What question did this study set out to answer?

The essay explores how dispersed memorials, particularly pyoseok, address the challenges of remembering history in a rapidly changing urban landscape.

July 5, 2026

Anchoring Memory in a City of Flux: Pyoseok , Han , and Teo in Seoul’s Dispersed Memorial Landscape

Key Points

The essay explores how dispersed memorials, particularly pyoseok, address the challenges of remembering history in a rapidly changing urban landscape.
Analyzed the concept of pyoseok in the context of Seoul's urban transformation.
Draws on Korean cultural concepts of han and teo to understand lived experiences.
Uses rhetorical scholarship to examine public memory in a non-Western context.
Pyoseok encourages remembering places instead of relying on permanent monuments.
Demonstrates how the loss of historical sites is compensated through decentralized markers.
Frames Seoul's material volatility as rhetorically acceptable, thus aiding in public memory.

Abstract

Places of memory have been widely studied, yet dispersed memorials outside Western contexts remain underexplored. In South Korea—a postcolonial, postwar nation marked by rapid development—accelerated urban transformation and conflicted attitudes toward modern history complicate the commemoration of historical places. This essay examines how these challenges are overcome through pyoseok, a city-led, decentralized project of installed stone markers where material traces of the past have disappeared. Drawing on the Korean concepts of han and teo, the essay uses lived experience to argue that pyoseok invite Koreans to remember places rather than securing permanent monuments. In doing so, pyoseok both compensate for the loss of historical sites and render Seoul’s material volatility rhetorically acceptable. The study contributes to rhetorical scholarship on public memory by foregrounding a non-Western dispersed memorial practice and calling for more culturally and globally attentive analyses of memorial rhetoric.

AI से पूछें

Bookmark