Characteristics of Han as a Cognitive Cultural Concept in Korea

Abstract

This study focuses on a special emotional quality, “Han,” unique to the Korean culture and society. In my account, this emotional quality is an ethnically distinctive Korean emotional sentiment that is an integral part of the people’s lives, spirituality, and culture in Korea. Especially, when incorporated with artistic forms, Han functions as a distinct cultural and spiritual concept that must be understood its complexity within particular Korean cultural milieus. This study focuses on examining Han as a unique cultural identity with a closer look at its cultural concept along with its particular characteristics and the implications in Korean culture. This study employs literature reviews as a major research method with an anthropologically “halfie” perspective. This research is limited to theoretical examination on the concept of Han as a Korean cultural identity. Based on its literal meaning, Han reflects a negative emotional condition involving grief, grudge, remorse and lamentation embedded in the tragic lives and historyof the Korean people. But this emotional state has been reshaped and Koreanized by specific Korean cultural circumstances. Within culturally incorporated artistic contexts, Han functions as a unique Korean cognitive concept rather than as a sad emotional sentiment. Han basically consists of two opposite sides of emotional characteristics—negative feelings of Won (怨, condemnation) and Tan (嘆, remorse) and positive feelings of Jung (情, warm sentiments) and Won (願, hope). The relationship among these four different feelings of Han is that the negative feelings are transformed into the positive feelings through a special cathartic transcending process, Sak-him, when Han is incorporated into socially acceptable art forms. This transformational process, Sak-him, itself reflects a peculiar cathartic Korean spiritual structure in the concept of Han, which eventually completes artistic transcendence in a Korean artistic representation. As an artistically involved cognitive concept, Han includes all of these three processes—negativity, transcendence, and transformation. Therefore, Han is not a simple sad emotional feeling but a complexly commingled cognitive concept which signifies a particular spirituality as well as a peculiar ethos of Korean people. The Korean society is heterogeneous in many aspects, social, economical, political, religious, and cultural; however, the concept of Han is learned and shared through the lived experience of the people in this community such as “habitus” in Pierre Bourdieu’s notion. Han is a cognitive cultural concept that implies a mixture of complexly inter-related emotions, spirituality, life history,in addition to a unique Korean cultural aesthetic and identity. This concept could be generalized as a unique trait of Korean-ness permeating the mentality and sentiment of Korean people. This is reinvigorated as a unique state of mind and aesthetic cultural quality intrinsic to the Korean cultural art forms including dance.