Koreans' stories about themselves: An ethnographic history of Hermit Pond Village in South Korea

This is an experimental ethnography which attempts to write an ethnographic history of Korean rural communists during the Korean war. This ethnography is composed of three layers of history, village, local and national. It uncovers and reconstructs the forgotten and sometimes forbidden village history of the rural communists in Hermit Pond Village in Yesan county of South Ch'ungch'ong province, restoring the unvoiced lives of ordinary villagers who lived through the historical events of Korean contemporary history. Village history is preserved in oral history and in personal narratives. These narratives tell of communist revolutionaries who have been victimized by the ideology of Cold War. By reinstating the villagers' forbidden memories, their stories about themselves become an historical discourse which ought to be recognized as a part of the social discourse of South Korean society.;Yesan county is a place with its own particular history and culture in relation to the political economy of South Korean agriculture. The relative underdevelopment of agricultural areas brought about by export-led industrialization has resulted in an agricultural crisis and a consequent deterioration of local histories and cultures. This predicament necessitates an urgent study of local cultures and histories from the view point of the local people. As such an effort, this ethnography attempts a preliminary reconstruction of the history of Yesan county based on the interviews with the local people and written documents.;The discursive contest between the official history and counter-history in Korean contemporary history is also analyzed. The interplay of historical process and historical discourses reveals that historical truth is essentially related to power. Minjung history produced by progressive intellectuals has created an alternative history from below. The official history based on anti-communist ideology and the minjung history of oppositional groups have created the two regimes of truth which illustrate the constant struggle between the official discourse and the counter-discourse. The village history of Hermit Pond Village, their unacknowledged revolutionaries, and the local history of Yesan county, are the effort to enunciate an alternative history to the official history as well as the minjung history.