Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion

Laurel Kendall

Published by University of Hawaii Press 2009

Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF

South Korean Popular Religion in Motion

Laurel Kendall

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780824860899

Overview
Contents

About this book

Thirty years ago, anthropologist Laurel Kendall did intensive fieldwork among South Korea’s (mostly female) shamans and their clients as a reflection of village women’s lives. In the intervening decades, South Korea experienced an unprecedented economic, social, political, and material transformation and Korean villages all but disappeared. And the shamans? Kendall attests that they not only persist but are very much a part of South Korean modernity.

This enlightening and entertaining study of contemporary Korean shamanism makes the case for the dynamism of popular religious practice, the creativity of those we call shamans, and the necessity of writing about them in the present tense. Shamans thrive in South Korea’s high-rise cities, working with clients who are largely middle class and technologically sophisticated. Emphasizing the shaman’s work as open and mutable, Kendall describes how gods and ancestors articulate the changing concerns of clients and how the ritual fame of these transactions has itself been transformed by urban sprawl, private cars, and zealous Christian proselytizing.

For most of the last century Korean shamans were reviled as practitioners of antimodern superstition; today they are nostalgically celebrated icons of a vanished rural world. Such superstition and tradition occupy flip sides of modernity’s coin—the one by confuting, the other by obscuring, the beating heart of shamanic practice. Kendall offers a lively account of shamans, who once ministered to the domestic crises of farmers, as they address the anxieties of entrepreneurs whose dreams of wealth are matched by their omnipresent fears of ruin. Money and access to foreign goods provoke moral dilemmas about getting and spending; shamanic rituals express these through the longings of the dead and the playful antics of greedy gods, some of whom have acquired a taste for imported whiskey.

No other book-length study captures the tension between contemporary South Korean life and the contemporary South Korean shamans’ work. Kendall’s familiarity with the country and long association with her subjects permit nuanced comparisons between a 1970s "then" and recent encounters—some with the same shamans and clients—as South Korea moved through the 1990s, endured the Asian Financial Crisis, and entered the new millennium. She approaches her subject through multiple anthropological lenses such that readers interested in religion, ritual performance, healing, gender, landscape, material culture, modernity, and consumption will find much of interest here.

Author / Editor information

Kendall Laurel :

Laurel Kendall is Curator in Charge of Asian Ethnographic Collections in the Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, and also teaches at Columbia University.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
Introduction: Shamanic Nostalgia Publicly Available Download PDF	xvii
1. Shifting Intellectual Terrain: “Superstition” Becomes “Culture” and “Religion” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Memory Horizons: Kut from Two Ethnographic Presents Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	34
3. Initiating Performance: Chini’s Story Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	66
4. The Ambiguities of Becoming: Phony Shamans and What Are Mudang After All? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	102
5. Korean Shamans and the Spirits of Capitalism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	129
6. Of Hungry Ghosts and Other Matters of Consumption Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	154
7. Built Landscapes and Mobile Gods Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	177
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	205
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	221
Index and Glossary Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	245
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	252

Language: English
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 280
Illustrations
- Other: 11 illus.

eBook

Published: September 1, 2009
ISBN: 9780824860899