A Study on the Actualization of Local Wisdom and
Village Community Regeneration in a Rural Village : Focusing on the Collective Biography of Oldest-Old Residents of
Yucheon Culture Village, Cheongdo
Lee Sung Ae
Department of Sociology
Graduate Scho...
A Study on the Actualization of Local Wisdom and
Village Community Regeneration in a Rural Village : Focusing on the Collective Biography of Oldest-Old Residents of
Yucheon Culture Village, Cheongdo
Lee Sung Ae
Department of Sociology
Graduate School
Yeungnam University
(Supervised by Professor Chung Yong Kyo)
Abstract
This study examines how the local wisdom accumulated by the
oldest-old residents of Yucheon Culture Village in Cheongdo is
reinterpreted and reactivated within contemporary processes of rural
community regeneration. Existing discussions of rural regeneration
have largely focused on demographic decline, population aging,
facility-based
physical
improvements,
and
tourism-oriented
development. In contrast, this study focuses on the life experiences,
place memories, and situated judgments of long-term residents,
viewing the oldest-old not as passive recipients of care but as
knowledge-bearing subjects capable of interpreting local change and
imagining future possibilities for their community.
Yucheon Culture Village, located in Cheongdo-eup, Cheongdo-gun,
Gyeongsangbuk-do, is a rural settlement where modern commercial
and cultural memories are densely layered. Places such as the
former Yucheon Station, the marketplace, Yeongsin Rice Mill,
Yucheon Theater, the Dongchangcheon and Cheongdocheon rivers,
and Sangnoksu Community Hall serve as key sites through which
residents remember, interpret, and reconfigure the village.
Methodologically, this study employs a qualitative case study design,
combining collective biography workshops, in-depth interviews,
participant observation, and documentary analysis. Four collective
biography workshops were conducted with eight female residents
aged 85 or older. These workshops followed a structured process of
memory triggering, third-person narrativization, collective analysis,
and meaning reconstruction and naming. To broaden and deepen
the analysis, this study used in-depth interviews with residents
across diverse backgrounds alongside participant observation of
village activities.
The findings are as follows: first, that local wisdom in Yucheon
Culture Village was formed through residents’ practical responses to
land scarcity, commercial activities centered around the station and
marketplace, experiences of war and disaster, and ongoing spatial
transformations. Commercial activities were not merely means of
economic survival; rather, they involved embodied ways of
interacting with people, reading situations, maintaining networks,
investing in children’s education, and sustaining place-based pride.
This study interprets these embodied dispositions as a form of
commercial habitus formed in Yucheon’s specific historical and
spatial context. Second, residents’ place memories were not confined
to mere nostalgia for the past. Memories of Yucheon Station,
Yucheon Theater, the cherry blossom event at Yucheon Elementary
School, Yucheon Eohwa, Sangnoksu Community Hall, and the
riverside retaining wall were rearticulated as contemporary practices
of hospitality, affective attachment, and autonomous spatial
judgment. Third, local wisdom was dynamically reactivated in
current regeneration practices. Through local discourses centering
on community specialties—such as Bawu Bread (a locally developed
bread) and godeutang (freshwater snail soup)—as well as the
renaming of the village festival as a community feast, localized
employment initiatives, and possibilities for external collaboration,
residents sought to connect everyday cultural resources with
future-oriented regeneration plans.
Ultimately, these processes cannot be fully explained by top-down
administrative planning or physical development alone. Rather, they
constitute a self-organizing regeneration assemblage in which
residents’ memories, places, living heritage, material spaces, and
external networks are connected and continuously rearranged in
relation to one another. The contribution of this study lies in
shifting the analytical focus of rural regeneration away from
external intervention and facility-based development toward the
experiential knowledge and situated judgment of oldest-old residents.
By conceptualizing this process as the actualization of local wisdom,
this study demonstrates how life experiences, place memories, and
everyday knowledge accumulated over time can become practical
resources for interpreting present village problems and imagining
the future of a rural community.
Keywords: local wisdom, actualization of local wisdom, collective
biography, commercial habitus, place memory, self-organizing
regeneration assemblage, Yucheon Culture Village