Abstract
This article explores the changing values of heritage in an era saturated by an excess of media coverage in various settings and also threatened by either natural or manmade disasters that constantly take place around the world. In doing so, we focus on discussing one specific case: the debate surrounding the identification of Sungnyemun as the number one national treasure in South Korea. Sungnyemun, which was first constructed in 1396 as the south gate of the walled city Seoul, is the country’s most acknowledged cultural heritage that is supposed to represent the national identity in the most authentic way, but its value was suddenly questioned through a nationwide debate after an unexpected fire. While the debate has been silenced after its ostensibly successful restoration conducted by the Cultural Heritage Administration in 2013, this article argues that the incident is a prime example illustrating how the once venerated heritage is reassembled through an entanglement of various agents and their affective engagements. Methodologically speaking, this article aims to read Sungnyemun in reference to the growing scholarship of actor-network theory (ANT) and the studies of heritage in the post-disaster era through which to explore what heritage means to us at the present time. Our synchronic approach to Sungnyemun encourages us to investigate how the once-stable monument becomes a field where material interventions and affective engagements of various agents release its public meanings in new ways.
Highlights
In this article, we explore how heritage becomes entangled with disasters and brings forth new layers of meaning that are not so much derived from a set of preestablished criteria but rather emerge through an assemblage of both human and nonhuman agents, material and immaterial forces and intensities
Reading heritage through actor-network theory (ANT) is not completely new in itself given its widespread impacts, we claim that what makes Sungnyemun a relevant case of an actor-networked field as entangled with the post-disaster moods is evidenced at least by the following four aspects: (1) the porosity and incompleteness of heritage administration that could provoke public debates; (2) a nationalist sentiment that is not unrelated to Korea’s colonial and postcolonial past and beyond; (3) the impermanence of heritage caused by its fragile materiality; and (4) the speed and intensity of social networking services generating senses of community in both online and offline spaces
By revisiting what had happened around the incident, not just tracing back its material reconstruction processes but instead excavating a set of debates and issues which might have changed its public meanings in new ways, we argue that the 2008 arson is not so much a historical past as a vibrant issue that could still be actualized according to ideas and affects that might be derived from multiple spatiotemporal dimensions
Summary
We explore how heritage becomes entangled with disasters and brings forth new layers of meaning that are not so much derived from a set of preestablished criteria but rather emerge through an assemblage of both human and nonhuman agents, material and immaterial forces and intensities. The primary materials that we analyze include a set of debates dealing with its identification as national treasure and related images taken before, during and after the fire This investigation enables us to examine how heritage damaged by disasters, either natural or manmade, could bring forth senses of community which encourage us to rethink the values of heritage from multiple perspectives in resonance to changing worldly atmospheres and technicalities. What is highlighted in such an “expanded assemblage of commemoration efforts”, as Rico nicely described it, is “affective atmospheres” as Palu Cloke and David Conradson address on a similar occasion, a series of earthquakes that took place in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, from 2010 to 2011 They focus on discussing how artists and other members of the community affectively engage with each other in order to generate shared senses of being together, which would challenge those who tend to consider post-disaster recovery as a “material and measurable” project [9]. We go further by attempting to interpret Sungnyemun through a comparative analysis of two crucial survey reports and associated photographs illustrating the structure before, during, and after the 2008 incident, which enables us to explore how the seemingly stable monument put on a pedestal could open up meanings that are fundamentally generative and interactive
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