구한말 서양인의 눈에 비친 조선인의 몸

Abstract

How does one experience the other in his or her first encounter with the other? What does happen especially when he or she encounters the other whose body radically differs from his or her own? Is it possible for the subject to see the other with innocent eyes not contaminated by racial and cultural ideologies? This paper is an attempt to answer such a question by analyzing travel writings on Korea by European travelers at the end of the 19th century. Among so such travelogues, Ernst Jakob Oppert's A Forbidden Land and Henry Savage-Landor's Corea or Cho-Sen: The Land of the Morning Calm will be discussed in detail, since the phenomenon of the encounter of the other is most predominantly foregrounded there. The author of this paper found that European travellers experienced Koreans indirectly, that is, through the mediation of racial and cultural schema. Racial schema enabled them to penetrate into the mystery of the Korean body, which would have remained indecipherable otherwise: Korean body should be described, characterized, and then categorized according to the then leading racial theory: theory produces the Korean body. For Oppert, Koreans are of two races, Mongolians and Caucasians with the latter of which he felt solidarity. Of course, such a notion of two races is produced by the racial schema which dichotomized the infinitely diverse Korean bodies, while ignoring bodily characteristics which do not confirm to the racial categories available. However, such a violent theoretical gaze at the Koreans happened to reveal the materiality of the Korean bodies invisible to the innocent eyes. The material condition of Korean nobility make them look like Caucasians whereas the Koreans laborers exposed to the harsh weather and the scorching and pitiless sun looked like black. Racial gaze inadvertently hit upon the fact that body is constituted according the class lines.