Vortrag: Genealogies of the Past: From Samhan Pluralism to Confucian Nativism in Medieval Korea
2. Februar 2018, von AAI Webmaster
On February 2nd 2018, Dr. Javier Cha from Seoul National University held a lecture on "Genealogies of the Past: From Samhan Pluralism to Confucian Nativism in Medieval Korea".
From the announcement: This lecture examines the making of a new notion of tradition in order to legitimate Confucianism in Korea.
Not only did the Confucian logic of ethnic exclusivism and environmental determinism reject the possibility of abstracting the Confucian ritual order from the sacred space of China proper, the Koreans before the 1300s were reluctant to transform their society according to alien social norms, institutions, and practices. The adoption of Confucianism and the subsequent development of a separate Korean Confucian tradition entailed extensively reworking the medieval Korean understanding of the past and developing a belief in the existence of a utopian world in Korea’s antiquity.
A new collective identity of Korea as “a miniature of China” based on this new historical understanding matured in the 1300s. From this point onward, no Korean courtier questioned the legitimacy of classical learning, the literary arts, and Sinitic bureaucratic institutions. The Confucian project of civilizing the Korean society through governance was cast in the language of restoring the social and political order that had once existed in Korea’s long and distant past, rather than an imposition of alien practices on native land.