The Confucian Transformation of Korea: A Study of Society and Ideology (review)

210BOOK REVIEWS Europe designed to produce religious piety and strengthen an ecclesiastical authority, and in Aztec songs in Mesoamerica designed to encourage a martial spirit and strengthen the prestige of the warrior caste. And, ironically , it neglects the insights that Cumings himself has to offer on the way media, television included, are impious not only through their themes but also through their very forms. Where there is an occasional weakness in Cumings's analysis, it seems to stem from the same mechanism he describes in his indictment of the camera's pseudo-objectivity, that is, from cropping. He sometimes pays attention to only part of the contributions of critical theorists. For example, he severely crops Walter Benjamin's celebrated essay on the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction, emphasizing only Benjamin's discussion of what is lost and wholly neglecting Benjamin's more sanguine views on the possibilities for critical consciousness that repetition provides. In general, however, War and Television is an important contribution to war and media studies. By placing the Korean War back in focus, particularly in the light of more recent geostrategic, deadly encounters and their legitimations, Cumings opens up a story that has been largely forgotten or represented only superficially within simplistic, cold-war narratives. Cumings repoliticizes the Korean War in the process of more generally politicizing the war-television nexus, and although there are a lot of gratuitous anecdotal and biographical asides, the main analytic narrative is well sustained. Michael J. Shapiro University of Hawai'i at Mänoa The Confucian Transformation ofKorea: A Study ofSociety and Ideology, by Martina Deuchler. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series, no. 36. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1992. $35.00. For some time now, scholars have been discussing the differences between Koryö and Chosön society, focusing on such aspects as inheritance practices , family structure, and marriage rites. However, these studies have been done in piecemeal fashion, without any sort of systematic understanding of the nature of their point of departure, Koryö society. They thus have lacked any real attempt to explain the process through which Korean society was transformed. Martina Deuchler has done us the inestimable BOOK REVIEWS211 favor of providing a comprehensive treatment of the issue of social change between Koryö and Chosön that remedies these shortcomings. She begins with a rigorous analysis of the extant evidence on the nature of Koryö society and provides a coherent explanation of the forces driving the transformation of Korean society that attributes the primary role to the ideals and values of the Neo-Confucianism that was introduced into Korea during the late Koryö period. In the process, she also gives us valuable insight into the nature of the cultural importation and adaptation that has played such an important role in shaping Korean society and culture throughout history. Deuchler tells us in her introduction that she seeks to test two hypotheses . One is that society in the second half of the Chosön dynasty was very unlike Koryö society, and that the difference resulted from the transformation of society during the transition from Koryö to Chosön. The other hypothesis is that the transformation was initiated and directed not by social and political factors, but by Neo-Confucianism, which "inspired a new class of Korean scholar-officials" to overthrow the Koryö and provided them with a vision and guidelines for a new social order. She then proceeds to make her case in a series of six chapters. The first chapter, which deals with Koryö society, is very informative . Deuchler points out that we can easily be misled about the nature of Koryö society by the tendency of both Koryö contemporaries and later writers to impose Chinese concepts and terminology on social institutions and practices that were actually very different from those of either China or later Korea. She demonstrates that the Koryö kinship group traced descent through both male and female lines, that its primary orientation was horizontal, with close relations existing between collateral groups, and that women enjoyed relatively high status that included inheritance rights and the freedom to divorce and remarry without stigma. She does note an early tendency toward patrilineal bias during...