근대이행기 혼례의 변화－독일 선교사들의 보고에 나타난 침묵과 언어－

Abstract

As part of a religious ceremony, rituals denote a collective attitude towards sanctity. However, rituals also fall into other categories. Indeed, religion does not only talks about sanctity but also about everyday life. Thus, rituals imply intuition of history, that is, the dynamics between everyday life and societies. From late 19th century to early 20th century, the korean traditional rituals had been altered by external pressure, namely modernization, western religion and colonialization. But those rituals did not totally change and nor did they break away from tradition. Standing both as an embrace of and an influence on power, rituals not only had a firm grip on continuous competition but also were in full command of the “changing” strategies. The purpose of this study is to examine how traditional rituals competed with the rapid modernization of the society for preservation, as reported in the German missionaries’ records. In other words, this study will investigate how and to what extent Koreans accepted those changes through marriages. A marriage ceremony is a rite of passage that unites two households and ratifies a new member’s arrival in another family. Korean traditional wedding ceremonies in particular, transcending the spouses’ individualities, involved the whole village in the festivities. These traditional wedding ceremonies did not reject the Christian wedding rituals but, on the contrary, assimilated them rather quickly. Nonetheless, this did not happen without some resistance. That is, ‘silence’ and ‘speech’, in their mutuality, showed their dissonance to the bitter end. On the one hand, the principle of silence was established as a Confucian virtue as well as a popular creed to embody the ideology of traditional marriage in the collision between tradition and modernity. On the other hand, ‘speech’ as the negation of silence represented the ideology of obedience to the Church authority. Ultimately, the fact that the principle of silence could not be wiped out at one stroke was not an issue and in time traditional rituals were delayed within the silence-speech antagonism. Elements of Europeanism that mimicked the Europeans’ colonial modernity and followed their rituals system were integrated into the Korean rituals as a form of etiquette that was not courtesy. Although the principle of silence persevered in ideological resistance within wedding ceremonies, in the end it faded into the negation of silence that set off like a firecracker. Marriage ceremonies were then transformed into a display of clamorous celebrations.