The passing-down of traditional knowledge regarding namuls belonged to the local people like illiterate women and poor people. But there are some good reference books on them compiled by Silhak (實學) scholars, who were educated in confucian idealism but longing for practical knowledge in order to better support people’s lives. This paper focuses on how Korean namuls were recognized, systemized and categorized by Seo, Yougu (徐有?, 1764~1845), one of the most productive Silhak writers and the author of Imwon Gyeongjeji (Economy of Farm life 임원경제지) consisting of 113 volumes and 16 subtitles, which was often called the most representative Korean Encyclopedia in early 19th century.
Especially two subtitles of the Book, Gwanhyuji (Cultivating and Gathering Vegetables 관휴지) and Injeji (Curing and Medicinal Ways 인제지) include respectively precious materials for edible plants and famine foods from old Chinese, Japanese and Korean literatures. In Seo’s work, those edible and medicinal plants were not sorted under the phylum ‘namul’, for the grouping of ‘namul’ was part of folk culture. His fieldwork was carried out not in nature but in hundreds of old literatures, since he was educated as a strict philologian, not as a folklorist. In both subtitles Gwanhyuji and Injeji, over 240 species of namuls were classified according to the way of cultivating, gathering, their habitats, edible parts of plants like buds, sprouts, young leaves, stems, roots, flowers and fruits etc.
Comparing the Seo’s inventory of Korean namuls with Chinese ones, taxonomy of ‘namuls’ were set up as a new phylum based on traditional folk knowledge, and in the process, some namuls like Dureup(두릅), Cheenamul(취나물) and Mowee (머위) were found to be exclusively registered in Korean books, i.e. they were indigenous Korean namuls. In that sense the tracing and newly defining of categorizing work on namuls by Seo can bring a significant insight to Ethnobotany, developed as an interdisciplinary subject relatively recently in Europe, and not widely known in Korea yet. It is noticeable that the inventory of Korean namuls for famine relief from Injeji is filled with insights not only for overcoming hard hungry times, but more significantly of the long history of human food from hunter-gatherer ancestors, as food anthropologists mentioned, that every food was originally famine food.
Since the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, the UN has proposed an international agreement to share the benefits arising from the utilization of biological resources in a fair and equitable way in order to overcome the ecological crisis of our age, especially climate change and the danger of increasing famine. It was adopted by the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity at its 10th meeting in Nagoya 2010, and on the domestic level many governments have begun to set up a foundation for digital preservation of traditional knowledge on indigenous species and regarding the use of the intellectual property.
Now seems to be the proper time that the Korean namul culture and history has to be researched and made known with the interdisciplinary methodology and comparative study of the 21st century on behalf of Gwanhyuji and Injeji, a really precious material for Korean traditional knowledge on namuls. This, to respond with the wider Eurasian perspective, to the attempt of Adam Maurizio when he wrote the History of our food plants in 1927.