Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan: Elite Graffiti in Premodern Korea by Maya K. H. Stiller (review)

Abstract

Carving Status at Kŭmgangsan is the fruit of Maya Stiller’s dedicated fieldwork at Kŭmgangsan 金剛山, traditionally believed to be the most beautiful site on the Korean Peninsula, but inaccessible to South Koreans due to its location in North Korea. Stiller surveyed the entire mountain twice, photographing more than five thousand carved inscriptions and identifying the majority of carved autographs by cross-referencing a variety of written documentation in order to map the location and time when the carvings were made. She had originally intended to examine Buddhist remains at and religious pilgrimages to Kŭmgangsan. However, the rock carvings she found throughout the mountain and the inscription a scholar left beside a statue of Buddha which was popular with Chosŏn Confucian scholars (p. 53–57) led her to change her focus to the secular motivations of late Chosŏn travelers to Kŭmgangsan. Drawing on Michel Foucault and Edward Soja, she suggests in the introduction that Kŭmgangsan may have been “a heterotopia” or a “third place” during the premodern period of Korea, serving as a counter-place to the class-controlled society of Chosŏn. She also applies Pierre Nora’s concept of “memory site” to the places at Kŭmgangsan where travelers left their autographic inscriptions.1 Stiller investigates how much a trip to Kŭmgangsan cost and how such trips were financed. According to her analysis, the cost was one-third of what it would take to feed a family for a year (p. 22), and the successful completion of such a costly trip depended on a traveler’s social status. This focus on money, social class, and individual desire for selfexpression, together with insights into material culture, are remarkable in that it overcomes the limitations of previous research which has generally not looked at Kŭmgangsan from this perspective. This is due to the fact that Kŭmgangsan took on a sacredness under Japanese colonial rule in the early twentieth century, as shown in Ode to Kŭmgang (Kŭmgang yech’an, 金剛 禮讚) by Ch’oe Namsŏn (1924) and many paintings of Kŭmgang-san by Ko Huidong during 1930s and it has since become a special, forbidden place in the collective South Korean