Abstract
Cultural memory—the collective, institutionally mediated process by which communities preserve, transmit, and contest representations of their past—occupies a peculiarly fraught position in the context of Korean national division. This paper examines how South Korean cultural institutions have navigated the dual imperatives of articulating a coherent national cultural heritage and maintaining openness to the profound rupture that division represents. Drawing on the work of Jan Assmann, Pierre Nora, and Paul Connerton, we analyze the institutional strategies, symbolic practices, and political contestations that characterize cultural heritage work in contemporary South Korea, with particular attention to the treatment of shared pre-division culture and to the emergence of what we term a 'diasporic heritage discourse' that anticipates—and in some respects constitutes—a future of reintegration.
Introduction
The philosopher Paul Ricoeur observed that memory and forgetting are not opposites but two dimensions of a single process: selective remembrance always involves selective forgetting, and the management of this process—which aspects of the past are preserved, commemorated, and transmitted—is among the most consequential political activities in which communities engage. Nowhere is this more evident than on the Korean Peninsula, where a single historical and cultural tradition has been divided for more than seven decades, giving rise to two distinct social orders with increasingly divergent cultural memories, official narratives, and modes of relating to a shared past.
For South Korean cultural institutions—museums, archives, heritage sites, universities, and the state agencies that support and regulate them—this situation poses distinctive challenges. The task of articulating a coherent Korean cultural heritage cannot be accomplished without reference to traditions, landscapes, and historical sites that now lie within North Korean territory, or to cultural practices and artistic forms that predate division and are claimed, in different ways, by both political systems.
Theoretical Framework: Cultural Memory and Institutionalization
Jan Assmann's distinction between communicative memory and cultural memory provides a useful starting point. Communicative memory is the living memory of lived experience, transmitted within three-to-four generation spans through informal channels—family narratives, local community practices, vernacular traditions. Cultural memory, by contrast, is the institutionally mediated, formally preserved, and symbolically elaborated representation of the more distant past—a past that has been 'frozen' into texts, monuments, rituals, and canonical images that serve as collective points of orientation.
The transition from communicative to cultural memory is one of the central dynamics of historical change: as the living witnesses of formative events pass away, their memories must be translated into institutional forms capable of transmission across generational boundaries. For divided Korea, this transition is occurring at an accelerating pace: the generation with living memories of pre-division Korea is diminishing, and with it the form of communicative memory that most directly bridges the division.
Diasporic Heritage Discourse
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of South Korean cultural heritage discourse in recent decades has been what we term 'diasporic heritage discourse': a mode of engagement with shared Korean cultural tradition that acknowledges the inaccessibility of much of that tradition in its original geographic contexts while maintaining its claim to relevance for contemporary Korean identity.
This discourse is most evident in the treatment of North Korean cultural artifacts—including folk music, traditional performance forms, archaeological sites, and royal palaces—in South Korean cultural institutions. These are represented as part of a continuous Korean cultural heritage, temporarily interrupted by division but in principle available for reintegration. The implicit narrative is one of diaspora and return: the cultural heritage of the North is understood as belonging to all Koreans, held in trust by North Korean institutions but ultimately available for recovery within a unified national heritage framework.
Conclusions
Cultural memory on the Korean Peninsula is a contested, dynamic, and politically consequential domain. South Korean cultural institutions have developed sophisticated strategies for navigating the demands of national cultural coherence and the realities of ongoing division, but these strategies are not neutral: they embed particular assumptions about the nature of Korean national identity, the political future of the Peninsula, and the cultural claims that any future unified Korean state might advance.
Engagement with these questions requires the kind of interdisciplinary attention—drawing on cultural philosophy, memory studies, heritage policy, and Korean studies—that the IOCSS Cultural Studies program is designed to support. By bringing these perspectives into dialogue, we hope to contribute to a more reflexive, more rigorous, and ultimately more honest engagement with the cultural dimensions of the Korean situation.
About the Author
This research paper was produced by the IOCSS Cultural Studies & Aesthetic Philosophy Program. The Foundation welcomes scholarly responses and contributions to this line of inquiry.