민속문화재 지정 현황을 바탕으로 한 문제 제기

Abstract

This study is aimed to find out problems related to the current status of designating folklore cultural heritages, one of the areas of cultural heritages, and suggest ways to operate folklore cultural heritages. Folklore cultural heritages have eight categories for designation, and currently, there are 305 nationally designated and 470 municipally and provincially designated folklore cultural heritages. According to the results of examining nationally designated folklore cultural heritages, 275 cases (90.1%) are related to food, clothing, and shelter, so folklore cultural heritages are mostly about the necessities of life. Next, 19 items are about religion, and six items related with trade are the relics of Bobusang (No. 30-1 to 30-6) which are, in fact, singularly designated. The rest categories include only one or two items designated or none. Although folklore cultural heritages have eight categories for designation, it is just nominal division, and they do not deal with all the folklore cultural heritages to be actually included. Examining the cases of folklore cultural heritages designated in detail, we can find folklore cultural heritages are associated with food, clothing, and shelter, and particularly, old houses, a part of ‘shelter’. Concerning the process of designation, there are no ranges or relations established for designating tangible, folklore, and private cultural heritages, so we can see that there are no unique criteria to designate folklore cultural heritages. Regarding times, most of the relics designated seem to be from the 18th and 19th centuries or so, but it is not applied to all. It means that it is needed to reestablish the categories for designating folklore cultural heritages, so this study suggests here a draft proposal for it. Also, folklore cultural heritages are both tangible and intangible, and terms used for folklore cultural heritages restricted as tangible ones are not appropriate, so we should find new terms for them. Moreover, it is more important to utilize folklore cultural heritages than to designate or manage them, so we have to pay more attention to it afterwards. The fruition of this study is to investigate the status of designating folklore cultural heritages which has been hardly done before and point out problems in it.