peculiarities or shallow merchandising of cultural elements. This paper avoids the idea that individual cultures have a fixed identity and suggests regarding cultures as the concept of ‘resources’. Cultural resources are neither possessions nor fixed essences such as identity, but the more they are discovered and unearthed, the more possible it is to use them. The Humanities Community Model proposed in this paper is the intercultural network that does not consider individual cultural resources as mutual exclusion or competition but creates and discovers cultural resources in a way to acknowledge each difference and therefore enrich one another. This intercultural network is ceaselessly directed to that of other cultural resources when it encounters a new cultural element or resource, as a result, expanding the local culture and strengthening its vitality. What local life is hardly any knowledge divided into abstract and exclusive concepts, so, cultural elements must be subsumed into an interactive network for cultural resources in order to make up the substance of local culture. Through this Humanities Community, a local culture evolves as a subject of dynamic life.