ABSTRACT
To root an indigenous heritage in popular imagination, appealing to a shared cultural memory, involves strategy. This typically starts with a process of rediscovery promoted and supported by the state or other powerful bodies, often undertaken in collaboration with or with the coercion of an affluent bourgeoisie. Folklorists, archaeologists, musicologists, art historians and other experts authenticate and document what is to be promoted. They seek to harness the enthusiasm of practitioners and consumers, and as such the process, much as has been promoted from the discipline of folklore (Abrahams 1968; Bauman 1971; Ben-Amos 1971; Hymes 1975), should be communicative. There are, then, two sides: preservation (planning, documentation, maintenance) and encouragement (publication, events and education) (Loomis 1983: iv). While academic agendas tend to hold firmly to the former, public allegiance over time shifts towards the latter or, more precisely, towards promotion. Loomis, writing in the United States after Congress had asked for a report on the status of ‘intangible cultural resources’ in consideration of amending the National Historic Preservation Act, used the term ‘cultural conservation’ as a ‘concept for organizing the profusion of public and private efforts’ that dealt with ‘traditional community cultural life’. The implication was that grassroots organizations were to form the focus, guided by academic ethnographic perspectives. In Korea, though, the system has largely resisted shifting responsibility from authenticator to practitioner. It remains top down, and so while Hufford (1994: 3) tells us that conservation should be dynamic in an ideal world, the Korean preservation system rarely is. This is the primary lesson to be drawn from the 1999 Korean reforms, where the thrust of the previous 35 years was maintained without enacting legislation to allow change and development.
