TY - BOOK ID - 136929939 TI - Establishing a pluralist society in medieval Korea, 918-1170 PY - 2010 SN - 1282786873 9786612786877 9004190120 9789004190122 9789004183254 9004183256 PB - Leiden Boston Brill DB - UniCat KW - National characteristics, Korean. KW - Korea KW - History KW - Social conditions KW - Intellectual life KW - Civilization KW - National characteristics, Korean UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:136929939 AB - This book offers no less than a radically different view of the Koryŏ state. Until now scholarship failed to recognize the complicated historical descent, byzantine international relations and multiple incommensurable worldviews of the early Korean Koryŏ state (918-1170). Instead, it subjected these to reductionist categories favouring reified particulars over broader views. Asking how Koryŏ meaningfully dealt with its environment, Remco Breuker rejects the reduction of Koryŏ intellectual abundance to analytical categories, and emphasizes the functional importance of Koryŏ’s pluralism in allowing the notion that realities were scattered, inconsistent and plural. Here is a convincing argument that Koryŏ’s pluralism decisively contributed to the formation of a region-transcending communal identity that enabled Koryŏ to engage in a civilizational competition with neighbouring Chinese and Manchurian states, while maintaining a dynamic but stable society domestically. ER -