조선(朝鮮)시대 분뇨시비(糞尿施肥)와 인분(人糞)-고대중국(古代中國)의 분뇨이용(糞尿利用)과 관련하여 = The Excrement and Manure serves in the Chosun Dynasty period-With respect to Manure Application of Ancient China

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

How did something that was once treated as a precious resource in East Asia become viewed as one of the most filthy, repellant objects of man to be concealed in silence and shame? This is the question to be asked of the history of excrement. Long ago, excrement was thought to hold life-giving power and energy. In peasant lore, that which we see as filth and waste was actually the primal nourishing manure for life to be born. In this innocent state in which human beings and nature are united, dirt and waste were not shunned as inhuman, as something to evoke disgust. On the contrary, all elements of nature constituted a part of life within a unified, harmonized ecosystem. In the peasants` attitude toward nature, therefore, there were no such dividing concepts as exclusivity, relativity, selectivity, and autocracy. Each person was not an other but united as one. This ecological view of life was gradually eroded in Asian culture through the forces of Western modernization and globalization. Driven by the one-sided pursuit of hygiene and cleanness, the Western mind was exclusive and discriminating. The world came to be divided into simple binary oppositions: good and evil; natural and unnatural; clean and dirty. Little by little, this view also began to be accepted among the Asian peasantry. What changed their minds? When did this momentous value shift take place and why? As fertilizer substituted for excrement, plunder substituted for peace in the peasants` attitude toward nature. In rejecting and mistreating excrement as waste, what was a resource of incalculable value was transformed into a pollutant. Slowly, the earth was feared more and more as threatening to our lives, as full of terror and uncertainty.