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The Modern View of Death and the Future of the Longevity Belt along Mt. Jirisan Region

So, Byung-Chul 1

1순천대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

On June, 2003, the four local governments in Mt. Jirisan region(Gurye, Gokseong, Sunchang, Damyang) organized a longevity belt jointly, and have so far attracted tourists from all over the country, holding the several longevity-related events including the ‘Centenarian Festival’ every year. However, because of their one-sided emphasis on the blessedness of longevity, the significance of the reflective discourses on death as its necessary end has been often forgotten by their local people. At first glance, this lacking interest in death seems to have originated in the local administration’s commercial branding of longevity villages for the promotion of ‘longevity industry.’ But we cannot deny that, on the hidden side of this phenomenon, the modern prevailing fear of death exists. In this essay I examined this fear of death as a problem to be solved in the following order. First, I critically analyzed our anxiety about the ‘negativity of death’ as the origin of that fear, and the resultant ‘separation of life and death’ and ‘tabooing of death.’ Second, I defined and analyzed the ‘positivity of death’ countervailing that ‘negativity of death’ as the ‘earthly immortality of human life’, roughly dividing it into the ‘historical immortality’ and the ‘natural immortality.’ Third, I tried to find the ways how the local administration of the longevity belt along Mt. Jirisan region could contribute to strengthen the ties between the old and young members of local communities on the basis of a balanced view of the negativity and positivity of death, and proposed two ways here, roughly dividing them into the activation of ‘death education’ and the development of ‘intergenerational empathy program.’ If those ways are practiced successfully, the local people inhabiting the longevity belt would come to be able to applaud the blessedness of healthy longevity on the basis of awareness of the harmony of life and death without feeling any pathological fear of death. So the death previously exiled from life would be again called into the finite life compatible with it calmly, and the life previously never acquainted with death would be reunited with the death as the gateway to earthly immortality without fear.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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