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Establishing a Pluralist Society in Medieval Korea, 918-1170
History, Ideology, and Identity in the KoryÅ Dynasty
Series: - Brill's Korean Studies Library, Volume: 1
Author:
This book offers no less than a radically different view of the KoryÅ state. Until now scholarship failed to recognize the complicated historical descent, byzantine international relations and multiple incommensurable worldviews of the early Korean KoryÅ state (918-1170). Instead, it subjected these to reductionist categories favouring reified particulars over broader views. Asking how KoryÅ meaningfully dealt with its environment, Remco Breuker rejects the reduction of KoryÅ intellectual abundance to analytical categories, and emphasizes the functional importance of KoryÅâs pluralism in allowing the notion that realities were scattered, inconsistent and plural.
Here is a convincing argument that KoryÅâs pluralism decisively contributed to the formation of a region-transcending communal identity that enabled KoryÅ to engage in a civilizational competition with neighbouring Chinese and Manchurian states, while maintaining a dynamic but stable society domestically.
Here is a convincing argument that KoryÅâs pluralism decisively contributed to the formation of a region-transcending communal identity that enabled KoryÅ to engage in a civilizational competition with neighbouring Chinese and Manchurian states, while maintaining a dynamic but stable society domestically.
Remco E. Breuker, Ph.D. (2006) in Korean History, Leiden University, works on medieval Korean and Northeast Asian history and historiography. He has published extensively on KoryÅ history including Forging the Truth: Creative Deception and National Identity in Medieval Korea (2009).
'The importance of this outstanding work goes well beyond reshaping our understanding of KoryÅ. Indeed, KoryÅâs way of understanding and living within the world as analyzed by Breuker would become an object of fear during the subsequent ChosÅn (1392-1910) dynasty. Those fearsâand the way they came to be expressedâprovide much additional evidence for Breukerâs thesis on KoryÅâs pluralism. They also point to a profound historical irony. In the minds of the ChosÅn elite, MyochâÅng was synonymous with political disorder. Yet in a fundamental sense, the ChosÅn eliteâs outlook had far more in common with MyochâÅngâs monism than with Kim Pusikâs pluralism. Among many other things, Breuker illuminates the origins of that remarkable contradiction.'
Gregory Evon, University of New South Wales, The Review of Korean Studies 16:2 (2013)
Gregory Evon, University of New South Wales, The Review of Korean Studies 16:2 (2013)
All those interested in Korean history, intellectual history, identity formation, pluralism, region-transcending communities, nation formation and the history of international relations in East Asia, as well as medievalists and philologists.