Intangible Cultural Heritage Policy and Folkloristics

The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between the national intangible cultural heritage policy and folkloristics. In Korean society that experienced colonialism, the intangible cultural heritage system was established in the process of constructing a cultural representation that secured the national identity by intellectuals who sought to regenerate national culture with nationalist discourse. Unlike the early Japanese folkloristics scholars, it was folkloristics that self-appointed the role of supporting the system in Korea, and so the folklore that scholars took as the subject of study was inevitably deeply linked to the nationalist ideology. Folkloristics scholars have regarded it as the mission of folklore to clarify the nature of national culture through folklore, and to save and preserve such folklore from the danger of extinction. As a result, folklore studies were limited to folklore that could be designated as an intangible cultural heritage, that is, folklore as the past, and the practice of life that is constantly being created and changed in front of us now was excluded from the subject.The result of this are that fokloristics have become the study of the intangible cultural heritage and that folklore has become the intangible cultural heritage. The Problem is when the folkloristics, that has become so, is combined with the cultural politics of the ruling power. This article took note of the cases of Japan and Germany, and focused on the nationally held “Kookpung 81” in the 1980s. In addition, it focused on the problem that had formed a conjugation and an accomplice relationship the folkloristics scholars with those cultural policy, by allowing folklore and intangible cultural heritage to be mobilized with very political intentions at the national tradition event, namely ‘Kookpung’ used by folklore scholars in a similar sense to the folklore of the day, and by producing logic and discourse to justify the situation whether they intended or not.Then, how did the conservative academicizing of folklore and folkloristics, brought about in the process, have an effect on the discipline itself? This article reviewed the special papers on the subject of “Comparative Studies between Intangible Cultural Properties and Folkloristics” recently prepared by the National Intangible Heritage Center, and attempted to capture some of the current folkloristics scholars’ general perceptions on the relationship between folklore and intangible cultural heritage policy.