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Hesselink, Nathan. P'ungmul: South Korean Drumming and Dance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xiii, 271 pp., illustration, appendix, notes, bibliography, glossary, index.
Like many other forms of Korean traditional music, p 'ungmul, Korean folk percussion and dance bands, nearly drowned in Korea's turbulent twentieth century. But in the late twentieth century, more than any other traditional form, the bands were resuscitated and remade into one of the hallmarks of South Korean national culture. Nathan Hesselink's P'ungmul: South Korean Drumming and Dance investigates why this might be, considering p'ungmul, in the 1990s, as a concrete social practice in continual conversation with the national imaginary.
On the surface, and indeed on the cover, Hesselink's book looks like a straightforward culturalist ethnography of a musical genre. To the extent that it is, it is a fine and thorough one, discussing the historical backgrounds, modes of learning, material culture, and social values that outline the world of southwestern Korean folk percussion bands, and providing a useful introduction to the genre.
But P'ungmul aspires to be much more. Culturalist ethnographies have long taken musical culture or genre as the subject of their inquiry and sloughed off the identities of musicians and other players like unnecessary superstructural skin. Hesselink's book, rather, rests on a radical, if quiet, transformation of this form, which puts the characters of his ethnography at the foundation of his study, rather than the genre, abstractly conceived. He persistently asks musicians and scholars, what they think, what they read, what they do and why, and so on, and gives them ample opportunity to answer back. We find extended translated interviews; translations of texts that musician/dancers used in their teaching and in formulating their teaching and performance philosophies; translations of primary source materials like governmental reports on p'ungmul. We hear from performers, teachers, and students across the rich continuum of the p'ungmul world in...