Korean Studies, Volume 25, No. 2. ©2002 by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved. The Parliament of Histories: New Religions, Collective Historiography, and the Nation Boudewijn Walraven Historiography is a social process, and professional historians are not the only ones to create images of the past. Therefore an understanding of what history means within a particular society requires an examination of the views of nonprofessional contributors to the historical debate. In this article, the problem of collective historical representation and identity construction at different levels of social organization is mainly illustrated with the recent historiography of religious groups that base themselves on the teachings of Chýngsan Kang Il-sun (1871–1909). In the conclusions, it is argued that a focus on national history, shared by such groups, is not necessarily repressive but offers them an opportunity to carve out a collective identity. [History] does not simply equal the past. The past is a notion of time, and inasmuch as any general concept is linked to it, it is one of chaos. History, by contrast, is a product of the mind—the intelligible representation that generation after generation and civilization after civilization have to create, ever anew, out of the rough chunks of the past visible to their eyes—the noble representation the forms and lines of which are determined by the unquenchable thirst for truth and knowledge, which in this life never finds the fountainhead. —Johannes Huizinga 1 This quotation from a posthumously published lecture by the author of The Waning of the Middle Ages and Homo Ludens drives home the fact that it does not take a postmodernist to believe that history, in the sense of the representa- tion of the past, is socially constructed. Few historians these days, whether they are absolute relativists or are convinced that some kind of truth may be established, will deny that history is part of the cultural edifice societies create. Yet, the implications of this view deserve more attention than they usually receive. In this article, the idea of historiography as a social activity, involving as a consequence attempts by social groups to formulate their own identity