근대 초기 선교사 기록에 담긴 후각 감각을 통해 본 문화번역의 가능성

Abstract

This article focuses on records of olfactory experiences in personal writings and official documents written by foreign missionaries who lived in Joseon from the late nineteenth century to the colonial period in Korea. Missionaries engaged in not only proselytization but also religious, educational, and documentary activities. In the course of such work, they communicated and coexisted with Joseon people of various classes, genders, and ages in their everyday environments. The perception of strong olfactory stimulation was present from the first contact with a foreign culture. Moreover, the perception of smells became a standard for judging the object and a means of self-examination for the subjects to confirm whether they could fully accept, understand, and coexist with the other. Missionaries also had to find the right words within the social context as they confessed to and analyzed smells and fragrances. Thus their writing process can be seen as an act of cultural translation taking place in a cultural contact zone. This research topic and methodology reveals three points. First, it is possible to read the inner workings of history’s actors by diversifying the dichotomies of pre-modernity/modernity, colony/empire, and East/West, which followed mostly from political perspectives or visual evidence. Missionaries had complex/multifaceted identities that altered between their religious calling, Eurocentric enlightenment, and self-reflection based on cultural relativism. Second, Joseon people who were perceived of as objects of observation sensed and communicated their own olfactory reactions to the missionaries. This process shows changes in the cultural contact zone were not one-way but the product of mutual interactions. Compared to the visual, olfactory experiences entail the coexistence of reason and emotion, consciousness and subconsciousness, and subject and object. Thus they disrupt the centrality and one-directionality of the observer. Third, ‘smells’ and ‘fragrances’ have existed as reality and metaphors on religious, ethical, and scientific dimensions, and when these dimensions are combined, they exert the power of sociocultural control. Reading such sensory records will hopefully ensure another perspective through which to understand the mechanism of how subjects of different cultures make contact and coexist.