서양 선교사와 근대한국 민속연구 제1의 물결

초록

A predominant view on the genesis of modern Korean Folklore is that it was an unfortunate queer product of competition and corroboration between Japanese bureaucrat-scholars and Korean nationalist intellectuals. Haunted by the ghost of origins, most scholars tend to ignore or underestimate the academic achievements of Western missionaries who collected and studied Korean folk materials ahead of Japanese and Korean scholars. This article intends to rediscover and reappraise Western missionaries’ indispensable contributions to collecting and researching Korean folklore during its very embryological stage. The main body of the article consists of two parts. The first half traces how Western missionaries from the late 19th century to the early 20th century had laid the groundwork for the birth of modern Korean folklore in the various fields such as proverbs, folktales, traditional festivals, and shamanism. The latter half examines academic legacy and influence of G. H. Jones and H. B. Hulbert, both of whom played critical roles in taking shapes of modern Korean folklore, but overlooked and underestimated by most previous studies. The main sources of analysis are the English monthly/academic magazines/journal published in Korea, including The Korean Repository, The Korea Review, and Transactions of the Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. The author arrives at the following conclusions. First, Western missionaries were very important personnel who had constructed solid and respectable foundation of Korean folklore fields and thus worth mentioning in historiography. Second, most Western missionaries discussed in the article were not value-neutral observers but shared Western-centric prejudice that evaluated peculiar Korean folklore/tradition as inferior in the chain of cultural evolution by distinguishing modern-central-rational Western civilization from primitivelocal-superstitious-oral mentalité of ‘Koreaness’. Third, there remains a very difficult task of re-writing the whole genealogy of modern Korean folklore studies, which would reveal disruptive collisions and/or overlapping wrinkles existing among the First Wave launched by Western missionaries, the First-Half Wave re-fabricated by Japanese bureaucrat-scholars, and the Second Wave embraced by Korean intellectuals.

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