It is clear that the national history of Korea is not the history of nation of Korea, but of its ethnos. On this view, the first step to learn Korean national history is to learn what the Korean ethnos is, which has been the main character to form nat...
It is clear that the national history of Korea is not the history of nation of Korea, but of its ethnos. On this view, the first step to learn Korean national history is to learn what the Korean ethnos is, which has been the main character to form national history. From the western perspective, the ethnos is extinguished or is doomed to be extinguished in the near future. However, it becomes even more important that when the boundaries defining countries fade out, the identity of the ethnos becomes the principal element of a global village.
The national text book of Korean history does not fully meet the expectation, given that the government designated text book of national history explains its ground purpose that “it cultivates the identity of our ethnos in order to nurture the ability as Korean citizen living in 21st century.” The reason is that the text book does not provide the clear elaboration of the formation of the ethnos.
This study reviews previous relevant studies on the concept of ‘ethnos’ of which meaning varies by contexts, the meaning of the name of the ethnos, the times and geographical range and tribe of its formation, and the ethos('얼') of Korean driving force of the ethnos. Furthermore, This study suggests the desirable way to supplement the national history text books for elementary, junior-high, and high schools on the basis of profound analysis of those text books.
The instrumentalist insisted that the concept of the nation(ethnos) was invented as a tool to justify modern nation as market economy developed. However, the author claims that this concept is not applicable to Korean history and not accepted by the Korean emotion because the concept is rooted imperialism of the western countries. Considering that, this study understands ‘an ethnos’ as Gyeorae(‘겨레’) defined by a blood society and an ethnic tradition by making reference to the concept of ‘ethnic nation’ from mixed symbolic theory
This study suggests that Korean ethnos be named ‘Han('한')’ and Han be presented as the official name of Korean ethnos. The rationales behind this are that; firstly, Han has been used even before the invention of Chinese characters such as 朝鮮, 倍達, and 韓 describing Korean ethnos. Secondly, Han carries various meanings including bright, the heaven, one(1), great and the center. Thirdly, the Han ethnos played main role in founding Dangun-choseon, the very first ancient dynasty of Korea. For this reason, the author suggests that the English name of Korea should be ‘Republic of Great Han’, because Han is a proper noun.
This paper requests that the text book contain the ancient birth myth of nation as another form of history before the formation of the ethnos which shows the prototype of Korean ethos('얼'), also that the stages of the societal development be clarified to elaborate in the text book. On the process to figure out the formation time of the ethnos, the author reviewed literatures regarding the Bronze Age, not only the era of the greatest invention in the human history but also of the large scale conquering wars. This literature reviews resulted in providing critical evidences to advance the formation time dated in the text book(B.C.20-15) by at least 5-10 centuries. On the basis of this analysis, the times when Han ethnos was created is dated back to the era of Chiwoo emperor, almost 300-400 years before Dangun was founded.
It is that Han ethnos included several ethnic groups of the whole Korean peninsula, the northern province of Manchuria, and up to Beijing-Tianjin when it was formed. This study suggests to consider Dongyi group(東夷族) as a part of Han ethnos, who were from the east shore of China including Shandong(山東) peninsula. Following this, it was found that Kija-choseon and Wiman-choseon were nothing but subject states located an outlying district of Dangun-choseon on the contrary to the conventional view dominating the text book that those countries were the successors of Dangun-choseon. Therefore, this study insists that the text book be corrected.
For the last, it is desirable to name the ethos of Han ethnos as Hanism by defining it as ‘the mind to pursuit the harmony to be a united one’. In order to back up this ethos, the author found its prototype from Korean mith of the creation of the world, reviewed its applications, developments, and transformations according to the times and locations in Korean history, from the examples of Pungryudo, the humanitarian ideal, Hwarangdo, Palgwan festival, the sacrifice for heaven, democratic idea of Korean type, the Koreanization of foreign religion. On the top of that Hanism still presents itself in the traditional life culture of the modern Korean society.
The author was thinking that Hanism can be the clue to smooth conflicts and oppositions within the human society and that Han ethnos can be the key player to support the mutual prosperity of Human being.
All in all, hereby the author suggests to re-write the national history text book based on Hanism and the humanitarian ideal which are the key elements of the identity of Han ethnos.