1960~70년대 마을문고운동의 전개와 농민의 자율성

Abstract

Agricultural areas of the 1960s in Korea have been perceived for a long time as a region where the time just stood still. It has also been a longstanding belief that such stagnance was overcome and faded away only after the government-led Saemaueul Movement was initiated and actively promoted by the regime in the 1970s. Quite a few recent studies, however, highlighted the fact that autonomous efforts for progress did take place in agricultural regions during the 1960s, and among those examples, a Book-reading Movement which was also called the “Village Library Movement” is particularly worth mentioning. This movement continued in Korean agricultural towns in the 1960s and ‘70s, and most importantly, such local voluntary activities reveal to us the autonomous nature of the peasant activities of the time.<BR> The Village Library Movement was launched as a civilian movement in 1961, and tried to organize all the existing book-reading activities by the peasants into a single grand movement. Peasants in various regions all autonomously operated book-reading communities of and on their own, officially under the banner of the Village Library Movement, and enhanced their own autonomous activities, by purchasing books the residents in their respective regions wanted to read and enjoy. The essence of this movement, the voluntary participation and autonomous nature of it, continued into the 1970s even when the movement was overtaken by the government and proceeded as a government-led project.<BR> Although the program came to serve as a portal through which books that the government felt necessary for the peasants’ education would flow into agricultural regions, peasants who continued to operate the book-reading communities did not give up their autonomous attitudes. The original ideals of the Village Library Movement was indeed compromised, but book-reading communities continued with many peasants’ participation, and some of them financially benefitted from the Saemaeul Movement, while some others inspired by the movement even joined anti-government peasant activities. We can see the voluntary and autonomous attitudes of the peasants cultivated through such activities involving book-reading communities actually enabled the peasants to set goals of their own for themselves, and to join the society in diverse capacities and roles.