범주와 정치

Political Meanings of ‘Categorization’ - Social Effects of an Extensive Investigation on Tenant Practices in Colonial Korea

The colonial state conducted an extensive investigation on tenant practices in order to deal with a variety of social issues, especially the proliferation and radicalization of tenancy disputes in the 1920s. The result of this investigation was collected and published in The Tenant Practices of Korea (1932, Chosennokosakukankō). In this investigation, the groups of absentee landlords and tenant land custodians were categorized in the stage of a research design and inscribed as substantive categories in tenant statistics of The Tenant Practices of Korea. After this investigation and publication, it was perceived that the agricultural troubles and problems in colonial Korea were caused by the absentee landlords and tenant land custodians. They were increasingly seen as “social evil,” and the image of the colonial state changed from “sovereign enemy” to “socioeconomic mediator” who would regulate these “social evils” and settle conflicts. Yet it was “an epistemological violence” in the sense that regardless of the size of land the absentee landlords were categorized uniformly and statistics were decontextualized. In this process of categorizations in the investigation, the colonial state who had robbed national sovereignty became a regulator/mediator of social disputes on the socioeconomic level, while unexpectedly escaping from direct criticisms by the colonial society.