Social Construction of “Baekdudaegan”: Nationalism, Environmentalism, and the Re-imagination of Landscape

This study analyzes the process through which “Baekdudaegan” was socially constructed and established as a legitimate geographical reality in modern Korea by the early 21th Century. Baekdudaegan is a premodern Korean concept of a continuous mountain range, originating from Mt. Baekdu. While modern geography, introduced during the Japanese colonial era by geologists like Koto Bunjiro, differentiated mountain ranges based on geological structures, Baekdudaegan perceives mountains as parts of a continuous network that stretches throughout the Korean Peninsula. Its early notion is found in Late-Joseon literatures, such as Sangyeongpyo Chart of the Mountain Ranges in Korea, which described all mountain peaks in the Peninsula as the offsprings of Mt. Baekdu.The paper traces how this forgotten concept was revived—or, reinvented—in the 1980s by mountaineers and map enthusiasts, as a counter-narrative to modern geography, which they stigmatized as being “Japanese.” It also demonstrates that the popularization of Baekdudaegan was more than a scientific debate, being a social phenomenon driven by various factors including partial democratization, rising nationalism, the hiking boom, and the environmental movement. These diverse social forces formed an “alliance” supporting Baekdudaegan, claiming that the geological discontinuity of the mountain ranges as a “severed national spirit” that needed restoration. The growing social pressure eventually led to the enactment of the “Act on Protection of Baekdudaegan Area” in 2003, granting the concept legal status despite skepticism from academic geographers.Consequently, the study argues that Baekdudaegan has become a legitimate entity through “social construction”, resulting in a dual knowledge system where the cultural-ecological framework of Baekdudaegan coexists with the geological-scientific framework of mountain ranges in contemporary Korea.