The Role of the Festival to Overcome the Regional Identity CRISIS in Republic of KOREA: Centering on Andong International Mask Dance Festival

This study is focused on festivals that can secure regional identity crisis. Local festivals, in particular, include local identity, which enhances self esteem, friendship, and solidarity. Also, recognizing that local identity is an important heritage that includes the social, cultural, historical, and local aspects of the area, local festivals that do not include local identities will not be able to perform the important functions of the festival. Therefore, we tried to examine the relationship between Andong International Tal-mance Festival, which is the representative festival of the region, and local identity. In order to grasp this relationship, the concept of regional identity was identified, and the components of lo-cal identity were analyzed, and the relationship between these components and the Andong Dance Festival was analyzed. As a result, Andong residents perceived Andong International Talmanche Festival as a local identity (spatiality, sociality, temporality) of Andong, and the Andong Talmance International Festival festival was found to have a certain relationship with spatiality, sociality, and time which constitute local identity. However, in the festival evaluation survey, there are evaluations of domestic visitors and foreign visitors. However, since the opinions of local residents participating in the festival are not reflected, the festival emphasizes only the economic aspect of revitalizing the local economy. It is not enough to reflect. It is necessary to add Andong In-ternational Mask Dance Festival to the residents of Andong area (participants and non-females), which are important members of the festival, so that they can better reflect local identity in the next festival. This study seems to have some deficiency in securing generality by analyzing festival and local identity by us-ing single festival, secondary data, and documentary data. However, these studies suggest that a new ap-proach to local festivals is needed. In other words, regional festivals function in various aspects such as eco-nomic aspect and cultural aspect, but the most essential function is to secure local identity. A local identity is a concept that includes a macroscopic and implicit meaning that includes the local tradition, culture and solidari-ty over a long period of time. Therefore, the identity of the local community, which has recently been weakened, is a necessary concept for the developmental aspect of local autonomy. This study is meaningful in terms of considering the ways to overcome the regional identity crisis.