A Conceptual History of ‘Chue-Yuk-In’: Critical Interpretation of Its Cultural Meanings as the Ideal Type of the National Sporting Citizen (1945-1961)

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this study was to explore cultural meanings of the concept of ‘Che-Yuk-In’ through a critical examination of how it was described, portrayed, and represented in the narratives of the mainstream newspapers in the early days of the nation(1945-1961).Methods As for the data collection and method, a total of 338 articles were collected by searching of "Che-Yuk-In" through the database provided by the Naver News Library. Sorting out them with the point of whether the concept simply denotes the number of players or the majority of athletes, for example, we select 140 column-type articles and analyzed how it serves as a linguistic element and what discourses were involved in the narratives.Results Our argument is twofold: 1) the concept of ‘Che-Yuk-In’ is a kind of self-representative terminology with which a particular group of people, who call themselves ‘Che-Yuk-In’, construct their collective identity into a particular type of the idealized subject, so-called sporting citizen, and 2) this construction consists of two functions: one is to share the emotion of pride by celebrating success and achievements of the sporting figures, and the other is to collectively reflect shame by criticizing negative incidents and controversies such as corruption, factional disputes, violent behaviors, which broke in the sporting practices. Conclusions With a brief summary, this paper concludes with some suggestions for future studies, in terms of how the shameful past should be embraced within the field of Korean sport history, and why a conceptual history of the ‘Che-Yuk-In’ might need to be further expanded.