This thesis attempts to interpret the attributes as a cultural heritage of historic villages that this study deals with, starting from the essence of the heritage’s concept. The concept of cultural heritage is continually expanding and changing, and...
This thesis attempts to interpret the attributes as a cultural heritage of historic villages that this study deals with, starting from the essence of the heritage’s concept. The concept of cultural heritage is continually expanding and changing, and it has become a complex concept that can no longer be fully grasped by a single and definite principle. Historical villages, which are the subject of this study, have the same context as folk villages and traditional villages that are recognized as existing cultural heritage’s concepts. However, in this study, this study’s target is not a distinctive village that can be designated from a current heritage-related system or see a remarkable past. In this study, the definition of the historical village as the most comprehensive meaning is equipped with the placeness as a built place where people can share their collective lives, the historicity that has its history stemmed from the past and the present life in the community. This study considers the recognition framework for recognizing existing historic villages as a cultural asset on the basis of the criticism for understanding the existing cultural heritages.
As an extreme situation in which villages with historical backgrounds have the necessity and justification of preservation, this thesis selects submerged villages as an example to find the synchronic and diachronic characteristics of cultural heritage’s perception of historic villages. The study targets two villages. First, it is the case of the disappearance of the Oenae Village by the construction of the Andong Dam in the 1970s as the earliest stage of heritage recognition as a historic village. Secondly, as the most recent case for analyzing the change of heritage perception, this research selects another case that performs the construction of the Yeongju Dam and the relocation of the Geumgang Village due to the major four-river refurbishment project (the Han, Nakdong, Geum and Yeongsan Rivers) in the 2010s. The cultural heritage’s recognition of the existing historic villages in both cases does not cover the whole object called the historic village, and it has a limitation that it is separated and recognized as a new object of cultural heritage that is not identified with the original object.
As a result, this recognition separates the historic village subjectively, temporally, and semantically from the heritage-making process, and it can be said that this causes the loss of the original way of existence. Therefore, this study argues the introduction of place recognition as a concept of cultural heritage to understand historical villages as a holistic and continuous phenomenon after analyzing the cultural heritage’s perceptions of historical villages in each case. The place is not one of the value attributes that make up existing cultural properties but is itself accepted as a concept of cultural heritage in a broad and concrete sense. However, the heritage recognition of historical villages revealed in each previous case shows that the concept of places is encyclopedic and narrow so that they do not reflect the unique place characteristics and values of each historical village.
This study criticizes the errors and borders of existing 'collective heritage interpretations', 'regular symbolization of cultural heritages', 'focalizing the past and freezing the time that cultural heritages are constructed' in the process of evolution in which the concept of cultural heritages is expanded and changed. This is concretely analyzed through the previous case of the historical village. In addition, the 'place' is derived as an all-inclusive and sweeping heritage’s concept to overcome the limitations of cultural heritage recognition. This study proposes that the concept of place should be more comprehensively defined as a way of recognizing complex and holistic phenomena through the existing criticism of place awareness as revealed in these cases. The subject that interprets a place also suggests that it is necessary to switch to the allegorical view from the inside that constitutes each object, rather than the universal view from the outside.