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Constructing Korean "Origins": A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories. By HYUNG-IL PAI. Harvard-Hallym Series on Korea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2000. xxxii, 543 pp. $49.50 (cloth).
Ernst Renan once wrote that "getting its history wrong is part of being a nation." Hyung II Pai's ambitious and wide-ranging work explores the role that archaeology has played in getting Korean history "wrong," and offers a compelling alternative for understanding prehistory on the Korean peninsula.
Pai outlines how the introduction of modern archaeological practices to the Korean peninsula allowed Korean nationalists to imagine a glorious ancient past unfettered by the restrictions of the traditional Chinese textual sources. Cataloging dolmen, unearthing slim bronze daggers, and collecting pottery from ancient grave sites, archaeologists seemed to provide objective proof for claims of a continuous Korean identity and a glorious ancient past. How artifacts have been gathered, cataloged, and displayed-processes all tightly controlled by the state in both North and South Korea-have also played a role in the formation of ideas about Korean origins and prehistory. The resulting narrative has permeated every corner of South Korea, from museums to amusement parks, from the basements of upscale department stores to the shelves of popular bookstores, from the college classroom to the terebi kyosu (television professor) appearing on the nightly news.
This nationalist narrative is in many respects a reaction against Japanese scholarship conducted during the period of Japanese colonial rule in Korea (191045). Japanese archaeologists were the first to conduct excavations and analysis of artifacts according to modern archaeological methods. And while their descriptions are meticulously detailed, their conclusions that Korean culture was essentially derivative and dominated by foreigners rankled many Korean scholars. However, once liberation allowed Korean intellectuals to forge their own paths, many proved unable to escape the conceptual universe established during Japanese rule. Thus, while highly critical of Japanese-era scholarship, Korean nationalist scholarship mirrors Japanese assumptions about race, the links between Korea,...