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Culture and State in Late Chosen Korea. Edited by JAHYUN KIM HABOUSH and MARTINA DEUCHLER. Harvard East Asian Monographs, 182; Harvard-- Hallym Series on Korean Studies. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999. xii, 304 pp. $40.00 (cloth).
English language works on the understudied history of the late Choson dynasty are always welcome-especially when they include a fine array of thought-provoking essays as collected in this volume by JaHyun Kim Haboush and Martina Deuchler. As the title suggests, these essays are about culture and the state. Yet as the editors explain more fully in their introduction, the essays revolve around the question of "how intellectual and religious communities negotiated and adjusted their ideologies and practices in the late Chosen period" (2).
This line of inquiry is carried out in the first three essays-by Yong-ho Ch'oe on private academies, by Haboush on royal mourning ritual controversies, and by Deuchler on three scholars branded as "despoilers of the Way"-through an exploration of the formation and bounds of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy. Steering away from the common assumption that this orthodoxy was static, each of the authors provides case studies that demonstrate how orthodoxy was in fact historically contingent, subject to the vagaries of intellectual trends, political battles, and changes in the broader East Asian political realm. Ch'oe traces the interactions between various academies (sowon) and the state to show how, despite their mutual vision of a NeoConfucian social order, their understanding diverged over what he calls the public versus private role of scholarship. By...