Korean Museums, Intangible Heritage, and the formation of national identity

This thesis is about the social and political roles of the Korean historical and cultural themed national museums with particular reference to the role and place of intangible heritage in national identity formation. Korean intangible heritage, which is at the core of legitimising the existence of a nation and maintaining the nation’s unique and exclusive identity as a form of national representation, is protected and promoted under government control. However, intangible cultural heritage is often understood to be based on human performance and practice and constructs people’s sense of identity through social interaction. Intangible cultural heritage has an unconventional relationship with a museum presenting its culture. Since Korean museums are mostly concerned with the interpretation of material culture, preserving, and promoting heritage as part of remembering a fixed and essentialised past, they have contributed to the development of official intangible heritage as an unchanging form of expression of ethnic identity and led to a form of fossilisation of practice. As a result, this intangible cultural heritage ceases to have much relevance for today’s society.

In the case of the National Folk Museum of Korea, this research suggests that the emphasis on an unchanging intangible form of expression of ethnic identity manifest in museum has a limited impact upon public ideas of what it means to be Korean today. Intangible cultural heritage as manifest in this way does not take account of the thoughts and feelings that visitors bring with them. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the museum’s attitude towards intangible cultural heritage which includes the relationship with heritage holders named as Living Human Treasures to open out a discussion about the role of heritage and the impact on to the visitor’s museum experience. It explores how the museum presents intangible heritage and articulates the formation of national identity as part of its role in maintaining and developing Korean’s national identity.