• Title/Summary/Keyword: territorial contestation

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A Theoretical Construction for the Cultural-Political Study on the Place Names in Korea (한국 지명의 문화정치적 연구를 위한 이론의 구성)

  • Kim, Sun-Bae;Ryu, Je-Hun
    • Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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    • v.43 no.4
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    • pp.599-619
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    • 2008
  • Korean peninsula has a long history and a geopolitical location as a buffer tone, which has provided the conditions for cultural dynamism and diversity across space and time. The changing processes of place names in Korea is considered to be better suited to the study on cultural politics that is interested in the culture wars over the meaning of culture among different social subjects. In order to ensure the legitimacy of cultural politics for the study of place names in Korea, this study attempts to make a theoretical construction based on the concepts of place identity, territorial contestation, and the politics of scale. Cultural and linguistic theories to be best applied to the study of place names in Korea are the theories on Angehm's and Castells' identity, $P{\hat{e}}cheux's$ identification, Hall's decoding, and Voloshinov's ideological sign. Power relations involved in the inclusion and exclusion are necessarily concerned with the process of constructing a place identity or territorial identity by means of a place name, which represents identity and ideology of a social subject. In the examination of this process, it is necessary to take the elements of identity, ideology and power relations into consideration. In this study, therefore, the politics of scale is experimented for its applicability in the study of place name in Korea, which is expected to accommodate concepts of boundary, territory, territoriality and territorialization. In the end, it is suggested in this study that a series of basic and interdisciplinary studies on the cultural politics of place names in a range of area should be undertaken along with the enough theoretical knowledge of cultural politics.