B.C.A. Walraven appointed

NEW CHAIR FOR KOREAN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE.

Dr. B.C.A. Walraven has recently been appointed as the first full
professor in Korean language and culture. Formerly, professor F.
Vos and his successor Professor W.J. Boot were nominated as
professor of Japanese and Korean Studies, but from now on a
separate chair will be devoted to the study of Korean language
and culture.

By Paul Wijsman

Dutch interest in Korea dates back a long time. In 1668 the
Journal of Hendrik Hamel, who had lived in Korea for thirteen
years with 15 other sailors after their ship was wrecked off the
coast of Cheju Island was published in Rotterdam.  The Journal
was the first substantial source of information about Korea, its
people, and culture. 
In the twenties of the nineteenth century, Philipp Franz von
Siebold, the German physician in Dutch service, also gathered
information about Korea during his stay in Japan. In Siebold's
'Nippon: Archiv zur Beschreibung von Japan', the main chapters
devoted to Korea were written by his assistant Dr. Johann Joseph
Hoffmann, who eventually became the first professor of Japanese
at Leiden University, from 1856 until his death in 1878.
Dr. Johannes Rahder who occupied the chair of Japanese from 1931
until 1946 made an extensive study of old, middle and modern
Korean for his comparative linguistic studies. His successor Dr.
Frits Vos became lecturer in Japanese in 1946, and in 1947
introduced courses in Korean language and history for the first
time in the history of Leiden University. In 1958 he was
nominated a full professor of Japanese and Korean at this
university (the first full professorship of Korean in Western
Europe). One of professor Vos' students, Dr. W.J. Boot, succeeded
him in 1985 as professor of Japanese and Korean. Another student
of Professor Vos, Dr. Boudewijn Walraven, has now been appointed
full professor of Korean. 
B.C.A. Walraven was born in New York in 1947. After taking a
first degree in Japanese at Leiden University, he studied Korean
language and literature there. From 1973 to 1975 he attended
Seoul National University studying Korean language, history, and
cultural anthropology. From 1976 onwards he taught Korean
language and culture at Leiden University. He obtained his Ph.D.
degree in 1985 with the dissertation 'Muga: the songs of Korean
shamanism' (recently reissued under the title 'Songs of the
Shaman: The Ritual Chants of the Korean Mudang'). He has
published articles about several aspects of Korean shamanism in
the present and the past and about Korean traditional literature.
A recent essay, "Confucians and Restless Spirits" in 'Control and
Accommodation in Early Modern East Asia: Essays in Honour of Erik
Zrcher' (Leiden, 1993), deals with a particular Confucian
ritual, which superficially seems to resemble shamanic rituals.
Prof. Walraven also published translations into Dutch of
traditional Korean stories in De Redder der Armen (Amsterdam,
1980).
Walraven is president of the Netherlands-Korea Association and
vice-president of the Association for Korean Studies in Europe
(AKSE).

YOU ARE APPOINTED PROFESSOR OF KOREAN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. WHAT
IS THE RANGE OF "CULTURE" IN THIS APPOINTMENT?

I interpret it as meaning the society and culture of Korea in the
broadest sense. Although obviously I will not be able to study
all these aspects myself, I hope that eventually the department
will develop in such a way that a wide range of subjects will be
covered, including, for example, subjects like anthropology or
law.

WHAT IS YOUR OWN FIELD OF STUDY?

I am interested in the place of religion, in particular popular
religion, in society. I study the question, for instance, of how
shamanism is related to Confucianism, the ideology or religion
of the elite. Recently I have focused my research on the
transitional period of the nineteenth and early twentieth
century. I want to show that popular religion, which is often
supposed to be rather static, constantly changes, adapting to
circumstances. 
In the near future I will cooperate with a research team of the
CNRS in Paris which is engaged in the study of the city of Seoul,
examining the religious aspects of the city in the period with
which I am concerned.
Another current interest of mine is the issue of gender in Korean
shaman songs. So far I have only studied the texts, but I intend
to do field work to find out how the audiences of the shaman
rituals, consisting mostly of women, listen to the songs of the
shamans. How do the listeners interpret these songs? What is the
crucial point for them? I raised these questions in my thesis,
but it was focused on more elementary questions: what are the
texts, where do they come from? I could not deal properly with
the concrete meaning of a text in one particular ritual.

HOW DO YOU REGARD THE DEVELOPMENT OF KOREAN STUDIES AS AN
INDEPENDENT FIELD?

This is, of course, a welcome and long overdue development. In
the early days of Korean Studies many researchers occupied
themselves with Korea as well as with China or Japan. The new
generation of Korean scholars fully concentrate on Korea, and
they have to because the field has developed in such a way that
one cannot afford to divide one's attention too much. On the
other hand there is the danger now that an exclusive
concentration on Korea results in a lack of perspective. If you
examine Korea in a wider, comparative, perspective, it will be
easier to understand what is typically Korean. Sometimes it may
seem that certain things in Korea looked very similar to what was
happening in China, but if you take a closer look it turns out
there are considerable differences. For this reason I would like
to encourage research which places Korea within the context of
East Asia.

WITHIN THE FIELDS OF SINOLOGY OR JAPANOLOGY ONE CAN SEE A
TENDENCY TOWARDS INCREASING SPECIALIZATION AND GREATER ATTENTION
TO MODERN TOPICS, SUCH AS THE ECONOMY OF CHINA OR LAW IN JAPAN.
IN THE PAST SCHOLARS MAINLY OCCUPIED THEMSELVES WITH LITERATURE,
HISTORY AND RELIGION. WHAT IS THE SITUATION IN THE KOREAN
STUDIES?

You see the same trend in Korean Studies, but so far somewhat
less than in Japanology or Sinology, mainly because there are
fewer researchers involved. In Leiden the department is still
small and for that reason it is impossible to have the same
number of specializations as the Chinese or Japanese departments,
but I hope that we will manage to create a department where
so-called traditional and modern aspects of Korea receive equal
attention. 
Students nowadays ask for a bigger variety of subjects in the
course of their study. To get a job later it it is important for
them to do more than language acquisition and to obtain
specialized knowledge of certain aspects of Korean society and
culture, difficult as this may be within the four years of the
curriculum. At this moment there is a trend among my students to
combine the study of law with Korean.

DOES THE KOREAN GOVERNMENT ACTIVELY SUPPORT KOREAN STUDIES?

Since 1977 the Association for Korean Studies in Europe has
received support from Korea to organize conferences and
workshops. Organizations like the Korean Research Foundation and
the Korea Foundation directly support our department by sending
books and by financing the appointment of staff members to assist
in the teaching and develop teaching materials. Moreover
researchers and students can apply for a fellowship to these
foundations. There are also exchange programmes between Leiden
University and the Academy of Korean Studies and Yonsei
University.

DO YOU FORESEE A GROWTH IN NUMBER OF STUDENTS?

Not to the same extent as in the Japanese department ten years
ago when every year more than a hundred students enrolled. The
simple reason is that the total number of students has been
decreasing for the last couple of years. But as the awareness of
the importance of Korea is increasing, the number of students of
Korean has the potential to grow. We also try to make our Korean
Studies curriculum more efficient and attractive. Because of my
appointment there is a vacancy at present for my old position.
We hope to find a new staff member soon as possible, who will add
to the variety of research done within the department and provide
the students with more options for specialization.

(For the part about the history of Korean studies the author
gratefully used the article "Korean studies in the Netherlands"
by Frits Vos in 'Papers of the 1st International Conference on
Korean Studies', 1979.)