A Study of Local Community Cultural Festivals and the History of Subjectivity : Focusing on the Case of Ulsan Citizen's Representative Festival
Authors:   Asia Cultural Creativity Inst., Kim SeJong 
Published: January 2024

In 2014, the Korean government and parliament enacted the Local Culture Promotion Act, creating a law to systematically promote local culture beyond the existing piecemeal laws on culture and arts. The purpose of the Act is to enhance the cultural enjoyment rights of local residents through voluntary cultural activities, thereby forming a modern community and creating added value for local competitiveness by using local culture as a resource.
Even statutory cultural city policies based on the voluntary and original local culture of local residents have been introduced, but even now, there is a strong movement to try cultural policies and projects as economic value creation tools such as tourism and experience products from the perspective of individual leisure and welfare or art and industry. Either way, it is based on the premise that residents are passive and passive objects from the perspective of the administration or producers and suppliers, which misses the basic point that local culture is a way of life formed and shared by local members, and eventually turns into a state that claims to be a cultural city but goes against it. Not only does it not fulfill the purpose of the Local Culture Promotion Act and local self-governance, but it is also distorted into an adverse effect that harms the possibility that it could have been formed naturally due to unilateral and unreasonable intervention.
In this study, we will analyze local cultural contents in the process of discovering and sharing local unique cultural resources with the community as a mediator as the main actors of local culture at the urban community level, and local festivals, which are the most commonly encountered, as a case study. Currently, most festivals are organized by a few people, such as the local government or an expert or agency working on their behalf, to mobilize residents to participate in the festival. In contrast to this phenomenon, this study examines the evolution of the Ulsan Residents' Representative Festival, which, until relatively recently, was organized by the residents themselves as a community feast. This study will shed light on how the festival, which was organized by the residents of Ulsan, a newly formed region in the modern era, was able to create regional harmony and unique values in the same context as the previous traditional festivals.
This study examines the 57-year evolution of the newly created Ulsan Residents' Representative Festival in the modern era and the changes in the position of residents by system in relation to the management of the festival. By examining how residents have created a relationship with the new area, we hope to draw out what the changes in residents' identity and agency mean for Korean society and the festival today. A community and organization starts with one person, and the character of a community depends on what kind of people it consists of, so as part of communication and integration, we need to think together about how local festivals should be created and why and how residents should be reintroduced as subjects. This is because local cultural contents are rooted in local culture, and this uniqueness is accumulated and shared over time by voluntary actors.