Arirang, Kimchi and Statism

The safeguarding movement of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) practiced both in national and international levels is expected to be non-political but challenged by the state-centered campaigns and strategies of each country. Since the 1980s, UNESCO has endeavored to establish the Convention whose spirit is developed on the basis of international cooperation, cultural relativism, cultural diversity and cultural identification. On the one hand, the value of the convention has been widely recognized by the member states, on the other hand, statism has also gained its power in domestic and international safeguarding activities. This paper critically discusses this issue. In particular, the UNESCO’s Representative Lists (RL) of ICH inscription process is getting more and more competitive among the member states. To earn more international reputation through the inscription of RL, South and North Koreas have respectively changed their existent legal systems into the ones oriented to the Convention. In these processes, the domestic safeguarding policies are screwed while UNESCO shows its ironic attitudes toward the selection process of Arirang and Kimchi- making of North Korea. More specifically, this paper will ask the following questions about how the domestic policies of the South and North have changed in order to inscribe the elements of Arirang and Kimchi-making, how UNESCO allows North Korea to be inscribed the two elements as RL, and how the latter contrasts with the policy of multinational ICH inscription which has been strongly encouraged by the Convention. To answer these questions, two ways of examination are sought. One is to explore each country’s domestic policies of ICH safeguarding which have recently established. The other is to study the state-centered competitive inscription process which seems to be contradictory with the encouraged principle of multinational lists by the Convention. The purpose of such a critical reflection between South and North Korea is to eventuate in building a cooperative system for the multinational inscription. In final, it is urgent for the two states to make a shared inventory of ICH in a cooperative way rather than leaning to the outside force.