Recent discussions of UNESCO, world heritage sites, and so-called intangible cultural heritage inevitably underscore the global nature of cultural identity and “ownership.” But how does something, either tangible or intangible, come to be labeled “heritage”? Who has the right or responsibility to manage it? Folklorists, anthropologists, and museum curators constantly confront such questions, and not surprisingly, the answers are always complex and necessarily contingent on historical circumstances and political ideologies. Hyung Il Pai’s Heritage Management in Korea and Japan: The Politics of Antiquity and Identity tackles these issues head on within the specific context of the relationship between imperial Japan and colonial Korea. The result is an almost overwhelmingly detailed historical overview of the policies, politics, and personalities that created and continue to inform understandings of heritage in East Asia and beyond.
Pai’s work is not about folklore per se, but rather about very tangible elements of heritage; indeed, the book often reads like a history of Japanese and Korean archaeology before, during, and immediately after the colonial period (1910-1945). Although it does not explicitly focus on the work of folklorists in either country, its careful recounting of the ways in which “race and ethnicity, categories of antiquity, and the rankings of treasures, historical sites, and monuments were codified through national or colonial legislation, fine art museums’ collections or inventories, or tourist publications in an East Asian regional context” (xxx) provides an invaluable analogy for understanding similar treatments of less tangible elements of culture, and for understanding situations in different parts of the globe.
Pai begins with an extended preface in which she explains that her objective “is to unravel how Japanese racial, cultural, and tourist policies, driven by ideologies of nationalism, mercantilism, and imperialism, have determined the fate of art and the archaeological remains currently displayed in public and private museums, art galleries and tourists sites in the Republic of Korea as well as Japan” (xxx). The preface itself is essential reading, as it sets the theoretical and historical stage and outlines the rather massive scope of the project. Indeed, one impressive aspect of the book is the sheer amount of archival material—in English, Japanese, and Korean—Pai consulted for her research. The preface helps to frame the material that follows, alerting the reader to the multiple ways in which a range of actors, including government officials, academics, merchants, connoisseurs, and tourists were involved in creating systems of heritage management and hierarchies of value that are still in place today.
The task Pai creates for herself is a major one, and the result is a complex multi-sited historical exploration packed full of data and details, at times brilliantly insightful, and at times difficult to follow. Indeed, there is so much going on here that it is hard to concisely summarize the book. The title itself needs a little interpretation; Pai does not so much explain “heritage management in Korea and Japan” but rather explores how (in the words of the subtitle) “the politics of antiquity and identity” affect the valuation of those objects and sites deemed meaningful as heritage. Although the first and concluding chapters focus on Korea, the middle chapters interrogate intellectual, economic, and political movements centered in Japan, where we see the foundations not only of heritage policy but also of the ideologies that would shape it.
This is a story about influence and the movement of ideas and people. We see how a mid-nineteenth-century European fascination with world fairs leads to both Western and Japanese interest in collection and exhibition, art and archaeological surveys, and the creation of museums. We see how an obsession with digging up the origins—of art and archaeology as well as languages, races, and ethnicities—expands to the literal excavation of remains throughout the Japanese empire, and particularly Korea, where archaeologists and scholars are followed by an influx of tourists. The largest part of Pai’s narrative focuses on the prewar period, but the thrust of her argument is that the political agendas, nationalist dogmas, and class and racial prejudices of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were critical to developing standards of aesthetics and authentication that influence “how the ‘Other’ continues to be presented to a world audience” (70).
There is human agency at work in this narrative of influence, and Pai introduces us to the major actors responsible for shaping these ideologies and policies. Among the more influential players are zoologist and archaeologist Edward Morse (1838-1925); art historian Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908); art critic Okakura Kakuz? (1863-1913); politician and statesman It? Hirobumi (1841-1909); architect Sekino Tadashi (1868-1935); anthropologist Torii Ry?z? (1870-1953); and museum director Kim Chae-w?n (1909-1990). There are many others, of course, but the effect is that we see how an elite cadre of educated intellectuals, collectors, and politically powerful individuals developed the practical methodologies for classifying, organizing, and displaying heritage objects and sites, and concomitantly created what remains a contemporary paradigm for ranking and valuation.
Pai’s concluding chapter is perhaps the most explicitly critical one. Here she explores the postwar and contemporary ramifications of the attitudes and activities of prewar European, American, Japanese, and Korean scholars and policy-makers. She explains, for example, that some people in Japan’s former colonies have incorporated “old platitudes concerning the indigenous, prehistoric origins of distinct races” into their own “new nationalistic narratives to explain the ethnic foundations of their respective modern ethnic states” (171). In Korea, she points out, the “most contentious topic…concerns the ‘return of cultural treasures’” (171), and she explores the fine line between appreciation/preservation and looting. This is of course a dynamic of critical concern in the museum industry worldwide and Pai’s work helps put the many elements of this contemporary debate into historical and regional perspective. The book is, as it were, an exploration of the heritage of heritage.
As such, this work will be of significant value for scholars not just of East Asia, but also of any region or discipline where questions of heritage, identity, and cultural ownership are concerns. Pai has gone through an immense amount of primary materials, and marshaled together a massive amount of data. The text is veritably packed with names, dates, lists, and includes appendices, timelines, and a glossary. This wealth of material is a great strength of the book, but also its weakness. It is often too easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. While the data amassed here is invaluable, I wish the author or editors had created more scaffolding or signposts to guide the reader through it. Each chapter would be well served by a short but clear statement of intentions and organization. Indeed, even the addition of subheadings throughout the book would have made the material collected here much more accessible.
But with that caveat, I would suggest that readers willing to take on the challenge will be rewarded for wading through the material here. The book is a rich resource for future scholarship—any one of the individuals mentioned above, for example, could easily be the subject of a significant monograph. More importantly, Pai implicitly reminds us that all of our own understandings of culture—in both its tangible and intangible forms—are inevitably the result of influences that have been buried over time. Excavating these influences is critical, even morally imperative, for recognizing the biases and assumptions on which our contemporary policies and practices are constructed. Finally, in this age of UNESCO and world heritage, the book provides a powerful and well-documented reminder that discourses of cultural ownership and identity have always been global.
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[Review length: 1242 words • Review posted on September 1, 2015]