역사의 거울에 비춰 본 한국인 정체성

Korean Identity Reflected In The Mirror Of History

For Koreans, the twenty-first century coincides, internationally, with the advent of the era of globalization and, nationally, with the emergence of a multicultural society. And this has made it imperative for us to reconsider our definition of who or what we Koreans are. Korean as an identity is a historically established concept, for it is not something we were born with but something we have become. The German philosopher F. Nietzsche once said that what is historical is not an object of definition but an object of interpretation; only what is not historical, thus, can be defined. In each period, people wrote their own version of 'Korean history' with which we can catch a glimpse of their idea of who Koreans are. Therefore, even if we cannot define Korean identity in any way, we should be still able to explain it through the history of the historical writings that dealt with the problem. It is only a recent or a modern phenomena that Koreans have started to define their identity in terms of the concept “nation" generally understood as a racially and culturally homeogenous group. To understand how our group identity was perceived before the modern age, we need to examine how the official history of each period was written. During the time of the dynasties, the official history was called ”Jeong-sa"(正史) and since the rise of the modern national state, it has been referred to as “Guk-sa"(國史). At the center of the transformation of historical discourse from “Jeong-sa" to “Guk-sa", there lies the change in the understanding of who Koreans are as the subject of Korean history. Therefore, the purposes of this paper are to (1) explain Korean identity with a genealogical analysis of historical discourse; (2) reconsider the question of who we are in relation to the emergence of a multicultural society in twenty-first-century Korea.