Reviews

In keeping with his focus on politics and culture, Pratt gives plenty of space to discussion of the factionalism of the Choson literati and the ideas of the sirhak Confucian reformers pp. 12931, 1445, 16872), but relatively little to the changing social structures of Choson society pp. 1545), and still less to the major economic developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that are now becoming much better understood by Korean historians. In the first, Preserving Korean Music, Howard begins with a historical overview of the infinitely interesting Korean preservation system, paying special attention to music-based traditions found under the designation of ``intangible cultural properties''. Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia results from a trend in the scholarship on this part of the Muslim world that began gaining momentum in the mid-1980s. Because of its location, on the geographical periphery of the Islamicate, there had been a tendency to regard Islam as a ``thin veneer'', as van Leur had characterized it, over much older and supposedly more profound cultural deposits originating from the Indian subcontinent. [...]there was even earlier pioneering work available.