한국 근대사 연구의 ‘문화사적 전환’ - 역사 대중화, 식민지 근대성, 경험세계의 역사화 -

Abstract

In the studies of western history a new cultural history has emerged, proposing a new look at history from a cultural "perspective" with some distance from conventional cultural history that studied "cultural areas," and highlighted anew subjective aspects that had been neglected, being focused on explaining a social structure including the network of meaning of the world of life, and the media and formats to inherit and reproduce it. It was in the 1990s that Korea started to introduce a cultural "perspective" in historical science in the line of the realistic worries facing the studies of Korean history such as the pursuit of "history from the bottom," demand for the popularization of history, and search for post-national and post-modern historical science. A "cultural turn" in the early modern history of Korea can be reviewed in three aspects: first, there was the expansion of research areas in the process of pursuing the popularization of history. It is in this stage that the study of history began to accept the microscopic worlds of experience of individuals or groups; secondly, there was an attempt to deconstruct the historical discourse of early modern nationalism, raising discourse about colonial modernity. It was a pursuit of post-colonial and post-national historical science in the dimension of macroscopic historical study; finally, there was a pursuit of historicization and historical narration about the world of experience such as issues of individual subjects' experiences and identities. Even today controversy over macroscopic historical discourse stands at the center of a cultural historical turn. Historical science is a science to seek after truth in facts from the past and build a story based on it. Historical discourse determines a framework for such works and accordingly claims significance. However, it will not be able to exercise its power without concrete and practical research on the past beyond a discussion about how to look at the past. Historical narrations are based on actual events from the past, which claim their objective existence before them or outside them. Of course, one cannot help admitting to the limitations with objective perceptions of facts from the past, and historical science delivers texts and realistic fiction of the past. However, there should be a clear distinction between "There is no knowing of facts as they were ultimately" and "There is no such thing as historical facts." Thus a cultural historical turn in the studies of the early modern history of Korea should move in a direction of facing the past as the world of experience beyond macroscopic historical discourse and interpretations of memories and symbols.