It’s Only a 민 Joke!!

We’ll put force against force, says the citizen. We have our greater Ireland beyond the sea. They were driven out of house and home in the black 47. Their mudcabins and their shielings by the roadside were laid low by the batteringram and the Times rubbed its hands and told the whitelivered Saxons there would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as redskins in America. Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres.
-James Joyce, Ulysses

Our nationality is like our relations to women: too implicated in our moral nature to be changed honourably, and too accidental to be worth changing.
-George Santayana

우리 나라, 우리 말, 우리 민족

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To paraphrase Ernest Gellner, nationalism is a political principle, which demands that the political and the national unit should be congruent—the merger of cultural chauvinism and political aspirations. By most accounts it is the obvious remedy for the kind of debilitating disorder that a collection of heterogeneous cultures (something not only common but necessary for Agrarian societies) imposes upon industrial states. Only by cloaking a people in a common culture, perpetuated by a state-run educational system, can the kind of mobility and communication between individuals that allows for perpetual economic growth be sustained. It is for this reason that the nation is now the most common if not the only accepted form of legitimate stateliness.

Occasionally, however, the cultural melding of groups is so immutably complete that a third element is added to this union of culture and politics: race. The reasons for the occasional emergence of this national trinity are as numerous as their various expressions; but this route is not open to all nations. Clearly, it would take a powerful cultural impact, combined with a disavowal of known history so complete to be tantamount to ignoring overt reality for a nation state like the USA to convince itself of a fallacy like racial homogeneity. Yet for nations like Korea, where physiological differences between nationals “seem” less acute, this leap is easily made, hence the largely accepted and educationally perpetuated notion of the Han Minjok.

As for the precise roots of this concept in Korea, I must admit ignorance. But for those interested, this excerpt from Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity is quite revealing.

In postwar South Korea, the mythical Tan'gun racial regeneration narrative was a product ( Yi K. B. 1990) of collective historical imaginations of today's most widely recognized "nationalist historians" (minjok sahakja) including Kim Ch'ŏl-jun, Yi Pyŏng-do, Ch'ŏn Kwan-u, Yi Ki-baek, Kim Chŏng-bae, and Yi Man-yŏl ( Yi M. Y. 1987). Because of their work, the Tan'gun narrative appears at the beginning of all Korean history textbooks despite the conspicuous absence of any reliable historical, archaeological, or art historical evidence supporting the legend prior to the thirteenth-century Samguk Yusa (Tales of the Three Kingdoms) ( Yi P. D. 1981). These historians also aver a historical lineage linking them to the pioneering spirit of national historical struggle (minjok t'uchaengsa insik) initiated by Sin Ch'ae-ho in the 1930s (TSKH 1987). Their shared claim of discovering "real" Korean history (Han'guksa palgyŏn) stems from a belief that all previous academic work--ranging from Japanese colonial historical scholarship to earlier Korean dynastic documents--cannot be considered Korean Studies since it lacks a truly "Korean historical consciousness" (Han'guk Yŏksa insik). Consequently, they dismiss earlier historians such as Kim Pu-sik ( twelfth century), the author of Korea's earliest complete historical work, Samguk Sagi, as being steeped in the traditional pro-Chinese attitude of sadae (to serve the bigger) ( Chŏn H. C. 1973) and lacking credibility as Korean historians because of their Confucian historiographical methodology. In addition, nationalistic historians denounce colonial-era publications and data, whether archaeological, ethnographic, or art historical, as tainted by Japanese scholars' "imperialistic historical viewpoint" (ilche hwang-guk sagwan) and, as a result, not worthy of study ( Pai 1994). Furthermore, they assail those Japanese scholars who study ancient history for deliberately distorting Korea's prehistoric past in hypothesizing a common racial origin for Japanese and Koreans (Nissen Dosoron), a hypothesis considered to be part of a Japanese conspiracy to deliberately eradicate Korean racial identity (minjok malsal).

…Three characteristics are commonly cited in self-definitions of Koreans: (1) the homogeneity of the Korean race, nation, language, and culture since Kochosŏn's prehistoric origins five thousand years ago; (2) the self-representation of Korean racial characteristics (minjoksŏng) as paedal minjok. Etymologically, the word paedal is said to derive from the name of the mythical pakdal tree on Paektusan where Tan'gun was born ( Ch'ŏn K. U. 1983). In Chinese characters, the word can also be written to mean "the delivered race" (paedal) who, as the "chosen" or "good" (sŏn) people, were saved from Japanese efforts at racial eradication and assimilation by the Tan'gun spirit of independence; and finally (3) the shared historical destiny and cultural heritage of all Koreans since the formation of the Korean race by the founding ancestor, Tan'gun. According to this view, Koreans have been able to preserve their distinct racial, cultural, and linguistic heritage because of a continuous spirit of resistance directed against foreign superpowers from time immemorial. Because of these widely accepted assumptions concerning the homogeneity of the Korean race, language, and culture, all scholarship on Korea is automatically subsumed under the rubric of racial history (minjoksa), leaving little room for alternative voices to be heard.

–Hyung Il Pai and Timothy R. Tangherlini - editors. Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California Berkeley1998.

Now it’s very likely that a resounding Korean response would be “so what?” And maybe there’s nothing at all wrong with all this. So what if Korean academia is crippled and blinded by its own racial image of itself? Who’s harmed by a national consciousness, which despite all the evidence to the contrary clings passionately to the idea of its own racial exceptionalism? Every nation has its own national mythology. In the United States school children are bombarded with absurdities, told in all seriousness mind you, about George Washington’s quasi-divine compulsory truthfulness and the communal harmony between Pilgrim settlers and Native Americans. The inherent incredulousness of these statements is enough to make a leper laugh. Yet these myths are not only perpetuated by the annual pageantry of American national holidays, they are sometimes fervently defended (though usually tolerantly ignored) by historians claiming academic objectivity.

So why do I think this idea of a Minjok should be condemned as a malignant national aberration? It is to my profound dismay that this question remains much easier to pose than to answer. It is entirely likely that my aversion to the idea of a pure race is merely a byproduct of the extant Western trauma affected by Nazism and Italian Fascism. The fear and repulsion of these ideologies and the disaster they precipitated continue to pervade political and academic thought in Europe and North America. Additionally, the American history of race-based slavery has left an indelible mark on the American consciousness, which has surely affected how and what I can rationalize. But outside of my own culturally-instilled prejudices I believe there are several other reasons to abhor the Korean notion of a Minjok. For the sake of argument (and this is all for the sake of argument) I propose two reasons: one of current practical importance, the other a likely scenario.

1—Many Koreans continue to hold fast to their own socially-generated characterizations and caricatures of foreigners: Chinese people smell, Southeast Asians are gold-diggers, Westerners are sex-crazed, drug-addicted morons taking advantage of Korea, and so on. Admittedly, every national group harbors such discriminatory attitudes toward outsiders. Yet these externally directed attitudes, when compounded by a sense of one’s own racial purity, have a tendency to produce barriers to educational opportunities and economic success, which in turn thwarts cultural assimilation. The consequence (if not the purpose) of this is to lock foreigners in a cycle of isolation, which breeds discrimination and further contributes to these race-based caricatures of foreigners.

2—This then brings me to a likely scenario, one that has been played out in other countries at other times in the past. What happens when Korea’s dynamic economic escalation inevitably suffers a prolonged recession? How will a racial consciousness react when an economic environment is created that compels some Koreans to compete with foreigners for jobs and other opportunities?

It’s because of the sensitivity surrounding this topic that I’ve chosen to use such an insipidly dull and colorless prose. It has never been my intention to degrade Korean culture. Nor do I think an educated discussion of this issue is in any way harmful to Korean society. I would, however, like to spawn some type of discussion on this subject, a discussion—judging by the passionately defensive responses I’ve received from every Korean with whom I’ve dared to broach this topic—that is entirely absent in popular Korean social discourse.

So…. let me he have it….