By Chung Ah-young
Staff reporter
As multiculturalism spreads across the world, and a growing number of immigrants move to Korea, what does ethnic identity mean?
W. Richard West Jr., founding director and director emeritus of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), said Korea has a chance to deal with the issue positively.
“I think it’s an opportunity for Korea to address this general subject of multiculturalism in a kind of new, imaginative and simple way. I think that multiculturalism is something virtually all countries will face in one form or another,” West said in an interview with The Korea Times.
He visited Korea to attend the symposium of international ethnology museum directors organized by the National Folk Museum of Korea that was held on Monday.
The American director pointed out that museums are in a unique and strong position to serve as social and cultural institutions that can help countries work through a set of issues.
“This is definitely true, because museums here in Korea are already interpreters and re-presenters of cultural identity and national identity of Korea historically, and they are at present times, to help Korea work through and discuss and debate and even address the controversy that arises out of multiculturalism as Korea’s own national cultural identity begins to change and become more multicultural,” he said.
Concerning Korea’s recent move to establishing a national ethnological and anthropological museum, he suggested that it should serve as a cultural mediator as for discussions and conversation.
West became the founding director of the NMAI as the first native American Indian director of the museum of its kind in 1990 and retired in 2007.
He attempted to introduce a unique museum policy by drawing active participation from the native community to the institution as a true living center.
From his experiences of establishing the museum identity from scratch, West advised that Korea doesn’t necessarily need to copy other models and should develop its own.
West put more emphasis on actively engaging the native people through a series of consultations at the planning stages stressing that the process of how they built the National Museum of American Indian was almost as important as its substance.
“The process literally went to the native communities. One of the things they said to us is ‘Talk about our experience as continuum. Do not treat us as some kind of ethnographic and ethnological remnants. But we are a dynamic and continuing set of cultures,’” he said.
West said that any good ethnological or anthropological museum these days should be a living institution, being interrelated through time and changing with the times. Then it is able to connect with national cultural experiences of Korea with the present.
It is also crucial to not just educate visitors but also be an institution of a living culture that uses resources and expertise as well as its cultural assets in the form of collections that help support a cultural future, he said.
“If a museum actually becomes a community institution or a forum for discussion or debate on the issues, then it becomes a civic place not just a cultural destination,” he said.
The director said that for both native Americans and Asian societies, both past and present, there is a fusion of tangible heritage and intangible heritage that is very important.
“You will not always find that in European museums. They sometimes exclude intangible heritage that surrounds the objects. The (future) national museum of ethnology or anthropology here is to be a living experience that has to honor both the intangible and tangible heritage of Korea,” he said.