Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion (Hawai'i Studies on Korea)

K O R E A N R E L I G I O N { Continued from front flap } —DON BAKER, University of British Columbia “With the public...

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K O R E A N

R E L I G I O N

{ Continued from front flap }

—DON BAKER, University of British Columbia “With the publication of Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF, Laurel Kendall opens a new chapter in the study not only of shamanism in Korea, but also in many societies undergoing the process of industrialization and modernization. It is distinguished by its rich ethnographic data and novel theoretical approach to the field of Korean popular religion. One of its many merits is that, unlike conventional studies that focus on ‘authentic’ shaman ritual performances, it reveals a wide spectrum of shamans and rituals within a grand system of practice.” — KWANG OK KIM, Seoul National University “Laurel Kendall’s sympathetic and lucid writing consistently leads from vivid narratives to penetrating theoretical insights. In her hands the IMF becomes a brilliant trope for the interplay between magical causality and the bewildering modernity which moulds our lives, as it does the lives of her shamans’ clients.” —PIERS VITEBSKY, University of Cambridge

KENDALL

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.

“Laurel Kendall has written a study of contemporary Korean shamans that is both entertaining and enlightening. Most studies of the topic treat shamans as an anachronistic remnant of the past. Kendall challenges that approach, drawing on several decades of close observation of shamans in action to reveal how shamanism is constantly evolving. It is an important work that will appeal to a wide audience.”

SHAMANS, NOSTALGIAS, AND THE IMF

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.

Jacket photograph: A mansin in the guise of a Spirit Warrior sings a song of self-praise with 10,000-won bills stuck under his/her hat, in the hatband at both cheeks, and as a “beard.” Jacket design: Julie Matsuo-Chun

ISBN 978-0-8248-3343-5

U N I V E R S I T Y OF H AWA I ‘I P R E S S HONOLULU, HAWAI‘I 96822-1888

90000

9 780824 833435 www.uhpress.hawaii.edu

SHAMANS NOSTALGIAS AND THE IMF

SOUTH KOREAN POPULAR RELIGION IN MOTION

LAUREL KENDALL

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 can be found thriving in the high-rise cities of South Korea, 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

{ Continued on back flap }

Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF

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

Laurel Kendall

University of Hawai‘i Press

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Honolulu

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© 2009 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 14 13 12 11 10 09

6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kendall, Laurel. Shamans, nostalgias, and the IMF : South Korean popular religion in motion / Laurel Kendall. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3343-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-0-8248-3398-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Shamanism—Korea. 2. Korea—Religion. 3. Korea— Civilization—Shamanistic influences. I. Title. BL2236.S5K463 2010 299.5'7—dc22 2009014290 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

Designed by University of Hawai‘i Press Production Department Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

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For Namyông Ômma with gratitude and affection

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Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: Shamanic Nostalgia xvii 1. Shifting Intellectual Terrain: “Superstition” Becomes “Culture” and “Religion” 1 2. Memory Horizons: Kut from Two Ethnographic Presents 34 3. Initiating Performance: Chini’s Story 66 4. The Ambiguities of Becoming: Phony Shamans and What Are Mudang After All? 102 5. Korean Shamans and the Spirits of Capitalism 129 6. Of Hungry Ghosts and Other Matters of Consumption 154 7. Built Landscapes and Mobile Gods 177 vii

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Conclusion 205 Notes 207 References 221 Index and Glossary 245

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Preface

In the late 1970s, I lived in a Korean village and wrote about a shaman I call “Yongsu’s Mother” and her colleagues and clients. In the intervening decades South Korea became an urbanized, high-tech, and relatively prosperous place, and all of us got older. This book contains observations on a changing world of shaman practice in the years before and after the turn of the millennium, with some backward glances to that first fieldwork of thirty years ago. In this account, I make a case for shamans inside Korean modernity, not only as the adversarial objects of modernity talk but, more significantly, as doers who engage anxious moments in the present tense through drum song, divine prognostication, and humorous repartee. Most of the shamans in this book are mansin (pronounced “mahnshin”), charismatic shamans, who perform the regional traditions of Seoul, and nearly all of the shamans in this book are women; I use the pronoun “she” with only rare exceptions. I have known some of these women since my first fieldwork in the 1970s, but others are new acquaintances whom I met either through my old contacts or during observations in commercial shaman shrines beginning in the 1990s. Although all of the major rituals that I describe are in the Seoul style (Hanyang kut, Hansông kut), some of my conversation partners practice other traditions. Some are either refugees from North Korea or southerners who were initiated into regional traditions brought south by refugees or earlier migrants. These shamans would also be called mansin, but others, from central Korea or further south, would not. The term “mudang” is more widely known and covers both the mansin and the hereditary tan’gol mudang of Korea’s southern provinces, but “mudang” can be derogatory and I avoided using it in my first book. Besides, it is imprecise. More than thirty years ago, a distinguished Korean folklorist complained that a variety of exorcists, diviners, and other popular religious practitioners who do not perform kut were inappropriately called mudang (Yim 1970). In the present, the question of who is a mudang has only become more muddled. Although the term is now used very broadly, many shamans, including some of my old acquaintances, have taken to ix

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calling each other “posal” (bodhisattva) in the manner of women who tend Buddhist temples, while others resent this seeming equation of their work with that of the tongja posal, diviners who are assisted by dead children. Shaman advocacy organizations sometimes use the term “musogin” (people who do mu, or shaman practices) and sometimes refer to their membership as sindo (believers) or musindo (believers in the ways of mu), approximating a language of organized religions. One articulate young shaman expressed impatience with verbal circumlocutions in a manner that recalled the fullcircling of politically correct language on American university campuses: “A mudang is a mudang.” Thus while I sympathize with those who would enjoin me to “use the term they use themselves,” the matter is not so simple, and “shaman” is no more nor less adequate than any other option, particularly where the speaker’s remarks imply broad generalization, as in “we posal,” “young mudang today,” or simply “us.” I distinguish “gods” (sin [pronounced “shin”], sillyông) from “ancestors” broadly speaking (chosang), as mansin do, and the term “spirits” (sin) for the whole collectivity, as mansin also do (“You’ve come back to learn more about the sin, haven’t you?”). Some Korean Christians have objected to my calling the shamans’ deities “gods,” since they are not ontologically transcendent beings in the Judeo-Christian sense. I agree with S. J. Tambiah’s critique that distinctions between “sovereign deity and manipulable divine being were the product of a specific historical epoch in European history and its particular preoccupations stemming from Judeo-Christian concepts and concerns” (1990, 20–21). This study takes place in the Republic of Korea, or in the Korean language Taehan Min’guk, commonly referred to as South Korea. Liberated from the Japanese Empire at the end of World War II, Korea was divided into northern and southern sectors and occupied by Soviet and US armies, respectively. Cold war politics and the Korean War (1950–1953) froze what was originally intended as a temporary expedient into two distinct polities. Some units of generalization, like “Korean history” or “Korean shamans,” extend beyond the thirty-eighth parallel and require the unmarked term. “Korea” as an idealized nation transcendent of current politics appears, mirage-like, at different points in this account. In the text, Korean names are rendered in Korean order, surname first, unless the reference is to the work of a scholar who has published in English with conventional English name order. I use McCune-Reischauer romanization for Korean terms and names except where another spelling is common (e.g., “Seoul”) or where an author has a preferred spelling known to me (e.g., “Dawnhee Yim”).

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Shamans and other conversation partners appear under pseudonyms with a few exceptions. The shamans who performed Chini’s initiation kut chose to appear under their own names in the video Diana Lee and I made of that ritual, a preference perpetuated in prose. I also make passing reference to the Cultural Treasure shaman, Kim Geum-hwa, and to a few other well-known shamans, citing high-profile public events and publications, including those of their own authorship, but I did not seek interviews with these already well-documented stars.

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Acknowledgments

A project of long duration engenders enormous debt. My gratitude to “Yongsu’s Mother,” her colleagues, and the many other shamans and their clients who took the time to talk to me and allow me to observe their rituals goes without saying. The knowledge, energy, and insight of my field assistant from 1994 to 2005, Kim Sung Ja (“Ms. Kim” in the text), made this a better book. A pleasant opportunity to work with filmmaker Diana Lee in 1989 and 1992 enabled the precise documentation of the kut for Mrs. Yi described in chapter 2 and Chini’s initiation kut described in chapter 3. Kim Asch expertly handled our sound recording in 1989. Kim Sung Ja, Pak Hyonsuk, and Yi Sujong transcribed Chini’s kut in 1989, and Kim Sung Ja did all subsequent transcription. In 1977 Sohn Hak-soon helped me reconstruct the “crazy kut” described in chapter 2. Kristen Olson at the American Museum of Natural History helped me prepare several incarnations of the “final” manuscript. Jennifer Steffey at AMNH helped me to prepare the illustrations. I am particularly indebted to the many colleagues with whom I have been able to discuss this project over the years in conferences and less formal settings both at home and in South Korea. Space does not allow a full list of acknowledgments. Suffice it that I mention Seong-nae Kim, who generously shared information, critique, and sources, making an otherwise lonely scholarly endeavor less so; Cho Han Haejoang, whose observations on Korean society are always insightful; Chungmoo Choi, who saved me from many embarrassing errors of translation and generously shared her insights during my work on the initiation kut; Oak-la Cho, who introduced me to “Ms. Shin”; and Eun Mee Kim, who shared her knowledge of the South Korean economy. Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer and Serinity Young kindly read and commented on most of this manuscript in draft form. Individual chapters, in prior lives as conference papers and manuscripts, benefited particularly from the comments of Donald Baker, Karen McCarthy Brown, Robert Buswell, Jean and John Comaroff, Linda Connor, Drew Gladney, Alexandre Guillemoz, Roberte Hamayon, Marilyn Ivy, Roger Janelli, Peter Köepping, Carol Laderman, Marina Roseman, Geoffrey Samuel, Todd Sanders, Lesley xiii

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Sharp, Timothy Tangherlini, Barbara Tedlock, Edith Turner, Piers Vitebsky, Robert Weller, and Harry West. Patricia Crosby at the University of Hawai‘i Press encouraged this project with wise words, patience, and good humor as she has my other books on Korean shamans. Rosemary Wetherold tidied my prose. My husband, Homer Williams, has continued to give me the benefit of his extraordinary research skills, consistently proving that no statistic is too obscure for him to track down. My son, Henry Williams (a.k.a. Kim Namsôp), was a baby awaiting adoption when I recorded Chini’s initiation kut in 1989, and as I finish this project, Henry is a college student studying Korean in Seoul. That measure of time was better for Henry’s sense of humor and his own growing interest in Korea. Research trips to Korea in 1989, 1992, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2003, and 2005 were supported by the Jane Belo-Tanenbaum Fund of the American Museum of Natural History with supplemental support from the Korea Research Foundation and the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies. I alone am responsible for the shortcomings of this effort. Some of the material contained in this book appeared previously as part of the following publications, and permission to reprint here is acknowledged with thanks: 2008. Auspicious places in a mobile landscape: Of shamans, shrines, and dreams. In Sitings: Critical approaches to Korean geography, ed. T. Tangherlini and S. Yea, 101–120. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. 2008. Of hungry ghosts and other matters of consumption. American Ethnologist 35 (1): 154–170. 2007. Shamanic nostalgia. In Korea in the middle: Korean studies and area studies, ed. R. E. Breuker, 144–174. Leiden: CNWS Publications. 2006. When the shaman becomes a cultural icon, what happens to efficacy? Some observations from Korea. In Ritual and identity: Performative practices as effective transformations of social reality, ed. K. P. Köepping, B. Leistle, and M. Rudolph, 195–218. Hamburg: LIT Press. 2004. Korean shamans and the definition of “religion”: A view from the grass roots. In Beyond primitivism: Indigenous religious traditions and modernity, ed. J. K. Olupona, 243–255. New York: Routledge. 2003. Gods, markets, and the IMF in the Korean spirit world. In Transparency and conspiracy: Ethnographies of suspicion in the New World Order, ed. H. G. West and T. Sanders, 38–64. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2002. An old shaman in a tile-roofed house. Shaman 10 (1–2): 113–124.

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2001. The cultural politics of “superstition” in the Korean shaman world: Modernity constructs its other. In Healing powers and modernity: Traditional medicine, shamanism, and science in Asian societies, ed. L. Connor and G. Samuel, 25–41. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey. 1998. The shaman’s journey. In Korean shamanism: Revivals, survivals, and change, ed. K. Howard, 91–112. Seoul: Royal Asiatic Society. 1998. Who speaks for Korean shamans when shamans speak of the nation? In Making majorities: Constituting the nation in Japan, China, Korea, Fiji, Malaysia, Turkey, and the United States, ed. Dru C. Gladney, 55–72. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1996. Initiating performance: The story of Chini, a Korean shaman. In The performance of healing, ed. C. Laderman and M. Roseman, 17–58. New York: Routledge. 1996. Korean shamans and the spirits of capitalism. American Anthropologist 98 (3): 512–527. 1977. Caught between ancestors and spirits: A Korean mansin’s healing kut. Korea Journal 17 (8): 8–23.

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Introduction Shamanic Nostalgia

When I asked the shaman Yongsu’s Mother how things had changed, she said: Nowadays the mountains just don’t have the same power to give us inspiration [myônggi] anymore. . . . Back around the time of the Korean War, the mountains’ power was fierce! If we shamans went to pray on the mountain, then the gods would tell us everything. If our gods told us today that a certain person would visit us tomorrow, then sure enough, that person would arrive, just as they’d said. And if some polluted person came to us [for a divination], if a woman was worried about her child, if a husband and wife had quarreled, if a daughter-in-law had run away, then the gods would show us these things, bright and clear. That’s how it was. Nowadays, we have to make a thousand prostrations to the gods and ask them, “Should this particular family do such and such?” In the past, it just came to us without our even asking. . . . You could be sleeping and then suddenly bolt up and run outside as if someone were calling you. Or you might be on your way somewhere and pass a house where, unbeknownst to you, there was some trouble, some problem in the family. The gods would send you right on inside. They would give you inspired speech and you would just burst out with it, telling the family, “Do this, do that.” There have even been cases where shamans brought the dead back to life. When you stop to think about it, there’s nothing like that anymore. Even though people still talk about powerful inspiration, it’s not what it used to be. Like many South Koreans of her generation, Yongsu’s Mother bifurcates “the old days” from “now,” “around the time of the Korean War” (yugio sabyôn chônhu). The empowered shamans of her remembered past, her collective “us” (uri ne), preceded her own initiation by at least two decades.

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As in so many other reminiscences, in South Korea and in other places, Yongsu’s Mother evokes her own childhood as a touchstone of cultural authenticity (R. Williams 1973): Around the time of the Korean War, there weren’t so many shamans like me. It was rare for the spirits to claim someone as a shaman. During the war, the mountains were fired upon and bombs dropped from the sky, so the gods on the mountain had nowhere to go. . . . People were running for their lives. Do you think the gods wouldn’t run away too? They came down into people. Nowadays so many people have the gods descend to make them destined shamans [naerin saram]. Today, even the sacred mountains [myôngsan] are being stripped and leveled, stripped and leveled, to make roads, to build apartments. That’s why the mountains give less inspiration now than in the past. . . . The gods on the mountain used to live on the pine needles, but now they can’t because the mountains are being stripped and leveled. So don’t the gods just descend into human beings? . . . In the past, if you wanted to seek out a shaman, then you would have to walk twenty ri,1 thirty ri, but nowadays, here’s one, and there’s one, and there’s another one. They’re everywhere. Yongsu’s Mother echoes other voices in other places with nostalgia talk so familiar that the reader may have heard it all before, if not in Korea then somewhere else: the shamans of today do not measure up to their predecessors. The instruments of modern warfare, capitalist opportunism, and ecological appropriation have disenchanted the sacred landscape and set the old gods to flight. Filtered through our own comfortable dichotomies, we might easily miss what Yongsu’s Mother is actually telling us, for even in a nostalgic mood, this shaman is emphatically not describing Levi-Strauss’ “world on the wane.” By her account, the dilution of the mountains’ power explains the unprecedented frequency of initiation kut in recent years and the subsequent proliferation of shamans. Yongsu’s Mother lives in an East Asian tiger economy where commodities are both copiously manufactured and avidly consumed. She describes recruits to the shaman profession as the products of divinely inspired mass production, with an echo of Walter Benjamin’s notion (1969) that the “aura” of a painfully exacted work of handicraft dissipates in assembly line goods. Yongsu’s Mother makes enchantment a relative condition, not foreclosed by the familiar litany of modernity, secularization, and rational-

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ization but diffused and transformed. The individual shaman’s power may be less remarkable than that of legendary shamans long ago, but more gods are currently descending into more South Koreans, creating more shamans than ever before. This study concerns Yongsu’s Mother’s present and its not-so-distant past. It asks how shamans and their clients have absorbed the profound changes in South Korean life over the last thirty-odd years and how, as Yongsu’s Mother does, they continue to make sense of the ground that moves beneath their feet. It describes shamans making sense in a place where common sense would not place them at all, not in villages, although some remain there, but in the high-rise cities of a relatively affluent South Korea, working with clients who are arguably middle class. It naturalizes a statement like “South Korea is a technologically sophisticated industrial society that has shamans” without using the word “still,” instead taking the juxtaposition of “shamans” and “technologically sophisticated industrial society” as a commonplace and not an irony and describing why this is so. In response to so much that has been written to set down and “preserve” Korean shaman traditions, as in amber, I emphasize the open and mutable parts of shamanic practice, both how gods and ancestors articulate the changing concerns of clients and how the ritual fame of these transactions has itself been transformed by such developments as urban sprawl, private cars, and zealous Christian proselytizing. The book is a qualitative exploration of changes in shamanic practice since I began my work as an anthropologist in a place called Enduring Pine Village more than thirty years ago. During that early fieldwork, I spent nearly two years in the company of the shaman, or mansin, I call Yongsu’s Mother, her colleagues, and her clients, listening to divination sessions, minor exorcisms, prayers, and gossip and following the shamans to kut, their most spectacular ritual. I also spent time with ordinary village women who spoke of their own dealings with the world of shamans and kut. These conversations and observations became the substance of my first book, Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits (1985). Korean shamans captured my anthropological curiosity with the ways that they and the gods and ancestors they manifested conceptualized and commented upon other dimensions of social life in and around a South Korean village. This same curiosity has drawn me back over the intervening decades to witness their engagement with South Korea’s multiple economic, social, and political transformations over that same span. I have chosen the word “engagement” carefully because I do not mean “survival,” “preservation,” or “revival.” Korean shamans are not struggling to reconstruct nearly vanished practices,

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as in Siberia or Central Asia, where shamans were effectively suppressed for many decades.2 Although Korean shamans were harassed by political regimes, both colonial and national, for most of the twentieth century and have a generally adversarial relationship with South Korea’s Protestant Christian population today, reports of their inevitable demise are overstated. Unlike many books on sale in South Korea and more than a few in English, this one makes no claim to a comprehensive statement about “Korean Shamans” or “Shaman Religion.” The Korean shaman world is a vast, diverse, and fluid place, and no single study can do justice to its entirety without reducing it to an inventory of signature ritual traditions. My true subject is change as refracted through the work of Korean shamans and the motley conversations I had with them over the last several years. Otherworldly improvisation Broadly speaking, shamans are religious practitioners who engage the spirits on behalf of the community, either through encounters during soul flight or by invoking the spirits into the here and now of a ritual space, conveying the immediacy of these experiences with their own bodies and voices.3 While heroic male shamans have dominated the literature (Eliade 1964; Lewis 1969), a majority of Korean shamans are women. Indeed female shamans predominate or are at least present and active in several other less well-known traditions (Tedlock 2005). The gods choose a Korean mansin and announce her destiny through a period of torment: ill health, madness, and other misfortune. When a woman accepts her calling, she mounts an initiation ritual in the hope that the gods will open her “gates of speech” (malmun) to inspired words from the spirits, enabling her to practice as a fully realized mansin. Korean shamans interact with gods and ancestors by divining their presence and will, by doing a variety of small rituals to placate them and sustain their favor, and by performing kut to feast and entertain them. Kut address affliction, send ancestors to paradise, and secure blessings and prosperity for client households. More than merely incarnating the deities and the dead, mansin call upon the spirits’ power to purify, exorcise, heal, and bring good fortune. Like many who write about these women and men in Western languages, I have called the mansin “shamans,” doers who engage the spirits in Shirokogoroff’s sense of the shaman as a “master of the spirits,” not merely their vessel or “spirit medium” (1935, cited in Jakobsen 1999, xiii). In Korea, “mastery” might be softened to “the ability to petition, entice, pacify, and effectively persuade the gods.

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As a central premise of this study, the shaman’s assumed ability to speak from “out there,” to bring new material in the shape of visions or in the voices of spirits, makes shamanic traditions less an archaic survival (cf. Eliade 1964) than a dynamic domain of popular religious practice. As performance-centered rather than liturgical events, shaman rituals reveal a condition of nonfixate, of open possibility (Atkinson 1989, 12), of an emergent space where, in Schieffelin’s terms (1985), the real work of ritual takes place. Shamanic practices are thus a particularly fluid, adaptable, and, in many places, tenacious domain of popular religious expression. Accounts from Mongolia to the Amazon rain forest speak of shamans who act within and sometimes upon changing historical milieus, from colonization to ecological degradation.4 And like shamanic or mediumistic practitioners in other places, Korean shamans incorporate new, sometimes radically contemporary imagery into their work (cf. Balzer 1996a, 1996b; Humphrey 1999; Roseman 2001, 2002; Taussig 1997). To perform kut, Korean mansin dress in the gods’ costumes, invoke the gods into the here and now, and perform them into being in appropriate sequence with music and abundant offerings. Learned procedures, songs, chants, and mime structure the kut, but the shaman’s performance also assumes an element of spontaneous possibility as the mansin dances and mimes manifestations of the gods and ancestors and speaks on their authority. She divines, performs dramatic play, and improvises on the basic structure of chants to mesh with the client’s own situation and the immediate circumstances of the ritual. As in other kinds of improvisational performance, turns of phrase that provoke laughter and particularly effective bits of mime tend to be repeated from one performance to another and then borrowed from one shaman to another. An assumed openness to visions and inspiration permits contemporary imagery. Chants evoke the ghosts of those who died in automobile accidents, on motorcycles, in airplanes, or—in the wake of 9/11—in skyscrapers. Gods promise that they will bring customers who pay “with cash and not credit,” and a shaman’s vision of raising a “building” becomes a more generally auspicious prognostication for different kinds of successful real estate endeavors such as my own purchase of a modest co-op apartment in New York. The ability of mansin to effectively mobilize words and actions to address contemporary concerns is the subject of chapters 5 and 6. As skilled improvisers, Korean shamans (and their spirits) have much to tell us about the particular iteration of South Korean society that came into being in the late twentieth century. This characterization would seem

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to contradict Ake Hultkrantz’ (1997, 2) much cited notion of the shaman as a “conservative factor in culture” and the shaman’s ritual enactments as a stabilizing source of tradition. A similar premise, that this is something old, fragile, in need of preservation, caused Korean shamans to be elevated as government-designated Human Cultural Treasures, beginning in the 1980s. My emphasis on the emergent quality of shamanic ritual does not belie the wealth of cultural knowledge contained in Korean shaman practice, the performance skills and ritual lore required of a fully realized Korean shaman, or the wealth of cultural knowledge she must master. While I describe shamans and their spirits as “agents of cultural production,” they bear no resemblance to the “New Age” shamans, “neo-shamans,” or “core shamans” who mobilize an eclectic spirituality for new cosmopolitan seekers.5 The Korean mansin I know would be horrified at the thought.6 In chapters 3 and 4, I discuss the unsteady balance between skill and inspiration, training and improvisation, in the career of a Korean shaman, and in chapters 5 and 6, some of the ways Korean shamans use their gift to address the specific needs and anxieties of their clients. New theatrical business and divine speech make sense to clients and other shamans when the spontaneous utterances of gods and ancestors are not only immediately personal and of the moment but also consistent with the sorts of things that shamans, gods, and ancestors have been saying and doing in Korea for a very long time. Re-enchanting modernity Since the sixteenth century, when Siberian shamans first appeared in Western travelers’ accounts, observers have been both repelled and fascinated by shamans’ capacity to make visible their encounters with spirits through spectacular breaks with quotidian reality—ecstatic movement, animal cries, and seemingly inexplicable feats (Flaherty 1988, 1992). As projective sites for fantasies of Otherness, shamans have been regarded as agents of the devil or purveyors of superstition, but also as seductive masters of magic (Hoppál 1989; Kehoe 2000; Taussig 1987), a romantic gloss that redounds to the benefit of some savvy contemporary shamans (Joralemon 1990; Laderman 1997). As the purported icons of ancient pasts, shamans bolster such quintessentially modern phenomena as the construction of ethnic and national identities 7 and the commodification of spiritual experiences.8 Shamans and spirits in South Korea muddle the logic of an older social science that made disenchantment the teleology of rational capitalist economies and modern nation states. Between Weber’s assertion (1958) that the modern, rational market has no place for spirits and Eliade’s romantic view

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(1964) of shamans as practitioners of primordial religion, shamans are not supposed to be here at all. In the anthropology of popular religion, prior logics are already well muddled where witchcraft, spells, and enchantments are deployed against the vicissitudes and inequities of new markets and the precariousness of new states.9 Because the South Korean ethnographic present of this story happens to be both more affluent and more economically well developed than most contexts where popular religion is typically researched, it permits an even more strident affirmation of the durability of enchantment than would be possible in most other places (so far)—Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan would be other obvious exceptions. “Authenticity” concerns me only insofar as, and indeed because, the notion of cultural authenticity is a contemporary South Korean concern, as it is in many places that have experienced recent urbanization and industrialization (Bendix 1997). A chorus of laments for vanishing Korean traditions has accompanied more than a century of Korean modernity, a chorus that Yongsu’s Mother and her colleagues sometimes join. The next chapter describes why this is so. Writing on a new blank page In 1989 and 1992, Diana Lee and I attempted to capture on video a kut like the one I had described in my first book, a large 1970s country party that articulated the concerns of a still-rural extended family, their kin, and neighbors, a kut like the one described in the first part of chapter 2. I describe one of these kut in chapter 1 as well. We assumed that we would film whatever kut Yongsu’s Mother and her colleagues happened to be performing, and that it would resemble the kut I had already described, in effect making my prose visual. But the kut that we found ourselves recording were held in different settings for different kinds of people, in a different social ambience from those I had seen before. I began to write about these changes, starting with a short conference paper that grew into a full-blown project, bringing me back to Korea in 1994, 1998, 2002, 2003, and 2005. I caught up with Yongsu’s Mother and her colleagues, observing their work and talking to the mansin and their clients about past and present. Business anxieties loomed large in the kut these shamans performed, and to see if this observation held beyond their immediate circle, I spent the summer of 1994 visiting four different commercial shaman shrines and several shamans’ advocacy associations. Because the fates of petty entrepreneurs were indeed a prominent theme in most of these kut, the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, known in South Korea as “the IMF Crisis” or simply “the IMF,” brought me back

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to the shaman shrines in 1998, and again in the new millennium when the crisis was past. I describe the shamans’ and spirits’ responses to a changing economic climate in chapter 5. I was able to follow over several years of recent South Korean history not only old friends and acquaintances but also several younger shamans whom I had met early in this new research. The specter of nostalgia Nostalgia stalks any project written with retrospective glances. It appears in this work in several forms: as a sentiment evoked by my conversation partners (about the diminished powers of mountains and shamans, for example), as a spectral presence in works that present Korean shamans as symbols of national “pastness” (cf. Morris 2002, 86), and as the anthropologist’s own liability of long-term familiarity with a place. Nostalgia has itself become a topic of academic inquiry, defined as the longing for a place of memory, or imagined memory, as the palpable sense of loss and mourning that some see as an inevitable consequence of the spatial ruptures imposed by what Rosalind Morris calls “the aching chasm” of modern and postmodern conditions (Morris 2002, 86; D. Harvey 1989; R. Williams 1973). Nostalgia adheres to inquiries into things “folkloric” and “traditional” on the presumption that “vanishing” worlds of village authenticity validate a common national past (Ivy 1995). As Susan Stewart and Marilyn Ivy describe it, nostalgia traffics in the ironic necessity of feeling loss, without which there could be no desired act of longing and no concomitant measure of progress (Stewart 1984, 23; Ivy 1995, 10 n. 17). In South Korea, for the sum of such reasons, a modern history of rupture by colonial occupation, war, national division, urban migration, and rapid industrial transformation renders nostalgia nearly inevitable and has made the study of folklore and tradition an impassioned South Korean pursuit. These endeavors have had much to say about Korean shamans, as described in the next chapter. Svetlana Boym’s characterization is apt: “Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship” (2001, xiii). Anthropologists may be particularly susceptible. We sustain long-distance relationships with the places we study, our sentimental attachments buoyed by the memory of an intense first encounter as youthful field-workers. I recently read Professor Seong-nae Kim’s Korean-language translation of my first book, in which I stated, “For the Chôn family kut, one must imagine a traditional Korean country house” (1985, 1). I had written of a one-story house with heated floors and sliding paper doors, two rooms separated by

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an open veranda and set behind a wide courtyard encircled by a wall and gate. In the Korean language in another time, my graduate student attempt to evoke in New York what I had experienced in rural Kyônggi Province the previous year had become something else entirely, a statement nearly as exotic to an urban South Korean readership as it would have been to my Columbia University dissertation committee thirty years ago. Today it would take some effort to locate such a house in Kyônggi Province, where villages and rice fields have been given over to the high-rise apartments and mega-marts of burgeoning satellite towns. For a contemporary Korean readership, “traditional Korean country house” connotes vanished time or folk village re-creations. It is impossible to write these changes without recourse to words like “disappeared” and very hard to avoid that pan–East Asian cliché of apartment blocks gobbling up rice paddies with its connotation of a “vanished way of life.” An unintended nostalgia insinuates itself into a long acquaintance with a field site. But even in the 1970s I had made choices that privileged a rural past tense. It was a traditional Korean country house, distinguished from urban neighborhoods of walled-in low-rise buildings, town houses, and new apartment block communities. Although I had lived in Seoul as a Peace Corps volunteer and had my first encounters with shamans there, I wrote a research proposal that described an imagined village setting as a place where I could observe quotidian social fields and the domestic dramas that might sometimes explode into rituals of shamanic healing; Victor Turner’s work (1968, 1969, 1974) was influential in my research design. But I was also taken with the notion, then current, that anthropologists worked in villages and, with the only slightly out-of-date (in 1976) assumption that South Korea was a predominantly rural place, best studied in a village setting. When I lived in Enduring Pine Village, it did seem refreshingly free of the shabby approximations of Western culture one found in Seoul in those days, or as I probably saw it at the time, there was less Western detritus to get in the way of real ethnography. In truth, it was easier to wander into households and join intimate conversations in the village than it would have been in the city, far easier in the 1970s than in subsequent decades when television is broadcast all day. When the South Korean electronics industry put wide-screen color televisions within reach of Enduring Pine Village families, it rendered conversation with an American anthropologist who speaks far-from-perfect Korean a less entertaining pastime than during that first field trip. The relationships that inform this more recent study are fractured as a measure of how we all live now, episodic meetings over a stretch of several years, rituals performed apart from extended communities of kin and

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neighbors, and interviews arranged by cell phone to accommodate the busy schedules of shamans. It is difficult not to wax nostalgic over the intimacy and leisurely pace of that early village fieldwork. As the memory horizons of the middle-aged claim various representations in South Korean popular culture (Abelmann 2003, 102), including museum exhibitions,10 even a foreign anthropologist is tempted to muster legitimacy from this same stock of memories—“a traditional Korean country house,” for example. This is small compensation for growing old, and I remind myself that, in the 1970s, people spoke of “the old days” as something that I had already missed completely. As in my first book, I am still trying to do justice to the ethnographic present where and when I find it, to the various ethnographic presents that I encountered through the 1990s and into the new millennium as the sites of a living and transforming shamanic practice. I am aware that what I characterize as a dynamic popular religious form includes increasingly abbreviated rituals and that the buoyant village parties I described in the 1970s have become rushed private ceremonies held in rented commercial space. The following pages include several encounters with contemporary shamans who, like Yongsu’s Mother, wax nostalgic about the skill and inspiration of old shamans, now dead, the lost and forgotten content of rituals, now condensed and simplified, or the deference that youthful apprentices were once expected to show their elders, the deference the speaker showed her spirit mother in the distant past. As their honest scribe, I risk the very value judgments that I have eschewed in ethnographic writing. To escape the eerie replay of nostalgic loss and mourning, I write both with and against the grain of nostalgia, “with” to understand how contemporary shamans and their clients remember and imagine their past inside a larger South Korean story, and “against” by reminding myself and my reader that, in the 1970s, shamans were already the stuff of nostalgia and that this was almost certainly true in the 1920s and 1930s, when colonized Koreans first turned their attention to national folklore (R. L. Janelli 1986; Robinson 1988). Raymond Williams, Marilyn Ivy, and Svetlana Boym have noted, each in his or her own way, that “tradition” dies multiple deaths and its mourning accompanies each stratigraphic layer of lived modernity (Boym 2001; Ivy 1995; R. Williams 1973). A full appreciation of that lived modernity involves some analysis of these different layers and the place of shamans and nostalgia within them, the task of chapter 1. If the ethnographic present has a future tense, it includes the possibility of finding our shamans and our magic in such places as the South Korean urbanscape, the work of subsequent chapters.

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Transformations and the work of shamans, gods, and ancestors Chapter 1 describes a late nineteenth-, twentieth-, and early twenty-firstcentury intellectual terrain where notions of shamans and their work as objects of “superstition,” “culture,” and “religion” have waxed and waned. I consider how some of the shamans I have encountered position themselves against these labels, and the stakes they claim in the characterization of what they do as “folklore” or “religion.” This discussion appears early in the book to avoid teleological readings of shamans performing on proscenium stages or organizing themselves into an official “religion” as the logical end point to my story. Such a reading would obscure the vitality of grassroots shamanic practices in South Korea today. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 deal with “shamanship.” They describe how shamans enact kut, how they are empowered to do this work, and how notions of effective shamanship are being transformed and contested in contemporary South Korea. Two kut provide the “memory horizons” of chapter 2, a “then” in 1977, and a “closer-to-now” from 1992. The 1977 “crazy kut,” with several others that I observed during my first fieldwork, helped me shape my description of the shaman world. The 1992 kut, and others like it, caused me to confront how that world had changed, provoking some of the themes that I will be tilting with in this study: the implications of different ritual time and space, the prominence of business anxieties as a problem for shamans and spirits, and the question of “real” (chinja) versus “phony” (ôngt’ôri) shamans. The ability to speak the words of the spirits (kongsu) is central to shamanic practice, and the opening of a prospective shaman’s “gates of speech” (malmun) is the central task of an initiation ritual. Chapter 3, “Initiating Performance,” tells the story of a bashful, reticent initiate, Chini, and the initiating shamans’ struggles to open her gates of speech. My analysis of hours of video, recorded by Diana Lee and Kim Asch, and the opportunity to discuss the outcome of this kut with Chini, her initiating “spirit mother,” and the other participating shamans brought me as close as I have come to understanding what a shaman is supposed to experience during kut and how shamans balance performance skills and inspiration to manifest their gods. Chapter 4, “The Ambiguities of Becoming: Phony Shamans and What Are Mudang After All?” continues the theme of initiation and apprenticeship as old shamans and young apprentices reflect upon what it means to become a shaman today and how older patterns of apprenticeship have fared across a generation gap.

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Chapters 5 and 6 are concerned with “gods and goods,” with clients, shamans, and spirits in the contemporary South Korean marketplace. Chapter 5, “Korean Shamans and the Spirits of Capitalism,” describes the kinds of problems that a universe of clients brought to shamans before, during, and after the financial crisis of late 1997. More than a sociological measure of who the clients are, this chapter shows how their anxieties, the product of both South Korean and global forces, were rendered meaningful within a schema of divine and ancestral causality. “Of Hungry Ghosts and Other Matters of Consumption,” chapter 6, concerns the performed interactions between clients, shamans, gods, and ancestors and how material objects, including new consumer goods, figure in this play. In Alfred Gell’s terms (1988), this chapter describes a “technology of magic” worked through material offerings of cash, food, drink, and clothing to secure the gods’ blessings for clients. In contemporary kut, offerings include new, sometimes luxurious commodities like imported whisky, as the gods and ancestors articulate contemporary moral dilemmas about having and desiring. The rapid growth of the city of Seoul, both upwards and outwards, in the second half of the twentieth century produced an urbanscape where little seems permanent or even very old. Chapter 7 takes the reader into the mountains that Yongsu’s Mother evoked, to the shrines and sacred sites that constitute a shamanic landscape. It describes the peregrinations of some venerable old shrines, forced from their original locations by urban development, and the flowering of new commercial shrines on other mountain slopes. If urban development has reduced sacred terrain, cars and good highways have expanded the shamans’ access to sacred sites within South Korea. Some shamans have even made pilgrimages to Mount Paektu, on (North) Korea’s northern border, traveling through China to the accessible Chinese slope of this most sacred Korean mountain. Circuitous pilgrimages to Mount Paektu underscore the irresolution of a divided Korea, “the country broken at the waist,” and shamans pray on a distant mountain as part of an unfolding Korean story.

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1 Shifting Intellectual Terrain “Superstition” Becomes “Culture” and “Religion”

Modernity, Nicholas Dirks suggests, is a story that a people tell themselves about themselves in relation to Others, history mobilized to distinguish the present from the past (Dirks 1990; Rofel 1992, 1999). Shamans have figured in Korean modernity’s story, but in inconsistent and sometimes contradictory ways. This chapter takes shape around three Korean encounters: with a village policeman, with the organizers of a revivalist folk arts performance, and with a would-be shaman, bringing local voices and experiences into a discussion of shamans and their work as “superstition” (misin), “culture” (munhua), and “religion” (chonggyo). As part of a modern Korean lexicon, these terms became apertures through which Korean shamans have been regarded by others and through which they sometimes see themselves. As a diagrammatic representation of my intentions in this chapter, imagine the Korean t’aegΔk, not the South Korean national flag’s binary yin/yang but the circular symbol painted on the doors of old shrines, three commashaped swirls of primary colors—red, yellow, and blue—waxing and waning against each other as they combine to make a circle. Imagine “superstition,” “culture,” and “religion” as the loci of ideas, attitudes, and social practices that wax and wane within the circle of Korean modernity where shamans dance. Encounter 1, “Superstition”: A confrontation with the district policeman in 1977 On a cold, dark night in the early spring of my first fieldwork, a family in the back hamlet of Enduring Pine Village holds a kut. By 10:30 the mansin 1

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are well into the kut when a policeman from the district office appears at the gate and orders them to cease their drumming and dancing. He complains loudly that this sort of activity is precisely why the government’s New Community Movement is not advancing in Enduring Pine Village and denounces the mansin for dancing and shaking their hips to the drum rhythm in front of schoolboys. This amuses the mansin, who will shake their hips for emphasis when they later recount the policeman’s words, but the primary sponsors of the kut, an elderly couple, are furious at the policeman’s intrusion. The old woman shouts, “My son is ill. We have to do it!” “If he’s ill, take him to the hospital.” “We’ve been to hospitals.” Neighbors and kin plead with the policeman to calm down and go away. He threatens to throw the shamans in jail for a month if he finds them still drumming and dancing when he returns. The white-haired master of the house intervenes: “Arrest them and you will have to take me too.” The policeman stalks away and does not return. Villagers assume that this defender of local morality and social progress has been mollified with an envelope of “cigarette money” for his trouble. The drumming and dancing resume and continue well into the next morning, when the last tearful ancestor has been sent along the road to paradise. Indeed, the family had been to many hospitals. Some months before, while the old woman tended her fields near a military installation, she was struck by a stray bullet that lodged near her heart. She had no idea what had hit her, sudden and strange. The family called in the local shaman, who performed a small exorcism. They also took the woman to a clinic in Righteous Town and then to the branch of a major hospital on the outskirts of Seoul. No one could say what was wrong with her. In desperation, the family took her to St. Mary’s General Hospital in downtown Seoul, where she received effective but expensive treatment. The family sold their cow and pig—most of their liquid assets—and spent the money that they had been saving for the youngest daughter’s wedding.1 Unable to locate the soldier who had fired the gun, they could not claim their rightful compensation money. Then the eldest son injured his leg. After visiting several doctors, he still walked with a limp, and the strained expression on his face suggested constant pain. The daughter who told me all of this added that even before her mother’s accident, things had not been going well for the family. Their regular shaman had advised them to tend their restless ancestors with a kut for the dead, the belated ritual that they were holding tonight after so much misfortune. This kut was not an exercise in “health-seeking behavior,” a privileging of “sacred medicine” over the “cosmopolitan” variety, a visit to the sha-


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man in preference to a visit to the hospital (cf. Chrisman 1977; Kleinman 1980). Technically, it was not even a kut for affliction (uhuan kut) but a kut to send off the ancestors (chinogi kut). The family had consulted a variety of hospitals and doctors, and the mother had received a satisfactory cure. The shaman was not a stand-in for the doctor. The kut addressed not so much a specific illness, neither the mother’s nor the son’s, but rather a pervasive climate of family affliction in which accidents and injuries could occur, where an injury might not heal despite repeated medical treatment, and where ruinous medical expenses had consequences for other members of the household. Although the mother told the policeman that she was holding the kut because her son was ill, when she importuned the spirits, she was equally concerned about her youngest daughter’s marriage prospects, anxious because her own treatment had cost her daughter’s marriage money. By calling in the shamans, the family was attempting to restore a harmonious relationship with its gods and ancestors, sending lingering dead to paradise so that all would be well under their own roof. The policeman, of course, saw things differently. People who were ill ought to be visiting doctors, not sponsoring kut. To do the latter was superstition. The irate policeman was a part of the rural landscape in 1977, no less than the shamans and their kut. The cultural politics of superstition When we consider “modernity” not as an inevitable and unidirectional process but rather, in Baudrillard’s sense (1987), as something like a viral ideology that has infected most of the globe but mutated in local settings (Rofel 1992), then new questions can be asked. “Superstition” may, with “modernity,” be interrogated as a historically contingent ideological construct, the potent dark side against which modernities take shape and measure themselves. For nearly a century, Korean intellectuals and reformers regarded shamanic practices as the target of a Manichean struggle between modernity and superstition, rationality and magic. From the modernizers’ perspective, as from the village policeman’s, this conflict has been about medicine and healing; it has been perceived and experienced as a contestation between rational science on the one hand and peasant credulity on the other, with shamans as agents of the dark side. In dynastic times, Confucian officials disdained shamans as practitioners of unclean and improper rituals and as potential charlatans, but the Confucian worldview did not deny the existence of spirits so much as assert that there were better, more proper, less socially deleterious ways to honor them than by employing shamans (Deuchler 1992, 175). Local magistrates


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periodically banned the shamans’ activities and attempted to transform shamanic rituals at local shrines into Confucian-style rites (che) performed by village elders (Hung-youn Cho 1997a, 18; Eikemeier 1976, 95; Walraven 1993, 5–8; Yi N. 1976).2 It required a cognitive break with the ambiguity and ambivalence of Confucians past to begin to label human interactions with gods and ancestors as superstition, to deny any causal link between the actions of living women and men and the actions of spirits, between the actions of spirits and human consequence. The term “superstition” had already enjoyed a long currency in the West with subtle shifts in meaning over time and space. Originally connoting improper, transgressive, or false beliefs in contrast to better, more orthodox religious ideas and practices, the Enlightenment gave superstition its modern meaning as not merely “bad religion” but also “bad science,” or in other words “misplaced assumptions about causality stemming from a faulty understanding of nature” (O’Neil 1987,165). Misin, rendered in Sino-Korean ideographs as “bewitching or deluded (mi) belief (sin),” took on a modern gloss as “superstition” in the lexicon that came to Korea in the late nineteenth century via Japan, where words had been feverishly coined, or in this instance reinvested, to express in Chinese ideographs the social, political, and philosophical concepts contained in Western books.3 In East Asia, as in the post-Enlightenment West, superstition (Ch. mixin, Viet. me tin, J. meishin) would be modernity’s subversive alter ego, connoting things irrational, invalid, and consequently harmful. But why—if we no longer accept the inevitability of a single modern grand narrative—should Korean intellectuals have accepted the terms of this language and incorporated them into their own view of the world? To pursue the viral analogy introduced above, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Korean intellectuals were highly susceptible to infection, attuned to modernist interpretations of imperial China’s decline and imperial Japan’s ascent (Schmid 2002). With Korea’s slide into the Japanese orbit, and its annexation as a colony in 1910, nationalist intellectuals blamed native traditions for the nation’s weakness and humiliation, “quick to point out Korea’s failings, contrasting their own tradition with their understanding of what was modern, progressive, and scientific” (Robinson 1988, 35). To aspiring modern eyes, Confucianism fostered oppressive gerontocratic mores and empty ritualism (ibid., chap. 1), Buddhism would be reformed along “modern, scientific lines” (Buswell 1992, 26; 1998) as in Thailand (Keyes 1989) and Sri Lanka (Obeyesekere 1991; Swearer 1991, 637–638), and shamans, as charlatans and purveyors of delusion, were to be extirpated (Walraven 1995) as in early modern China (Anagnost 1987, 1994; Duara


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1991; Luo 1991), Siberia (Balzer 1993, 1996a, 1996b; Vitebsky 1995a), and many other places. Modernity’s devils In the 1890s, Protestant Christianity sank deep roots in Korea, bearing schools for Western education and hospitals, the institutional accoutrements of enlightenment and science (Clark 1986, chap. 2), and many early Korean progressives marked their rejection of the past by becoming Christian (Robinson 1988; Wells 1990). Early Protestant Christian encounters with Korean shamans yielded a complex legacy. Missionaries, and early Western travelers who relied on resident missionaries for information, described Korean popular religion through a language of “demon worship, exorcism, and superstition,” glossing virtually any shamanic activity as “exorcism,” from a dramatic purging of invasive spirits to commiserating with ancestors to playfully bantering with gods. They converted (if one can use that word) the diverse gods, restless ancestors, wandering ghosts, and noxious influences of Korean popular religion to “evil spirits” and “demons,” sometimes to “the devil” himself (Oak n.d.): “As with Luther, the devil is an important personage, and they have many ceremonies for exorcising him” (Rockhill 1891, 183).4 In reportage and lightly fictionalized novels, Korea missionaries described the awesome absolute of conversion as itself a kind of exorcism. In “fetish” burnings, great bonfires of ancestral tablets, shamans’ paraphernalia, and the cloth, straw, paper, and crockery harborages for spirits were “destroyed as were the books in Ephesus” (Cram 1905, 149; Gifford 1898, 115; Jones 1902, 41). In the most dramatic accounts, vanquished shamans cast their own paraphernalia into the flames, sometimes inspiring their more timid neighbors to destroy their own “fetishes” (Anonymous 1895, 149; Baird 1909, 99–101; Bishop 1970, 348; Cram 1905; Oak n.d., 18). Missionaries enthusiastically circulated the story of a converted shaman who became a zealous faith healer, casting out demons in the Christian mode (Baird 1909, 102; Oak n.d.), a possibility replayed in the 1970s in Youngsook Kim Harvey’s life history of the former shaman “Deaconess Chang” (1979, 205–234; 1987). Missionaries were initially surprised when—as they described it—new converts and potential converts came to them “in great terror,” asking “to be freed from devils and evil spirits” (Gale 1898, 246–247). Biblical accounts of early Christian exorcism took on a new and more literal relevance (Oak n.d., 17): “Our remedy is to read from the New Testament, translating the English into Korean as we proceed” (H. N. Allen 1908, 171; Baird 1909;


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Cram 1905; Gifford 1898, 117; Oak n.d.).5 Thus were foul spirits “adjured in the name of Jesus to come out” (Bishop 1970, 348). The exorcistic struggle between shaman and Christian even became a literary motif in Kim Tongni’s colonial-period novella, Portrait of a Shaman (Munyôdo, 1971), produced as a film in the early 1970s. Pentecostal South Korean Christians today continue to regard native spirits as devils and demons (sat’an) requiring exorcism, many see shamans as engaging in “devil worship,” and some groups zealously strive to rescue shamans from Satan’s grasp (Ch’a 1997, 38; Y. K. Harvey 1979, 205–234; 1987; Sun 1991, 203–204).6 But how did demons and exorcism cohabit the vision of modernity that Christianity offered early Korean progressives? Why are their descendants, as mainline Protestants, disturbed by what they regard as a “shamanized” Pentecostal Christianity in South Korea today (Y. K. Harvey 1987, 156; H. Lee 1977; D. K. Suh 1983, 49–51; Yoo 1988, 66)? While the missionaries’ field reports, memoirs, and fictionalized narratives suggest a firm faith in the healing power of scripture and in the power of prayer to produce miraculous cures and cause converts to lead better, happier lives, they reveal more ambiguity regarding the literal presence of devils and demons. A few speak with the Reverend W. G. Cram’s certainty: “At home we read of devil possession in the Bible and we know how Christ dealt with such cases, but we seldom see a person possessed with demons. In Korea we come in contact with such cases regularly. . . . That the devil at times makes his home in the bodies of men and women, especially in heathen lands, is a matter of unmistakable evidence” (1905, 148). The Reverend Charles Alan Clark, initially skeptical of devil exorcism in the mission field, found himself confronting Satan during a particularly impassioned Korean revival meeting (D. N. Clark 2003, 39–40). In general, however, missionary authors wrote of the shaman (mudang) with ethnographic distance and from an explicitly modern perspective: “She claims to be in league with the evil spirits which infest the world, and can appease them and persuade them to leave” (Moose 1911, 149, my emphasis); “it is easy for us as Westerners to ridicule the superstitions of the Koreans; but if we, in a spirit of sympathy, assume for a time their angle of vision, we can see that to them the fear of demons is the cause of frequent and intense mental suffering” (Gifford 1898, 11, my emphasis). In such writing, the shaman is diabolical not so much because she literally serves the devil as because she propagates superstition, demanding obeisance to an oppressive and false spirit world, “a dark and gloomy land peopled by hob-goblins and capricious demons” (Gifford 1898, 148), and, above all, because she exacts huge sums for her work, “an amount of


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expense and credulity against which many a Korean rebels” (Anonymous 1895, 147; Lowell 1886, 193–212). The rationalist missionaries who mounted these critiques found allies among Korean progressive intellectuals in the twilight years of the Chosôn Kingdom, those who “linked in their own minds Western social and political institutions with Christianity” (Robinson 1988, 35). Some of these early reformers joined forces with missionaries to produce the Independent (Tongnip Sinmun), Korea’s first vernacular newspaper (Schmid 2002, 47–48; Wells 1990, 61).7 This voice of passionate iconoclasm had much to say on the subject of shamans (Walraven 1995): “The Government officials must know by this time that the practice of these people [mudang] is simply

“Natives in their Superstitious Service.” Stereograph, Keystone View Company, 1919, LC-USZ62-72680.


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a game of deception. . . . It is the duty of the authority to make an effective prevention, so that the poor and ignorant people will not lose their hard earned money to these charlatans” (Independent, 7 January 1897). In 1896, when police began to arrest shamans, destroy shrines, and burn paraphernalia, the Independent cheered them on: “The mutangs [sic] and fortune-tellers are having a hard time just at present, but thousands of other people rejoice at the downfall of the devil worshippers” (18 May 1897).8 When the campaign lost momentum, the Independent seethed: “Some people in Chemulpo [present-day Inch’ôn] collected money from the inhabitants for the purpose of offering a grand sacrifice to the evil spirit. . . . What are the policemen doing in Chemulpo?” (29 April 1897).9 When prominent officials were seen to collude with shamans, the Independent invoked the “moral failure and weakness” that left Korea open to Japanese invasion in the sixteenth century (18 June 1896), making veiled reference to Japan’s looming imperial interests.10 The Independent routinely grouped shamans together with diviners, Buddhist monks, geomancers, and doctors of acupuncture, condemning the lot as charlatans, as did the police orders used to arrest them and destroy their paraphernalia (21 November 1896, 7 January, 4 March, 18 May 1897). In de Certeau’s terms, shamans, with other practitioners of popular religion and healing, were placed on the wrong side of the “cleavage that organizes modernity,” consigned to the “ ‘irrational’ hinterland of the human imagination” (1984, 6). Anti-superstition campaigns also accompanied Japan’s annexation of Korea, the Japanese having already equated modernity with anti-superstition at home (Ch’oe S. 1999, 4). The strong arm of the colonial police harassed and sometimes arrested shamans (Hung-youn Cho 1990, 47–48; Ch’oe K. 1974; C. Lee 1999),11 but under Japanese rule (1910–1945), policies toward shamans were neither monolithic nor consistent (Ch’oe S. 1999). In 1911 ethnologist Frederick Starr received permission to film a shaman’s kut inside a palace garden, but the appearance of a police inspector reduced his shaman subject to “trembling with fear” and hastily packing her paraphernalia (1911, 58, 60–61, quoted in Oppenheim 2005). The colonial police were still shadowing kut (and foreigners) at the end of the decade when artist Elizabeth Keith attended “a modest shaman ceremony” on a mountain near Seoul. Two of the “inevitable Japanese officers” appeared toward the end of the event, wanting to know why the foreigners were present. “The sorceress gave them one of her motherly smiles and a graceful bow,” Keith noted, “and after a consultation with each other, both officials left” (1947, 26). As in Enduring Pine Village during the New Community Movement, some shamans seem to have made their own accommodations with the colonial police.


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Shamans in the hinterland of the imagination The colonial period produced a perceptual divide between city and country when “modernity,” as a self-conscious ideology, shaped the identity of firstgeneration professionals and entrepreneurs in colonial Korean cities (Eckert 1991, chap. 2; Robinson 1988). Following the rhetorical logic of the Independent writers of a generation past, the colonial press portrayed shamanic activities as irrational and wasteful, adding the notion that they were also unhygienic (Hwang 2005). Disdain for shamans became a naturalized attribute of self-consciously modern urbanites seeking to distinguish themselves from their own rural origins. One Christian-educated “new woman” who spent her formative years in this milieu echoed the observations of earlier missionaries and foreign travelers as she described for a Western audience how adherents of “shamanism” lived under “constant fear” of the spirits: “Often a normal accident will be interpreted as evidence of an evil spirit, and the person involved will be overwhelmed by mumbo-jumbo incantations and rites in order to rid himself of the possessing demons. I am gratified that this cult is on the wane as enlightenment reaches out across our peninsula” (Pahk 1954, 132). New urban migrants took up the logic of this association—modernity and anti-superstition—as an affirmation of their aspirations and a measure of their distance from the countryside. In Pak Wansô’s autobiographical novella, Mother’s Stake 1 (ÔmôniΔi malttuk, 1991), a young widow turns her back on village life to eke out a marginal livelihood in Seoul in the hope of educating her son and transforming her daughter into a “new woman.”12 The widow attributes her husband’s early death to rural ignorance. When the doctor of Chinese medicine cannot cure her husband’s sudden and severe appendicitis, she accompanies her mother-in-law to consult a shaman who sets an auspicious date for a healing kut, but her husband dies while she is away. The neighbors attribute his death to ominous forces stirred up by the construction of a new house. The widow thinks otherwise. Pak writes from the young daughter’s perspective: “Mother didn’t agree with them. She . . . had relatives in cities, and had tasted civilization before marriage, so she knew that the disease Father had died of could have been cured, as simply and easily as an operation on an infected finger. If only he had seen a doctor trained in Western Medicine. From that moment on, Mother began to dream of an exodus to the city” (Pak W. 1991, 178). This is modernity’s either-or logic (Tambiah 1990, 20–21), the logic of the rural policemen at the kut in the back hamlet a few decades later. The young man died of ignorance, an onus cast equally upon the bad science of


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Chinese medicine and the irrationality of shamanic practice, an association already made logical in the writings of the early reformers. A doctor of Western medicine would have saved the patient; rural tradition killed him. But this is emphatically not the logic of Korean popular religion, whose palimpsest can just barely be discerned in the story. Ominous spirits, stirred up by moving earth or erecting a new house without ritual precautions, wreaked havoc upon a particularly vulnerable family member.13 The rural family of Pak’s story summoned a doctor of Chinese medicine for their afflicted son, just as in 1977 the family in the back hamlet brought their afflicted mother and son to clinics and hospitals while cognizant of restless ancestors. The spirits would be dealt with, but in their fashion. The spatial logic that informs Pak’s story, a backward and superstitious countryside and a modern, enlightened city, would make anti-superstition a commonplace of rural development projects in an independent South Korea. Writing of village life in the late 1950s, a period when police surveillance was less severe than under either colonial rule or military dictatorship, a Korean ethnographer reported, “Inviting . . . mudang is always done furtively as the police are strongly against the mudang” (report of Yoo Eul Byong in Mills 1960, 77). In the early 1970s, President Park Chunghee initiated the New Community Movement (SaemaΔl Undong), a mass mobilization intended to transform rural society in both form and spirit. The movement targeted not only backward rural conditions, addressed with public works projects, but also what the policy makers defined as backward rural mentality (Jager 2003, 86–96), the object of the rural policeman’s rage at the kut in the back hamlet. Under the movement banner and with official encouragement, local leaders attacked extravagant rituals as “superstitious” practices deemed detrimental to economies of time and money necessary for national development. Agents of the Movement to Overthrow Superstition (Misint’ap’a Undong) poured gasoline on village shrines and torched them, raided kut like the one described above, and sometimes fined or imprisoned the shamans who performed them, as the rural policeman had threatened to do (Chung 1973, 211; also Hung-youn Cho 1990, 214; Ch’oe K. 1974; Huang 2000, 241).14 In the 1990s, older shamans in Seoul readily recalled the harassment they experienced in the early 1970s. Commentators writing today describe colonial period anti-superstition campaigns as having damaged the shaman tradition, but they regard the New Community Movement as even more pernicious for having caused much of the South Korean population to regard their shamanic heritage as “superstition” and embrace the foreign Christian faith in record numbers (Hung-youn Cho 1990; Huang 2000; Ch’ôn 2001).


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The equation of popular religion with rural backwardness, the superstitious countryside as the mirror image of the enlightened city, is by no means unique to South Korea (cf. R. Williams 1973). Stacey Pigg’s observation that “the idea of the modern generates a sense of difference while at the same time holding out the promise of inclusion in a global cosmopolitan culture” has a wide application beyond the site of her Nepalese fieldwork (1992; 1996, 165). For more than a century, emergent middle classes throughout Asia have imbibed the notion that rationalized religious practices are a necessary and desirable component of modernity, a defining quality of who they are or want to be (Keyes, Hardacre, and Kendall 1994, 4). For those who operate within the skin of a new modernity, “anti-superstition” may seem both natural and inevitable, a part of the habitus of a time and place.15 But the countryside provokes ambivalent emotions in those who no longer live there, “alternately seductive and dangerous, unique, lost” (de Certeau 1984, 132), places of ambiguous imagining and emotional resonance, simultaneously backward and bucolic (R. Williams 1973), loci of a nostalgia-inducing vanishing authenticity (Ivy 1995). If the mother of Pak Wansô’s novella fled the countryside, the narrating daughter remembers it fondly. Where shamans evoked the superstitious countryside, nostalgia and nationalism would rehabilitate them as bearers of national culture. Encounter 2, “Culture”: Babe at the Tano kut, 1992 Babe, Yongsu’s Mother’s promising apprentice, announced that on Tano day, the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, she would perform a kut with the Ansan City branch of a shaman advocacy association. Babe wanted Yongsu’s Mother, her celebrated teacher, to participate, and she wanted me to see it. Yongsu’s Mother, who also performs with a national heritage team, and the foreign researcher would be a catch, enhancing Babe’s luster in her local circle. I normally avoid staged cultural performances as a professional conceit, but that spring Diana Lee and I had been working on a pilot film about the contemporary Korean shaman scene and we needed a kut on a proscenium stage to round out our portrait. Since our invitation came from Babe, whom we had already filmed, this seemed like a golden opportunity. That morning, Babe’s husband drives us through the quiet streets of Ansan City while, with the amplified voice of a huckster, he advertises the Tano kut through a rented megaphone. We collect a freshly permed Yongsu’s Mother from the beauty parlor and arrive at the grassy park beside a large apartment complex. Several shamans are setting up offerings and hanging god paintings on a rope line above the proscenium stage, Babe in the thick


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of things. The audience of mostly elderly women and young children drifts into the bleacherlike seats. Officials of the sponsoring shaman society, obvious in their dark dress suits, busily exchange greetings and name cards. A young man in a monk’s habit distributes the association’s newspaper, featuring an article about the danger of using lighted candles on mountainsides. The newspaper is filled with advertisements for individual shamans. This seems odd to me, shamans posting advertisements for a readership of other shamans. I do not yet realize that many shamans regard these newspapers with cynicism and see the advertisement fees as a source of quasi-coerced income for the advocacy associations. The associations who organize these public kut consciously model their activities on performances staged by Cultural Treasure (munhuaje) shaman teams recognized by the Ministry of Culture, occasions where initiated shamans perform abbreviated kut but do not invoke the gods and ancestors into the performance space.16 The Tano kut, and similar events, inhabit more ambiguous space. Yongsu’s Mother claims that when she performs with a cultural heritage team but without the gods’ inspiration, she soon grows weary and her arms and legs feel heavy. When I ask her about today’s performance, she will insist that it is “the real thing” (chinja), that the spirits appeared, however briefly. Even so, space and time are organized in the manner of a cultural festival rather than a shaman ritual, and the members of the organizing committee consistently refer to it as a haengsa, “an event,” rather than a shaman’s kut or even a festival (che). The audience rises for a tape recording of the national anthem. A master of ceremonies introduces members of the festival committee (all men but for the smartly dressed leader of the woman’s auxiliary) and distinguished guests (including myself, pinned like the rest with a distinguished guest’s boutonniere). Echoing commentary in the printed program, the chairman speaks of how the influence of foreign cultures has harmed Korea’s own distinct traditions and affirms that this event keeps the memory of such practices alive. He describes how the original Ansan Tano kut disappeared during the colonial period, borrowing for this small local revival the specter of colonial erasure that had haunted both the government’s designating vanishing folk arts as “intangible cultural heritage” (muhyang munhuaje) and the shamanic protest theater of the 1980s (C. Choi 1993). After the introductory formalities, association members gather for a commemorative photograph, and at last the kut begins. Two teams of shamans alternate segments performed in the styles of Hwanghae Province (now in North Korea) and Seoul and necessarily leave a great deal out. Yongsu’s Mother will grumble when it is done that this


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Shaman standing on knife blades at a public kut on Seoul’s YôΔido Plaza in 1994. Like the Tano kut, this kut was sponsored by a shaman advocacy organization, and as on that occasion, the action was condensed but spirits were invoked.


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mixing of northern and Seoul area gods so confused the deities that the shamans had a more difficult time manifesting them. As on similar occasions, the stage relegates the spectators to the role of a passive audience while a knot of women from the association, dressed in identical pink full-skirted and crescent-sleeved Korean costumes (hanbok), receive the gods’ divinations and bow in unison. A loud-voiced man with a microphone announces each segment, explains its significance, names the participating shamans, and sometimes offers running commentary, which, in the climactic moments of a shaman’s balancing on blades, resembles the frenzied pitch of a football announcer. He invites us to breach the invisible fourth wall separating the audience from the stage at specific, well-anticipated moments intended to evoke the communal atmosphere of a village kut. When he urges reluctant spectators to come forward and choose divination flags, only three men comply, but he has no difficulty in coaxing the crowd to gather around the two shamans jumping on fodder chopper blades (chaktu). At the very end of the kut, he invites spectators to come forward, pay their respects to the gods (with cash offerings), and dance on the stage. In staged public kut, this dancing aspires to the lost communitas (kongdongch’e) of a village ritual. Some heritage teams are particularly skilled at generating an ecstatic grand finale both in Korea and in performances abroad, but today the pleading of the master of ceremonies falls on deaf ears and the stage remains empty. One of the older shamans attempts to take charge, but she has trouble adjusting the microphone and calls for “some man” to come and fix it. I scrawl grouchily in my fieldnotes that her remark is “paradigmatic of the entire day,” of men with microphones imposing their text upon the activities of women and spirits. The dynamic could not be more different from the intimate atmosphere of a private kut, where the gods and ancestors vest with authority and humor the intimate histories and aspirations of particular client families, baring tales of wayward children, drunken spouses, and financial misadventures as they work to set things right. As public performances, kut necessarily become something else; they address not a gathering of concerned participants, neighbors, and kin but a large and largely anonymous audience: the residents of the sponsoring town or ward, the television viewing nation, or, on the occasion of the First Conference of the International Society for Shamanistic Research, scholars of the world. Embarrassing revelations from the private realm have no place in public kut intended to celebrate an abstract “Korean culture.” Instead, the kut showcases feats, spectacle, and photo opportunities while the shamans offer innocuous prognostications for good fortune. A larger national story swallows up intimate personal stories in an


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authorizing process whose dominant voices are almost inevitably educated men, not female shamans, gods, and ancestors. This becomes painfully evident when we approach Babe during the lunch break and ask her to explain on camera why the shamans are performing a Tano kut today in Ansan. We want to film a replay of what she has already told us about the Tano kut, and because she likes to preen for our camera, we assume that she will be an easy subject. But Babe misunderstands our intention of interviewing her, or perhaps we are naïve in requesting the interview as an “explanation.” With Diana and me in tow, she sets off at a brisk pace, to find a quiet spot for the interview, we assume, but it is not to be. She seeks out a member of the festival committee, an amateur folklorist with a leonine mop of white hair, and asks him to explain the event on camera. His text, like the stage itself, is far removed from immediate experience. He tells us how, in the past, women suffered throughout the year but had this one day, Tano, in which to enjoy themselves. He describes the Tano customs that appear in any folklore text and passes us on to the head of the sponsoring advocacy association. This man describes how members in the geomancers’ association are active in the festival committee, how they “help” the members of this particular shamans’ association. The geomancers have learning (hak) while the shamans have inspiration (yông); in other words, the shamans need men’s learning to fully understand and convey the significance of their work, and the learned men provide the text. Thus does a shamans’ association relegate most of the shamans to a “women’s auxiliary” (punyôhoe), for which our friend Babe, a junior shaman in her community, chairs her local branch. A gender gap? I was disturbed by the totality with which the interpreting voice controlled the act of performance, even at this undistinguished venue, and the degree to which both Yongsu’s Mother and Babe, articulate and forthright in their own sphere, accepted this voice as natural. On subsequent visits to Korea, I would seek out and interview the leaders of three different shaman advocacy associations, including the sponsors of the Ansan Tano kut. Spokespersons for these groups were almost exclusively men, usually non-shamans but sometimes the husbands or sons of shamans, and they all seemed to speak from a common transcript. They described themselves as defending the interests of professional shamans while educating the public about this important national tradition through ritual performances like the Ansan Tano kut. While they lauded shaman practice as the deep root of Korean


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culture, they saw their own work as offering “guidance” to illiterate or partially literate practitioners who were incapable of representing their own interests or preserving the pure form of their rituals. (The idea of “guidance” was already well established in 1977, when I visited the headquarters of the Spirit Worshippers’ Anti-Communist Association.) In the 1990s some groups were inviting scholars to lecture the practitioners about the proper form and meaning of their kut.17 The prominence of women in the Korean shaman world had drawn me into their midst many years ago, and after enjoying the company of these bold, often outspoken women, the muted shamans at the Tano kut and the conceits of the advocacy associations unnerved me. I mounted a feminist high horse (Kendall 1998b). I subsequently read with great enthusiasm the work of Rey Chow (1991), Lata Mani (1987), and Sharon Nolte and Sally Hastings (1991), who describe how modern Asian nationalists have rendered women as voiceless symbols of the nation itself, either as victims or as “good wives and wise mothers.” In Gayatri Spivak’s writing (1988), the subaltern does not speak, and for Luce Irigaray, woman is “castrated of words . . . except as a prostitute to the interests of the dominant ideology” (Irigaray 1985, 142). But when I spoke to several shamans about the associations that claim to represent them, I soon realized that they cared far less than I did about their being “objectified in the service of a masculine discourse,” or, as I put it to them, “that men run the associations.” When I asked the Gong Granny about the non-shaman leadership of the association for which she serves as an “adviser,” she told me that the paksu mudang, the male shamans, were too busy doing their own kut to run an association, assuming uncritically that even shaman leaders would be men. Shamans grumble about the various shaman professional organizations, not because male authorities represent them, but because they see these associations as ineffectual in furthering shamans’ own interests and sometimes as downright exploitative. Shamans described one organization as having functioned like a protection racket during the high tide of anti-superstition campaigns, reporting the activities of nonmember shamans to the authorities. Even in 1994 I encountered one otherwise successful shrine owner who had recently been harassed when he switched his affiliation to a new association. He was afraid to be interviewed, but he sent us to his present association, where we learned what had happened to him. Another shaman complained that the men who collect the membership fees also use this opportunity to sexually exploit the younger shamans. Only one young shaman echoed my feelings about gender. Ms. Shin counts some feminist scholars among her clients and is dedicated to advanc-


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ing the status of her profession. The associations have a “gender problem” (namnyô munje), she told me in 1994: “Most of the shamans are women, but non-shaman men run the associations.” But she, too, was most immediately critical of the associations as weak advocates for her profession. I shall have more to say about Ms. Shin. Whatever feminist inclination led me to the Korean shaman world, however much I see gender as implicated in the structure of revival, most of the shamans I have encountered do not derive their primary identity as “women.” They see their lives as having been defined by an unwelcome calling from the gods that made them into shamans and caused them to suffer, in dynastic times as members of an outcast (ch’ônmin) profession, and for a hundred years or more as practitioners of superstition. As officially recognized bearers of Korean tradition and performers of national heritage, they have begun to gain respect and recognition. Yongsu’s Mother and her colleagues were particularly impressed when Kim Geum-hwa, a well-spoken shaman and government-designated Human Cultural Treasure (in’ganmunhuaje), appeared on a television talk show where the moderator addressed her respectfully as “teacher” (sônsaeng).18 The women I interviewed welcome scholarly and media interest in their profession, often proudly describing the Korean, Japanese, North American, and European “students” who have attended their kut. Although Yongsu’s Mother found much to criticize at the Tano kut and chuckled at my account of a similar event where a chorus line of shamans kept bumping into each other, she was emphatic that these events are important celebrations of shamans and spirits. Shamans willingly dip into their own pockets to finance the impressive and photogenic heaps of offering food for events like the Ansan Tano kut and purchase the expensive yunipôlmΔ (from English “uniform”) of matching silk Korean outfits in imitation of shamans at national heritage performances. How did this transition from articulate outcasts to muted cultural icons take place? Shamans enter folklore As in early modern Europe (Burke 1978; K. Thomas 1971, 666) and in early modern Japan (Ivy 1995), the flip side of rural backwardness would be rural folklore. Just as wellborn collectors of popular folklore in seventeenth-century England fed a growing sense that the citizens of town and country inhabited different mental worlds, the rise of modern folklore studies in early twentieth-century Korea distinguished modern urbanites from their rural past. As elsewhere, this past came to be regarded as a common


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national experience, a source of “usness.”19 In the manner of Confucian officials who made it their work to distinguish “good and rich” custom from harmful practices (Deuchler 1992, 110–111), early folklorists saw themselves as sifting the pure stuff of tradition from the dross of superstition to create a reformed and strengthened society (R. L. Janelli 1986, 30–31; Robinson 1988, 32). In crypto-Confucian dress, they performed the culture work of new elites who “normalize” popular practices into modernity’s new intellectual regime by observing, recording, and inscribing “custom” (cf. de Certeau 1984, esp. chap. 4). But the early folklorists were also fired by the longings of a colonized people who saw urgency in salvaging old customs and fragmentary myths as the foundation of an emphatically Korean identity (I. Choi 1987). On the eve of the colonial period, the cultural nationalist writer Sin Ch’aeho linked the tale of the culture hero Tan’gun to the origin of the Korean people, a “people” in the modern sense of nation (Em 1999; Schmid 2002, 181).20 Folklorist and historian Ch’oe Namsôn gave Tan’gun a further gloss as a proto-shaman, thus precipitating an intellectual tradition that regards what shamans do as a survival from the ancient indigenous religion of the Korean people, predating the introduction of Buddhism and Confucianism (C. T. Allen 1990; R. L. Janelli 1986).21 The notion of a primordial Korean shamanism would appear again in the second-generation folklore revival that began in the 1960s, and many shamans and shaman advocacy associations now make this claim themselves (Walraven 1993). Korean folklore studies would become a complex amalgam of cultural nationalist origin quests and colonial ethnology. In the 1920s, Japanese folklore scholarship also extended its interest to the colony, seeking primitive forms of Shinto as proof of common Korean and Japanese origins and rationale for the empire’s assimilationist policies in Korea. In the 1930s the colonial governor general’s office would subsidize a major study of shamans and popular religion employing a team of Korean and Japanese scholars (Ch’oe S. 1999). Some present-day Korean scholars find the colonial-period Korean folklorists guilty by association with the colonial project. Hung-youn Cho faults them for reducing Korea’s shamanic heritage to custom (sok) or folklore (minsok) when they might have valued it as religion (chonggyo; Hung-youn Cho 1990; 1997a, 112; 1997b, 25).22 Ch’ôn Pokhua, an impassioned shaman author, even posits a conscious Japanese plot to undermine the Korean national essence through folklore studies (2001, 155). The contemporary critique of colonial folklore studies reminds us that labels and categories cannot be neutral or innocent of history and that colonial regimes organize ethnographic knowledge to their own ends (Cohn 1996). But in


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claiming that the early folklorists and their immediate successors denigrated shamans, the critics fail to recognize that these efforts placed shamans high on an inventory of things immutably Korean in the first instance.23 Vanishing shamans Where early twentieth-century Korean folklore marked a distinction between metropolitan scholars and rural informants, between the defunct kingdom and early modernity, revivalist folklorists of the 1960s and 1970s apprehended Korean traditions across a memory horizon of colonial, wartime, and more recent industrial dislocations, against rural mass mobilizations and urban development projects, and against the seductive power of Western (in those days largely American) culture. If shamans were initially relegated to the rural hinterland of the imagination, tradition seemed to be dying there as well. While agents of the New Community Movement, like the rural policeman in Enduring Pine Village, attacked “superstitious” local rituals, folklorists in the service of the Ministry of Culture labored to record and protect them, reminding the government that its anti-superstition campaigns followed a colonial model (Ch’oe K. 1974; C. Choi 1987, 1991). The Park regime buffed its legitimacy as the defender of national culture, even as it initiated profound social and economic changes (C. Choi 1987, 1991; N. Lee 2003), and this would give the folklorists leverage to protect the shamans. In 1962, Korea had enacted a Cultural Properties Protection Law with a provision for performing arts, including rituals, as intangible cultural heritage, making designations on the basis of folklorists’ reports. One veteran folklorist confesses that the scholars protected the East Coast shamans by “tricking” the government into preserving the Tano Festival of KangnΔng, including its Tano kut, as intangible heritage (Walraven 1993).24 The heritage system also encouraged shamans, as masters of traditional song and dance forms, to train and perform with intangible heritage teams even before their kut per se received heritage designation (Yang 1994, 52–54, 104).25 With the popularization of folklore studies from the 1970s, well-read Koreans began to regard shamanic practices (musok) as part of a Korean cultural repertoire, part of the visual inventory of things Korean recuperated from a lost village world (Delissen 2001). In 1981 the distinguished folklorist Yim Seuk Jai (Im Sôk-chae) and his students founded the Kut Study Group (Kut hakhoe). Photographers Kim Su-nam and Kim Tong-hΔi produced evocative photographic essays of regional kut, shot in black and white in earthy, rural-seeming settings, and a flood of books about shamans


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claimed space on the shelves of Seoul bookstores, publications intended for a general as much as a specialist audience. In 1983 the media seized upon the shamanic initiation of UCLA graduate student Ch’ae (Park) Hi-a as a seemingly anomalous mediation of Western education and Korean popular religion.26 Features about shamans appeared in glossy magazines. Into the 1980s, cultural gatekeepers continued to express unease about using shamans to represent Korean culture overseas. In 1982 the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival invited the shaman Kim Geum-hwa, already a veteran of the Korean folk festival circuit, to perform on the mall in Washington, D. C. Kim’s advocates argued mightily with the Ministry of Culture to secure her participation, but the tide was definitely turning.27 In 1985, Kim and her kut received Human Cultural Treasure status. That same year, a South Korean 70-wôn postage stamp featured a drawing of a shaman with a resemblance to Kim performing kut. In 1989 the in-flight magazine of Korea’s Asiana Airlines offered international travelers a full-color spread of kut, a great distance from the early 1970s, when I had suggested using an image of shamans on the cover of a monthly Seoul tourist magazine and was told by my employers that this would be “too primitive, like Africa.” In 1991, on the occasion of the First Conference of the International Society for Shamanistic Research, held in Seoul, Professor Kim T’ae-gon, a wellknown Korean folklorist and the conference organizer, proudly suggested that Korea possessed the world’s most vital living shaman tradition. The process had come full circle from denial, through nostalgic celebration, to recognition as a national resource. Shamans, once regarded as embarrassing evidence of rural backwardness, had become cultural icons, in part because the past itself had become something different. By the 1980s, memories of national humiliation and economic hardship could be measured against South Korea’s triumphant entrance into the ranks of the newly developed nations and by the selection of Seoul as the site of the 1988 Olympics. Whereas policy makers had once regarded shamanic practices as a superstitious impediment to national development, shamans were now being revisited as part of the national essence that had enabled Koreans to endure adversity and triumph. The organizers of the Seoul 1988 Olympics Arts Festival made this explicit by sequencing a major performing arts event as if it were a kut and by using music and dance derived from shaman ritual in the performance itself (Dilling 2001, 178, 198). By this time, and in such contexts, shamans were being inscribed as national essence. Scholarship had played a part, from Ch’oe Namsôn’s anointing of the mythical founder Tan’gun as Korea’s primordial shaman to Kim T’aegon’s describing mudang as the source of Korea’s spiritual energy (chôngsin


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enoji; 1972, 76). Where folklore and cultural preservation had domesticated shamans as icons of the Korean past, the pro-democratic Popular Culture Movement (Minjung Munhua Undong), allied with South Korea’s struggle for democracy, would fuse shamans and their work to a resonant notion of late twentieth-century Koreanness, bringing folklore and theology into the crucible of radical politics. Shamans and the masses In the years of scholarly folklore revival, the cultural critic Sim U-sông argued that folklore was not something found only in villages or associated with the past, but the very essence of Korean culture, alive in customs, theater, and folk festivals (Sim U. 1985, 13).28 If this view was novel in the 1970s, it has since become commonplace in much contemporary South Korean writing and thinking about shamans as a legacy of the Popular Culture Movement. The 1980s erupted with impassioned protest and violent suppression, baptized in the blood of the Kwangju Insurrection and culminating in the torrent of popular dissent, labor strikes, and grassroots movements that ushered out the Chun Doo Hwan government in 1987. Things Korean came to be cast in opposition to things Western. The most obvious targets were postwar American patronage, held culpable in the massacre in Kwangju and more broadly for supporting several decades of dictatorship, and Western-inspired popular culture, seen as having stifled an indigenous Korean spirit. But democratically minded social critics were also anti-elitist, scorning the conservative ethos of the old Confucian yangban nobility and drawing new idioms of Koreanness from the traditions of downtrodden farmers, laborers, and outcast shamans, the minjung, or “masses” (Abelmann 1993; C. Choi 1987, 1993, 1995; Kwang-ok Kim 1994; N. Lee 2003). The movement drew ideological ballast from Minjung theology, the theology of the masses, developed by progressive Christian clergy who saw factory workers, farmers, and urban poor as “the inheritors of the Heavenly Kingdom” (D. K. Suh 1983; Yoo 1988, chap. 8). In the 1970s and 1980s, university students who had embraced the folkloric revival used folk forms as vehicles of political protests. Jongsung Yang, who taught students as a journeyman heritage performer, suggests that the government’s intangible heritage system also inadvertently fed into the protest theater of the Popular Culture Movement by elevating theretofore humble folk forms as intangible heritage and by encouraging heritage performers to teach a widening circle of enthusiasts, including movement-oriented university students (1994, chap. 5).


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Minjung theology popularized the notion of han, unrequited grievances, as the pain of the politically and socially oppressed Korean masses, unbound and released (hanp’uri) in kut. In Minjung thinking, Koreans bare the han of bitter national experience, colonization, national division, fratricidal war, military occupation, and economic exploitation. Shaman rituals that give voice to and thereby release the pain of the unquiet dead witness the spirituality of a historically oppressed people (CTC-CCA 1981; D. K. Suh 1983). By linking kut for the dead and placations of hungry ancestors to specific instances of historical and recent oppression, Minjung ideology enabled the recasting of shaman rituals as a widely recognized idiom of protest theater (C. Choi 1987, chap. 3; 1995; Kwang-ok Kim 1994; Seong-nae Kim 1989a., 1989b; Sun 1991, chap. 3). At mass demonstrations, sympathetic shamans or self-styled shamanic performers invoked and comforted the souls of students and workers who had died in the cause of social justice as “martyrs for democracy.”29 The notion of shamans as culture bearers for the masses brought socially marginal shamans into close contact with university students and dissident intellectuals who sought them out and studied their chants and dances in order to perform more authentic protest kut. One woman who performed as a shaman during demonstrations learned of her own divine destiny when she sought instruction from a well-known shaman and was subsequently initiated (Ch’a 1997, 48–63). Many of the older shamans, long wary of government harassment and protective of their newly favored status, avoided involvement with the students, but younger shamans welcomed the attention of their more privileged age peers. Some continued their own practice with an expanded political consciousness (ibid., 63–65) while others came to feel exploited and disillusioned with students who, rather than using the kut to comfort their fallen comrades and their own turbulent hearts, seemed to use the shaman as a mouthpiece for political slogans (Sun 1991, 177–179). On the campuses, approximations of shaman ritual and performances of folk-inspired protest theater would reach an ecstatic climax, often as a prelude to an off-campus political demonstration (Kwang-ok Kim 1994; N. Lee 2003). This evocation of communitas would be dubbed kongdongch’e, literally “the collective body,” as evoked in accounts of traditional village rituals (Ch’a 1997; Huang 2000) and sometimes described as an ancient and fundamental expression of Korean religiosity, a sacramental experience (Hung-youn Cho 1990, 231). These forms, and their national essentialist interpretation, spread well beyond the university. In 1987, at the end of a well-attended kut performed by a Cultural Treasure shaman team in the open air, the emcee tried to shame a bashful audience into dancing by telling


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them to “pity the poor foreigners who cannot play like this.” By the time of the Ansan Tano kut, in the early 1990s, ecstatic collective dancing was an expected, if sometimes unconsummated, feature of public kut, even kut performed on proscenium stages to mimic heritage performances. As an abiding legacy of the struggle years, the kut for the dead remains a powerful protest idiom that effectively links ritual, history, and the unresolved emotions of those who mourn. In the 1980s, Seong-nae Kim described kut for the dead on Cheju Island as a covert space where mourning for the otherwise unmentionable victims of the Cheju Uprising of 1948 could be articulated (1989a, 1989b); she now writes of kut performed on Cheju as public expressions of protest and commemoration (2000, 2001b). A group of young shamans from Inch’ôn has vowed to perform kut in all eight (traditional) Korean provinces to release the souls of “military comfort women” who were forced to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Pacific War. The shamans’ work, initially inspired by the feminist Alternative Culture Group (TtohanaΔi Munhua), has taken on a life of its own as the shamans make a link between Korea’s tragic history, the unresolved pain of dead comfort women, the demands of living comfort women for a formal apology from the Japanese government, and the continuing division of the Korean nation. So legible is this idiom of mourning and release that Korean shamans have performed kut for the dead of non-Korean tragedies to receptive foreign audiences. In 1992 the shaman Chun Tae-bok sent off the souls of London’s blitz victims at a kut at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. When Cultural Treasure shaman Kim Geum-hwa performed to a packed New York auditorium during the Lincoln Center Festival in 2003, she invoked the dead of 9/11, bringing most of her audience to tears, including many who did not understand a word of her spoken Korean. Jung Mun San, a male shaman, had already tended the collective dead of 9/11 on the first anniversary, mounting a kut in New York’s Battery Park. In one of the most remarked upon and controversial reinscriptions of this idiom, Hyun Kyung Chung, minister and feminist theologian, began her plenary address to the World Council of Churches in Canberra in 1991 with a shamanic invocation of “Joan of Arc and other women burned as witches, all the victims of the crusades and of Western colonization, Jews killed in Nazi gas chambers, Vietnamese napalmed and boat people starved, those smashed by tanks in Kwangju, Tiananmen Square and Lithuania . . .” (New York Times, 16 March 1991; Cox 1995, 213–241). And yet, despite favorable recent media attention and the flattery of imitation by non-shaman performers, those who call themselves mudang,


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mansin, and posal continue to be harassed by officials, thugs, and cranky neighbors. Shamans have every incentive to perpetuate an image and language of cultural authenticity and to welcome cultural performance opportunities like the Ansan Tano kut, but this recognition does not always protect them. Some within the shaman world have come to see such harassment as religious discrimination. Christian neighbors use existing noise pollution laws to complain about neighborhood kut, and a shaman observes that her adversaries “ring their own bells at all hours.” When urban development projects destroy shrines and sacred sites, the question becomes, “Would they tear down a Christian church or a Buddhist temple?” Despite, or perhaps because of, her celebrity status, Kim Geum-hwa often finds herself the butt of Christian confrontation (C. Kim 2003, 158), incidents that she describes as an insult to both her culture and her religion (Ch’a 1997, 38). By calling what they do “religion,” some shamans, and their advocates, have begun to dispute the designation of their work as folklore or custom. Ms. Shin, the young shaman who described a “gender problem” in the advocacy associations, first posed the question to me: “Would they make ministers or Buddhist monks into Human Cultural Treasures?” “Religion,” with its own trajectory in Korean thinking about shamans, waxes as the third comma on my t’aegΔk symbol. Encounter 3, “Religion”: Auntie Cho’s picaresque, 1994 We meet her by chance at the Celestial Shrine on a wet June day in 1994, a shrine cook and maid-of-all-work (kongyangju) wearing simple work clothes, immaculately clean, her cropped hair flecked through with white. Far more willing to talk to us than is her reticent employer, she unabashedly joins our conversation, speaking up when he hesitates. Her short, sturdy frame radiates energy, her eyes twinkle, and a broad smile fills her round face. She tells us to call her “Auntie Cho,” a humble term of address. She has struggled for years with her spiritual calling, initially resisting but now praying for full inspiration. Women like Auntie Cho often work as shrine cooks, observing the work of successful shamans and continuing their own devotions, but Auntie Cho has also traveled other spiritual paths and has thought deeply about their implications. We huddle in the alley outside the shrine. My assistant Ms. Kim and I balance notebooks and tape recorder while Auntie Cho speaks, unperturbed by the tall Westerner and the tape recorder, not flustered by the presence of three young men—intoxicated at midafternoon—who evidence great curiosity in our conversation, proclaim that they are also “Buddhists,” and hover


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close for a while, breathing residual alcohol fumes into our faces before lurching to the wall to relieve themselves. Auntie Cho has a tale to tell, and the bizarre circumstances of the telling will not hold her back: When I was young, I thought that maybe I would become a Catholic nun . . . but you need your parents’ permission, and without that, I couldn’t do it. I continued to go to the Catholic church, but then I became less avid. You have to observe the sacraments and it’s all very complicated. Next, I went to the Protestant church, the Methodists. I went there for a while, but that was when I began to dream [the visionary dreams that foretell a shaman destiny]. I went into business. I was 90 percent, 100 percent resolved that I wanted to live a quiet life, but things kept falling apart. Tens of times, just when I was at the point of accomplishing something, things fell apart and fell apart again . . . and then I would go to some house and see a kut and the spirits would come. . . . When you get to be that way, you don’t know what is happening to you. . . . I could see a person’s entire situation. I was in a very strange state. A friend of mine asked me to divine for her, and when I did, I could see everything, even to the graves of her ancestors. But a shaman30 has to have sense; she has to know how to put it all together, everything about all the client’s kith and kin [to make a convincing divination]. I wasn’t able to take what I had and make a living with it. I just couldn’t do it. I would see it all, exactly as if I had laid my own eyes on it, but I didn’t know how to express it in words. I didn’t want to have this. I wanted to be rid of it. I entered a Buddhist temple to suppress it, sitting there beneath the Buddha; in his beneficent aura [kap’i] . . . I sat and prayed for two years. . . . I was a cook in a Buddhist temple for two years, but then it was just as before, so I came out of the temple and now I’ve been here for two months. . . . I don’t have much to say for my life. After wandering around like that, I don’t have any family to speak of. On my path, there are young spirits and middle-range spirits who sometimes err from [the teachings of] Christianity and Buddhism. . . . In Buddhism the fame and glory [myôngne] of human life are like rice powder; one must perceive the world as no more than a pit filled with rice cake. . . . But the ancestors I have [the ancestors who should become her guardian gods and assist her


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in her work as a shaman] are still practicing self-cultivation [torΔl tangnΔnjosang], so they haven’t yet opened my mouth [to give inspired speech as a shaman does]. Korean shamans and aspiring shamans often tell tales of the incredible hardships, pain, and rootless wandering they endure before assuming their calling.31 A destined shaman might flirt with Christianity to avoid her fate or might attempt to hold the spirits in check through rigorous Buddhist practice (Y. K. Harvey 1979, 110; Kendall 1988, 81), and some women feel a calling despite their prior commitment to Christianity. The Mansin from Within-theWall told me that when she was still a devout Christian, she saw Hananim, the Christian God, descending in a white airplane. She thanks Hananim for granting her the shaman profession so that she can provide for her family. On another visit to the Celestial Shrine, Ms. Kim and I met a thin young woman in the throes of a religious conflict. Girlishly dressed in short denim slacks and a T-shirt, she assisted the shaman by delivering fans and offering food at the appropriate moment, cued the client, and anticipated the appearance of gods from a few bars of appropriate music. Indeed she seemed far more at home in the world of kut than the bumbling novice shaman who was awkwardly presiding over one of her own first kut. The woman described herself as a Christian but felt that it was wrong to call the shaman gods “Satan,” as Christians do. As we suspected, her thin physique evidenced that she was suffering from “the drought caused by the gods” (sinΔi kamul), the ill health and misfortunes that dog a destined shaman’s footsteps until she accepts her calling. She explained that she was trying to appease her gods by spending time at kut, and once she had recovered her health, she would go back to church because Christianity was “more elevated” (wich’iga nop’ta) than popular religion. But she had every appearance of an apprentice shaman, learning the kut in anticipation of her own initiation. Even against such stories, Auntie Cho stands out for me as a bricoleur (Levi-Strauss 1966, 16–36), piecing together her own theology out of images and understandings gained on her different spiritual paths. She describes her prolonged suffering as, simultaneously, a sort of Catholic penance, of which she has not yet done enough, and a consequence of her guardian gods’ lack of Buddhist self-cultivation, their failure to lead the lives of good Christians and Buddhists. As a religious comparativist, the would-be shaman measures shamanic practices against her understanding of Buddhism and Christianity, evaluating the shaman’s path against that of the Christian minister and the Buddhist monk:


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To become a monk, you must go deep into the mountains, sever all ties, and rigorously practice self-cultivation twice a day, over and over. Becoming a minister, that’s the quickest way. As for a shaman, if she isn’t someone with divine inspiration [yôngjôk insin], then she can’t do it. She has to divine for people even though she knows absolutely nothing about them. Once you say, “Here’s how it is with you,” you have to get it right or no one will come to you for divinations. . . . That’s how it is with our shaman practice, and the same with Minister Cho Yong-gi [the leader of Korea’s and possibly the world’s largest Pentecostal church who is credited with powers as a faith healer]. I would call him a great male shaman [k’Δn paksu]. When you serve the ancestors, you must make a Christlike effort with your prayers. The Buddha said that everyone has the Buddha nature, just as something you dig out of the dirt will sparkle like a diamond when you polish it. Minister Cho quotes scripture, he tells us to make a Christ-like effort, he puts his faith in prayer, dedicates everything to it, and this is miracle talk. You might say that all religions have miracles [kijôk]. For Auntie Cho, the “Christ-like effort” (Yesuwa kat’Δn nΔngryôk) required to fulfill one’s spiritual destiny, or Buddhist self-cultivation, the metaphor of polishing a diamond found in the dirt, describes the shaman’s path. As many Koreans do, she equates the “miraculous” power of healing through Christian prayer with the shaman’s power to divine and heal. In ironically defining Minister Cho as “a great male shaman,” Auntie Cho would seem to vindicate her own much-maligned path toward the shaman profession—“all religions have miracles”—but she immediately denigrates the miraculous work of shamans as insufficient to her understanding of “religion” (chonggyo). This is the nub of the problem for Auntie Cho: The thing we call belief [sinang] must be moralistic, universalistic, and virtuous, and shamanic practices [musok] have not been systematized like that. This is because shamans are not very educated. But as for miracles, more of these come to the shamans, more than in Buddhism, more than in Christianity. You see, in order to become a shaman, you must experience extreme pain. Not just anyone can take it, every imaginable humiliation down to the depths of hard living. Just short of the point of death the gods come. And because one has known


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such suffering, one can empathize with the suffering of sentient beings. . . . As the fundamental rule of salvation, one must first seek self-understanding, and from that, the salvation of others. But that isn’t how it works. Even if one feels this need in one’s own heart, it gets forgotten because there is no basis for it [in shaman practice]. . . . This is where our shaman practices are weak. We have genuine miracles and inspiration, but the shamans are ignorant. They should be concerned with saving all living things, but they put too much emphasis on the spirits. I mean, it isn’t right to value miracles above everything else. Of course there are miracles, there are always miracles, but I feel that the shamans don’t yet have the knowledge to guide believers on the right and proper path, even while they give them miracles and help. That’s because there’s nothing systematic to it [shamanic practices]. I firmly believe that if someone should arise from among our shaman society within Korea and educate all the shamans in a group, then all sentient beings could be guided. But we don’t have any such system yet. I left this encounter with a sense of irony. Where I find the shamans’ lack of hierarchy and doctrine appealing, Auntie Cho craves orthodoxy, structure, and leadership and, like generations of reformers before her, faults the shamans for their lack of education. Where I find agents of cultural production who mesh the shifting needs and circumstances of their clients to a broad but always reassuringly Korean religiosity, Auntie Cho sees a simpleminded instrumental appeal to the “miraculous” that fails to provide a suffering humanity with an inspirational and morally uplifting doctrine. Where I find strong-minded women, untrammeled by the authority of a religious hierarchy, Auntie Cho longs for a messiah to set them all straight by wedding the miraculous powers of the shamans to a theology of salvation. Of such syncretistic encounters are messianic movements and “new religions” born, though Auntie Cho would not, I think, be a leader. When we look for Auntie Cho again in 1998, we will be disappointed but not surprised that she has disappeared without a trace. The shrine-keeper will not remember her, because so many women like her have passed through his employ.32 The problem of “religion” Auntie Cho, the would-be shaman, deems shamanic practices deficient as a “religion,” a term that I would have been happy to do without, partic-


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ularly as she deployed it in a narrow, post-Enlightenment Western sense that stacked the deck against shamans and would-be shamans like herself (cf. Asad 1993, 27–53; 2001; Smith 1978; Tambiah 1990). But Western preconceptions, in the most basic sense of “church” and “doctrine,” have already structured the idea of “religion” for Auntie Cho, and not just Auntie Cho, and not just the Korean scholars and theologians who would define what she does as “shaman religion” (mugyo), and not just in Korea. As Webb Keane puts it, religion, with culture, has been “let out of the bag, and we are hardly in a position to scoop them back up again” (2007, 86). Western notions of religion have influenced the modern iterations of Shinto (Hardacre 1989, 55), Hinduism (Freitag 1980; Frykenberg 1993), and Thai (Keyes 1989) and Sinhalese Buddhism (Obeyesekere 1991; Swearer 1991, 637–638). They have also influenced the construction of religious policies in postcolonial states and the manner in which different practitioners position themselves in relation to officially recognized religious practice. Jane Atkinson has described how the Wana, a tribal group in eastern Sulawesi, found it necessary to justify their own indigenous cosmology (and ethnic identity) through a language compatible with the monotheistic requirements of Indonesian law regarding “religion” (Atkinson 1983). With the collapse of the Soviet Union, shamans in the Buryat and Sakha republics have begun to make explicitly religious claims for what they do by comparison with recognized religions (Balzer 1996a, 1996b; Humphrey 1999). Christian notions of religion have taken on a life of their own in South Korea, where nearly 20 percent of the population is Protestant Christian and another 11 percent Catholic (Republic of Korea, 2005 census). With Japanese, South Asian, Thai, and Sinhalese reformers of the late nineteenth century; with the Wana, the Buryat, and the Sakha at the end of the twentieth; and with theology students the world over, Auntie Cho engages in her own “dialogue with world religions” (cf. Atkinson 1983, 684). Making religion In contemporary South Korea, the Popular Culture Movement’s notion of shaman ritual as embodying a distinctive Korean spirituality, the folklore revival’s embrace of shamans as national culture, and a religious historical view of “shamanism” as primordial religion all contribute to contemporary Korean understandings of shamans and their work. The notion of mugyo as the ancient religion of the Korean people is now so pervasive that many shamans and their followers will, at the drop of a hat, discourse to visiting scholars about the tradition’s five-thousand-year history and its primordial


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influence on all aspects of Korean culture. Minjung theology brought theologians into the shaman world as researchers and writers comfortable with the idea of a “mugyo,” or shaman religion, but bearing their own preconceptions of what a religion must be. Following a procrustean sense of “religion,” the leaders of shaman advocacy associations describe themselves as providing a strong organization with an effective leadership that will champion the interests of the shaman world in the political arena just as Christian and Buddhist associations, the latter in reaction to the formidable Christian presence (Buswell 1992, 143–144), have effectively defended and advanced member interests. But the shaman world makes a bad fit with commonplace notions of a religion as church, congregation, or doctrine in the Christian sense. Shamans operate as free agents rather than an ordained clergy, and while some clients may develop enduring relationships with a particular shaman and the efficacious gods in her shrine, they feel no loyalty to an overarching religious abstraction. When efficacy fails, they might seek another shaman, they might make offerings at a Buddhist temple, they might attend a Christian church, or they might do nothing at all.33 In the summer of 1994 the leaders of one advocacy organization, citing these “obstacles,” labored to create an official religious organization for Korean shamans. With an echo of Auntie Cho, craving her shaman messiah, and the geomancers at the Ansan Tano kut who saw themselves as contributing literate knowledge to divinely inspired shamans, they explained that the shaman world could not advance (paljôni andoenda) in the absence of “scholarship” (hangmun). As a measure of the dominance of a Christian model, they believed that a successful religious body must have both scripture and a primary god: As you probably know, the shamans consider General Ch’oe Yông a god, and President Park Chung-hee is a god, Mme. Yuk Yôngsu is a god. . . .34 And because [the shamans] all have different spirits, each one claims, “My spirits and only mine are superior.” That is the main reason they aren’t able to unite. Normal religions [ilban chonggyo] unite around a single body of scripture [kyôngjôn]; if the Buddhists have Sakyamuni, then they believe only in Sakyamuni, and if the Christians have Jesus, then Jesus God is the only one they believe in. This is how they have been nurtured to the present day. This is why they are able to unite and advance themselves. Of course, it isn’t that way with shamans is it?


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These would-be organizers were at work writing the requisite scripture. They were also planning to unite their membership, and ultimately all Korean shamans, through the common worship of Tan’gun, the mythical founder. They advanced a complex discussion of how Tan’gun worship would provide a common symbol of national strength and resolve, just as (in their view) the Japanese nation unites in venerating the emperor.35 While at least one other advocacy organization brings its membership together once a year to venerate Tan’gun, “our founder,” this group’s theological insistence on a primary god, along the Christian model, was striking. They explained that common veneration of an exalted being would engender respect for parents and elders and would restore morality to social and political life. They also recognized that monotheism and shaman pantheons were incompatible but suggested a practical compromise: We are promoting Tan’gun when we educate the shamans. We recognize, of course, that any god might descend into a shaman when she is initiated [to become her guardian god], so when they are in their own homes, in their own shrines, in their own places of prayer, then they should serve those gods. But when they come out and deal with people in the public sphere, then they should follow Tan’gun. This is what we are trying to instill, but you know how it is with shamans today; while they are sympathetic to the idea, none of them are able to do it. By 1998 this quixotic organization had disappeared. Its plan had been no more realistic than Auntie Cho’s wish for a shaman messiah or the ambitions of a former Christian, a shaman’s husband, to establish a theology school for shamans. I was surprised, therefore, to hear a reprise of this project from the energetic Ms. Shin, the young shaman who had so emphatically described the associations as having a “gender problem.” Now she was organizing the shamans themselves outside the male-dominated advocacy associations. Although she prominently displayed Buddha statues and other Buddhist imagery in her own shrine, did divinations with a Buddhist rosary wrapped around her wrist, and had another rosary dangling from the rearview mirror of her van, she was grappling with the possibility that a true shaman religion would remove the Buddha. Whereas in a previous interview she had denied that Tan’gun was an authentic shaman god, she now invoked him as a unifying figure, the founding national ancestor and ancestral shaman. Like some of the men I had spoken with in the advocacy


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organizations, she regretted the potentially divisive claims shamans made for the superior powers of the gods in their own shrines even though they honored the same basic pantheon—“My General Yi Sun-sin is better than your General Yi Sun-sin.” Ms. Shin had formed an alliance with Nami,36 a prominent Human Cultural Treasure shaman, and had brought together normally rivalrous shamans from Seoul and Inch’ôn to found a religious association that the government would recognize. She was exhorting the shamans to stand together (tanhap) and act in unity (hwahap). By early June 1998 they had held several meetings, written articles of association, and sponsored a highprofile kut to pray for national reunification on Tano day. In the immediate aftermath of this event, an exhausted Ms. Shin spoke of her unflagging dedication to the project, of how important it was to organize and address the insults that shamans receive, and of their need for media access in the manner of Christian spokespersons. She also acknowledged the difficulty of organizing shamans. In the end, her project would fail, although I suspect that she has not abandoned her dream. Conclusion: Lost worlds and the stakes and limitations of “culture” and “religion” Once considered superstitious, antimodern, and even demonic, Korean shamans claim new respect as national icons. At century’s end, Koreans regardless of religion or background can enjoy performances of kut and even join in ecstatic dancing at the end, so long as the spiritual content of these events is glossed as a cultural entertainment (Kendall 1998b; Hogarth 1999, 348–349).37 When scholarly and oppositional discourses elevated shamans to the realm of national culture, they also objectified the shamans as signs of rural authenticity. Scholars offer bittersweet descriptions of fast-disappearing village rituals precariously maintained by fragmented communities of elderly people whose ancestral communities were destroyed by urban development schemes (Huang 2000). Park Ki-bok’s well-received documentary of the shaman world, Yôngmae,38 includes the requisite communal rite in a fishing village with men and women joining the shamans in ecstatic dancing. The camera pans a line of weathered, happy faces, but each face in the frame seems over the age of fifty and underscores (yet again) the precariousness of an authentic cultural experience. With an idealized view of the past feeding a national nostalgia, some contemporary scholars fault living shamans for failing to measure up to the image of “Korean culture” or “Korean religion” constructed in their name.


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Even the shamans’ strongest scholarly advocates describe contemporary practices as a diminished tradition, the legacy of colonialism and the blind acceptance of Western culture that followed in its wake (Hung-youn Cho 1990, 216; 1997b, 110–111; Huang 1988, 19–31; 2000, 271–273). Contemporary shamans are routinely criticized for charging high fees, encouraging excesses of offering food and ritual paraphernalia, and, above all, for performing abbreviated rituals and neglecting to learn the long chants and ritual lore held in the fragile memories of elderly shamans. In effect, critics blame the shamans for adapting to contemporary South Korean life, even as shamans were once faulted for engaging in things backward, rural, and superstitious. Superstition, religion, and culture have engaged South Korea in arguably modern ways, and each has roots early in the story of Korean modernity. I have written to sketch this history and to suggest both how Korean modernity has regarded shamans through different and inconsistent lenses and how some shamans have responded to these characterizations in words not of their own making. The body of this book describes shamans living inside South Korean modernity, digesting it in a daily practice that presumes human interactions with gods and ancestors and, through such interactions, transforms anew. These shamans will undoubtedly disappoint readers who seek a changeless authenticity, but they are alive and well in South Korea’s ethnographic present and sometimes they hold up an unflattering mirror to its face.


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2 Memory Horizons Kut from Two Ethnographic Presents

At the end of March 1977, angry spirits accosted a certain Mrs. Min and drove her mad. Shamans labored throughout a chilly spring night to save her life and restore her sanity, and I took fieldnotes. This experience accosted my own ethnographic imagination and pushed it in some of the directions that would generate Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits. In that work, I make only passing reference to these events, but an early description was the substance of an obscure publication, my first (Kendall 1977a). I have used descriptions of the “crazy kut” (mich’in kut) many times to teach students how kut work as therapy. When I shared this material with a cross-cultural psychiatry seminar at the University of Hawai‘i, residents who worked with “psychotic break” cases in a hospital emergency ward judged that, by whatever means, the Korean mansin had done a creditable night’s work in making their patient functional. The kut from 1977 provides a necessary counterpoint to a kut held fifteen years later in a commercial shaman shrine for an urban woman who, although not mad, was in pain. The 1992 kut throws into question some of what I thought I knew and highlights the particular challenge of studying rituals performed in a transient urban setting. There are risks in comparing two examples plucked from the universes of kut observed in these different time strata, particularly when the polarities bracket a past-to-present, country-to-city continuum that is all too predictable. Although the full-on possession and exorcism described in the 1977 kut was rare for even the shamans who performed it, and any kut has features unique to its own circumstance, both of these kut were kut for affliction (uhuan kut), not kut for good fortune (chaesu kut) or kut to send off ancestors (chinogi kut). 34


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Two of the three shamans who performed the 1977 kut also performed the 1992 kut. But even in the 1970s Yongsu’s Mother and her colleagues performed kut in Seoul, Righteous Town, and Anyang as well as in villages, although only rarely in commercial shaman shrines, and even in villages at least one kut lacked the concerned chorus of kinswomen and neighbors who are prominent in the crazy kut and so noticeably absent in 1992.1 In other words, the two rituals make a general but not pure or perfect comparison of some of the ways that social, demographic, and spatial changes were transforming the world of kut for Yongsu’s Mother and her colleagues in the years between 1977, when I first knew them, and 1992, when I began to work with them again. 1977: The “crazy kut” After several days of administering family census questionnaires, my assistant and I are on our way to catch the late afternoon bus to Seoul, savoring thoughts of hot baths and downtime. On our way to the bus stop, we drop in on the shaman, Yongsu’s Mother. We are barely seated when Chatterbox Mansin arrives in great excitement, slides back the wood-and-paper door, and subverts any thought of hot baths and downtime. Yongsu’s Mother must join her in an urgent kut for a “crazy person” (mich’in saram), a “crazy kut” (mich’in kut). (In the client family’s presence they will tactfully call the ritual a kut for affliction). An in-law of one of Chatterbox’s clients is in the throes of a violent possession, so violent that if their exorcism fails, she will die in torment. They insist that we go with them. Yongsu’s Mother, six years a mansin, has seen a crazy kut only twice before, and Chatterbox, with twenty years’ experience, has participated in only three. Chatterbox Mansin pours out the details. The possessed woman, Mrs. Min, and her husband, Mr. Pak, are landless hired laborers at the bottom rung of rural society. They had gone to Mrs. Min’s natal home for the memorial ritual that ended three years of mourning (taesang) for Mrs. Min’s mother.2 Despite the poverty of her own household, Mrs. Min brought two mal of rice as her contribution.3 Following custom, when the ritual was complete, the women took rice cakes and sweets from the offering table to distribute among the neighbors. Mrs. Min went out with them, her skirt filled with rice cake. Once she stepped outside the main gate of her natal home, the cake in her skirt jiggled and bounced as her arms began to shake. She flailed out of control, uttering a stream of garbled, incomprehensible speech. The men of the family tried to restrain her violent thrashing, but three days later, at the time of her kut, she is still badly bruised and swollen.


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According to one of her kinswomen, “She seemed to be trying so hard to say something, but her nerves [sin’gyông] would not let her.” The notion that Mrs. Min’s “nerves” caused her to keep her feelings bottled up inside would be stated repeatedly by her assembled neighbors and kin: “She doesn’t talk about things—she holds it all in and gets so tense”; she lives with anxiety, or, literally, “uses her nerves” (sin’gyôngΔl ssΔda); “Her husband should have let her talk, just say whatever was on her mind.” By and by, the gods and ancestors will echo these same sentiments when they appear in the kut. Her husband knew, when his wife began to writhe outside the house gate, that this was a matter for the mansin. Family and neighbors had argued that a mansin would “just tell you to do a kut,” something that Mr. Pak and his household could ill afford. Instead, he took his wife by taxi to a hospital (probably a small walk-in clinic) where the doctor gave her an injection and a prescription of powdered medicine. In the mansin’s view, a hospital is useless when someone is struck mich’ida at a funeral or a major ancestor rite, circumstances that indicate a dangerous and life-threatening possession: “With an injection, the person just sleeps. They don’t get better. The medicine just makes them weak.” Mrs. Min spent the next two days in a drugged and unresponsive state. Alarmed, Mr. Pak’s cousin’s wife went to Chatterbox Mansin, her “regular mansin,” or tan’gol. Chatterbox suspected that one or more of the greedy supernatural Officials (Taegam) in Mrs. Min’s household were making trouble. Instead of offering rice cake to her own household gods, Mrs. Min had taken the grain to her natal home. Chatterbox divined (mugôri), casting rice and coins on the slick surface of a varnished tray, heedful of any vision or sensation, then asked more questions and refined her diagnosis. Mrs. Min was possessed by two particular spirit Officials; one lived in the embankment near her home, and the other had presided over the old shack where Mrs. Min and her husband used to live. The abandoned god rode the recycled lumber to their new house. Meanwhile, the family’s Mountain God (Sansin, Sansillyông), angry at past neglect, allowed the family dead in their hillside graves to move about. Mrs. Min’s dead mother, pitying her daughter’s poverty, reached out to caress her, but the unwholesome touch of the dead helped bring on her madness. We would hear more details at the Pak house, where kinswomen and neighbors assembled to prepare the kut. Mrs. Min had given birth seventeen times, with many difficult pregnancies and deliveries, but only three daughters, ages eighteen, fifteen, and six, survived. Mrs. Min’s sonless state was cause for particular pity. When she gave birth to sons, they died within days or in the first few years of life, and male triplets had expired shortly after


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birth. When the family was still living in a shack, she had carried her youngest child, a five-month-old girl, to the fields with her. The baby slept while the mother worked, covered with a tattered blanket for protection from sun and wind. The driver of a military vehicle, mistaking the blanket for a bundle of discarded rags, ran over the sleeping child, crushing her skull. With the compensation money, the Paks were able to leave their one-room shack and move to a small but adequate house near Mrs. Min’s kin. Mrs. Min had been struck mich’ida once before, after the death of another of her babies. Her mother and husband had buried the little corpse in a rough woven rice sack to discourage a malevolent spirit from repeatedly entering Mrs. Min’s womb. That night, Mrs. Min’s elder brother’s wife dreamed of a white-haired old woman in a white dress who said, “Do you think that all the babies are dying because of this one baby?” The sisterin-law raced to her brother’s house and found Mrs. Min already raving. The mansin identified the woman in the dream as the Birth Grandmother (Samsin Halmôni), who, angry at their treatment of the baby she had sent the family, struck Mrs. Min with madness.4 When Mr. Pak and Mrs. Min’s mother reburied the baby, Mrs. Min’s mind cleared. But now the helpful mother was gone and Mrs. Min had lost her deepest bond to her natal home, a loss marked in time and space by her step outside the threshold of her natal home at the end of the last mortuary rite. As a commonplace of village life, the relationship between a brother’s wife (olk’e) and husband’s sister (sinu) is often fraught (Brandt 1971, 129; C. C. Han 1949, 24–31; Shigematsu 1980). In the mansin’s view, Mrs. Min’s brother’s wife was ignoring her responsibility to her afflicted sister-in-law. The kut should have been held at the natal home, since this was where Mrs. Min had been struck mich’ida. “The brother’s wife didn’t want to spend the money,” Yongsu’s Mother didn’t mince words. “Here was someone on the brink of death, and the brother’s wife went off to Seoul to help her son move.” Neighbor women and Pak family wives were unsparing in their criticism of Mrs. Min’s brother’s wife. The woman would arrive late in the evening, claiming sincerity in having rushed back from Seoul on the last bus of the day. Chatterbox would give her careful and loudly public instructions on the precautionary ritual she would have to perform to remove any malevolent influence from her own home, tacitly affirming a connection between this woman’s household and her suffering sister-in-law. It was the husband’s kin—women married into the Pak family—who called in some loans and financed the kut. Mr. Pak’s cousin’s wife and younger brother’s wife assumed the burden and responsibility of preparing the kut, and during the ritual, they would actively plead with the gods


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and ancestors on Mrs. Min’s behalf. The mansin charged only 20,000 wôn (about US$40 in 1977) for the kut, the cheapest kut I saw, claiming that they kept the price low because the client was “so pathetic” (pulsanghada). The humble offerings set out on low tables for the gods and ancestors evidenced poverty. The greedy Official required meat, at least a chicken, to be satisfied. The scrawny specimen on the offering tray, “a baby chick” in the gods’ eyes, would figure in humorous exchanges between the greedy supernatural Officials and the afflicted woman’s kin. We arrive at the Pak house at sunset, joined by Chatterbox’s apprentice, Okkyông’s Mother. The small two-room dwelling is filled with activity as women hastily steam rice cake and fry flour pancakes for offerings. In the inner room, Mrs. Min, covered with a thick quilt, lies on a sleeping mat, a small woman with a worn and wrinkled face, her graying hair unbound and in disarray. Yongsu’s Mother loudly remarks on how old and haggard Mrs. Min looks, a woman only a few years older than herself: “She’s only forty-seven? Am I going to look like that when I turn forty-seven?” Mrs. Min tosses restlessly in a drugged slumber, grimacing as if in constant pain, her arms bent back at the elbows, her fists clinched. One of the women takes her arms and gently sets them on her chest. Another woman, noting her restlessness, suggests that she may want to urinate. They prop Mrs. Min up in a sitting position, but she slides over on her side and they have to support her, then gently settle her back down on her pallet and cover her. She seems to sleep, but her facial muscles remain tense and her lips move. Throughout the night, neighbor women, wives of the Pak family, and Mrs. Min’s own daughters will gently minister to her needs. Before the start of the kut, Chatterbox smoothes the woman’s hair and addresses the possessing spirits in wheedling and cajoling tones: “We’re going to give you meat, wine, and rice cake with red beans. We’re going to give it all to the Official and the ancestor. In a while, the Official will play and the ancestor will play.” The mock funeral Because Mrs. Min’s condition is dangerous to the point of death, the mansin hold a mock funeral to counter the effects of the noxious, potentially fatal arrows (sal) that strike vulnerable people at funerals and feasts, and to expel other malevolent forces that have assembled in vulturelike anticipation of a death.5 The mansin instruct Mr. Pak to prepare a little straw doll as a scapegoat, “to take the pain away with it.” He writes an inscription with Mrs. Min’s name, date of birth, and age and inserts it into the doll with seven


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coins for the underworld guide. He wraps the doll in a scrap of Mrs. Min’s clothing, then binds it in seven places like a corpse. At 7:40 Mrs. Min, with the doll on her chest, is carried outside, set down gently on rice sack mats, and bundled in quilts for a mock funeral. As in a village funeral, the women have set little mounds of steaming rice on a winnower for the death messenger (saja), who escorts the deceased to the underworld, and have placed one of Mrs. Min’s shirts, for calling her soul, on the ground nearby.6 Chatterbox distributes stout poles and instructs men from the neighborhood, men with surnames other than “Pak,” to walk nine times around Mrs. Min’s sleeping form while singing the gravediggers’ chant and pounding the earth as if they are tamping down a new grave. “Just do what you do when someone dies,” she says. This done, Chatterbox draws a makeshift bow and shoots several sticks of peach wood, a potent exorcistic substance, over Mrs. Min’s recumbent form. She flings back the quilts and pelts the semiconscious woman with fistfuls of salt, tears a piece of hemp cloth, and waves a knife over Mrs. Min, cutting and tearing malevolent influences. She tosses the knife, and it lands with the tip pointing away from the house—success. Chatterbox gives the straw doll to the “gravediggers.” who carry it away to bury on a nearby hillside, still chanting the gravediggers’ refrain. Chatterbox gives rapid-fire instructions. Before Mr. Pak can carry his wife back into the house, the door of the main gate, closed when Mrs. Min was carried outside, must be opened and the open door closed. Yongsu’s Mother explains, “A dead person goes out the front door. They can’t go back in that way again, can they? We would usually bring the patient in through the back door, but since this house doesn’t have a back door, we just opened one side of the front door and closed the other, then switched them.” This threshold switching gives graphic witness to transition, a reversal in Mrs. Min’s condition; her sick self died and was carried away, buried with the straw doll. Now the kut will aim to heal her. Encounters outside the gate After the mock funeral, it begins to rain. We wait out the rain in the inner room until nearly 11 p.m., the women discussing Mrs. Min’s condition while quietly tending her. When the rain stops, we go outside the main gate, Mrs. Min carried again in her bundle of quilts. Her husband’s cousin’s wife props her into a sitting position and holds her up, like a big rag doll. Chatterbox manifests the Mountain God of the family’s native place and then, in blue and red military robes, the Warrior Official (Kunung Taegam), who


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shoots malevolent arrows beyond the gate. She calls for a cooking pot to protect Mrs. Min’s head. With Okkyông’s mother pounding the cymbals, Chatterbox, in the gods’ persona, beats on the cooking pot helmet with a bundle of peachwood sticks, swings the chicken around Mrs. Min’s head, and pelts her with bits of chicken, millet, and rice. With a battle cry, she rips scraps of cloth over Mrs. Min and spits several jets of liquid into her face while the other women giggle. Satisfied, Chatterbox/the Spirit Warrior, a deity with exorcistic powers, takes the five-direction flags that the mansin use as a divination tool and thrusts the sticks toward Mrs. Min.7 We hold our breath. The afflicted woman slowly reaches out and with a weak gesture lightly taps a stick, her first visible sign of participation in the ritual intended to cure her. With a whooping “Aahahaha!” the mansin draws out a white flag, an auspicious color indicating the ascendancy of gods identified with Buddhas and the celestial sphere. Mr. Pak carries his wife back inside, and the women of the family, an unruly chorus led by Mr. Pak’s younger brother’s wife and his cousin’s wife, confront the Warrior Official, one of the gods that is possessing Mrs. Min. chatterbox/official: You human beings are as insignificant as grains of sand. You didn’t think the Official’s influence [param] could cause you all this trouble, did you? [Points to the offering tray.] Did you think that I would even consider such an offering? pak brother’s wife: [Laughing] We don’t have anything else to give you. In the fall, we’ll give you a steamer of rice cake this big. [Holds her hands wide.] Please, please make her well! pak cousin’s wife: In the fall we’ll give you a pig’s noggin. [More laughter because “noggin” (taegari), is a crude word.] chatterbox/official: [Dangling the chicken by one of its legs] Where did you ever find one like this? pak brother’s wife: We took an airplane to get it. [Laughter] We went all the way to a foreign country to get it. [More laughter] chatterbox/official: Did you think that the Official would help you when you make an offering like this? women: Please, please help! chatterbox/official: [Singing] Shall I help or not? women: We beg you to help! yongsu’s mother: [Sitting at the drum] It’s nothing more than the smell of rotting chicken. chatterbox/official: Smell it yourself and see if we’re lying.


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pak brother’s wife: Mmm. It smells good. chatterbox/official: Shall I restore the sanity of this Lady Kim, or shall I call the whole thing off? pak brother’s wife: We’re begging you to make this sick woman well! [With comic indignation] Now look here, we’ve been walking tong, tong, tong all over, fixing this spread for you. chatterbox/official: Well, you can just eat it all yourselves. [Drinks a cup of wine.] pak cousin’s wife: Must be hungry. [Laughter] chatterbox/official: Shall I make her better, or shall I call the whole thing off? women: [Laughing] please, please make her well! We took a taxi to go and find you that chicken! We beg you to make her well! chatterbox/official: Well then, shall I help you get what you want? [Sings the Official’s song of self-praise.] My Official is a wonderful Official, too wonderful for words. [Stops singing.] How come you’re all standing there as straight as electric poles? [The women hastily bob up and down in supplication.] The rites inside the house Chatterbox dances a few bars to rapid drumming, removes her costume, and becomes Chatterbox again. Hitting drum and cymbals, the three mansin lead the women back into the house where, seated with the drum on the wooden veranda, Chatterbox performs the long chant that casts away impurities and invites the gods into the house for the kut. The chant complete, Chatterbox goes into the inner room, has the women prop Mrs. Min into a sitting position, and holds a bowl of thick rice wine to her lips. Mrs. Min takes a few hesitant swallows. Chatterbox encourages the spirits that possess her to drink more: “The Official is supposed to drink well! What sort of Official are you if you don’t drink?” But the wine from the bowl dribbles down Mrs. Min’s chin. Chatterbox mops Mrs. Min’s face and ties back her hair with a piece of elastic, repeating once again, “We’re going to give you rice cake. The Official will play and the ancestor will play.” I write in my notes that the lines on Mrs. Min’s face seem ever so slightly relaxed. Chatterbox manifests the Great Spirit Grandmother (Taesin), a deceased shaman who escorts the family’s ancestors to kut, and the Kamang, identified with suicides, violent deaths, and deaths far from home. Both gods scold the Paks for neglecting offerings to the household gods: “Everything’s turned out like this. Even the high heavens have fallen down. Didn’t you


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even suspect that we were behind it all? You gathered up all the rice grain and took it away. You wanted to eat it all yourself, but now I’ve got you.” With urging from the other mansin, these gods eventually agree to help restore Mrs. Min “so that there will be no separation of wife from husband or parent from child.” Chatterbox manifests the ancestors, beginning with Mr. Pak’s greatgrandfather and great-grandmother and descending to ancestors of recent living memory. Speaking with the tearful voice that ancestors use in kut, a succession of ancestors lament Mrs. Min’s condition, both her present helplessness and the hardships she endured as a daughter-in-law of the Pak family. They promise to help her. chatterbox/mother-in-law: Grandmother has come, grandmother has come. [The daughters sob in the background.] What should be done, my son? How could such a thing have happened? . . . So pathetic. By whatever means possible, however you can, please save her. Then get her something fancy to wear. pak brother’s wife: Please help her! We’ve given you your travel money, so play and go. chatterbox/mother-in-law: Though I’m only a soul [nôk], I’ll help. Fix her some Chinese medicine. [Weeps.] Aigo! So pathetic, words can’t tell it. She’s had nothing to eat and nothing to wear. [Mrs. Min’s mother, one of the spirits responsible for her madness, makes the most dramatic manifestation of all.] chatterbox/mother: Mother has come, Mother has come. pak brother’s wife: Why have you struck your own daughter like this? Why did you have to come back? chatterbox/mother: Why can’t I come back? pak brother’s wife: We treated you well. Why do you come trailing after us now? chatterbox/mother: Typhoid take you! You’re shooting at me like a machine gun. pak brother’s wife: Please make her well! chatterbox/mother: [Sings mournfully.] What can be done? When can I rest in peace and leave this awful situation behind me? daughters: Please help Mother get up!


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chatterbox/mother: Aigo! Dangling between life and death. Aigo! What’s to be done? I don’t like to see her in this sorry state. She doesn’t have sons like other people, and there’s so much resentment pent up in her breast. [Chatterbox as ancestor echoes the words of kinswomen and neighbors.] She’s so pathetic I can’t bear it. She smothers it all inside, so she’s fallen sick like this. I’m given rice [as offerings], but she goes hungry. When can I rest in peace and see my daughter living comfortably? Ah well, bit by bit she will recover. After the ancestors have all played, the apprentice, Okkyông’s Mother, in a white peaked cowl and white robe, invokes Buddhist-inspired celestial deities: the Buddhist Sage (Pulsa); Seven Stars (Ch’ilsông), associated with successful child rearing; and the Birth Grandmother, associated with conception and childbirth. This manifestation takes place in the inner room, where women give birth and venerate the Birth Grandmother: You’re just shocked by how things have turned out now. You didn’t think this sorry state would ever come to pass. You said you didn’t have time. No time. No money. I waited for three years, and three years, and three years again. You’ve grown old. You made me wait such a long time. You’re no better than birds and beasts. What good have you accomplished? You don’t have any wealth, and there’s something threatening to separate husband and wife. If you’d made the proper offerings, you could have kept your sons. Now it’s too late. Even after these blunt words, the spirits in the inner room eventually promise aid: “Don’t worry. If my lady can just surmount the peak of this crisis, I’ll give you long life and blessings. Don’t worry. I’ll help.” Distributing dates and chestnuts from the upturned surface of her cymbals, Okkyông’s Mother provides hopeful divinations for the entire family, promising that the eighteen-year-old daughter will marry and all will be well. The exorcism At 2:40 in the morning, Yongsu’s Mother manifests the martial spirits. The knife-wielding Spirit Warrior, the god most feared by anonymous ghosts, restless ancestors, and malevolent spirits, presides over the critical exorcism


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as the kut approaches its climax. Mrs. Min is made to kneel at the edge of the veranda, the Spirit Warrior’s halberd and an ordinary kitchen knife crossed against her breast. Okkyông’s Mother hits the cymbals, a steady percussive sequence close to Mrs. Min’s ear as Yongsu’s Mother/the Spirit Warrior swiftly pelts her with grains of rice and millet, bits of rice cake, and bits of chicken. So far, this is a standard exorcism, done in any family experiencing illness or misfortune, the sort of exorcism that I will witness many times. With a mich’in person’s possession, however, the mansin must expose the tormenting spirit and force it to depart. While Yongsu’s Mother applies the prongs of her trident to Mrs. Min’s back, Chatterbox stands on the ground below the veranda, wielding a flaming bundle of rice straw. The interrogation begins. youngsu’s mother/spirit warrior: Is it Mother who is doing this? chatterbox: Because you’re so pathetic? youngsu’s mother/spirit warrior: Speak up! chatterbox: So pathetic, so pitiful, is that it? Or is it the honorable Official who’s doing this? You didn’t give him rice cake and he was vexed? Is that it? You didn’t give him any wine and you took the grain out of the house, so he was angry. Is that what it’s all about? Mrs. Min sits mute. As she brandishes the flaming straw, Chatterbox threatens, “If you don’t speak up, we’ll take our knives and cast you into this fiery hole!” Referring to the Official from the old shack that she had seen in her divination, she asks, “Is this the Official who came trailing after an old wooden post?” She asks if it is the Warrior Official from outside the gate, “lacking company, wandering alone like a noxious weed, roaming here and there until he settled on this client from the Pak family.” With a slight acknowledgment from Mrs. Min, a sign imperceptible to me but legible to Chatterbox, the mansin begins the next phase of her questioning. She coaxes the intrusive spirits to acknowledge when they will depart, scripting the encounter and leading the witness. chatterbox: If you just let our Lady Kim know the day that you’ll leave, we’ll take you to a rib house and give you the foreleg of a cow and the hind leg of a cow. Look! The Official’s eyes are blinking open. Oho! So that’s the sort of talk that


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makes you open your eyes! What a well-behaved Official now! Such a tranquil Official, who is going to go far, far away. The mansin repeats her lavish promises of a cow’s head, hind legs, and forelegs, remarking on how the hungry Official’s eyes seem to be blinking wider and wider at the mention of meat. The women drag a steamer of rice cake to where the troublesome god can see it, and Mr. Pak’s brother’s wife holds out the scrawny chicken. Chatterbox continues to alternately bribe and threaten until she discerns some slight affirmation from Mrs. Min that the Official will depart. Now she extracts a specific time: “All right, then when will you restore her? I know very well that you will be leaving. Just tell me when. When will she be well? On the third day? That’s it, on the third day!” “The third day!” The possessing spirits will leave today. The mansin shout their victory, whooping to a rising crescendo of cymbals. Chatterbox pitches the fiery band into the courtyard. Yongsu’s Mother/the Spirit Warrior zealously pelts Mrs. Min with more rice cake and bits of dried fish in a grand confusion of sound and fury and sends the metal bowl clattering to the ground. She waves the remains of the scrawny chicken once more around Mrs. Min’s head. Chatterbox has Mrs. Min choose a flag again, red, the most auspicious color. The general is ascendant, and the exorcism a success. “You’ve chosen such a pretty one,” Chatterbox says, triumphantly waving the flag over Mrs. Min’s head. A giddy air of relief fills the house. A grinning Spirit Warrior dances on the veranda with light and lively steps. The god spreads the divination flags in a pile in front of Mr. Pak, who must place cash on the topmost flag until, satisfied with the amount, the Spirit Warrior rolls it back to reveal the next flag in the pile and the process begins again, spreading cash, rolling back flags, until all five have been covered. Everyone laughs at the Spirit Warrior’s exaggerated stubbornness. Then the Spirit Warrior works the inner room, thrusting outstretched flag sticks at the different women who choose, receive divinations, and leave small bits of cash on the outstretched flags. One of the daughters resists—out of bashfulness or disavowal it is impossible to say—but the other women coax her into drawing her flag. Still wearing a black military hat, but now in a long blue vest, Yongsu’s Mother becomes the Spirit Warrior’s Official, his greedy underling. The Official flings down the steamer of rice cake that has been dedicated to him and regards the worse-for-wear chicken with disdain. He picks up a dried


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fish from the steamer and measures it with his fingers, eying the family with a squint of contempt, then takes the fish and, holding it out at crotch level, jerks it up and down like a phallus while the women titter. Yongsu’s Mother/the Official punches eyeholes in one of the pancakes and holds it in front of her/his face, like a mask, grinning and dancing a few steps, then plasters the mask on Mr. Pak’s face, to more laughter. The Official takes the battered chicken into the inner room and rubs his/her greasy hands on a daughter’s face, then rubs at Mrs. Min, who huddles on the floor in a deep bow, her face pressed flat against her hands in supplication. Chatterbox yells, “Have her bow again!” Women lift Mrs. Min into a standing position, and she crumples quickly to the floor in another bow. She seems to be conscious of what she is doing, and the women chuckle softly at her effort. Yongsu’s Mother dresses Mrs. Min in the Spirit Warrior’s red-sleeved black jacket and ties the god’s red sash across her chest, giving her the god’s protection. Mrs. Min lets the women lead her out to the veranda as if she were a sleepy child on her way to bed. She collapses, once again, into a deep bow at the Official’s feet. Yongsu’s Mother/the Official takes the black military hat from her own head and places it on Mrs. Min. The steamer of rice cake goes onto the Official’s own head, causing Mrs. Min to confront the tangible source of her difficulties, the rice cakes she did not offer to her household gods. Chatterbox gestures for Mrs. Min to reach up and place a 500-wôn bill on the handle of the rice cake steamer. The mansin want Mrs. Min to dance, as would normally happen at the resolution of a kut, to purge her frustrations and enjoy the favor (hoΔi) of her gods. chatterbox: [Drumming] Lady Kim, look at me. That thing the Official carries on his head, isn’t that the reason why the Official grabbed you? You should bow to the Official and patch things up with him today. Open your eyes as if it never happened, like waking up fresh in the morning. Afterward you will be treated well. Now, Official, play! youngsu’s mother/official: [Singing] My Official is a wonderful Official, too wonderful for words. [She waves her arms, encouraging Mrs. Min to dance.] chatterbox: Play together! That’s the way! [Mrs. Min hesitantly raises and lowers her arms, barely twice, then sits down on the floor.] chatterbox: “Get her to dance!”


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Yongsu’s Mother shakes her head. She will tell me later that because Mrs. Min was menstruating and had been bundled into makeshift sanitary protection, she was frantically pressing her trembling knees together, unable to move her legs. Yongsu’s Mother will provide me with an apt pantomime, chuckling at the woman’s all too understandable distress. Mrs. Min is led back to the inner room. Yongsu’s Mother, still manifesting the Official, gestures for Mr. Pak to put money on the other handle of the rice cake steamer, and then she wisecracks about his gambling, drawing laughter from the women. The Official grudgingly promises to help the family. youngsu’s mother/official: Your children aren’t any more significant to me than a wart on my Official’s ass. The offerings you’ve given me are no more than a baby’s teardrop. Even so, I will support you. The kut is nearly complete. Chatterbox goes into the inner room. Stroking Mrs. Min’s hair, she gives some final advice, speaking in a serious tone, abandoning the wheedling voice she used when addressing the possessing spirits. She calls Mrs. Min “ajumôni,” as she would any middle-aged married woman, no longer addressing her as “the Official” or “the ancestor.” chatterbox: Ajumôni, look at me, listen to me. We’ve set our minds to saving you. Although you feel weak, you must try to muster your strength and get up. Your body aches as if you had been beaten up, isn’t that it? You must try a little. Listen to me. Ask your husband to get some medicine because you feel beaten and bruised—I mean Chinese medicine to sweat it out. It won’t go away all that quickly. You’ve got bruises all over. We’re making this noise, hitting the drum. We know you’re poor, but it’s the only way to save you. In a little while, after I finish this kut, I’ll be gone, so I’m telling you all of this now. I will tell your husband too. Ask for something to eat, whatever you want, and grab hold of yourself. The mansin quickly manifest the remaining gods on the veranda and in the courtyard and then go out the main gate, where they expel wandering ghosts and lingering noxious influences. By full dawn the kut is complete, and the mansin rush to catch the early bus home. Some days later I will hear


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from Yongsu’s Mother, who heard from Chatterbox that when Mrs. Min woke up that morning, she was able to eat and resume her household tasks. In a few more days she was able to speak again, expressing embarrassment over what had taken place. According to Chatterbox, the neighbors were impressed with the success of the mansin’s work, and Mr. Pak was deeply grateful to the mansin for saving his wife’s life. Retrospectives By the 1970s, anthropology had turned from analyzing shamans as potential psychopaths to regarding their work as folk psychotherapy (Atkinson 1992, 309–310; Fabrega 1974, 32–44; Kiev 1964; Kleinman 1980, chap. 7; Murphy 1964). The crazy kut seemed to confirm in detail the “therapeutic value” of kut that others writing about Korean shamans had posited (Y. K. Harvey 1976; Kwang-iel Kim 1973; Rhi 1970; S. Yoon 1976). I was inspired to write it up as a case study because it could be neatly analyzed, the results reassuringly visible in Mrs. Min’s gradual response to the mansin’s work and the other women’s coaxing. Words and acts of spirits simultaneously reinforced interpretations of divine anger and human frustration. The mansin made healing a visual and visceral process, sending illness away with the scapegoat doll, cutting and tearing it, driving it out with a pelting of grain, and reconfiguring doors to mark a path to healing. With human and divine banter over cash offerings, a scrawny chicken, and the problematic rice cake, they marked restored relationships between a household and its gods. Weeping ancestors affirmed Mrs. Min’s pain but also her human worth (“By whatever means possible, however you can, please save her. Then get her something fancy to wear”). The crazy kut made perfect sense in terms of the structural and symbolist anthropology that was popular when I was in graduate school. I had learned to see healing rituals as a “language of argument” for articulating social tensions and making compensation through psychologically compelling enactments of “spirit possession” (Harris 1957; Kessler 1977; Leach 1964, 278; Lewis 1966, 1969; Werbner 1964). An out-married daughter in a patrilineal society, Mrs. Min was caught between her obligations and attachment to her own household (and its neglected gods) and her obligations and attachments to her natal kin (made tangible in the rice offered to her dead mother). The kut dramatized her social and moral paradox in the play and eventual reconciliation of greedy spirit Officials from her marital home and her own mother as an unquiet ancestor. She had been possessed by malevolent gods who inhabited the temporal space between her own home


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and her Mother’s house, “wandering like noxious weeds,” who had struck her at the moment when she passed outside the threshold of her natal home. Dangerous interstitial space marked the social ambiguity of an out-married daughter and sonless wife (cf. Douglas 1966). But in restoring a madwoman to sanity, in this singular and urgent focus, the crazy kut was also unique in my fieldwork experience. A medicalized analysis of the crazy kut, or a structural analysis focused on its suffering female subject alone, risks eliding the gods and ancestors’ promises of future support and blessing for Mrs. Min’s entire household, the generalized promises that any kut brings to the particular and urgent problems of client households, problems that lie outside the domain of biomedicine. This kut, and the opportunity to discuss it at length with Yongsu’s Mother, enabled me to see beyond the one-patient, one-problem case study, to understand Mrs. Min’s madness as part of a larger family story that assumed ongoing relationships between a household, its extended relationships of kin, and its gods and ancestors. The thresholds, gates, and doors that impinged on Mrs. Min’s story reinforced my dawning awareness of the house as the central metaphor of kut held for the benefit of households, the kut as an enacted and symbolically pregnant ritual process that moved from outside the main gate, into and through the dwelling, and outside the gate again (cf. Turner 1967, 1968, 1969). Such analyses have been justly faulted for ignoring the larger political economy that set the terms of Mrs. Min’s life and the historical contingency of a place like South Korea in 1977 (Ortner 1984). Like any lens, structuralism gave only partial vision, but it brought some things into focus that might otherwise not have been seen. It was not a bad lens through which to read kut in rural Korea in the 1970s. That was more than thirty years ago. The formidable Chatterbox Mansin has now long since retired from the shaman profession, her sharpness blunted as she slips into old age. Okkyông’s Mother, the gentle “little apprentice” of my fieldnotes, has become a robust shaman with a booming voice and an imperious manner. In 1977, Yongsu’s Mother was still following the lead of older shamans like Chatterbox. By the 1990s, clients and colleagues were regarding her as a great shaman (k’Δn mudang), and some aspiring young shamans looked to her for guidance, sharing my appreciation of her patience and clarity as a teacher. Generational transitions happen in the flow of time, but some other aspects of this story could not be repeated in South Korea today. Landless agricultural laborers like the Pak family, the rural underclass, were already rare in the 1970s. They disappeared from the countryside as the promise of factory work drew their children to the cities. In demographic probability, this would have been the fate of the Paks’ three


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daughters. The $40 kut seems almost laughable in the contemporary shaman world, where Yongsu’s Mother’s kut cost nearly a hundred times that amount—prohibitive to some of her longtime clients—and many urban kut cost even more. The story of a kut from 1992, only fifteen years after the crazy kut, reveals significant changes in the mansin’s work. Late May 1992: “When people worry about money it makes them sick” In 1992, Yongsu’s Mother was in thrall to a young apprentice—I call her “Babe”8—who lived in Ansan, a new satellite city at one of the then southernmost extensions of the Seoul subway system. Although Babe addressed Yongsu’s Mother as “Mother,” another shaman had initiated her. Yongsu’s Mother and Babe had been working together for over a year after meeting at a kut where they were members of the same team. The savvy shaman and the savvy apprentice had taken to each other right away. Yongsu’s Mother lowered her voice and mumbled this information when I asked; it is not good ethics to take another shaman’s “spirit daughter” (sinttal), although it happens all the time. In 1977, Yongsu’s Mother had herself been courted by Clear Spring Mansin, a rival of the sometimes overbearing Chatterbox. Babe and Yongsu’s Mother enjoyed a mutually beneficial bond. Babe saw Yongsu’s Mother as a better and more generous teacher than the shaman who had initiated her. Yongsu’s Mother saw Babe as a gifted pupil with a resonant voice, already capable of performing long segments of kut. Babe’s manifestation of the Child Gods (Tongja) was said to be “just like a little child.” I did not find Babe’s childish falsetto remarkable, particularly since she had no compunction about using it out of character, but perhaps I was jealous, missing the attention Yongsu’s Mother now lavished on Babe—a sort of sibling rivalry. Yongsu’s Mother also benefited from Babe’s professional success since Babe needed a senior shaman to guide her through the rituals she performed for the clients she gained from divination sessions. Babe’s clients were family entrepreneurs who spent the equivalent of $3,000 to $4,000 on a kut. That spring, many of the kut on Yongsu’s Mother’s schedule were for Babe’s clients, with Yongsu’s Mother in charge as the senior shaman. I remember this period as the peak of her prosperity. Working with Babe was also convenient, since Babe’s husband had a van for his furniture business and seemed eager to leave work to transport the mansin to kut. That Babe was more than a little flirtatious may have prompted his attentiveness. Babe would speak at length about the men who grab at her when she performs kut, the black G.I. who had wanted to marry


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her, and the lover who swallowed rat poison when his mother prohibited him from marrying Babe. Babe has installed this ill-fated suitor as a deity in her shrine and consoles him with bottles of beer. I remember a drive through the clogged Saturday-afternoon streets of Righteous Town, Babe leaning out of the passenger window to beg a light for her cigarette from the driver of the adjoining car while her husband tightened his grip on the steering wheel. This marriage would dissolve into the continuing picaresque of Babe’s life, related in bawdy detail by Yongsu’s Mother a few years later when her working relationship with this once-favored apprentice had soured. But that is in the future. On this May morning in 1992, Diana Lee and I have made a dawn journey along the north-south axis of the Seoul subway system to gather in Babe’s apartment, a small but well-furnished accommodation on the top floor of a three-story building. Yongsu’s Mother worked a smaller ritual with Babe the preceding day and has spent the last two nights in Ansan, as she often does when Babe provides an abundance of work. Okkyông’s Mother, who will be part of the team today, arrives after we do. Babe, a gracious hostess, serves us a generous breakfast. We wait for a telephone call from the client, who, the shamans rightly assume, cannot leave for the kut until her husband is out of the house. Yongsu’s Mother grows impatient, muttering under her breath about people who keep one waiting. I try to discover what the kut is about. Someone is ill? Yes, it’s a kut for affliction, an uhuan kut. The wife is ill. They should have had a kut three years ago. The husband was in construction, building houses and selling them, but he lost everything and just stays home. Now the wife goes out to clean and cook for other people while the couple wallows in debt. The call comes through, and we collect Mrs. Yi from a pink apartment complex, not a luxurious facility—there is no landscaping—but a fresh new construction like much of the housing in Ansan in 1992. Mrs. Yi, a tall, thin woman in her early thirties, wears jeans, a striped knit top, and a cardigan. She is carefully groomed, with permed hair, bright and carefully applied makeup, gold earrings, and a thin gold chain necklace. This is probably how she leaves the house to go to work, disguised to resemble any young housewife going on a shopping trip or meeting friends. Long, red artificial fingernails complete the image, belying hands that do other women’s housework. She comes out to the van hauling a large carton of fruit for the offerings. After exchanging greetings with Babe and nodding to the rest of us, she sits silent all the way to the shrine. Like a paper flower that unfolds in a glass of water, she will open up slowly over the course of her kut. We arrive at a mountain kuttang, one of the many commercial shaman shrines that rent space for kut. A one-story structure with several rooms


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facing an open courtyard, this shrine resembles an old-fashioned Korean inn. We were here only a few days ago for another of Babe’s kut. Okkyông’s Mother observes that this is the biggest change in the shaman world that we both remember from the 1970s. Although she and “elder sister” (Yongsu’s Mother) live in detached houses with their own commodious shrines and can host and cater their own clients’ kut, most of the other shamans they work with live in apartments or dense urban housing and use the commercial shrines for their work as Babe does. Few clients these days hold kut in their own homes. The shrine’s kitchen staff replaces the bustling kinswomen and neighbors who prepared the crazy kut and many others, cooking the offering rice and steaming the gods’ rice cake. At the shrine, we unload cartons of offering food and the shamans’ costumes and equipment. Yongsu’s mother directs the arrangement of offerings and meticulously arranges the foot-high cylindrical piles of traditional sweets herself. Relative to the crazy kut, indeed relative to most of the kut I saw in the 1970s, these are lavish offerings: the high piles of sweets, as well as seasonal tomatoes, bunches of bananas, and a watermelon supplementing the requisite apples and pears.9 But relative to the kut we saw a few days ago for a more successful entrepreneurial family, the small pig’s head is only a modest meat offering. The other family had offered a full side of ribs. Babe brings out the remains of a frosted cake from her birthday celebration two days ago, hands plates around, and sends some to the staff working in the shrine kitchen, whose assistance will be necessary to make this day and many others go smoothly. Okkyông’s Mother recognizes a mansin friend who is working in one of the other shrine rooms, and steals a few moments to gossip over a cigarette. Babe’s husband washes and polishes the van, then joins a card game with other drivers and male hangers-on.10 Much gambling goes on around the shrines, and some of the shamans, including Babe, are addicted to it. She will play a hand during one of the breaks. I try to engage the bashful, quiet Mrs. Yi in conversation. Like many residents of Ansan City, she came from further south and has lived in Ansan for only ten years. She is thirty-four years old and has two children, an eight-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl. Because she seems uneasy, both with talking to a foreigner and with holding a kut, I offer some platitude about my interest in kut as a part of Korean culture. “Interesting?” she says, with a little mirthless laugh. “I think of it as ‘expensive.’ I’m only doing this because I’m desperate.” She tells me that she aches all over and that her husband’s business is not going well (according to Babe, it has failed). Has she ever held a kut before? No. Did her mother do this? No. Her mother-in-law? She goes to church. How did Mrs. Yi come to sponsor a


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kut? She was at her wits’ end. “Someone,” probably a neighbor, introduced her to Babe. The preparations complete, the mansin put on the traditional billowing Korean skirts and crescent-sleeved jackets they wear to serve the spirits. Removing her slacks in the narrow confines of the shrine, Yongsu’s Mother turns toward the altar and says, “Grandfathers, please don’t look.” In the next room a paksu, a male shaman, begins to drum and chant a sitting kut (anjΔn kut) in the style of the central provinces.11 A quarrel erupts from the direction of the kitchen. Babe rushes in, very excited, and announces a spat in the proprietor’s family. Yongsu’s Mother grumbles that they ought not to do this when people “come here to work” (quarrels are not conducive to auspicious kut). Babe will get more details later when she encounters the proprietress in the outhouse during a cigarette break and learns the source of her anger. “Can you believe it?” Babe will tell us. “The daughter actually hit the daughter-in-law!” Once the kut begins, the mansin will perform straight through, pausing only for lunch and for short cigarette breaks between the three major segments that they divide between them. Mrs. Yi glances periodically at her watch, anxious to get home before her husband returns. Yongsu’s Mother, who has spent the last few days in Ansan, also seems anxious to finish the kut and go home. There is no elaborate beginning, equivalent to the rituals outside a house gate, although the non-shamans are sent beyond the overhanging roof when Yongsu’s Mother first hits the drum and rouses the gods. Babe is still arranging offerings when Yongsu’s Mother sings the invocation, and the shrine staff are still delivering steamers of rice cake for Babe and Okkyông’s Mother to set in place. Without breaking stride in her chanting, Yongsu’s Mother manages a few sips of water from a bowl that Babe holds for her, and on striking the last drumbeat, the mansin yells for lunch. The young daughter-in-law brings in the lunch tray, looking downcast. Head bowed, she apologizes that lunch is late, obliquely alluding to the quarrel. Over lunch, Babe talks about a dream she had in the fall when the gods from Yongsu’s Mother’s shrine told her, “We’ll see you again in the warm spring.” It was true. There was no work during that winter (this must be an exaggeration), but now they are busy again. The dream communication underscores Babe’s having linked her professional fortunes to Yongsu’s Mother and her gods. Babe dresses to invoke the Mountain God, joking that it will be hard to work on such a full stomach. The mansin laugh, but Mrs. Yi’s face is blank. Babe/the Mountain God describes anxiety over wealth going out of the family. The god speaks of a grandmother who prayed on mountains in the past


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and an ancestor who was a high official. These sightings indicate a family with powerful gods, a family that should honor them with frequent kut. All of the deities in this sequence make reference to wealth going out of the family and to the necessity of honoring gods. With gestures toward the offering tables, the gods repeat, over and over, that if the family had done a kut earlier, all would have been well, a logic familiar from Mrs. Min’s kut and many others. When, as the Mountain God’s Special Messenger, Babe tries to balance the pig’s head on a trident, a sign that the kut offering is accepted, she cannot get the trident to balance. The wobbly trident is further evidence that the Yi family’s kut was overdue. Okkyông’s Mother, with a sharp hand gesture, sets Mrs. Yi to bowing in front of the offering tray, where Babe struggles with the trident. When it finally stands, Babe relates a vision of the ancestral grandmother who honored the Seven Stars, a confirmation of the divination she has already given. In a white robe and peaked cap, Babe manifests the Buddhist Sage and the Seven Stars, then hands Mrs. Yi a cup of rice wine. Okkyông’s Mother orders her to kowtow six times: “Do it!” Babe manages a complicated dance, trailing the long sleeves of the white robe, and then speaks while Mrs. Yi rubs her hands with intense supplication. Babe/the Seven Stars says, “I am the Seven Stars, who have helped this family from long ago. In the past, the women of the family honored me. As for you, no benevolence [indôk] has come to you [from the neglected Seven Stars].” Gesturing to her forehead, she adds, “Your head aches all the time.” Mrs. Yi tries to flick away the tears that pool in the corners of her eyes. Babe/the Birth Grandmother tosses chestnuts and dates from the upturned surface of her cymbals into Mrs. Yi’s lap, telling her, “If you can just surmount the current crisis, all will be well. I will help you.” The pockmarked Princess (Hogu), her red skirt thrown over her head, makes a brief appearance and extracts a fee for makeup to cover her scars, the fee that enables her to remove the red skirt. She manages to convey all of this to Mrs. Yi with gestures, pointing to her cheeks to indicate the marks. Next, attired in a traditional military robe and hat, Babe dances with the five-direction flags and manifests the Buddhist Sage’s Spirit Warrior: You left your native place. You have a difficult fate. There was a Spirit Warrior in this house from long ago [a god increasingly identified not just with exorcism, as in Mrs. Min’s kut, but also with commerce]. I have waited for a long time. If your luck changes quickly, it will be in the eighth or ninth month. If it comes more


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slowly, then next year things will improve. I will help you get a house of your own. When the Spirit Warrior offers her the flags for divination, Mrs. Yi errs (as I have done), attempting to extract a flag by its stick rather than merely indicating her choice. Because she does not know how to respond to the gods, the mansin address them on her behalf: “It was because she didn’t know any better [that she delayed her kut].” “Please help her. Make [the misfortune] go away.” “She will give you more next time.” Mrs. Yi has not caught on to the stylized exchanges and stands silent, rubbing her hands in supplication, an anxious expression on her face as she strains to understand what the shaman is saying. It is not just that she must listen over the percussion, the drum and cymbals of her own kut and the different rhythms pounding out of the kut in the next chamber. The language of kut has its own idioms and uses many archaic terms. Even if Mrs. Yi’s mother had patronized shamans and Mrs. Yi had seen them in her youth, these kut would have been in a different regional style and dialect. Yongsu’s Mother will remark afterward that when someone like Mrs. Yi has a kut for the first time, she usually cannot understand the mansin’s speech. Babe/the Spirit Warrior flourishes a white divination flag as Mrs. Yi’s choice, a flag identified with celestial spirits like the Buddhist Sage and the Seven Stars. This further confirms the gods’ insistence: “They honored the Seven Stars in this house in the past. . . . You saw a woman in white in a dream. That’s who it was [the ancestor who worshipped the Seven Stars, conflated with the deity after her death].” The Spirit Warrior says that Mrs. Yi will be healthy if she does not eat dog meat, a polluting substance offensive to vegetarian deities like the Seven Stars, and commiserates with Mrs. Yi for the many hardships of her married life: “There are things you want to say, but you hold them in for years on end.” She speaks of auspicious and dangerous months for Mrs. Yi’s children, a typical prognostication from the Seven Stars, the deities who protect children. Yongsu’s Mother shouts, “You won’t get rich in a single morning. You have to make a great effort and make offerings [kong].”12 I had heard this phrase—“You won’t get rich in a single morning”—at the kut for the entrepreneurial family a few days past, and I would hear it at many more performed by these and other shamans, but I did not remember hearing it in the 1970s. As the Buddhist Sage’s greedy Official, Babe comments on the quality of the pig’s head, sticking her fingers up nostrils that should have held rolled 10,000-wôn bills. Grabbing the tip of one ear, the god dangles the pig’s head


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in a gesture of contempt. In an ice blue robe and black scholar’s cap, Babe becomes Grandfather Sage (Tosa Harabôji), a god I have seen primarily in Babe’s kut. Babe struts with her back arched to suggest a full paunch and becomes playful, saying, “There was a Grandfather Sage in this house, with a long beard [she strokes an imaginary beard]. And he smoked a long pipe [she holds out an imaginary pipe]. You should give him a pipe, and then husband and wife will make a lot of money between them.” The delivery is buoyant, and Mrs. Yi smiles now, even laughs a little, covering her mouth with her hand as Korean women are supposed to do. In her next manifestation, Babe picks up the two bundles of children’s clothing, a boy and a girl, and curls an arm around each one as if they were puppets animated by her own waddling, childlike gait and the occasional petulant stamp of a foot. Babe’s Child Gods make a lively manifestation. In a lisping falsetto they announce that they have come down from Mount Sôrak: “Oh my! This is exciting!” They pour water into an aluminum bowl, call it liquor, and drink it down. “This tastes gooood!” they say. Babe balances the bowl on her head, making a comic face. The other shamans giggle. The Child Gods give a quick divination to Mrs. Yi and turn to the rest of us. They tell Yongsu’s Mother that she will make a lot of money and fix up her house and that good things will come to her to the measure of her past sufferings. They tell me that I should make another pilgrimage to Kam’ak (Kambak) Mountain “if you want your child to study well,” drawing out the childish words syllable by syllable in mockery of a Westerner trying to speak Korean. They tell Okkyông’s Mother not to scold her husband. “Don’t fight with Grandfather; it makes him cry,” the Child Gods says as Babe wipes her eyes. With heaving chest and bulging eyes, Babe gives a caricature of Okkyông’s Mother in a rage that has the signature of one of Yongsu’s Mother’s impersonations. Yongsu’s Mother, laughing, shouts to Babe, “The video will make you famous,” and the Child Gods remind us that if our project turns out well, we should buy a treat for Yongsu’s Mother. Babe has proven her competence, manifesting numerous gods for well over an hour, showing a knack for comedy. Yongsu’s Mother has watched her like a proud parent, laughing at all of her jokes and antics. Mrs. Yi, initially poker-faced, slowly warmed to the commiserations and antics of mansin and gods. During a brief cigarette break, Mrs. Yi, who has been sitting apart in a corner of the room, bends into the conversation and asks to clarify one of the points made in the divinations. Okkyông’s Mother, who will manifest the ancestors, takes this opportunity to ask her about the grandmothers and grandfathers in her family and the manner of their deaths, then puts on a yellow robe and manifests Great Spirit Grandmother, who leads the ances-


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tors to kut. In a weepy voice, she says, “There are afflictions [uhuan] in this family, multiple afflictions. You can never go back home [both parents are dead]. Things did not work out for you. You are sore all over. Is there any place on your body that isn’t in pain?” Babe manifests the ancestors, beginning with distant generations, conjuring a grandmother who speaks of “descendants’ mistakes,” alluding to the broken tradition of honoring the Seven Stars. She advises Mrs. Yi to “sell” her children to the Seven Stars’ keeping—that is, to dedicate lengths of cloth with their names and birth dates in Babe’s shrine. The grandparents, aunts, uncles, and dead siblings of her husband’s family express concern for Mrs. Yi and give her the sorts of advice that ancestors give in kut: “Be careful of someone you know, an acquaintance can do you harm.” Mrs. Yi’s own father, who hung himself, appears, weeping, and says, “Why did Father die? There wasn’t any property. There wasn’t any money. It tears you up inside. It’s so pathetic.” Her dead mother follows, continuing the lament for the hardships that led to the father’s suicide. After Okkyông’s Mother tears the strips of cloth that signify each ancestor’s release from hell, she rubs Mrs. Yi’s hair and shoulders, half-embracing her. Mrs. Yi sobs without restraint, as she is meant to do. An uncle complains that he died as a bachelor. A sister-in-law who died as a child demands candy and cash, then promises to look after her nephew. Okkyông’s Mother rubs Mrs. Yi’s back, a locus of pain. Departing ancestors express gratitude for their offerings and tell her not to worry. During all this slow, sad drama, the paksu in the next room conducts a lively exorcism, tossing scraps of offering food into the open courtyard. Then the cacophony stops. A shrine attendant, thinking the paksu is done, sweeps the refuse away, and more comes pelting down. This happens again, and then again, with the shrine staff all giggling as though watching a game or comedy routine. Once the ancestors’ segment is complete, the mansin order a tray of coffee from the kitchen, Babe’s treat. Okkyông’s Mother describes how, when she manifested Mrs. Yi’s father, she could not stop coughing, her own throat constricted because he died by hanging. As they often do, the mansin comment on the intensity of longing manifested by the client’s ancestors and advise Mrs. Yi to “send them off well” with a full kut for the dead (chinogi kut) in the future. Mrs. Yi asks Okkyông’s Mother what the ancestral grandmother meant when she said to “sell” her children to the Seven Stars. Okkyông’s Mother explains about myôngdari, the length of white cloth that ritually binds a child to the Seven Stars “to make them study well and be healthy.”


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Yongsu’s Mother dresses to perform the military gods, the gods who play (nolda) particularly well with her. As the General, she echoes an earlier divination: things will get better in the eighth or ninth month. She continues: “Do you think you can get rich without me? . . . You worry so much that you can’t sleep. There are times when you pick quarrels with your husband. I will help you open up your luck.” The Special Messenger says much the same thing, as does the Spirit Warrior, but Yongsu’s Mother plays these gods—particularly the Spirit Warrior, who is associated with her own dead husband— with a parody of masculine imperiousness, swaggering, harrumphing, and snapping at the client, scrunching her face into a leering mask that shows some teeth and causes Mrs. Yi to giggle, as she is meant to do. The Spirit Warrior tells Mrs. Yi to give the Official a new vest, to dedicate it in Babe’s shrine, adding, “Then in three years, something good will happen to you. You didn’t give us anything, and that’s the problem. [If you do,] I’ll help you. I will open the gates of commerce [sangôp mun] for you.” Again the halberd is balanced, and again the trident is balanced with the speared pig’s head on top. The mansin direct Mrs. Yi to place 10,000wôn bills in its ears and mouth. Again the Spirit Warrior has Mrs. Yi choose a divination flag; again a god flourishes a white flag. The Spirit Warrior tells Mrs. Yi, “You thought that you couldn’t honor the spirits because you didn’t have the money, but after that, nothing worked out, isn’t that so?” The same phrases that caused Mrs. Yi to look solemn in the earlier segment now, with Yongsu’s Mother’s comic intonations and her phallic play bouncing the long, stiff, dried fish up under her costume, make Mrs. Yi smile and even laugh. “Something is bothering you,” the Spirit Warrior says. “You tried to do something like this in the past, but it wasn’t effective and now there are inauspicious forces in your path.” In fact, Mrs. Yi had gone to another shaman and made an offering (ch’isông), but in the middle of the ritual, the incompetent shaman had sent her away. Mrs. Yi felt ill after that because the spirits had been roused but not properly treated, and this distress had brought her to Babe’s door. Mrs. Yi draws a second flag, an auspicious red one, and the Spirit Warrior prances grandly with the flags draped over her/his shoulders, engaging in the bargaining, bantering games enjoyed by the Spirit Warrior and the Official. When Mrs. Yi gives the Spirit Warrior 10,000 wôn, the god calls it a widower; when he receives a second bill, he dubs it “as nice as a widower going into a widow’s room.” This is an old joke, but it has the desired effect on Mrs. Yi, who laughs without restraint. And she has finally caught on to the bantering play. She meets the Spirit Warrior’s demands by saying, “Next time I’ll give you more.”


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As the Official, Yongsu’s Mother extends her lips into a piglike snout and contemptuously surveys the offerings. Again she bobs the stiff, straight fish up under her costume. Covering her open mouth with both palms, Mrs. Yi dissolves into belly laughs. The Official grabs Mrs. Yi’s leg and drags her across the room. Word has gone around the shrine that a particularly lively Official is present. The shrine staff and people from the other kut crowd the doorway as Yongsu’s Mother extracts 10,000-wôn bills until Mrs. Yi says that she has spent all of her money. Okkyông’s Mother prods her to give her last 1,000 wôn. The Official dances with the big steamer of rice cake and hands it to Mrs. Yi, calling her “pretty” and chanting a list of all of the Officials who will help her, including the Commerce Official (Sangôp Taegam), who will aid her husband’s business. The other mansin coach Mrs. Yi to pour out a bowl of rice wine for the Official, who snidely asks, “What’s the matter with you? Do you only know how to drink beer?” Hoisting a tray bearing the pig’s head on top of her own head, Yongsu’s Mother prances and sings, “Our Official is so fine! I’ll keep your husband busy [by bringing him work],” adding as an aside that the Official is having such a good time that he could keep partying all night. I sense today, as I have on other occasions, that Yongsu’s Mother does not want to stop her buoyant manifestation of the Official, even despite her expressed desire to get home early. Finally, Yongsu’s Mother passes the pig’s head to Mrs. Yi’s waiting arms, followed by the Official’s blue vest and military hat, a bestowal of blessings. The paksu from the next room, manifesting a tearful ancestor and carrying a bundle of spirit clothes in his arms, appears in the doorway and is waved away. In the courtyard, a long cloth bridge to the netherworld awaits, and he begins his weeping journey down the length of it. Babe very quickly invokes the House Lord (Sôngju) and the Mountebank (Ch’angbu), affirming that next year things will be much better. While they are packing up, Yongsu’s Mother elaborates for Mrs. Yi on the dire consequences of her earlier aborted ritual: “It’s because your luck was blocked that nothing has worked out for you.” A few days later, when I discuss this kut with Yongsu’s Mother, she will fall into a tirade against the incompetent, irresponsible, and immoral shamans “these days,” who practice without proper guidance from the gods and “don’t know front from back.” Babe gives Mrs. Yi final instructions. She must take some of the white rice cake home and place it in the inner room for the grandmother who honored the Seven Stars: Bow three times, saying, “You are the grandmother who helped us from long ago.” Tell her you are giving her an offering. The


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red bean rice cake is for your House Lord. Set it under the main beam, with three cups of wine and one dried fish on the top. Do you understand? [Mrs. Yi points straight up to verify that she understands the location of the beam, a prominent feature of traditional architecture but hidden in apartment construction.] Say to the Twelve Officials, “Twelve Officials, make us rich.” Then take a sip of wine from each cup and toss some of the wine outside. Mrs. Yi takes notes. Babe gives her other leftover offering food to take home and suggests how she might use it, the colored sugar in homemade wine, the sugar chestnuts in cups of coffee, and the fried fish and bean curd in stew. As Babe fills plastic bags with fish, meat, and rice cake and places them inside a carton of fruit, Mrs. Yi looks a bit overwhelmed, perhaps wondering how to deal with this sudden excess and whether it will arouse her husband’s suspicions about the kut. Babe also gives fruit and rice cake to the other shamans and shows me that she is taking home a plastic bag of rice grain. She must collect rice from thirty-seven kut to become a kija, a fully realized shaman who serves the spirits. Yongsu’s Mother takes care of the gods outside the house and the final send-off of wandering ghosts and noxious influences. She seats Mrs. Yi on the edge of the narrow veranda and exorcises her, pelting her with scraps of food, taking the bundle of clothing offered to the ancestors and wafting it around Mrs. Yi before tossing it away, tearing more cloth “bridges” to release the hold of the dead, brandishing her knife until she is satisfied that Mrs. Yi is clean. Okkyông’s Mother reminds Mrs. Yi that she should sponsor a full kut for the dead when she can afford it. Yongsu’s Mother invokes the wandering ghosts as she sends them away. She manifests the husband’s dead sister, who receives cash and candy, and then more generic ghosts appear. As a blind ghost, Yongsu’s Mother rolls back her eyes, takes a froglike leap, and squats on the ground, tapping with her hand until she finds the basin of water that she must sprinkle on her eyes in order to open them again. For the ghost of a woman who has died in childbirth, she takes a bowl of postpartum soup and bites a huge wad of kelp so that it dangles from her teeth like a long ghostly green tongue. Babe jumps into the camera frame and says in her Child God voice, “Mom, let’s be photographed together.” Yongsu’s Mother hastily bundles scraps of food into a plastic bag and takes them, with the bundle of cloth scraps and ancestral clothing, to the incinerator. Within minutes, the mansin are in everyday wear, the van is packed, and we are on our way home. I ask Mrs. Yi if she feels relieved. She tells


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A client couple being exorcised during a kut in a public shrine in 1994, their heads covered with the five-direction flags. They sit in the threshold of the chamber where their kut was held and face the open courtyard.

me that she does not know what she feels. During the kut, she says, she felt heavy-hearted about all of the things that had gone wrong in her life, but the ancestors understood her feelings and had given her encouragement. As we drive away, the mansin rehash the shrine-keeper’s family quarrel and remark on the paksu who was performing in the next room: “Did you see? He even wore makeup. And he went around in women’s clothing, even when he wasn’t doing the kut.” Babe grabs the microphone from the karaoke set and begins to belt out Korea’s best-known tune, “Arirang.” Doubled retrospective The next day, I asked Yongsu’s Mother about this kut. Was it because the family should have held a kut in the past? Is this why the wife became ill and the husband’s business failed? “Yes, more or less,” she said. “They should have had a kut. The husband’s business failed. He hasn’t worked for three years. They’re just living on debt. Living that way makes a person anxious,


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they use their nerves, and then, of course they get sick. It’s that way with everyone, isn’t it? You don’t have money and then you fret about it until it makes you ill.” “Use their nerves” was the same phrase that the women and spirits had applied to Mrs. Min. In the language of medical anthropology, Mrs. Yi somatized her financial and related domestic anxieties, experiencing mental anxiety as physical pain (cf. Kleinman 1980). South Korean intellectuals might describe the afflictions of Mrs. Min and Mrs. Yi as han, pent-up grievances induced by historical exploitation or social inequity, and there is merit in an interpretation that situates both the landless laborer of the 1970s and the bankrupt contractor’s wife in the 1990s as casualties of a larger political economy. But the mansin who performed these two kut did not themselves use han as a significant interpretive tool, anymore than they spoke of somatization or catharsis. In these and other kut, they spoke of nerves, of clients who were tormented (soksanghada), had tumultuous feelings (sok seda), were heavy-hearted (taptaphada), or were in pain (ap’Δda). The dead had wônhan, unrequited resentments, wôn (desire, craving) paired with han (grievance, spite) in the description of a resentful ghost (wônhangi) or as a statement of ancestral emotions—“lots of wôn, lots of han.” Had these mansin been younger or more exposed to South Korean intellectual discourse, they might have made han talk more central to their kut, as some other South Korean shamans do. In the mansin’s terms, Mrs. Min’s and Mrs. Yi’s afflictions were, simultaneously, products of anxiety and frustration and consequences of their having neglected to honor the spirits with appropriate rituals and offerings. Symbolic healing works, James Dow (1986) suggests, because the healer successfully establishes a “mythic world” whose premises are understood and accepted by both the healer and the patient. The healer effectively performs ritual acts that link the patient’s emotions to shared transactional symbols. Mrs. Min was caused to acknowledge her possession by angry gods and restless ancestors and to confirm their willingness to depart (cf. Seong-nae Kim 1992). Mrs. Yi experienced the compassion of family ancestors and was encouraged to regard an ancestral grandmother as a long-neglected but potentially helpful deity. Both kut offered a vision of reconciliation between human households and spirits through the gods’ play and the ancestors’ tears. But here the two experiences diverge. The village house that I saw as both setting and symbol for the kut’s social universe survived only as a palimpsest when Babe instructed Mrs. Yi to set out offering food in her own apartment and when the shamans descended from shrine room to courtyard


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to dispel inauspicious entities at the end of the kut.13 The diverse ties of kinship that had mapped trajectories of angry gods and pitying ancestors across the literal gateways of village households and social thresholds of obligation and reciprocity in Mrs. Min’s kut were not operable for Mrs. Yi. Extended kinship remains significant, but its day-to-day presence and salience are reduced relative to village life in the 1970s, especially for a migrant like Mrs. Yi, whose parents were dead. On the strength of what any of us—shaman or anthropologist—knew of Mrs. Yi, it would be difficult to build the sort of sociostructural analysis that the gathering of kinswomen and neighbors had enabled at Mrs. Min’s kut. Mrs. Yi’s difficulties lay in the less tractable, less legible enmeshment of her household in a national and global economy, something shamans, gods, and ancestors now frequently address, as described in chapters 5 and 6. Neither Mrs. Yi nor Mrs. Min was a full participant in the kut held on her behalf, Mrs. Min because she was drugged and temporarily insane, and Mrs. Yi because she did not know the procedures and had to be coached by the shamans. In Mrs. Min’s kut, her kinswomen readily bantered and pleaded with the spirits in her stead and, despite the dire situation, seemed to find amusement in some of these encounters. Mrs. Yi’s absolute aloneness—without even the accompanying mother, sister, sister-in-law, husband, or neighbor one sometimes sees at shrine kut—forced me to recognize how much the social world of kut had shrunk since the 1970s, when I characterized it as part of a shared village women’s culture. Even in Enduring Pine Village, kut in Yongsu’s Mother’s shrine do not draw the same curious crowds of neighbors that I remembered from a time when television was less available. The moral community that had mustered on Mrs. Min’s behalf was anticipated in Levi-Strauss’s description of the “public who also participate in the cure, experiencing an enthusiasm and an intellectual and emotional satisfaction which produce collective support” (1967, 123). In shrine kut, this signifying public has melted away. The shamans, carefully groomed and clothed in billowing Korean dress, are usually more numerous than the non-shaman participants. In the new millennium, I would even see kut performed for busy clients who were absent from the kuttang. To the degree that Mrs. Yi received emotional support, it came from the shamans themselves. How they do this—a mingling of inspiration, skill, and improvisation—is the subject of the next several chapters. By contrast, the premises and procedures of a shared popular religion engaged Mrs. Min’s kinswomen, who negotiated the kut and engaged the spirits on her behalf; her husband, who recognized a dangerous possession behind her madness; and even a more lucid Mrs. Min. Although Mrs. Min


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could not afford to sponsor a kut, she would have seen them in the homes of kinswomen who were Chatterbox’s regular clients. In her semiconscious state, she knew to tap the bundle of divination flags, something beyond Mrs. Yi’s prior experience.14 Until well into her kut, Mrs. Yi seemed confused and awkward, present only because she was desperate enough to accept a shaman’s advice. In the crazy kut, the shamans’ efforts caused Mrs. Min to identify her possessing spirits, who could then be forced to depart, a dynamic built upon prior understandings of spirit behavior and kut dynamics. For Mrs. Yi, by contrast, the mansin had to construct a mythic world, foundation up, before inducting her into it. They gave Mrs. Yi an ancestral grandmother as avatar of the Seven Stars (“You saw a woman in white in a dream. That’s who it was”), a link between household gods and family fortune whose presence they underscored throughout the kut, an image that could be perpetuated in the household ritual Babe enjoined Mrs. Yi to perform at home. The ancestors articulated the tragedy of her father’s suicide. The Official’s antics gave presence to demanding gods who would also be honored at home. By degrees, the mansin brought Mrs. Yi to the point of weeping, laughing, and talking back to the gods, a process that recalls Mrs. Min’s slow ascent to responsiveness but was worlds apart from her kinswomen’s familiar bantering with the gods and ancestors. In this work, the apprentice Babe displayed competence and a developing comic flare, an ability to provoke moist eyes and giggles, but it was the two more experienced shamans, Yongsu’s Mother and Okkyông’s Mother, who caused Mrs. Yi to weep and laugh with abandon. Yongsu’s Mother’s comic manifestation of the Official elicited not only belly laughs from her erstwhile bashful client but also drew outside spectators to the doorway. How would Mrs. Yi have known when she agreed to do a kut with Babe that this particular team of mansin and their gods would work so hard on her behalf? She had chosen an incompetent shaman once, much to her detriment. When kut were performed in village houses and in low-rise urban neighborhoods, women had frequent opportunities to see them, and some, like Mrs. Min’s kinswomen, became aficionados. Judgments about the shamans they saw informed subsequent patronage as when, early in her career, observations of Yongsu’s Mother at a kut countered the claims of an elderly rival that Yongsu’s Mother “wasn’t a real shaman.”15 Other ethnographers working in other places have described similar community judgments, validating both the efficacy of a particular ritual and the legitimacy of the performing shaman (Atkinson 1989, 117–249; Schieffelin 1996). But the isolated mountain kuttang removes shamans from a community of knowing observ-


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ers. That young urban clients like Mrs. Yi have little or no prior experience and can fall prey to incompetent shamans is a matter of much concern in the contemporary South Korean shaman world and a subject taken up in chapter 4. The anthropologist risks nostalgia as she tallies up the contrasts between a past and a more recent past, a village kut and a kut in a commercial shrine. It is nearly impossible to write these two moments, 1977 and 1992, without recuperating some of the wonder of a first field trip and its absence in a later encounter. I had watched the crazy kut as a neophyte who struggled to understand what was being said and done, awaiting the gods’ appearances as bathed in magical possibilities. In Mrs. Yi’s kut, familiarity replaced magical possibility, and my fieldnotes were riddled with references to “familiar business,” “expected results,” and “old jokes.” When I found myself chuckling, even so, I was appreciating a skilled execution of familiar material, as the mansin seemed to do. Perhaps the reader had some sense of this in the move from Mrs. Min’s kut to Mrs. Yi’s kut. More than a litany of loss or a lament for the disappearance of kut performed in country houses, these combined perspectives begin to suggest the skill and resourcefulness with which mansin like Yongsu’s Mother and Okkyông’s Mother and their gods continue to work their enchantment for women like Mrs. Yi in places like the anonymous kuttang. The next chapter, on initiation, introduces the difficult process whereby a prospective mansin gains this authority to speak in a god’s voice.


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3 Initiating Performance Chini’s Story

kendall: They say a shaman’s initiation is the most difficult kut of all. young shaman: It’s hard on the disciple and hard on the teacher. The gods keep coming in and going out again, and hiding themselves, and then restless ancestors come in and interfere with things. experienced shaman: If it goes well, the initiate speaks the true words of the spirits. A lot of people come, and they all receive remarkable divinations, that sort of thing, proof that the initiate has really become a shaman. If she fails, then no one takes her seriously. Prologue The three shamans meet again in Chini’s dank little rented room on the day before her kut, filling their student’s cramped quarters with drum and cymbals, cheap vinyl suitcases bulging with the gods’ costumes, and the flurry of their preparations.1 Chini’s pitiful accommodations, like her emaciated figure, attest to the hardship of one who is destined to serve the spirits. The three shamans claim to know this well; the tribulations of the calling are their common history. Still, one must stretch the imagination to find in these robust and forthright matrons any trace of a woman like Chini, thin and timid, pale at the prospect of performing a kut to claim the gods’ authority as her own.

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In the late spring they had taken Chini to the kuttang on Kam’ak Mountain for her initiation ritual, her naerim kut,2 but the initiate was reticent and the gods stubborn. As the shamans would tell me months later, they hit the drum throughout the night while the initiate stood mute. They hit the drum until four o’clock in the morning before Chini began to shout out the names of her gods, the eleven gods whose painted images she has since installed in a narrow shrine against the far wall of her tiny room.3 That she had managed this much was the final proof. The gods have chosen Chini, caused her the past ten years of bitter suffering, and now offer resolution in her initiation as a shaman. But Chini’s words on the mountain were not enough. Her gates of speech (malmun) had not opened to pour out inspired oracles. She lacks sufficient inspiration to prognosticate for her clients over a divination tray or while performing at a kut. The gods have not yet empowered her to earn her living as a shaman. The first kut cleansed Chini of unclean ghosts and ominous forces. Now, in the fall, this second kut would call in the gods and urge them to make Chini into a successful shaman.4 To become a shaman, she must find it in herself to perform as one. Theater meets anthropology In the 1960s and 1970s, avant-garde theater attempted to re-enchant performance by dipping into ethnography, describing the actor’s experience as analogous to possession rituals and shamanic journeys that evoke visionary truths in the experienced immediacy of performance, thereby making them “real.” Actors were encouraged to see themselves as shamans (Cole 1975; Kirby 1983). Ironically, performance is precisely what Chini, a destined shaman by the standards of her own society, would find so difficult (and what had eluded Auntie Cho). This is the story of Chini’s second initiation kut, held in the fall of 1989 to open her gates of speech in the presence of three members of her family, an anthropologist (myself), and an ethnographic filmmaker (Diana Lee) with crew (Kim Asch). Chini’s story navigates the delicate balance between theatricality and inspiration as shamans work with the initiate and her family to construct compelling idioms of past misfortune and future power, which the initiate must then perform into being. Because Chini’s second initiation will ultimately fail, her story confounds the ethnographic near certainty of formulaic passage rites, the near inevitability of ritual processes that by their own internal dynamic transform mere mortals into shamans and healers.


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Filming the invocation at the start of a kut in 1989 in a bungalow-style village house. This segment, like most of the kut, used to be performed on an open porch.

There is irony in Western theater’s having sought its reflection in ethnography before anthropology was prepared to confront the subjects of its own musings in theater. The recognition that ritual is essentially performance was not new to anthropology. Waldemar Bogoras’ early twentieth-century account of a Chukchi shaman’s séance, a masterpiece of ethnographic description, evokes the beats of the drum, the range of variation in the shaman’s voice as he chants, the spectators’ shouts, and then the cries and whispers of the spirits as they enter the room (1907, 433–441). Dramatic portrayals of shamanic soul quests and netherworldly journeys riddle the pages of Eliade’s opus (1964). Michel Leiris describes the “theatrical” possession rituals of the Ethiopians of Gondar (1958, cited in Cole 1975), and Raymond Firth (1967) the “dramatic elements” in performances by Malay spirit mediums. The Human Relations Area Files offer numerous descriptions of shaman rituals replete with such “theatrical” business as impersonation, pantomime, dialogue, sound effects, costumes, and lighting (Charles 1953). But while many anthropologists recognized the theatrical content of shaman rituals, they were slow to pursue it. If by the 1970s anthropologists


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had found new ways to write full-blooded accounts of ritual performance,5 John Beattie (1977) could still claim that they had generally neglected the learned and performed quality of spirit possession itself. The shaman as actor has been an uncomfortable notion for a relativistic social science. Our students inevitably ask us if we “believe” in the powers of the shamans we have studied, or if the spirits were “really” there. The question discomfits insofar as it implies, on the one hand, that the ethnographer follows Castaneda’s leap beyond the pale of professional credulity (1972) or, on the other, that acknowledgments of simulation make charlatans of one’s informants. We bear the burden of Euro-American conventions in which, as Richard Schechner reminds us, “ ‘acting’ means make-believe, illusion, lying. . . . In America we say someone is ‘only acting’ when we detect the seams between the performance and the non-acting surround” (1982, 63). Bogoras knew that many Chukchi recognized the ventriloquistic feats and sleights of hand that enhanced a shaman’s performance, but he attributed this knowledge to a skepticism born of acculturation. He did not ponder how Chukchi cognizance of, in his words, “deceit,” “liars,” and “fraud” might yet be reconciled to his informants’ perception of the performances as “wonderful” and possibly efficacious (Bogoras 1907, 429). Levi-Strauss (1967) gave us the parable of Quesalid, the Kwakiutl shaman who was not so much a great shaman because he was able to cure, as able to cure because he was a great shaman, a fine performer.6 The story highlights our (and initially Quesalid’s) equation of theatricality with falsehood and then subverts it. Quesalid, the cynic who apprentices himself as a shaman to expose the tricks of the trade, discovers that his competent sleight of hand cures more effectively than the tricks of a rival shaman. In that realization, conveyed from the Kwakiutl shaman to the discipline of anthropology, lies knowledge of the power of performance (Tambiah 1977), but the parable of Quesalid still separates artful illusion from the truth claims of the ritual text.7 It remained for avant-garde theater to insist that elemental drama was something more than the imitation of a reality that existed elsewhere (Brecht 1964; Brook 1968; Cole 1975) and to seek in ritual and in ritual dramas a revitalized knowledge of compelling performance (Artaud 1958; Kirby 1983; Schechner 1982, 1985; Schechner and Schuman 1976). It remained for anthropology to blur the distinction between theatrical artifice and ritual, most notably in Victor Turner’s mediumistic relationship with the avant-garde (1982). The convergence of interest between the anthropologist and the avant-garde director Richard Schechner appears in the nearparallel titles of their From Ritual to Theater (ibid.) and Between Theater


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and Anthropology (Schechner 1985). Such encounters would foster an anthropological awareness of shamanic and mediumistic performances as more than the sum of their structures and symbols and make the term “performance” a commonplace in these inscriptions (Laderman and Roseman 1996a, 1996b). We begin to find, here and there, accounts of those who are poor performers and consequently failed shamans (Obeyesekere 1977, 289; Schieffelin 1996), Korean shamans among them (C. Choi 1987, 164). The road leads circuitously back to Quesalid and his Chukchi cousins, to an acceptance of artistry as an attribute of healing power, and on to Chini, feeling neither skilled nor yet sufficiently empowered. Her three shaman teachers will struggle to construct for her a mythic world in which the promise and burden of her calling might at last be made manifest. It would be tempting to present Chini’s initiation as a case study, but a “case” implies closure, however ambiguous, while the shaman’s initiation represents only an early chapter in the longer story of a shaman career. Chini’s story, and its realization in the performance of her kut, comes to us linked with other stories, from her family, whose troubled history is linked with Chini’s, and from the mansin who find resonances with their own experiences. In the text that follows, as in the ethnographic film that Diana Lee and I produced to document this same event (D. S. Lee and Kendall 1991), these several voices—of Chini, the members of her family, the three shamans, the anthropologist, and the spirits—speak in, through, and about the performance of Chini’s initiation kut, sometimes assessing the action in a monologue, sometimes creating it in the heteroglossia of an unfolding performance. Being a mansin Mansin are both born and made: fated from birth to suffer until they acknowledge and accept their destiny, initiated, and then trained by a senior shaman to perform kut, less elaborate rituals, and divinations. Korean shamans draw legitimacy from personal histories of affliction constructed as evidence of a calling (C. Choi 1989b; Kendall 1988, 16, 63–64), but they become great shamans through their command of ritual knowledge and performance skills acquired during an onerous apprenticeship (C. Choi 1987, 1989a). The two motifs, calling and training, intersect during a shaman’s initiation, her naerim kut, when the initiate must perform like a shaman with appropriate chants, dancing, and, above all, divine oracles to conjure and convey the inspiration sent by the gods. Having thus proven her ability,


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she begins to receive clients for divinations, builds a following, and earns an income as a shaman, assisting at her spirit mother’s kut and organizing kut of her own, Babe’s situation in 1992. As in more ordinary kut, the senior shamans labor to create an efficacious atmosphere, but at an initiation kut, the would-be shaman becomes an active agent in her own transformation. By her own performance, she wills the spirits’ presence; if she lacks confidence and rudimentary ritual knowledge, if she falters, then she fails. Humiliated, she also bears the burden of sponsoring yet another expensive initiation ritual before she can even begin to earn her living as a shaman and work off her debt. In the words of Chini’s spirit mother, the formidable shaman Kim Pongsun, “If the initiation ritual fails, then the initiate has no professional standing as a shaman. She can’t divine for clients. No food, no money, an empty belly, illness—she has to go through all that again.” Kim Pongsun explained Chini’s circumstances with great compassion: Chini’s all alone in the world. She has one living parent and an older sister, but there really isn’t anyone who can help her make her way. So we’ll make a great shaman out of her. . . . [T]his time we’ll do another kut and she’ll have more self-confidence, she’ll balance on the knife blades, perform like a shaman. Anyone desired by the gods has hardships. When Chini had her kut in the spring, her elder sister gave her the money, and of course she paid for this one too. But after this, Chini will be a great shaman [comic hyperbole] and then she can make money and pay back her debt. The stakes for Chini are best understood in her own words, a tale that reveals how she, and those around her, came to construct her story as that of a destined shaman, a tale she willingly told on camera. I had dreaded the task of interviewing her for the film. In my earlier attempts to solicit her story, always in the company of her spirit mother, the seasoned raconteur swiftly overwhelmed Chini’s quiet voice and poured out her own emphatic tale of Chini’s tribulations. This time we arranged to interview Chini on the eve of her kut, choosing a quiet moment when the senior shamans had gone out on an errand. Initially, Chini was uncomfortable with the idea, insisting that she “really didn’t know anything,” displaying an apprentice’s insecurity over her partial knowledge, compounded by the senior shamans’ teasing insistence that even the anthropologist bested Chini in knowing the rituals. She nearly giggled with relief at the patent obviousness of my first question, “What are you going to do tomorrow?”


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Chini’s story Tomorrow, of course, that’s my initiation kut. That’s when you receive the spirits, and after that you become a shaman. Ever since I was twenty-three years old, for the last ten years, everything has gone wrong. I’ve been ill and my family too. Nothing’s worked out for them. If it were just for my sake, then I wouldn’t go through with it, but my whole family is affected. I have an aunt and a cousin who got to be the way I am now, and when they didn’t accept the gods and become shamans, they lost their minds, they went crazy. Because two people refused the gods, and because I’ve been struggling with this for so long, one kut wouldn’t do it for me. . . . If I’d accepted the gods when they first claimed me, then everything would have burst out of me and I would have danced like crazy, but now it’s gone on for too long. Chini’s own story, like the stories of many other shamans, begins with a portentous dream: I dreamed I was with three friends by a mountain stream. There was a big round rock with a great cavity in the base. . . . I went to see what was hidden there, and when I drew it out, it seemed to be some sort of clothing—I didn’t know what kind—a bright, dazzling garment. I put it on, and then right before my eyes, I saw a building that looked like a temple. It was a shaman’s shrine—that’s how I interpret it now—and the clothing was what the shamans wear. Back then, I had no idea what it was or what sort of clothes those were, but just when I put on that splendid garment, I saw the old tile-roofed house. There aren’t many of them left now, are there? It was the sort of house they used to build in Korea during the Chosôn dynasty. The dream was so clear and vivid. I haven’t forgotten it, even after all the things that have happened to me since then. When my teachers, the great shamans, asked me about my most vivid dream . . . that’s when I realized what it meant. . . . Even after so much time had passed, I remembered everything just as soon as someone asked me, “What have you dreamed?” The clothes . . . that I put on, the old house, I can still picture them, although most of my dreams just fade away. When I was twentythree years old and had that dream, that’s when I should have received the spirits and become a shaman. Instead, a matchmaker


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came by, and I was married. My married life was nothing but quarrels and suffering. I couldn’t bear it. I had to leave. On another occasion Kim Pongsun, familiar with the tribulations of Chini’s married life, elaborated: She was match-made and married off, but that man did nothing but drink. He did absolutely nothing to provide for his family, just drank. As if that wasn’t enough, he got himself another woman and fooled around. . . . So she ran away. . . . She gave up her children, a boy and a girl, a three-year-old and a six-year-old. She left all that behind. In Chini’s words: I made my own way and earned some money, but I’d loan it to someone who’d make off with it, or I’d have to go to the hospital or to a psychiatric hospital. Even though I had several examinations, they never could find anything wrong with me. Medically speaking, there wasn’t anything wrong. But as far as I was concerned, I was always in pain. In the four years since I left married life, what little money I earned was wasted on bad loans and my medical expenses. . . . That’s how it is. I haven’t the least bit of money to show for all that time and all those hardships. I even tried peddling. There isn’t anything I haven’t tried to sell—scrub brushes, rice cake, water—I tried them all, but I couldn’t make any money at it . . . and my body is as it is. I used to weigh more than 110 pounds. I’ve lost 22 pounds. I used to have a nice full figure. [She gestures the shape of a shapely, healthy body and chuckles at the thought of her emaciated figure.] I was sitting in a tearoom with some friends when a shaman happened by, come from an exorcism or something. As soon as she saw me, she said, “The spirits want to make an apprentice of someone. You know who I mean, don’t you? If you don’t apprentice yourself, you’ll have a hard time surmounting your troubles.”8 And with that she left. I went on, worked different jobs, but never anything that suited me. I had jobs that didn’t pay very well, and sometimes they even withheld my pay. When I had work, I would sense that someone outside was calling me. I’d feel an urge to rush outside. But of course there wouldn’t be anyone there. It


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was the spirits who were shaking me up. I didn’t realize what was happening. I’d be out looking for work, roaming around, and I’d see a shaman’s house. You know, they have a flag. Every now and then I’d go in. They’d tell me [She gives her voice a portentous ring], “You must receive the spirits before the next year is out. You must. If you refuse, your health will deteriorate even more and you will have even worse luck. You must accept them.” I went from job to job until I finally got discouraged and went to my sister’s house. Just joking, I said, “I don’t see any way out. I may as well become a shaman.” My sister yelled at me, called me a crazy woman [Laughs] because I, her own little sister, had said such a thing. In Korea, if you become one, it’s still considered really base. She hated the idea. “Crazy woman! On top of everything else, would you go that far to make a living?” Since it couldn’t be helped, I went out again and forced myself to find work, but they cheated me out of my pay. . . . I went back to my sister’s house. My sister said, “Mother and I talked it over. If the gods have got such a hold on you, then you have to accept them. Could we hold that against you?” Chini’s story follows upon numerous other shaman autobiographies as a tale of inexplicable illness, marital turmoil, and financial reverses, interlaced with portentous dreams and oracles (Ch’oe K. 1981; Y. K. Harvey 1979; Kendall 1988; T’ae-gon Kim 1981, 196–228). Chini’s dreamed discovery of shamanic goods hidden away in the mountains (C. Choi 1987, 114, 121–126), the mysterious compulsion to rush out of the workplace (T’ae-gon Kim 1981, 202), and even the dream image of the tile-roofed shrine (Ch’oe K. 1981, 66) recall other stories. Like other shamans in other tales, Chini presents herself as dodging and denying the bald evidence of her destiny through years of pain. Her tale builds to a relentless sense of inevitability when she and her family finally acquiesce to the will of the gods. But while Chini presents herself as avoiding the obvious, her actions, even as she describes them, reveal a nagging preoccupation with the intimations of a calling. She visits diviners, and their response becomes predictable: “You must serve the spirits.” She broaches the idea to her sister, “Just joking.” The construction of Chini’s tale is a collective enterprise with a long gestation, begun in the divination sessions where she tells her story to one shaman and then to another, learning and reconfirming its meaning (cf.


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C. Choi 1989b.).9 By the time of her kut, Chini’s story has also become a part of her spirit mother’s repertoire, a story the older shaman tells about Chini as confirmation of the necessity of initiating her and as one more example of the kind of person who is a destined shaman. The oral performance of Chini’s story—Chini to several shamans, Chini to her family, Chini to our camera, Kim Pongsun to her colleagues, to the anthropologist, and back again in Chini’s hearing—happens outside the performance of Chini’s initiation kut, but by its message and its place among a universe of similar tales, it is intrinsic to the ritual’s realization (Bauman and Briggs 1990), and as with Mrs. Min’s and Mrs. Yi’s hardships, the backstory will necessarily break through the seams of the ritual itself. Finding a teacher Between Chini’s acceptance of her calling and her first initiation lay a crucial task: finding a shaman who would perform the initiation ritual and train her as a spirit daughter. “You have to find a good shaman to do the initiation,” the old shaman An Hosun insists. “If you meet up with a bad woman—and there certainly are a lot of bad women—if they don’t do it right, then the initiate might even lose the force of her inspiration [myônggi]. . . . There are bad male shamans too, of course.” Chini explains how her sister took her to Kwan Myôngnyô, a young shaman she consulted, but Kwan Myôngnyô was unwilling to preside at Chini’s initiation kut. Kwan Myôngnyô said, “As soon as you walked in, the General [Changgun] and the Child Gods [Tongja] came right on in after you. Whether I do a divination or not, that’s the way it is [the gods are with you].” Then she divined and told me that I absolutely had to receive the spirits in the next year. There it was! She said exactly the same thing as all the others. Kwan Myôngnyô said, “I’m just a beginner. I’m going to introduce you to a good, experienced teacher. I’ll take you to meet her right now.” And that’s how I came to meet my spirit mother, Kim Pongsun. Although still an apprentice “little shaman” (chagΔn mudang) or disciple (cheja) studying with her teacher (sônsaeng) Kim Pongsun, Kwan Myôngnyô might yet have claimed Chini as her own client and organized her initiation. An avaricious little shaman would have done so, but Kwan Myôngnyô considered this immoral:


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Would I go and ruin someone else’s life for a few coins? The truth is, it’s pitiful enough when someone is forced to become a shaman. When someone gets in that situation, the only right and proper thing to do is see that they get a good teacher. . . . I had so many difficulties when I began, the last thing I wanted was for her to go through what I’d endured. Kwan Myôngnyô had sponsored four kut before she was able to burst out with inspired speech and deliver oracles from the spirits. She claims, with some heat, that once she had sponsored her expensive initiation kut, her spirit mother “forgot who I was.” Her story, of an incompetent initiation and lack of subsequent training, reveals the perils for any novice shaman who trusts her future to the wrong spirit mother: On my fourth try, sudden as a thunderclap, the spirits made me into a shaman. But even so, things didn’t work out for me. I struggled for two years, worked as a diviner. I could do that all right, but when it came to doing kut, I didn’t have any teachers like these to show me how to do things. “This is what I’ve been saying,” the old shaman An Hosun interjects. “If you meet the wrong teacher, if you meet a bad person, that’s what happens.” The occasion prompts old memories for An Hosun, who describes her bitter experience as a young apprentice, criticized and beaten, until she ran away from her spirit mother’s house and spent many desolate years wandering before fully accepting her calling late in life. Toward Chini, her sternness as a teacher comes mingled with the concern of a “maternal aunt” (imo) in this ad hoc family of shamans who often work together.10 An Hosun enjoins Chini to take her initiation and training seriously and avoid wasting her own prime years as An herself had done. On the morning of the kut, she delivers a sharp lecture to the apprentice, becoming more impassioned as she speaks: If I had just met you for the first time, then I wouldn’t be saying this. I’d think that these were just the troubles of someone else’s child, that it’s sad but it doesn’t concern me. But now I’m telling you, like your own mother. I’m old, I’ve had a lot of experience. . . . If you don’t go through with it, you’ll be beaten down in the end. That’s what happened to me. I refused . . . said I wouldn’t follow a shaman’s path and left, said I wouldn’t make my


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living this way, but in the end this is what I became. Even if it’s the death of you, you have to heed your spirit mother’s words and give a good answer. I mean it. Those who make it through find their minds at ease. They’re no longer burdened with sorrow. I’ve spoken in a fit of passion. Hereafter, just be responsive. If there’s something you need to know, don’t hide it. Ask “Which god is this?” “Mother, how should I do this?” Only if you make a point of asking such things will you ever become a great shaman. If you’re stubborn and just do as you please, it won’t happen. . . . You have to be diligent. Did you hear me? Answer me “Yes, right.” That’s how you should make a good response. The spirit mother, Kim Pongsun, is even more anxious on the initiate’s behalf, for Chini is her first spirit daughter. As Kwan Myôngnyô told me, “We call the shaman who presides at the initiation ‘spirit mother’ because her responsibilities are as weighty as those of any parent raising a child.” Or as Kim Pongsun put it herself, confessing her anxiety: If she hadn’t taken to me, then she would have just gone away, but this child didn’t leave. When someone sets out to become a shaman, they agonize over whether they’ll make it or not, and now that’s my worry too. It would be different if Chini hadn’t come to my house, but when you are like parent and child, then you agonize over them. Americans feel that way too, don’t they? Chini had lived all summer in Kim Pongsun’s house, following the custom of apprentice shamans who spend a period of training in the spirit mother’s home, learning the mansin’s work but also performing household tasks as if she were a daughter-in-law (Ch’oe K. 1981, 81, 129; C. Choi 1987, 131–132; Huang 1988, 23). For Chini, bereft of both economic and social capital and still unable to begin her own practice as a diviner, this was a fortuitous interlude. She ran errands and helped in the kitchen while sharing the good food and comfortable accommodations of a successful shaman’s household. Diana Lee told me that when she first met Chini early in the summer, the young woman was emaciated, but by the time of this second kut, the apprentice had gained back some of her weight and seemed less high-strung and tense. In the months between her first and second kut, Chini tried to develop both her practical knowledge of ritual performance and her store of spiritual inspiration. She would learn the former through Kim Pongsun’s instruction


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and by observing Kim Pongsun’s work, a process Yongsu’s Mother had once likened to my own fieldwork (Kendall 1985, 67–68). When I visited Kim Pongsun’s shrine to discuss our plans for the film, I found Chini perched in a posture of intense concentration while Kim Pongsun performed an exorcism in the shrine. Chini also made pilgrimages to four sacred mountains seeking the spiritual force or energy (myônggi) that would sharpen her visions and give her the power to convey oracles from the spirits. On the eve of her second kut, Chini spoke with a small store of confidence in the powers she had acquired through these efforts: When the gods appear, when they’re really touching me, it’s like your film rolling on, image by image, the vision comes up and then it disappears. [She said this while facing Diana’s camera.] . . . Each time I went to the mountain, the gods would come out and play for a while. You see, at first inspired speech didn’t burst out of me, but then each time I went to the mountain, the gods gave me a little more power and inspiration. This time I’ve got to go through with it. They’ll give me the power of inspired speech. This time their oracles will pour out. Chini describes herself as a passive receptor of divine power. Her shaman teachers, on the other hand, will insist that Chini must take the initiative, perform like a shaman to claim the gods’ power as her own. This tension between passive animation and inspired performance will be evident throughout Chini’s kut. As she helps Chini into her costume on the first morning of the kut, Kwan Myôngnyô recalls her own series of failed initiations and urges Chini, “You have to call the gods or the gods won’t come, and they won’t give you the power of inspired speech. Do you want to spend the rest of your life doing kut after kut?” Summoning the Buddhist Sage The experienced shamans perform the preliminaries, purifying the ritual space and inviting the gods and ancestors into Chini’s rented room. After this, and as in other initiation kut, the mansin will dress Chini in costumes for the different gods who appear in each segment of the kut. More than theatrical artifice, the costumes that the shamans wear become vehicles for the gods’ presence. During an initiation kut and very occasionally at other kut, gods with particularly pressing business appear out of turn, inspiring a shaman to reach spontaneously for a particular costume, clothe herself,


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and speak in the intrusive god’s voice. During Chini’s kut, the shamans will urge her to follow her impulses and select from a random array of costumes, to follow the inspiration of a potent god that could become her own bodygoverning guardian (momju taesin), a god who will work through her when she performs kut and divinations. In costume Chini must dance to provoke the gods’ descent, encouraged by the three mansin who beat the drum, gong, and cymbals. When charged with divine inspiration, she must be able to proclaim the long lists of gods associated with each segment of the kut as the visions appear before her eyes, and to transmit the gods’ oracles. A mansin performs a spontaneous flow of visions, the specific subcategories of deities appearing in each segment, but a mansin also memorizes the format of these long and complicated lists of gods. At the time of Chini’s kut, Kwan Myôngnyô still receives occasional coaching before she performs, and Okkyông’s Mother, three years a mansin when I began my first fieldwork in 1977, was often criticized for the mistakes she made (Kendall 1985, 67). The mansin dress Chini in a flowing white robe and peaked cowl for the Buddhist Sage, the Seven Stars, and the Birth Grandmother, pure, high gods who are honored on mountains or in high places. To receive these deities, Chini must balance on the rim of an earthen jar filled with water and call them to this pure, elevated place. She faces the mansin and listens to the drum rhythm, the essential rhythm of a kut, the beats that pick up pace when the dancer seems ready to assume the series of jumps, on the balls of her feet, that signify inspiration. A strong drummer coaxes a timid initiate like Chini into contact with the gods. Only Kim Pongsun and An Hosun, the two experienced mansin, will wield the drumstick during Chini’s kut. Kwan Myôngnyô bangs the cymbals and the gong to punctuate the arrival of gods or the high drama of an exorcism. Chini, dancing with timid steps, moves her lips, attempting to follow the shamans’ chant of invocation. She begins to jump, encouraged by the drumbeats. She hesitates, wide-eyed and uncertain. In the distance, her own mother and sister kneel on the floor beside the earthen water jar, hugging it steady in tense anticipation of Chini’s ascent. Chini hesitates. kim pongsun: Now look here, it takes concentration to do it. Set your mind to it. You’ve got to get up on that jar! kwan myôngnyô: [Shouting encouragement] The gods are coming! When you’re jumping, when you feel an urge to grab a spirit’s costume, then grab it and jump like crazy. Today all you have to do is dance with the costume, go up on the jar, and give


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it a try. This behavior is really too much, stupid!” [Said with a touch of affection, as to a recalcitrant child] kim pongsun: [Angry, frustrated] I’m losing my patience. What’s to deliberate? Do you think that the gods will show up if you just stand there waiting for them? [The drum pounds its tong, tong, tong, ta kung rhythm; the pace accelerates as Chini approaches the jar, still dancing, still hesitating.] an hosun: Go on, go on, get up, go right on up! The gods will only give you the force of their inspiration when you get up on the jar! The Buddhist Sage is giving you inspiration! Go on up! That’s right! kwan myôngnyô: The gods are coming through! Go up, the gods are pushing you up! Bow, bow, bow, bow! [Chini stands on the rim of the jar and bows to the four directions, but still she does not speak. The shamans address not Chini but the gods.] an hosun: Are you here? Who are you? Who are you? kwan myôngnyô: Please open the great front gate for the apprentice of the Yi family.11 chini/buddhist sage: [In a breathy, uncertain voice] The Buddhist Sage of the Sun and Moon, the Buddhist Sage of the Heavenly Palace, just so, the Buddhist Sage of the village shrine, just so, pray to the Buddhist Sage, the Buddhist Sage, the Buddhist Sage . . . [She falters, shakes her head in frustration, recovers.] The Buddhist Sage of the village shrine . . . [She draws a deep breath as if fighting panic.] The Buddhist Sage from the village shrine in our ancestral home. For years we have intended to help our apprentice, just so, but our apprentice does not accept us. kwan myôngnyô: Because she doesn’t know any better. [She makes excuses on Chini’s behalf, using the same turn of phrase that the shamans used at Mrs. Yi’s and other kut.] chini/buddhist sage: All this year she must bow in the shrine, yes, and honor the spirits, offer many more prayers, and then next year we’ll give her the power of inspired speech. [This makes the shamans livid on Chini’s behalf and at the same time vexed with her.] kwan myôngnyô: Aigo! You’ll put it off to next year? We’ve done all this so that you’ll give her the power of inspired speech


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now. Why should we wait until next year? You keep coming through with visions, keep right on transmitting the words of the spirits! kim pongsun: Give us the true words of the spirits, an inspired divination! chini/buddhist sage: This year the spirits will just come and go . . . the apprentice will not gain the power of inspired speech. Something is blocking her. kwan myôngnyô: Go on! Haven’t we given you everything you asked for to make you unblock her gates of inspired speech? kim pongsun: That’s no good! We gave you everything you wanted. What’s this about next year, next year? In the meantime your apprentice will have starved to death! Chini descends from the jar. Her foot slips on the paper covering the mouth of the jar and splashes into the water. The mansin remove her sodden stocking. The downcast initiate returns to the shrine, her face red with silent weeping. Back in the shrine, she sways on her feet to the slowed drumbeats, like the ticks of a lethargic metronome. We are all tense with anticipation, but Chini speaks no more. The old shaman An Hosun urges her, once again, to give vent to the spontaneous impulses that will unleash the spirits: “If you want to insult someone, insult them. If you want to cry, then cry your fill. Do whatever you feel like—this is the spirits’ day!” Kwan Myôngnyô, conscious of Chini’s peril, tries again to coax her into constructive action: “If all you’re going to do is stand there praying for something to happen, then the gods will just go their merry way without doing anything for you. . . . All you have to do is say, ‘I’m the Seven Stars’ and give an oracle. Come on, whether the gods have made you into a shaman or not.” An Hosun suggests a stiff beating, such as she once endured. The shamans consider the Buddhist Sage’s assertion that something, some spirit out of sequence, is blocking Chini, a common occurrence at an initiation kut. Noting Chini’s timid prances, Kim Pongsun offers the wry comment that the ghost of a dead deer is possessing the initiate. As Chini continues to sway in silence, Kim Pongsun scolds her in mounting desperation. What are you up to? Come on, you’ve got to talk. Why can’t you give us an oracle from the spirits? Isn’t this what you asked for? We decided to do this because you thought that you could bring it off. [And still Chini hesitates.] You’ve already given us one oracle. Now


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shouldn’t you give us the true words of the Seven Stars? You can’t? What are you thinking of? You’ve let yourself get distracted, filled your mind with other things. Otherwise you’d feel the gods from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. Come on. Say, “It’s the Seven Stars! Here’s how it is with Chini.” [She draws out her words for emphasis in the manner of a god proclaiming his presence through the shaman during a kut.] Tell us she’s frustrated, tell us she’s pitiful. Hey, do you think some god is really going to move your tongue for you? [And as a muttered aside] I’m struck dumb by her stupidity! Kim Pongsun’s scolding betrays the paradox of agency and performance that marks Chini’s struggle. Chini has failed to “feel the gods,” but she has also failed to act inspired, to convey the presence of gods through her own words and actions. Chini gives up and bows her head for a scowling Kim Pongsun to untie and remove her white cowl. Chini giggles with embarrassment, probably heightened by the realization that she is in full view of Diana’s camera. This earns the wrath of Kim Pongsun: “Laughing? Don’t you have any pride? How dare you laugh after that?” Kwan Myôngnyô gives Chini a gentle reprimand, telling her to listen attentively to her spirit mother’s words. “Listen to what?” snaps Kim Pongsun. “If you tell her something, it just goes in one ear and out the other. Today I don’t have a single shred of patience left. Just wait and see what I’ve got in store for you!” In the corner of the room, the old shaman, An Hosun, quietly wipes away a tear. Chini’s sister embraces and comforts her. Later she will tell the shamans, “This child never cries, and that’s a worry. She holds it in.” When I asked Chini how she felt on the eve of her kut, she had admitted this herself: “Other people might get depressed and cry about it, but I’m not the sort of person who sheds tears.” Her inability to give vent to emotion is a liability. Her sister calls it “a worry,” believing that pain held too long inside festers into pathology, aware of Chini’s past treatment for mental illness. Similarly Mrs. Min and Mrs. Yi “held things inside for too long,” but neither was called upon to have the “true words of the spirits” burst from her mouth. For the shamans, Chini’s emotional resistance prevents her from clearing her mind and opening herself to divine inspiration. She does not heed the impulse to draw down a particular god’s costume as a vehicle of divine presence and power. She neither weeps nor shouts insults, thus resisting the very acts of emotional release and surrender that would bring on the force of the gods.12 Above all, she has failed to act like a shaman. The shamans


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have told her that the gods will not move her tongue for her, that performing inspired speech “whether or not the gods have made you into a shaman” is more constructive than succumbing to stage fright in stony silence. Their metaphor, that Chini’s gates of inspired speech are blocked (makta), works on two nearly indistinguishable levels: she is blocked because an obstreperous god or ancestor stands in her path, and she is blocked because she cannot clear her mind and open herself to feelings, impulses, and gods by losing herself in performance. Because Chini lacks the will to continue, Kwan Myôngnyô performs in her place, manifesting the Seven Stars and the Birth Grandmother, who must also appear in this segment of the kut. These spirits, like the shamans, scold Chini for her lack of resolve. kwan myôngnyô/seven stars: Shape up, set your mind to it, and we gods will give you the power of inspired speech, right here in your shrine. If you don’t shape up, then we’re all going to leave you. chini: How can you leave me? Please give me the power of inspired speech. kwan myôngnyô/seven stars: Didn’t you close your lips when we were going to give you speech? . . . Quick, quick, unless you set your mind to it, you won’t be able to receive it. This time, try for it with all your heart and soul. Princess Hogu When Kim Pongsun, the spirit mother, performs the Mountain God’s segment, she seeks the spirits that are blocking Chini. As the Mountain God, who presides over the dead, she senses the presence of two restless souls (malmyông).13 The likely candidates are Chini’s father, a heavy drinker and poor provider who died away from home while in his prime, and a pockmarked sister who committed suicide at age nineteen. Kim Pongsun orders that two sets of spirit clothes be purchased to appease the restless shades, clothes offered to the ancestors and then burned at the end of the kut, and dispatches Chini’s sister to the shaman supply shop. But when Kim Pongsun, as the Special Messenger, balances the offering meat on her trident, she sees a vision of Chini’s dead sister in a more formidable guise. Dressed in the crown and rainbow-sleeved jacket of a princess or a bride, the dead sister claims pride of place, not as a mere ghostly maiden suicide but as a destined shaman who, through the force of her calling, asserts herself as a


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guardian god (taesin), a god who will assist the new shaman in her practice. Kim Pongsun’s chant alternates the observing voice of the shaman with the voice of the spirit as shamans do (Bruno 2002; C. Choi 1989a). It’s Chini’s sister, who has come here as Princess Hogu, blocking Chini’s path. It’s clear, she’s come here wearing a crown and a court robe. She’s come as Princess Hogu to be Chini’s guardian spirit. “I’m full of resentment, full of regret. Chini, you’re not as bright as your sister. I’m so very bright, and filled with jealousy, but you, for some reason, you’re cowardly, you don’t take initiative, you’re always anxious and troubled. If you honor me as your guardian god, Princess Hogu, if you give me a robe and a crown, then all will be well. The calamities will cease.” . . . I see the child, flickering before my eyes. What’s to be done? It’s clear, she’s Princess Hogu. Had she lived, Chini’s sister was fated to become a shaman, to be renowned far and wide. She died without fulfilling her destiny, so now it’s come to you, but however you look at it, Chini, you can’t measure up to your dead sister. The mansin immediately seize upon the logic of this apparition. With the women of Chini’s family, they reconstruct a story about a dead girl who could become a god. kwan myôngnyô: They say she was pockmarked, Chini’s dead sister. kim pongsun: And she was bright, as bright as a button. chini’s mother: She’d say, “What’s the point of living?” We couldn’t give her plastic surgery. She’d get upset when she went out in public. She thought that everyone was staring at her. And then she’d say that she was going to kill herself. I’d say, “What’s this talk of dying? You’ll find a nice husband and things will work out.” That’s what I told her. [She speaks with great speed and heat, reliving the force of her old argument against the fact of her daughter’s death.] kwan myôngnyô: [Breaking in on Chini’s mother] She took poison? When she was still a maiden? Well then, of course she would come back as Princess Hogu. She died a maiden. kim pongsun: [Authoritatively] Of course, if she died unmarried, she would be Princess Hogu. chini’s mother: She was nineteen years old.


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shamans: There, you see! kwan myôngnyô: Chini, your sister’s come to guide you, to be your guardian god and make you into a successful shaman. And now Chini claims that she sensed her dead sister’s presence when she was unable to perform: “It was so strange. She said that she had come to me because I’m so pathetic. No one else in the family has suffered the way I have.” The words Chini gives to her dead sister could as easily be her own or an echo of the old shaman An Hosun’s lament, “Why did I have to endure this?”—the common question of a shaman’s life. The sister will become a permanent symbol of Chini’s destiny, indeed a partner in it. The spirit mother orders that the family purchase a crown and robe to honor the dead girl as Princess Hogu, Chini’s guardian god (Hogu Taesin) and sends Chini’s elder sister back to the shaman supply shop. Princess Hogu both is and is more than Chini’s personal idiom (cf. Boddy 1989, 136, 166; Crapanzano 1977; Obeyesekere 1970, 1977, 1981). The shamans construct the logic of her story from a common history of family suffering even as family fortune hangs upon Chini’s cure. The gods had determined to make a shaman of someone in the family, but the family consistently misread the signs. When the gods claimed an aunt and then a cousin, the family called these women “crazy,” and the two unfortunates did ultimately lose their minds. The pockmarked sister committed suicide. Chini endured ten years of suffering and a bad marriage because her portentous dream was ignored. Chini’s story also “belongs” to her mother and sister, and they tell it to make sense of their common history, to cast Chini’s destiny as one manifestation of a common fate. More of their story will be enacted, and interacted when the family’s ancestors appear later in the kut. To Western ears, the spirit mother sounds callous when she tells Chini that she can’t measure up to her dead sister, who was “as bright as a button.” In context, Kim Pongsun expresses compassion, not cruelty, when she says, “She was the one who was destined to become a shaman, but the family didn’t recognize it.” Chini should have been spared this ordeal and the necessity of embracing a profession for which, it is now obvious; she is temperamentally ill-suited. Because Chini herself ignored the gods, she cannot now easily claim their power. Chini had acknowledged this when she spoke to us the night before: “If I’d accepted the gods when they first claimed me, then everything would have burst out of me and I would have danced like crazy, but now it’s gone on for too long. . . . I won’t be cured just like that.” Kim Pongsun affirms this to Chini’s mother during a break in the kut:


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There is a difference between someone who’s been sitting quietly and then bursts out with it like a sudden peal of thunder, and someone who has been stuck with a stubborn spirit through a long, hard, and bitter experience. From what I’ve seen and those I’ve helped along at other initiation kut, she’s been too hasty [in holding this second kut]. . . . It isn’t a matter of foresight. It’s just how things have turned out. . . . If I take her on, then she’s got to become a shaman. We can’t give up, even if we don’t succeed this time. Not a single one of her siblings is doing well, right? If they don’t have anything, then they can’t help her out. It can’t be helped. But even if they can’t support her, they should find it in their hearts not to slander her. When she hears that, how can she muster the strength to go on? If they help her, as loving brothers and sisters, then in a year or two, by the time Chini is thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, she will be a success. She addresses Chini’s mother and, through Chini’s mother, Chini herself, evoking the bond of suffering that she and Chini share: The first time I talked to you, Auntie, didn’t I tell you that I also had difficulties starting out? But now I have a house, I’m comfortable, and everyone comes to me for handouts. . . . Look, Chini has a bad fate and I have a bad fate. There’s nothing we can do about it. Didn’t she come to my house and didn’t I meet her and that’s how it happened [that she became my apprentice]? Have I ever denied her food to eat or clothes to wear? . . . I’m quicktempered. I scold with my lips, but inside, my heart aches for her, all alone in the world. I’ve been through this myself. Ancestral affirmations When the old shaman An Hosun performs the ancestors’ sequence, the dead sister appears twice, first as the Great Spirit Princess Hogu (Hogu Taesin), a dead shaman become guardian god who leads the ancestors to the kut. As An Hosun begins the segment, she chants the list of Great Spirit guardians, and just as she intones “Hogu Taesin,” she starts, takes in a great gasp of air, and grins. Because she stands at the open doorway and facing out of the room, only Diana and her camera see this. Princess Hogu, speaking through An Hosun, validates the story of the dead sister’s thwarted destiny as a shaman and her claim to the status of a guardian god: “How is my little sister


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going to fill my big shoes with her tiny feet?” She will reappear later in the persona of a family ghost, trailing after the family ancestors, as must the unquiet soul of one who died unmarried and without issue. Predictably, the ghostly maiden will lachrymosely complain of her unmarried state. When Chini’s dead father appears, he affirms his role in the family’s misery, first by neglect, then by dying and abandoning Chini’s mother to fend for herself and her children. an hosun/chini’s father: You think I died away from home because I was too fond of my friends, good times, and spending money? You think that’s why I died, don’t you? mother: Yes. an hosun/chini’s father: And because I died, look at how you’ve suffered. All because I died, you’ve had so much reason to cry. [Sobs] . . . When I was alive I thought of my own pleasure, I didn’t provide for my family at home. I used what was in my pocket to treat my friends. Chini’s mother remains stoic, nodding in quiet agreement with her husband’s self-deprecation and his recounting of her own hardship, the sort of words that would have evoked sobs from many a widow. Like Chini, the mother does not easily give vent to emotion and barely manages a wan smile when her late husband offers a cup of wine to his long-suffering wife: “I haven’t seen you, dear, for such a long time.” The shamans will comment later that all of Chini’s family is unusually reserved, although her sister and sister-in-law do titter at An Hosun’s repeated in-character requests for yet another cup of wine. As in any kut, the appearance of the ancestors gives voice to a larger family story of pain, recrimination, and reconciliation. In the guise of restless ancestors, An Hosun gives back as drama what was told as story, inviting Chini’s family to confront visions of their common past. Everyone present, including Diana Lee and I, knew their basic history before the kut began. When Chini’s elder sister came to her as a client, Kwan Myôngnyô would have heard tales of childhood poverty and hardship, of a drunken, spendthrift father who died young and a widowed mother who worked herself to the bone. Later, Kim Pongsun become a raconteur of Chini’s story. At the kut itself, Chini’s mother and sister offer other fragments and elaborations to an unfolding dialogic interpretation—“She took poison? When she was still a maiden?” Ancestral appearances, ancestors turned into gods, and stories told about the dead affirm that bonds of kinship and history are


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implicated in Chini’s plight and that the common fates of mother, sister, and sister-in-law are bound together in the process of Chini’s initiation. Chini tries again The shamans dress Chini in Princess Hogu’s robes. She stands tense with anticipation when the drumming starts, then rushes to the street and scatters coarse grain to drive off malevolent forces. She leaps while the drum throbs, but when she stops, she remains mute. In near desperation, the shamans clothe Chini in the gold satin robe of the Heavenly King (Ch’ônha Taeuang), a high god in her pantheon whose presence she proclaimed on the mountain.14 This god came to her from her mother’s lineage, a consort line in dynastic times.15 No intrusive spirit could block the high King; the mansin are bringing out the big guns, making an appeal to the highest possible authority. No longer jumping, Chini sways on her feet to the slowed pace of the drum, eyes vacant, a smile on her lips. kim pongsun: Has the Heavenly King arrived? chini: Just so, the Heavenly King. kim pongsun: [To the god] Now that you’ve descended into the apprentice, please speak. Such a dignified god as yourself should instruct her so that her every phrase is eloquent and each word fragrant. Give us the true words of the spirits. kwan myôngnyô: Chini’s spirit mother has gone to so much trouble. Give the spirit mother your words of knowledge and then divine for all the other shamans here too. Chini lapses back into silence, swaying on her feet and tugging at her ear as if struggling to hear a faint or distant voice. She sways in silence for a very long time. Kim Pongsun kneels in front of Chini’s altar and rubs her hands in supplication, petitioning the spirits: kim pongsun: If you’ve really descended into the apprentice, give her inspiration, give us the true words of the spirits. . . . What does the apprentice know? She’s like a little child, a three-yearold baby. . . . You’re such a renowned deity. Please let her have her wish. Ah, we human beings don’t know anything. Please give her the power to see and express the gods’ knowledge. She’s


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been clumsy and stupid. Now your shaman is going to have sore legs from kneeling here for so long honoring you this way. She asks Chini, “Don’t you have the least little vision? Who is that standing beside you, huh? Who’s the one at your side?” No response. Chini continues to sway. The spirit mother directs her frustration to the painted images above Chini’s altar, telling them that in all of her seventeen years as a shaman, she has never picked a fight with the gods, not even once, but now she is reaching her limit. Chini’s sister-in-law catches my eye, stifling a giggle at the spirit mother’s haranguing the divine. kim pongsun: I’m going to tear you all off the wall and burn you up! [Regains her self-control and gives slow emphasis to her next statement] I mean it, if I get any angrier . . . because you’ve been tormenting the apprentice to death. I said that we should do the initiation next spring, but because you harassed her so much, we’re doing it now, quick as a flash. Why can’t you speak? [Sarcastically] All you nobles, you’re really something. You’re as heartless as an empty can. That’s the truth. [With great heat] If I get any angrier, I’ll cast you all out, I will! The shamans continue to coax Chini, reminding her of the effort that they have all been making on her behalf, telling her to let it all burst out of her, asking her for “just one little word.” Kim Pongsun, with reckless humor, asks, “Shall I chant you some sutra?” Still kneeling, she taps lightly on her gong, mimicking a monk beating a wooden clapper, and intones the Ch’ônsu Kyông, the sutra she plays on tape at home when she has a headache or feels depressed. “You like that?” she asks with a coy roll of her eyes. “Well then, talk!” And at last, Chini speaks: chini/heavenly king: From now on, the great Heavenly King will help the apprentice to become a successful shaman. The apprentice must make many offerings in her shrine, and then bit by bit we will help her gain recognition. Princess Hogu has become a disciple of the Heavenly King. kwan myôngnyô: That’s the way! chini/princess hogu: I am Princess Hogu. I have not harmed my family. I have received the teaching of the Heavenly King.16


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The shamans tell her to deliver an oracle to her sister-in-law, who, as a prayer for Chini’s brother’s success, bought the divination tray that Chini will use when she divines for her future clients. The shamans call the sister-in-law into the room and order her to “Kowtow! Kowtow! Kowtow!” which she does with great dispatch. Chini, as Princess Hogu, reassures her that “bit by bit, things will improve,” that Princess Hogu will help her family from now on. She tells her own mother, “If you honor me, then your children will be free from misfortune and strife,” and again promises good fortune and the god’s protection to her elder sister. Kim Pongsun complains that this was not an impressive oracle, that Chini’s words were not enough (and indeed they were formulaic and predictable). Kwan Myôngnyô defends Chini: “It’s her nature.” “Her nature is her nature, but the gods come on with a bang,” Kim Pongsun reminds her. She continues to urge Chini on, using a now-familiar formula: “If there’s a costume the god wants to wear, then put it on! Jump and keep shouting out the divine commands. That’s what we mean by the true words of the spirits. Shout out what the spirits have to tell us. That’s what it’s all about.” The shamans pound cymbals, drum, and gong with great enthusiasm, the percussive boom, boom, boom reverberating against the tong, tong, tong, ta kung rhythm of the drum, as Chini reaches again for Princess Hogu’s robe. kim pongsun: Cry your heart out! Then everything will burst out. chini: [Racked with sobs as she buries her tear-streaked face in her open fan, the fan Princess Hogu uses to cover her pockmarks] Mother! Mother! Mother! kim pongsun: You see, she’s letting it all come out. kwan myôngnyô: Chini’s Mother, come up here, come up here. chini: [Gasping out her words between sobs while her mother rubs her hands in supplication, her eyes brimming over with tears] Mother! Mother! I wanted so much to be beautiful. Mother . . . I’ll help my little sister as a shaman, Mother. I want your blessing, but you don’t respond. Mother, how many times I’ve called you! . . . When my mother raised me she wasn’t able to give us decent food. I’m full of pity for Chini. How can it be helped, Mother? . . . That’s why I’ve come. Weeks later, Kim Pongsun will comment on the pathos of this encounter: She was telling her mother what she couldn’t say when she was alive. She had to die to do it. “Mother, did you give me good food to eat? Did you ever buy me a persimmon? Did you ever make me


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pretty clothes?” . . . By possessing her younger sister, she attacks her mother. The mother was heartsick when she heard that. . . . She never realized how her daughter felt. Even in death, her daughter felt so much resentment that she possessed her sister and said these things. . . . It was a pathetic death, age nineteen, that should be such a lovely age, but she wasn’t able to eat good food, wasn’t able to wear nice clothes, wasn’t able to feel her mother’s love. So she possesses her younger sister and says, “I was tormented to death, so you had better take care of me.” That’s what she meant. Chini’s sister cried, her mother cried, even I cried—we all cried. But Chini’s portrayal differs subtly from Kim Pongsun’s recollection of a resentful, spiteful child, the sort of dead child who usually appears in kut. In Chini’s weepy inspired speech, the dead girl has a more benevolent guise consistent with Chini’s acceptance of the ghost-turned-god as her divine alter ego.17 Princess Hogu received the elevated instruction of the Heavenly King and has not harmed her family; she seeks her mother’s blessing and acceptance (as does Chini). Again, the dead girl’s pain merges with Chini’s story and with the painful history of her family. After this confrontation the mother describes the dead girl’s suicide by poison on a lonely hillside. Kwan Myôngnyô, remarking that she heard the dead girl mention white trousers when Chini spoke, taps a well of remorse in Chini’s elder sister: White trousers, she said she wanted to wear white trousers. It wasn’t easy for me then either. I wasn’t more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old. I said, “Crazy woman, what’s so important about white trousers?” I was hateful. It was her nature not to be bothered by little things. When she came to my house, she didn’t just sit and visit. She’d wash the diapers for me, help me out however she could, fix the food, even boil up the stew. My younger siblings, when they come round, ahyu! They won’t so much as lift a dishrag, except for Chini, of course. The shamans lead Chini, still in the persona of her dead sister/Princess Hogu, to the divination tray. They expect her to cast rice on the lacquered surface and, from its configurations, offer oracles in the manner of a shaman giving divinations, the work she must do if she hopes to make a living as a shaman. Chini collapses on the floor in a bow of supplication at Kim Pongsun’s feet. “Teacher, help me!” she sobs. Between them, they spread and count rice grains as Chini, shielding her tear-streaked face in Princess


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Hogu’s fan, produces simple divinations for her mother, elder sister, and Kwan Myôngnyô, all confirmed as Kim Pongsun flicks the rice grains with her own fingertips. Kim Pongsun hands Chini the bridal crown they have purchased for Princess Hogu. kim pongsun: How do you like this bridal crown we bought for you? chini/princess hogu: [Soft, happy, overwhelmed] How do I wear this sort of thing? [She places it awkwardly on her head, takes it off, looks at it.] It’s beautiful. kim pongsun: You’ll use this crown now, all right? [She makes an emphatic bargain.] When you’ve helped Chini make some money as a shaman, when you’ve given her boundless good fortune, then she’ll get you another one. kwan myôngnyô: When you’ve given her work, when she’s done small rituals and kut, then we’ll buy it for you. It’s difficult to do all at once. chini/princess hogu: [Tearfully] My little sister Chini bought this for me? kim pongsun: Yes, that’s because she’s asking you to let go of all your resentment [stop harassing her and help her succeed]. chini/princess hogu: But didn’t you buy it without letting Chini know? Won’t she be upset? elder sister: [Comforting] No, she won’t be upset. Your little sister knows all about it. chini/princess hogu: Then I’m going to give our dear mother good health. Chini stands while the shamans give her the rhythm for the god’s praise song (t’aryông), a chance for the singer to proclaim triumphantly, “There is no guardian god so wonderful as my guardian god, too wonderful for words.” Half dancing, half staggering, Chini flails her arms and sobs her way through a few bars of the usually lively song. Encouraged by the drum rhythm, she jumps to the point of exhaustion and collapses in a bow on the floor in front of the altar to receive the shamans’ praise. an hosun: You did well. kim pongsun: That was A-one!18 Cry your heart out. Let go of all your resentment. Cry your heart out, and next time don’t cry, just give a terrific performance.19


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kwan myôngnyô: Today is a day for crying, a day to let all your feelings out. kim pongsun: Next time come right on down and give us the words of the spirits. Today cry to your heart’s content, since this is your day. Have you gotten it all out of your system? You’ve really exerted yourself. [The small room fills with a palpable sense of relief and celebration. Chini, herself again, pale with exhaustion and slightly embarrassed, affirms her confidence in Princess Hogu’s presence by describing her vision of the spirit.] chini: [Waves her hand in front of her face to suggest the red skirt that a shaman wears over her head for Princess Hogu] Her face was hidden like this. I couldn’t see her face. kim pongsun: That’s because of her pockmarks. Your sister came in as Princess Hogu because she was pockmarked. Without the pockmarks, she couldn’t appear as Princess Hogu. chini: [Chuckling] Ahyu! I didn’t even cry when father died. This is the first time I’ve cried. kim pongsun: Normally, I just call the spirits and they come, do my part and dance. This time I’ve had to fret about hundreds and thousands of things, but now you’ve done well. The story of a successful ritual process would have ended here with Chini’s triumphant unblocking after the mansin had drawn out appropriate personal and familial symbols from a larger cultural lexicon and set them at play, as at the crazy kut (cf. Kessler 1977; Laderman 1991; Obeyesekere 1977; Turner 1967, 1968). The transformative power of spiritual manifestations—both gods and ancestors—in this and other kut thickens a common family history of pain, casts individual affliction amid a web of family experience, and offers a promise of common resolution for both the initiate and the members of her family, living and dead. Performance theory would lead us to an appreciation of how drumbeats, costumes, dance, and the recognizable theatrical business of particular spirits—the fan over Princess Hogu’s pockmarked face, the pouring of wine for a drunkard father, the sobbing cry of “Mother!”—combine to make a successful kut, a kut that becomes compelling for its universe of participants (cf. Kapferer 1983). Chini’s kut “works” in the sense that ordinary kut work, as the kut for Mrs. Min and Mrs. Yi worked, a collective mustering of family, gods, and ancestors, conjoined in the performance of their collective story and experienced with tears and laughter. If we were to interpret Chini’s initiation as primarily a


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healing ritual, we would find reassurance in Chini’s catharsis through the persona of her dead sister (cf. Scheff 1979), and the remainder of her kut would be but denouement. But the stakes are different and higher in an initiation kut, and a moment of catharsis is insufficient to the expectations for a fully realized shaman. Chini has made progress. An Hosun and Kwan Myôngnyô confirm this later that night at Kwan Myôngnyô’s home, when Kim Pongsun stays behind to instruct Chini on the next day’s performance. “After all, she did manage to give us some words from the spirits,” says An Hosun, contrasting Chini’s performance today with her recalcitrance on the mountain last spring. Yet in their guarded comments the shamans recognize that Chini is not yet empowered to pour out compelling oracles on command and minister to clients. Except for her brief and deeply personal encounter with her dead sister, come back as Princess Hogu, her words have been formulaic and limited. Chini is not yet a shaman, and the successful outcome of her kut remains uncertain. The Knife-Riding General The next day, Chini faces a final ordeal. She must summon the fearless Knife-Riding General (Chaktu Changgun) and, through the force of his power, balance on blades used to chop fodder. The shamans will set the blades high atop the earthen water jar, and from that perch, Chini must again try to deliver the true words of the spirits. An Hosun, the old shaman, helps her to dress, layering one of her own costumes, a blue court robe, under the General’s red brocade, giving Chini the added power of one of her own gods. As she fastens the ribbon of the blue robe, she tells Chini, “Wear this and think of Auntie.” Chini is optimistic: “I feel it today . . . the Heavenly King, the Jade Emperor is taking me away. It’s good. Your star pupil is going to be fine.” Chini starts to dance, then stops, reaches for the Heavenly King’s robe, and puts it on, doing spontaneously what yesterday had to be urged upon her. She dances, stops, announces the presence of the Heavenly King and then the Generals. She declares that she is going to ride the blades. Once again, the frustrated shamans urge her to deliver the true words of the spirits, but now Chini just continues to dance. Again, they urge her to follow any impulse and grab another costume, or to pick up the blades and dance with them. When this fails, they clothe her in Princess Hogu’s robe. When this fails, they dress her in the robe for Kim Pongsun’s own Knife-Riding


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Guardian God (Chaktu Taesin). Kim Pongsun scolds her for staring up into space while she dances, rather than casting her eyes down, clearing her mind, and allowing the gods to descend. The spirit mother bumps and waddles in a comic imitation of Chini’s dancing style. Chini struggles to keep dancing, then gives up and mops her brow. kim pongsun: She’s dumbfounded, panic-stricken. How can she go through with it? an hosun: [To Chini in a gentle, instructive tone] You have to have faith in the spirits for it to work. kwan myôngnyô: You even said, “Now I’m going to ride the knife blades.” Did the very thought of it make you freeze in your tracks? [To Kim Pongsun] She’s made herself too nervous. She might get up there and hurt herself. chini: That’s not it. I’m not nervous about the blades. kim pongsun: What do you mean? kwan myôngnyô: Then what’s this all about? chini: I just can’t. I don’t know why. kwan myôngnyô: She says she doesn’t know. That’s her answer. She says she just doesn’t know. kim pongsun: Bitch! Is that all you have to say for yourself? an hosun: As they used to say in the old days, beat her with the drumstick. [Kim Pongsun suggests another spirit-engendered cause for Chini’s difficulty.] kim pongsun: You were so stupid you must have concrete for brains. When the Heavenly King kept coming up in your visions, maybe you didn’t know enough to say, “I’m the Heavenly King, I need a crown,” but couldn’t you at least have made the right gestures for a crown? Couldn’t you have done that much with the King coming up in your visions like that? kwan myôngnyô: When you see the vision, you should say, “You’re insolent. Why didn’t you give me a crown?” chini: How would I know? kim pongsun: He was telling you, in the vision. kwan myôngnyô: You can’t ignore that when you’re divining. Speak up about each and every vision . . . [To Kim Pongsun] What does it mean? Is it because we didn’t buy the King a crown?


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kim pongsun: He’s telling us, “Buy one.” That’s what it means. kwan myôngnyô: Of course. She should buy one, and then he will bring boundless good fortune. chini’s sister: [To Chini in anger and frustration] If you knew it, you should have spoken up. If you have a vision of a crown or the knife blades, then you should come out with it. Then your teachers will understand. Even if it hurts to say it, what’s the point of speaking up when it’s all over and done? kwan myôngnyô: You get the vision and then you speak. Understand? How can we know what language the gods use? kim pongsun: [To Chini] If the spirits come up right before your eyes and you don’t announce them, then what’s the point? chini: Uhm, this time, the Heavenly King appeared. I saw him, I think it was him, the Heavenly King. kim pongsun: Ahyu! If he appeared, then why didn’t you gesture with your hands, “I need a crown like such and such?” [She demonstrates the appropriate gesture.] You’ve got to come out with it. chini: [Surprisingly feisty] The vision was really clear. The Heavenly King appeared. I mean I thought I recognized him, but how could I know what to do? kwan myôngnyô: You say, “I’ve arrived.” You say, “I’ve come down from heaven wearing my crown.” Couldn’t you even say that? [She gives Chini a playful punch.] kim pongsun: When the Heavenly King dances, you show his crown like so. [She mimes the appropriate posture and gesture for the Heavenly King, thrusting her hands up into the air to indicate his crown.] When you’ve gotten the message, when you see what he wants, you say, “I’m the Heavenly King. Why haven’t you done this for me?” You’ve got to have confidence— you’re the one who says it [the gods don’t say it for you]. It’s what you see, a vision. And when you’re doing kut, the General or the Special Messenger comes up, like so. [For each of these gods, she strikes the pose she would take when manifesting them in kut.] Or someone with pockmarks takes shape in your eye, a woman, that’s Princess Hogu, isn’t it? . . . And again, when it’s the Warrior Spirits, don’t you recognize the Warrior Spirits? And all the Generals from long ago look like so. [She places her hands on her hips and thrusts her chest forward, imperiously, her characteristic pose when manifesting a divine General during


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kut.] When you see those gentlemen, say, “I’m this General, I’m that General.” Then right when you take up the blades—didn’t I teach you that this morning?—take the blades in hand like this and test them like this [Pantomimes pressing the blade’s sharp edge into her cheek], and here too [Striking her forearms]. And then when you’ve done that, and you’re ready to go up, wash your feet and climb on up. That’s how it’s done. Now Kim Pongsun herself puts on the costume and invokes the KnifeRiding General. Wearing the imperious scowl of a disgruntled spirit, she performs the gestures that she has just demonstrated to Chini, pressing the blades against her cheeks and forearms with zealous shouts and rapid dancing. She removes her costume, and Chini tries again, dressed in Kim Pongsun’s costume, holding the blades with tense concentration during the invocation while Kim Pongsun stands beside her, rubbing her hands in supplication. This time, Chini dances with the blades and tests them against her arm as Kim Pongsun has shown her. She pumps her arms in a frenzied dance as the drum throbs. The shamans place the blades on a board balanced on top of the water jar in anticipation now of Chini’s ascent. Kim Pongsun burns thin white paper over the blades to purify them. The women wash Chini’s feet. We hold our breath. She approaches the jar, climbs up, and gingerly rests her feet on the blades, turning and bowing to the four directions. She pivots toward the wall and steadies herself against it, sobbing. an hosun: Yes? Yes? chini: [Gasping out her words between sobs] It’s the Knife-Riding General! shamans: Yes! an hosun: Help her succeed! chini/knife-riding general: [With great emotion, weeping] Just so, from now on, we’ll keep her busy with work and help her succeed as a shaman. We will give her boundless good fortune. kim pongsun: Yes, that’s right! kwan myôngnyô: Are her gates of speech open? chini: [Still racked with emotion] They’re all coming through. All the spirits are here. kim pongsun: [Almost chuckling] Well of course they’re all here now. If you had gone all the way up there and they hadn’t come, then that really would have been a disaster!


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Aftermath When Chini stood upon the blades, we thought that we had just filmed our happy ending, that Chini, coached by her spirit mother, encouraged by her sister shamans, and supported by the women of her family, had finally called in the spirits. The results were, alas, more ambiguous. Even when she stood on the knives, Chini did not deliver oracles. When she descended from the jar, she did not speak again, and the senior shamans finished the kut. Although the shamans praised Chini for ascending the blades, a feat Kwan Myôngnyô had not managed after several kut, they were disappointed. The initial oracle and Kim Pongsun’s assessment during the kut still held: Chini had been too hasty. She still could not perform as a shaman; her gates of speech were not yet fully open. She must spend the next year cultivating the source of her inspiration through devotions and prayers on sacred mountains as the Buddhist Sage required. Immediately after the kut, Chini seemed relieved. Her step was lighter and she smiled. A few days after her initiation, we saw her working with the other mansin, hitting the cymbals and gong at a kut, performing the simple task allotted to apprentice shamans (and occasionally to visiting anthropologists). Frequently corrected for rhythm and style, she watched the kut intently and moved her lips to follow the invocations. After that encounter, Chini disappeared for a while. The shamans would offer little more than “Chini’s off praying on some mountain.” A month after her kut, on the eve of my departure from Korea, we saw her again, assisting at a kut in her spirit mother’s shrine. The small store of confidence that she had mustered for her kut seemed to have withered. When she hit the gong or the cymbals, the shamans immediately corrected her and sometimes a more experienced shaman summarily relieved her of this charge. As happens with an overdisciplined piano student, her mistakes increased. When I dressed to dance mugam, the interval at a kut when clients dance in shaman’s costumes, I noticed Chini watching me intently.20 I recalled her telling me that the mansin chided her with unfavorable comparisons between her dancing and my dancing. “Damn,” I thought as the drumming started. “She’s taking the joke too seriously.” So it seemed. They clothed Chini to dance mugam, but after a few desultory jumps, she gave it up and retreated to a distant part of the house. Kim Pongsun described Chini’s demoralized state and her own disappointment. Chini had gone to pray on a sacred mountain after her kut, but this time she had not been granted a single vision.


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Chini was impulsive when she said she wanted to have a kut. She wasn’t able to deliver the true words of the spirits, was she? Of course I’m heartsick too. It isn’t as though she had the money to do this. She borrowed the money for her kut, so she has to start earning to pay off the debt. But without inspired speech, she isn’t ready to earn money as a shaman. She got discouraged. She tried to find a job in Seoul. But when the gods want her for a shaman, do you think they’re going to let her find another job? Now she’s really upset and her eyes are bothering her.” [Chini enters the room.] Isn’t that right? You’ve started wearing glasses? The apprentice responds that the kitchen smoke got in her eyes. She retreats from the camera, smiling faintly and shaking her head as Kim Pongsun urges her, “Fix your hair and take your glasses off. You want to look pretty for the video.” That, for now, is my final image of Chini. Two years later, when I returned to Korea with the completed video, I learned that Chini had broken with her spirit mother and was struggling as the disciple of another shaman. Kwan Myôngnyô, who was still in touch with Chini’s sister, reported that Chini had remarried, this time to a shaman’s son. We sent a copy of our video to her via Kwan Myôngnyô. Kim Pongsun and I watched the video together, and she said that it reminded her of all the frustration she felt on that day.21 Conclusion: Will Chini ever become a shaman? Kim Pongsun, Chini’s spirit mother, attributed Chini’s difficulties to temperament: If the gods are strong, if the initiate is strong, then the gods come on strong, but if the initiate is a weakling, a spirit wanders in, you sit around for a while waiting, and then another spirit wanders in. It’s frustrating. If someone is going to become a shaman, then they should just burst out with it while they’re sitting or sleeping, suddenly shouting, “I’m this spirit, I’m that spirit, I’m the Heavenly King!” But with someone like Chini, who just sits there waiting, things drag on. That’s so frustrating. [She chuckles at the memory.] Even as she states that there are “people like Chini” to whom the gods come slowly, Kim Pongsun affirms a cultural ideal of destined shamans who


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burst forth with spontaneous oracles from the spirits: “The visions take shape in their eye, and then even without their realizing it, they’re shouting out, ‘I’m so-and-so, I’m such-and-such,’ even though they have no idea who the Spirit Warrior is, or the Generals, or Princess Hogu, or the Special Messenger. You take an ordinary housewife who knows nothing about the shaman profession. Would she know anything about the Special Messenger?” The Korean shaman world’s own myths fit tidily with a scholarly tradition that celebrates shamanic initiation as an experience of profound psychological and spiritual transformation.22 But if the mansin themselves idealize the sudden and spontaneous metamorphosis of a haunted young woman into an inspired shaman, reality often disappoints. While scholars have recorded Korean shaman initiations that match classic expectations,23 more discursive accounts by Antonetta Bruno (2002, chap. 6), Chung-moo Choi (1987, 136), Soon-Hwa Sun (1991, 14–29), and myself (Kendall 1985, 65–66) describe initiations that were far less compelling than even Chini’s kut. Diana Lee observed two in the summer before we filmed Chini’s initiation and felt that she had a better idea of what was supposed to happen than did one of the initiates (pers. comm., 17 July 1989). Auntie Cho’s frustration and Kwan Myôngnyô’s unabashed admission of previous failures suggest that many aspiring shamans hold multiple initiation kut (see also C. Choi 1987, 179). Chini’s experience and the expectations and instructions the shamans placed upon her allow us to bridge a seeming dichotomy of true inspiration and pure performance. Throughout her kut the shamans chided Chini for naïvely assuming that the spirits would “move her tongue for her.” The mansin repeatedly prompted her in performative business that would transform the passive stuff of visions, inference, and intuition into an active divine presence: “Say, ‘I’m the Seven Stars! Here’s how it is with Chini.’ Tell us she’s frustrated, tell us she’s pitiful.” “When you see the vision [of the Heavenly King], you should say, ‘You’re insolent! Why didn’t you give me a crown?’ ” “And all the generals from long ago look like so. When you see those gentlemen, say, ‘I’m this General, I’m that General.’ ” It was the ability to perform that Chini lacked. She failed, the shamans acknowledged, because she was too self-conscious and inhibited. By their logic, she was unable to perform because she could not give herself over to the flow of inspiration conjured by drumbeats, dancing, costumes, and their own suggestive comments: “The gods are coming!” “Who is that standing beside you?” To feel the gods and transmit their will and power to others, she must be willing to perform for the gods, to simulate the gods in order to manifest them. From Chini’s perspective, the gods had not matched her expectations. Apart from


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the encounter with her dead sister, and the moment when she finally stood on the blades, she could not feel their presence, and lacking inspiration, she could not perform them into being. Her lack of nerve aborted mimesis (cf. Taussig 1993). Throughout her kut, Chini seldom transcended her mundane identity as a timid young woman with a diminished store of self-esteem. In the discouraged apprentice, we find the mirror image of the successful avant-garde actor who becomes “like a shaman,” inspired to inhabit an alien presence as one’s own. If frustrated by Chini’s performance and her subsequent loss of nerve, Kim Pongsun was also sympathetic, noting in a private moment that novice shamans are often embarrassed and inhibited. “Even you, Mother?” her incredulous daughter-in-law had asked, and the now-formidable shaman and mother-in-law insisted that this had been the case. I have witnessed, over the years, the transformation of Okkyông’s Mother, the soft-voiced, bumbling apprentice of my first fieldwork, who “forgets to pick up a fan, misses whole portions of an invocation, or uses incomprehensible words from the dialect of her native Kyôngsang Province” (Kendall 1985, 67). These days, she often appears at kut with one or another of her own apprentices in deferential tow. Recalling the teasing she endured long ago, she tells me, “They used to say that even you danced better than I did, but which of us is the better dancer now?” So it may be with Chini. For now, Kim Pongsun, the spirit mother, has the last word: Look at it this way. It isn’t as if anyone could become a successful shaman right when they got the calling. They must make a great effort and change completely. If it happened automatically, then wouldn’t everyone be making their living as a shaman? Everyone has their moment, and all things happen in their season. If this time the gods vacillated, then by and by the time can come when they will make her into a successful shaman.


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4 The Ambiguities of Becoming Phony Shamans and What Are Mudang After All?

The stakes were high and Chini had failed, failed to gain sufficient inspiration during her kut and failed at the expectations of apprenticeship, losing her nerve and fleeing her teacher. This chapter continues the discussion of inspiration and skilled performance that began with Chini’s kut, asking what it means to become a shaman in the present Korean moment. I am picking up a thread from Yongsu’s Mother’s observation that although there are more shamans now than ever before, they lack the old shamans’ power of inspiration, or as she put it on another occasion, many of them “don’t know front from back.” I am seeking some purchase on the slippery slope between shamanic nostalgia, as thick as viscous mud, and a reconfigured Korea where most things really have changed a great deal. Spirit mothers, spirit daughters, and tales of long ago The experiences of Auntie Cho, Kwan Myôngnyô, and An Hosun and the autobiographical tales of many other shamans suggest that an initiation kut, even a successful one, does not produce a fully realized shaman, and many initiation kut are not successful at all. Apprentices become kija, recognized shamans, through a slow and by no means certain process, and many initiates give it up, as Chini had tried to do, at least for a time.1 Even Kwan Myôngnyô, who had seemed so self-assured at Chini’s kut, left shamanship a few years later and tried to trade on her contacts by marketing fruit, the oversized pears and apples that shamans pile up in such abundance when they prepare for a kut, impressing on their clients the high cost of even a 102


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single apple or pear. Kwan’s enterprise was doomed from the start because the gods had chosen her as a shaman, so Kim Pongsun would tell me after the fact, adding that “others” had tried to convince Kwan that her ancestors were not really powerful deities, not sufficient to support a mansin’s career, and had told her that she could leave it all behind with no ill consequence. Instead, the business failed, Kwan’s marriage collapsed into threats for her physical safety, and she returned repentant to Kim Pongsun’s tutelage. The last time I saw Kwan Myôngnyô, she was her jolly old self, going off to a kut with Kim Pongsun as though there had been no break in their working relationship, giggling about the latest gossip in their circle. In shamanic nostalgia talk, the spirit mothers of the past were strict, even abusive task masters. At Chini’s kut the old shaman, An Hosun, recalled her own bitter experiences as a spirit daughter in “the old days”: When the spirits first came to me, I thought I would go out of my mind. . . . Why was I fated to have this happen to me? I was miserable, desolate. I would sob and sob. It was all because I was just a little slip of an apprentice. In the old days, the shamans were very strict. When I was an apprentice, if you made a mistake over a single word, they’d give you a scolding right then and there, no matter who was there to hear it. You had to be careful about so many things. If you made a mistake, well, then they’d beat you, slap bang, with the drumstick or the drum mallet. When you’re a new shaman, what do you know? You don’t know the sequences. You don’t know the rules and procedures. All you’ve got going for you is inspiration. . . . [She pictures her younger self struggling through snowdrifts on her way to a kut.] Those were the most miserable times. You’d sink into snowdrifts up to your knees and your feet would freeze. . . . You had to walk. No matter if it were ten ri, fifteen ri, twenty ri, you had to do your work that day. . . . It was a little bit better when it rained, but when it snowed, when you were pelted with snow—well, even slogging through knee-high drifts was all right, but when you sank in up to your waist, that was misery. You had to carry everything on your head, even the drum and all the gods’ paraphernalia. No one wanted to go. All the carriers would refuse. Who wanted to wade through the high snowdrifts? You had to slog through with everything on your own head. That was when I was the most miserable of all. Would other women have given up a son and given up a husband? All they had to do was keep house


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and things worked out for them. Why did I have to endure this? At those times I cried a lot. [Chuckles.] Isn’t what I’m telling you sad and pathetic? An Hosun left in despair, and although she was able to assist at other shamans’ kut and earn a pittance, as Auntie Cho had done, she did not become a fully realized mansin until she was forty-eight years old. She thinks of the years between her initiation at age thirty-six and her final acceptance of the gods twelve years later as empty time marked by illness, mental instability, and penury. An Hosun’s memories of scoldings, beatings, and struggling through waist-high snowdrifts with her drum balanced on her head engender the contradictory emotions that caused her to suggest a beating for Chini as “in the old days” even as she wiped away a tear on Chini’s behalf. Of course nowadays . . . they love and protect their apprentices. They instruct them when no one is around and tell them, “You do this like so.” In the past the old ladies would scold you. I was so miserable, and on top of everything else, I had to put up with this. I would go off by myself and cry my heart out. When they scolded me, I’d go hide and sob away. Sometimes I’d go to the outhouse or I’d go behind the house, where I could cry all by myself. I’d come back and pretend that I hadn’t been crying, and if I did well after that, then everything would be fine. Nowadays they say, “Well done, well done,” even when the apprentice doesn’t know what she’s doing, isn’t that so? It wasn’t like that in the past, . . . I wanted to escape the beatings. I decided not to go through with it. Older shamans like An Hosun almost invariably make unfavorable comparisons between rigorous long-term apprenticeships in the past—by implication their own past—and what they regard as soft and superficial apprenticeships today. They criticize new shamans, impatient to practice and earn money, who rely on their own inspiration for divinations but lack the patience to learn the shaman’s craft by studying with appropriate teachers. Some would-be shamans even practice without holding an initiation kut, particularly when their attractiveness or performance skills prompt seasoned shamans to include them in their kut (C. Choi 1987, 132; Y. K. Harvey 1979, 191–195).2 Shamans echo complaints voiced by scholars in works that also quote shamans (Hung-youn Cho 1990, 215–216; Huang 1988,


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19–21; Sun 1991, 77–78; Pak I. 1999) or are written by shamans themselves (Ch’ôn 2001, 270–274). The older shamans I spoke with described the long servitude of a proper spirit daughter, cooking and cleaning in the spirit mother’s home for three, five, or even ten years while studying at the feet of a master shaman, of exacting spirit mothers who enjoined their spirit daughters to place their shoes just so on removing them to enter the house, and spirit daughters who prepared only the tastiest dishes to please their spirit mother. Cultural Treasure shaman Kim Geum-hwa, who has initiated many shamans, idealizes the “very special relationship” of a spirit mother and her spirit daughter, evoking the loyalty and subordination of spirit daughters in the past to contrast the fluidity and instrumentality of these relationships today: “When her spirit mother died, then the spirit daughter would mourn her for three years as if mourning her own blood mother, and no spirit daughter could choose another spirit mother without first securing the permission of her original spirit mother” (quoted in Ch’a 1997, 37). The Keeper of the TileRoofed Shrine, who sees herself as the last in a line of old Seoul shamans, equates the impatience of spirit daughters with the moral bankruptcy of the present moment: People are greedy, all in a rush to make money. Money is all they think about while filial piety [hyo] and loyalty [ch’ung] have disappeared. It’s that way with parents and children, and so too with our shaman world. Families used to eat together and sleep together, but now everyone goes their own way and it’s just the same with us. The Gong Granny, a shaman born in the North who was a favored informant of a distinguished Korean folklorist, considers proper deportment a part of what the well-trained spirit daughter learns form her spirit mother, the dignified (chômjant’a) behavior of mansin in the past as enjoined by rigorous spirit mothers. She tries to be this sort of spirit mother when instructing her own many apprentices, whom she affectionately refers to as “the kids” (ae). She concedes that some spirit daughters are respectful, but others “drink and play,” carousing with the musicians at a kut, “the behavior of ignorant people.” She shares An Hosun’s feelings regarding the soft training of apprentices today: “In the past it was difficult and you spent ten years serving a spirit mother, but nowadays they don’t study, don’t listen, and what they do is phony [ôngt’ôri]. Initiates think it’s only a matter of the god


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descending, that the shaman herself doesn’t have to have any special ability. They’re missing the essence of it [kot’ongi ôpta].” Ch’ôn Pokhua, a relatively young shaman who writes with passion about the current state of “shaman religion,” offers an idealized view of a past she never experienced, “imagined nostalgia” in Appadurai’s sense (1996, 77). She describes how even if the spirit mother abused her apprentice as a scullery maid and heaped scorn upon her head, the spirit daughter was bound for all eternity in a relationship ordained by the gods. She should love her spirit mother as she loved her own parent: “Consider the shameless state of our contemporary mudang who call each other ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ but have only spent a year together. What sort of wretched people would spend only a year together as parent and child and then each go their own way?” (Ch’ôn 2001, 272). How much credence should we give to the old shamans’ stories of tenyear apprenticeships and lifelong bonds, of the rigorous training and high competence of shamans in the past? Both Kim Geum-hwa and the Keeper of the Tile-Roofed Shrine, a major star and a minor one, received their initial training from their own grandmothers, relationships of literal kinship that were already family bonds. Yongsu’s Mother apprenticed with Chatterbox, her elder sister, and the prickly terms of their relationship continued. The Gong Granny claims that, aided by her own grandmother’s spirit, she never needed a formal initiation and is vague about her training, although she would have observed her grandmother’s kut growing up. The Gong Granny weeps, as An Hosun does, when she recounts her early years as a shaman, but she weeps over her broken marriage and solitary life. Firsthand information about a rigorous apprenticeship unmitigated by family bonds comes from An Hosun, who found it intolerable and ran away, and she was not alone (C. Choi 1987, 130; Sun 1991, 74–82). The relationships between spirit mothers and spirit daughters that I described thirty years ago were far from ideal. The loyalty of a spirit mother and her spirit daughter was often subverted by jealousy among junior shamans, feelings of exploitation, or the ambitions of established shamans who would snatch a promising apprentice (Kendall 1985, 59, 69–71; 1988, 116–117). I also recall a kut from that era where Chatterbox resumed a sharp-tongued argument with her long-deceased spirit mother, who appeared as her Great Spirit Grandmother (Taesin Halmôni), one of her guardian gods, and lambasted Chatterbox for going out on her own many years in the past. Chatterbox, in turn, accused her dead spirit mother of stinginess, but Chatterbox’s own apprentices—Yongsu’s Mother and Okkyông’s Mother—were making the same complaint about Chatterbox (Kendall 1985, 133). One suspects that,


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as with blood parents and senior classmen, Korean shamans are inclined to view the younger generation as having it soft, and perhaps it was ever so. Learning, commodified learning Although highly critical of spirit daughters who approach their training in a superficial way, Ch’ôn Pokhua reserves her sharpest barbs for spirit mothers who fail to take their own responsibility seriously. She says that they have reduced a relationship between parent and child to a transaction; teachers receive payment for enabling the gods to descend into their pupils (Ch’ôn 2001, 273). These complaints were already abroad among Seoul shamans in the early 1980s (C. Choi 1987, 179). As respected “great shamans,” both the Gong Granny and the Keeper of the Tile-Roofed Shrine claim that they take as their own spirit daughters only women who are sincere in their ambition and capable of learning the craft. They distinguish themselves from the less than maternally inclined shamans who take on spirit daughters indiscriminately, pocketing the money for their kut with no intention of training them. Kwan Myôngnyô had the misfortune of such a spirit mother, a woman who “forgot who I was” once Kwan held her expensive initiation ritual. Untrained, without the ability to function as a mansin, Kwan was at the mercy of experienced senior shamans who used her labor without enhancing her knowledge: When I’d bounced my way through a kut, [the established shamans] would take all the money for themselves; they wouldn’t share it with their apprentices. After a while, I got wise to that. But even though I struggled, the gates of inspired speech did not open for me. I had a lot of customers for divinations, a steady stream of work, but I couldn’t perform kut. Even though I had many opportunities for work where I could jump and call up the gods, I had to give it away to other shamans. Kim Pongsun is the only one [who helped me]. Because I met her, things are working out for me now. An Hosun offered emphatic agreement: That’s what I’ve been saying! There are rules and procedures [pôpto]. Now you’re learning them one by one, huh? You’ll get to know them all by and by because you’ve met the right teacher. You know which god this is and which god that is, rules and procedures. When you perform properly, then aren’t you a shaman


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who serves the spirits [sinΔi kija]? You’ve got to know it all, for all twelve segments of a kut, the way it’s been handed down from the old people, sequence by sequence. You have to learn it all to be a shaman, and it’s very difficult to learn. Although in 1989 Kwan Myôngnyô had finally found a willing teacher, one she regarded with such grateful enthusiasm that she brought Chini to her door as a prospective spirit daughter, she still found the mastery of the rules and procedures a challenging task. After An’s disquisition on the proper education of a mansin, Kwan turned to me for sympathy and said: It’s really hard. You learn all that, and there are still so many different sorts of things to learn, a lot of different gods, a lot of rules and procedures. . . . They say that if you don’t concentrate, just so, then it goes right past you. . . . Since I met Kim Pongsun, I always write everything down. Me too [like the anthropologist]. When I go home at night, I write down everything that I’ve learned during the day and fix it in my mind. I write it all down just as you do. But of course, the language of the spirits and the way we humans talk isn’t the same thing, is it? The possibility of writing it all down at night, like the anthropologist transcribing her scratch notes, was beyond the abilities of uneducated shamans in the past, even shamans like Yongsu’s Mother, who is literate but writes slowly and painfully as a consequence of her abbreviated education. Several of the women I spoke with justly marveled at the abilities of illiterate shamans in times past who memorized quantities of chants and ritual lore sufficient to sustain a kut that lasted for several days. “The old grandmothers must have had very good minds,” one shaman opined. Shamans who could read vernacular script used printed compilations of the chants and invocations they had to master. In 1977, I found handwritten guides to kut and amulet preparation in an antiquarian bookshop whose proprietor assured me they were “at least a hundred years old,” although I had my doubts since at least one transcriber had used a ballpoint pen. Today shops (manmulsa) vending Buddhist and shamanic paraphernalia offer a variety of cheaply bound compilations of chants along with guides to divination, dream interpretation, and the preparation of amulets. When I first knew her, Yongsu’s Mother was studying chants and songs from a worn text that Chatterbox had given over to her. Like many Korean ritual manuals, its printed pages simulated an old book printed from woodblocks.


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The text was more a study aid than a source of secret knowledge, and Yongsu’s Mother had no objection to my borrowing it for photocopying. In the summer of 1983, Yongsu’s Mother used both the book and an audiotape made by a senior colleague, Clear Spring Mansin, to learn the complicated chants in the kut for the dead; the tape provided the rhythm and intonations missing in the printed text.3 In the 1990s, when we talked again about the manual, I learned that she had passed it on to Babe along with tapes of critical songs, but she subsequently replaced it with a fresh copy, which she kept with her divination manuals and her copy of Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits in a stack on her altar.4 I do not know how old her copy was; the original cover had been replaced with cardboard. The nearly identical later edition that I subsequently found in a shaman supply shop was also devoid of any publication data. The anonymity of the chant book enabled the shamans who used it to emphasize, not the authority of its authorship, but its line of transmission from spirit mother to spirit daughter. The book supplemented the senior shaman’s instruction and the apprentice’s ability to pick things up as she worked with and observed more experienced shamans at kut. The use of voice, body posture, and facial expression to convey divine presence —as Kim Pongsun had tried to show Chini—cannot be mastered from books or even audiocassettes (also available in the supply shops). Kim Geum-hwa’s published anthology of rituals and chants (1995) and the authored and prefaced volumes by lesser stars that have been sold in shaman supply shops since at least the 1980s make claims as authoritative sources of ritual knowledge outside the spirit mother–spirit daughter relationship. On the strength of Kim’s reputation as a Cultural Treasure, her book appears in the folklore section of mainstream bookshops as well as the shaman supply shops, a crossover book of interest to scholars, folklore enthusiasts, and shamans aspiring to perform the traditions of Hwanghae Province. Similarly marketed, Ch’ôn Pokhua’s Mudang Chronicles (2001) is more a disquisition on the profession than a ritual manual and seems to be made up of articles written for an advocacy association newspaper. Much of her commentary is specifically addressed to an audience of aspiring shamans on whom Ch’ôn would impress the moral code of a shaman religion and for whose benefit she provides basic instruction in simple rituals and amulet preparation. For her part, Yongsu’s Mother resists the subversive potential of the age of mechanical reproduction. When a spirit daughter recounted a version of the tale of Princess Pari gleaned from a book purchased in a shaman supply shop, Yongsu’s Mother told her that “the book is wrong.”5 When Babe attempted to learn the Official’s song of self-praise,


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the Taegam t’aryông, from a commercial tape, Yongsu’s Mother told her that “the rhythm is off” and that she would make a tape for Babe on her own equipment. In recent years, shaman schools offering instruction in drum rhythms and ritual procedures have further eroded the authority of seasoned shamans or, depending on one’s perspective, give recent initiates a commercial option when spirit mothers neglect their responsibilities or even lack the ability to teach them.6 For more than a decade, the Spirit Worshippers’ Anti-Communist Association ran the best-known shaman school under the leadership of a respected male shaman, Pak Ino (Guillemoz 1998). A threeyear curriculum for initiated but untrained shamans included drumming, songs and dances, and ritual procedures (uri haengsaΔi pôpsu). The director claimed that three years of daily study at the school would adequately equip a shaman to perform kut in the Seoul style. In addition, some aspiring shamans found congenial classmates and formed teams for future kut even without a spirit mother’s network. Rival associations also started schools, many of these short-lived, and some of the shamans I spoke with mentioned either failed attempts at starting schools or future aspirations. Chungmoo Choi (1991) described one such effort in the 1980s. In 2002, Kim Sung Ja and I used the telephone number on a tattered poster in a kuttang to contact a young musician, a shaman’s son who had tried to run a training institute on the encouragement of one of the advocacy associations. We visited the school, where a dozen or more hourglass drums rested in a row awaiting prospective students, but the instructor seemed to have lost interest in the project, and during our interview a plethora of puppies frisked over and repeatedly soiled the institute’s carpet. Around this same time, Hyun-key Kim Hogarth (2003) visited three viable shaman schools in Seoul. The ambiguities of “phony”? Traditionalist shamans like the Gong Granny, who was intrigued by the idea of a school of her own, still affirm that what one learns from a spirit mother could never be replicated in a school. Even so, and while individual shaman schools come and go, the persistence of this relatively new form of shaman training offers oblique confirmation of the two widely expressed but otherwise unverifiable assertions that opened this discussion: there are more shamans now than ever before but many of them are “phony,” insufficiently inspired and badly trained. Although Yongsu’s Mother spoke of gods expelled from sacred mountains who descend into people, she also shared in the widespread perception


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that as with unnecessary surgeries, many women and men are being initiated without proper cause. Huang (1988, 19) quotes a shaman who joked in the 1980s that one out of every two kut is an initiation. Sun cites a popular observation in the shaman world that “in poor districts like Kuro-dong if a woman shivers after urinating, she is initiated” (1991, 34). The Keeper of the Tile-Roofed Shrine complained that if people so much as dance particularly vigorously when they wear the mugam during kut, they are encouraged to have an initiation kut even though they’ve done no more than “disco dancing.” Kwan Myôngnyô put a favorable spin on the rising number of initiation kut in the late 1980s, attributing the growing number of both female and male shamans to massΔ com (mass communications), to the media’s newly positive image of shamans and kut.7 She suggested that prospective initiates now willingly embrace a calling that shamans in another generation resisted to the point of death. Ch’ôn, the shaman-critic, observes that where avaricious prospective spirit mothers urge insufficiently inspired women (and men) into the profession, they set up a vicious circle of incompetents initiating and training incompetents (2001, 33, 235–240). Ch’ôn even posits that greedy shamans promote initiation kut to make up for the business in healing kut that modern medicine replaced (ibid., 273). By a similar logic, impatience for financial gain drives improperly trained shamans to perform “phony” kut (ibid., 258–261, 263–269; Hung-youn Cho 1990, 225; 1997b, 110; Pak I. 1999, 103). According to the Keeper of the Tile-Roofed Shrine, such initiates “can’t divine”: “They can’t speak for the gods. They may claim that they are mudang, but they really aren’t. Only people who have the gods, who act on behalf of the gods are real mudang.” The Gong Granny opines, “[Initiates] jump right into it as soon as they’re descended by the gods in order to receive clients, and some of them aren’t even properly descended. That’s wrong.” The Keeper of the Fortification Shrine, claiming the authority of lifelong observation, recalls that in the past the shamans had to perform everything just so, the full twelve sequences of a kut: “[These days] they just do whatever they feel like [chagine maΔmdaero], without really knowing the proper sequence. They’re only in it for the money. That isn’t right.” Incompetence poses a danger for shaman and client alike. Recall Yongsu’s Mother’s rage on Mrs. Yi’s behalf. Yongsu’s Mother defended the high cost of her own kut by stating, “You have to do a kut just right. The Seoul mudang do it any which way and people end up bankrupt.” When I asked the Keeper of the Fortification Shrine whether the gods are displeased by badly performed kut, she said, “How would I know? I’m not a shaman,” then drew breath and shared her impression that inept shamans experience


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tumult in their personal lives and have trouble making a living. The Keeper of the Celestial Shrine, himself a shaman, was less reserved. He attributed a falloff of business in his kuttang to the recent deaths of several shamans and a lack of clients for others as divine punishments falling on shamans who performed kut even though they were not fully god-descended and not adequately trained. Citing the possibility of such misfortune, Ch’ôn Pokhua cautions her readership against the danger of rushing into an initiation on the basis of a divination alone (Ch’ôn 2001, 237). Like the author of a medical advice column, she advises women who receive such a diagnosis to get a second opinion from a well-regarded and experienced authority. I wonder what she would have thought of Chini, who had not been hasty, who had resisted her calling until she was truly at the end of her resources, but who had never really burst out with shouts and hand claps, spontaneously proclaiming the presence of the spirits. Even her spirit mother, who seemed sincerely invested in Chini’s career and frustrated by the outcome of her kut, saw this as a limitation, an explanation for failure after the fact. One of my transcribers, after seeing Chini on film, suggested that the poor initiate had only a very weak connection with the gods and might be able to avoid her calling by zealously honoring the Buddhas, something one of the transcriber’s own relatives had done effectively. Of course, this same strategy had not worked for Auntie Cho. In light of these uncertainties—ambiguous symptoms and the suspicion that shamans have vested interests in diagnosing potential initiates—one might also understand why Kwan, during a bad season, tried to rethink her own destiny. The phony, or ôngt’ôri, shaman should not be confused with Western notions of a charlatan. A shaman inhabits what Michael Taussig calls the space between “the real and the really made-up” (1993, xvii; 2003), performing mimetic acts that satisfy both humans and spirits, doing so even when inspiration eludes them. This was a lesson of Chini’s initiation. In the critic’s eye, a phony shaman is not necessarily a shaman who makes bogus claims to having spirits (although some claims are bogus); rather, she may not have the right kind of spirits (the question behind Kwan Myôngnyô’s temporary defection), and a phony shaman will most certainly not know how to deal with them. By all that has gone before, the phony shaman is a poor performer, deficient in inspiration, knowledge, and skill. Nearly every shaman I talked with opined that “most young shamans,” “most Seoul shamans,” or “most shamans these days” are phony shamans. How seriously should we take these statements?


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Complaints about phony shamans in the present and the idealization of true shamans in the past can be read against the grain of nostalgia, or at least taken with a grain of salt. But skepticism should also be leavened with an appreciation of how shamanic practices have been transformed in tandem with much else in South Korean life. A reading with the grain hints at how things become something else. We have already seen how contemporary structures of time and space compress performance relative to even the not-so-distant past. With shorter kut, mansin need master less ritual business, fewer lists of gods and their manifestations, fewer rules and procedures. As the deeply nostalgic Keeper of the Tile-Roofed Shrine put it, “It takes a great effort to do this work, and modern people want things to be easy. They abbreviate. . . . Things that should take an hour or more are done in thirty minutes . . . and then things are lost with the passage of time. When my generation is gone, it will all be gone.” Yongsu’s Mother complains that “Seoul shamans,” a bête noire of hers, “get angry if you perform things in the old way and take too much time.” And we have already seen how the commercial shrine’s isolation removes aspiring shamans from critical scrutiny outside the circle of other shamans. Other changes are linked to a larger South Korean demographic. Where the desperation of god-descended women in generations past might have empowered spirit mothers to indulge in tyrannies akin to those attributed to traditional mothers-in-law, women outside of families now have options for employment and at least meager survival at the margins of a thriving service industry. Spirit daughters today are sometimes impatient with elderly teachers who have less education than they do. Women born in the 1930s, as Yongsu’s Mother was, had a fifty-fifty chance of an elementary education while initiates in their thirties in the 1990s would almost certainly have studied through middle school and likely attended high school, and some young shamans have been college students.8 Systems of training for Cultural Treasures, and the involvement of shamans in that world, foster notions of professionalized instruction and a vocabulary of “disciple” and “teacher” (C. Choi 1991; Yang 1994). The reader will, of course, recognize that this entire discussion has been impressionistic and anecdotal. A quick scan of the literature on shamans in other parts of the world will reveal that in however many ethnographies, the last “real” shaman died either just before the anthropologist’s first field trip or very shortly thereafter.9 Talk of phony shamans today versus whatever they might have been “in the past,” “in the Chosôn period,” or “before the Korean War” resembles the sort of talk engendered wherever modernity


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drives its harsh “wedge between cosmology and history” (Anderson 1991, 36), historicizing legend and making memory into nostalgia. “Authentic” and “phony” are will-o’-the-wisps. Rather then chase them to an unanswerable nonresolution, I will introduce three flesh-and-blood shamans, all under the age of forty in the 1990s, whom I have revisited over several years. These three women defy any easy generalization, but, in that fact alone, they suggest a complex range of styles and possibilities for shamanship in South Korea today. Minju’s Mother 2002. As a recent initiate, Minju’s Mother seems the most traditional of the three, but that impression may be colored by our having met in the home of her spirit mother. In the spring of 2002, I went to visit Yongsu’s Mother, who had been emphatic that I come for lunch. Her daughter-inlaw, training to be a beautician, was nowhere in sight, but a pretty woman in early middle age bustled around the kitchen while Yongsu’s Mother and I leisurely brought each other up-to-date. I wondered if Yongsu’s Mother had finally found a wife for her unmarried stepson. Sometime between my arrival and the serving of a sumptuous repast worthy of a new daughter-inlaw’s command performance, I learned that the pretty woman was Minju’s Mother and that she was Yongsu’s Mother’s spirit daughter. Although Yongsu’s Mother teaches willingly and well, and several already-initiated junior shamans, like Babe, have sought alliances with her, she had only done two initiation kut before meeting Minju’s Mother, and both of these were failures. By contrast, Okkyông’s Mother, who still defers to Yongsu’s Mother in ritual knowledge and lacks her performance skills, has initiated more than half a dozen spirit daughters and sons, at least one of whom quietly asked Yongsu’s Mother for instruction. Minju’s Mother had come to Yongsu’s Mother through the predictably painful and fantastic trajectory of a destined shaman, a story Yongsu’s Mother promptly ordered her to recount for my tape recorder so that I could “write it in a book.” A disjointed tale, a torrent of words, a work in progress, but Minju’s Mother told her story willingly and with passion, sitting with her back very straight and her legs folded in a posture of Buddhist meditation. When she was nine years old, her father became deathly ill, vomiting blood, and her mother sponsored a secret kut to save him. He recovered, but her mother learned from the shaman that she must “bow to the spirits and become a shaman herself.” Her mother set up a small altar


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A lantern in the shape of a lotus flower and a white flag mark a shaman’s rented office in downtown Righteous Town, 1994. The shaman’s immediate neighbors include a lingerie shop (left) and a video rental (right).

to honor the gods, but her father tore it down, causing subsequent misfortune in the family. The daughter was forced to quit elementary school just short of graduation and find work in a cigarette factory. At fourteen, she was allowed a thirty-minute break each day to rush home and tend her ailing mother. She describes herself in this frantic life, “always bowing to the Buddha, even when I went to the toilet.” When she was twenty-three, a friend of her mother’s arranged a marriage with a pharmacist in Pusan, a seemingly good match that, of course, would be otherwise. Her husband, bright and cheerful on the surface, was a philanderer and a wife beater—“he would strike me on the head twice a day”—and her back and her hearing are affected to this day. In despair, Minju’s Mother tried to kill herself three times, always saved by near-miraculous circumstances. Swallowing sleeping pills and a bottle of


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liquor, she slipped into the water off of a deserted island in Pusan Harbor, but a fisherman pulled her out. Abandoned at home, she swallowed poison, but her brother-in-law woke up from a prophetic dream and rushed to save her. She planned her third attempt carefully, sent her child to spend the night with neighbors, bolted the door, and swallowed rat poison. Her agitated child insisted that the neighbors break down the door. Minju’s Mother was already far gone when they found her, and the hospital doubted that they could save her, predicting that even if she survived, she would be no better than an idiot. Unconscious for twenty-one days while her husband wept apologies at her bedside, she saw Grandfather Sage in his long-sleeved gown and long white beard.10 In the telling, she draws down her hand to pantomime a beard, a gesture that I have seen Yongsu’s Mother make many times when she describes her own lifesaving and portentous encounter with the white-bearded Mountain God.11 Grandfather Sage told Minju’s Mother, “You are destined to live your life’s full span.” She returned to consciousness, repeating, “I’m going home, I’m going home.” Minju’s Mother no longer thought of dying but said she “just fought constantly” with her husband. She began to follow her mother-in-law to Buddhist temples and made prayer vigils, but nothing changed. During one vigil, her nose ran constantly, pouring out the noxious influences (aek) inside her. Then she developed a large lump in her throat and became mute. The doctor told her that she had incurable throat cancer and that she would soon die. In a daze, she passed the bus depot and boarded a bus for a distant mountain prayer retreat. In the deep snow, she sat and prayed while her tears flowed down her face and she felt her insides turn to ice. A series of visions passed before her eyes, first tigers, then soldiers, and then the Mountain God himself, who opened her gates of speech. She began to clap and shout out the names of the gods, mute no more. She accepted her shaman’s destiny and was divorced, but without the money for an initiation, she spent the next few years half-crazy, praying on mountains and wandering from place to place. In the town of Chinju, a shaman took her in, but when the shaman’s husband became attracted to her, she lost that perch. She drifted to Anyang, where her brother was struggling to get by. She rented a small vinyl hut to set up her altar and slept in the basement of a hotel where she found menial work. She went repeatedly to pray on the surrounding mountains and, in the course of one of these journeys, met and was befriended by a spirit daughter of Okkyông’s Mother. This friend called her to help with the preparations for a kut in a Seoul kuttang, a kut that included Yongsu’s Mother. And when Minju’s Mother first set eyes on Yongsu’s Mother, she recalled, “the gods struck me three


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times and said, ‘This is the one who will be your spirit mother.’ ” Yongsu’s Mother took her in and, in the older shaman’s telling, Minju’s Mother came to her “with nothing, nothing more than her vagina to call her own.” After starving herself for so long and living mainly on water, the abundant food at Yongsu’s Mother’s house painfully bloated Minju’s Mother’s stomach. She scraped together the money for her kut with loans. At the end of 1999, Yongsu’s Mother, Okkyông’s Mother, and the sisterly apprentice took her to a mountain, where she poured out the names of the gods in a successful initiation kut. (At this point in the telling, her cell phone spontaneously spilled forth an electronic chorus of “Congratulations and Celebrations.”) Nearly three years later, she is still closely tied to Yongsu’s Mother, commuting from the far southern end of the greater Seoul subway line to its far northern extension “to do Mother’s work,” both in rituals and in such tasks as preparing a fancy lunch for an old friend from New York. As a recent initiate, Minju’s Mother fairly bursts with stories of uncannily accurate divinations that lead to efficacious rituals, almost incredulous at her own ability to prognosticate. Most remarkable, she went to a butcher shop where the proprietress recognized her from a dream; she had seen Minju’s Mother wearing the Buddhist Sage’s costume and standing in a shrine, the shrine the butcher shop proprietress would recognize when she visited Minju’s Mother. “But how would she know me?” Minju’s Mother asks. “I came from Pusan. I had never been in her shop before.” Even before meeting me, but anticipating my arrival, Minju’s Mother understood from the gods that I should go to pray again on Kam’ak Mountain before leaving Korea, and so we did, just after dawn one late spring morning. I remember how ably Minju’s Mother assisted in the preparations, how skillfully she spelled Yongsu’s Mother by invoking the Buddhist Sage, giving me a creditable and fluent, if predictable divination, and how, when she was not performing, she bowed again and again in her own intense devotion, long after my own back and thighs had given up the task. Five months later, things were going badly for both spirit mother and spirit daughter. Yongsu’s Mother had taken a bad fall at a hot spring, suffered a compound fracture, and was immobilized for several months, still hobbling with crutches when I visited her. The untended gods in her shrine had troubled her sleep until she ordered Minju’s Mother to come from Anyang, clean the shrine, polish the vessels, and make the requisite daily offering of clear water. For her part, Minju’s Mother has had back surgery for a slipped disk, paid for by her former husband, whose beatings had damaged her. She is also having trouble making her living as a shaman. According to Yongsu’s Mother, Minju’s Mother must pray on a mountain sacred to her


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husband’s family, but her husband’s uncle, an exorcist, guards this knowledge and will not share it with his nephew’s former wife. As a consequence, again according to Yongsu’s Mother, Minju’s Mother’s gods are afflicting not only the poor apprentice but also people close to her, including Yongsu’s Mother herself. 2003. Minju’s Mother has found the mountain and prayed there but still struggles as a shaman, and after two operations on her back, the doctor has told her that it will be two years before she is fully healed, able to jump in mansin fashion at a kut. Even so, when I sponsor a kut in August, she is an active member of the team, setting up offerings, coaching me on where and how much money I should set down, and answering all manner of questions posed by my ethnographically interested guests. When Minju’s Mother manifests a Child God, Yongsu’s Mother hands her the gaudy box of foil-wrapped chocolates that I provided and a bag of suckers “from sister,” from Minju’s Mother herself. In child voice, the god rejects the suckers but is delighted with the chocolate: “You brought it for me? On an airplane?” The Child God divines for all of us, including a friend of mine who is having marital trouble. Then, removing her costume but still clasping the Child God’s clothes, Minju’s Mother collapses, racked with sobs. When she recovers, we ask her why she cried. She tells us that the possessing god caused her to cry because she identified with my friend’s troubles and “it all welled up.” Yongsu’s Mother claims that the god was frustrated to find Minju’s Mother dancing at someone else’s kut when she needs to honor her gods with a kut of her own. Minju’s Mother had cried, in the Child God’s voice, to Yongsu’s Mother, “I wasn’t able to get it out! I wasn’t able to get it out!” (p’ullida, literally, unbind). Minju’s Mother/the Child God could not unbind her/her gods’ frustration; she could not attain an unblocked surge of inspiration. And Yongsu’s Mother comforted her, as one would a weeping child, saying, “It will come, it will come.” 2005. Two years later, things are not looking up for Minju’s Mother. In Yongsu’s Mother’s description, her spirit daughter is guileless, and this gets her into trouble. She freely distributes her telephone number, and when prospective clients call, she advises them over the phone gratis. “She should make them seek her out so that she can charge them,” Yongsu’s Mother says. There had been the matter of an unwise loan to an untrustworthy “sister,” a debt over a rented room, and Minju’s Mother’s temporary flight back to Pusan to try, unsuccessfully, to recoup her lost savings. Moreover, her ungrateful grown son forgot to buy her a present on Parents’ Day, “although he buys gifts for his girlfriend.” In the next year, Minju’s Mother


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would fall while ice skating—unseemly at her age, Yongsu’s Mother would opine with a chuckle—and would need a pin in her shoulder. But the bond with Yongsu’s Mother holds. As I sit with Yongsu’s Mother, a call comes in from another shaman, asking her to a kut. Yongsu’s Mother immediately puts in a pitch to include Minju’s Mother in the team because “she does a good job.” Yongsu’s Mother carries Minju’s Mother’s Child God voice as the recording on her cell phone. The Fairy Maid 1994. The Fairy Maid, or rather her husband, sought me out in the summer of 1994. When the Keeper of the Fortification Shrine mentioned the visit of a foreign researcher, he was keen to meet me, anxious to introduce me to his shaman wife, desirous that she should win my attention. Although the Fairy Maid had been initiated little more than a year before, she had already divined for thousands of clients, using her acute powers of inspiration, or so he claimed. Ms. Kim and I seek them out and spend an interesting summer afternoon listening to this couple, still in their late twenties, in a little one-story house down an alley near a major university. The husband describes his plans to make his wife into a Cultural Treasure, his own cultivation of extrasensory powers, the need to unite all of the shamans into a common religious association, his wish to establish a theology school for shamans, his complaints about the moral degeneracy of the contemporary moment, and the neglect of traditional culture. He is active in an advocacy organization and talks the talk that we have heard before. When we finally pose a question to the Fairy Maid herself, she takes the stage and speaks nonstop. The husband absents himself to the garden, where he smokes sulkily, returning much later to resume his sermon while she sits silent, the suggestion of a frown on her otherwise smooth forehead. I wonder what their ordinary domestic conversations are like. Like many Seoul shamans, including Yongsu’s Mother, who grew up in the city, the Fairy Maid received early signs of her calling as compulsions to pray in front of the numinous Sônbawi stone on Inuang Mountain. Like others, she claims that she resisted the calling; she wanted only to be “the least of the Buddha’s disciples.” She speaks of several mountain journeys, undertaken with her husband, to shore up her store of inspiration. On Chiri Mountain, in a desolate, frightening place, he fell asleep while she struck her gong prayerfully throughout the night. In the deep midnight, she heard someone shout, “Stop that!” but she persisted and then realized that no one


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was there, that the gods had been testing her. She claims to have mastered the technical knowledge of her practice in record time, the best spirit daughter that her spirit mother had encountered in forty years of practice. Even so, her spirit mother did not give her the training she promised. The Fairy Maid does better by her own spirit daughter. That’s right, spirit daughter. Less than two years since her own initiation, she has initiated another shaman. Yes, it is difficult for a young shaman to preside at an initiation kut, but the Fairy Maid describes herself as a quick learner and practically bubbles over with confidence in her own abilities. We just missed meeting the spirit daughter, who had left before we arrived, a woman more than a decade older than the Fairy Maid, who cooks her rice when she visits and who addresses the younger woman as “Mother.” Although the terms of this relationship amuse the Fairy Maid, she favorably contrasts “modern” practices with the servitude of spirit daughters in the past: “It’s easier to live now. You only ask your spirit mother for the things you don’t know. Nowadays one learns through one’s own effort.” “How?” “You pray to your wits’ end. It’s difficult, but by and by you are able to do more and more difficult things.” She contrasts her abilities with the fate of women who cook rice in shrines and temples, struggling to gain sufficient inspiration. By contrast, her own divinations are always accurate, her prayers always work, children are born to barren couples, and businesses succeed. One client, imprisoned for bank fraud, gained his release in record time when his wife followed the Fairy Maid’s advice. Still, she admits that she does not do many kut apart from those for her own clients or those her spirit mother asks her to join. She turns down invitations from other shamans—although “many of them ask me”—admitting that she lacks the requisite skill (kisul). Her power lies in divination and in making prayers on her clients’ behalf. She estimates that 30 percent of her clients are men concerned with their businesses, job and promotion prospects, and “complicated relations with women.” I am surprised by this sex ratio, although I will subsequently meet other young shamans who count businessmen as clients. As if to confirm her claim, a client in a dark suit and tie arrives for a consultation just as we are leaving the house. 1998. Four years later, the Fairy Maid is doing very well. Where I had last seen her in the rented room of a traditional Korean house, I meet her again in a newly purchased apartment, crammed with appliances, imitation Louis XIV furniture, a television and a good sound system, ornate knickknacks, and overbearing arrangements of artificial flowers. The lavishly fit-


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ted shrine, with its statues, paintings, and incense pots, sacks of rice, and bottles of foreign whisky, also boasts a fax machine and a telephone on top of a porcelain elephant.12 While we wait for the Fairy Maid, who is closeted in her shrine with a client, her husband troops in with two colleagues, all similarly attired in suits, flashy ties, and expensive haircuts, an almost comic approximation of gangster chic for the collection team of a shaman advocacy association. He nods a greeting and changes his shirt, and they leave again. The Fairy Maid emerges from her consultation, a glamorous apparition with her face carefully painted, her long black shift stylishly cut and topped with a silver mesh shrug, her fingernails manicured and brightly painted. She speaks, as in the past, of her constant prayers and the great effort she makes to master her profession—“studying,” she calls it, to suggest the spiritual endeavors of a Buddhist monk or a Confucian sage. She even opines that everyone has ki, or spiritual force, such that anyone can become a shaman through disciplined self-cultivation. She elaborates on her great powers of prophecy, claiming that she can see a year and a half into the future and that clients return from this remove of time to confirm her predictions. She claims that her gods warned her, obliquely, of the impending Asian Financial Crisis. Her spirit daughter from 1994 failed to make a living as a shaman, and the two women have not spoken with each other for two years, but the Fairy Maid has other disciples now. With respect to performing kut, the Fairy Maid is cautious. Her gods have warned her against performing kut in public shrines, telling her to quietly minister to clients in her household shrine and perform small rituals there to invoke the gods’ goodwill, a view compatible with her sense of her own strength as a diviner. She is making a good living as a shaman even without having mastered the dances, songs, chants, mime, and feats of balance required to invoke and satisfy gods and ancestors during kut. 2002. The Keeper of the Fortification Shrine tells us that the Fairy Maid has finally learned to perform kut and that the young shaman manages to give a creditable performance. We make an appointment, and the Fairy Maid herself explains that she has gone to one of the shaman schools, and of course she keeps praying and working on self-cultivation. She is destined to do kut, she tells us in a buoyant, giggly mood, and invites us to the kut she will perform in two days. On this visit, she is even more striking than she was four years ago, dressed in an elegant Korean hanbok to receive clients on a Saturday morning. Her husband, present in several large framed photographs, has gone to business school, and she describes him vaguely as


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“doing this and that.” She tells us that the quality of her clients has become more elevated; more businessmen and professors. The women from the drinking houses who sought her out in the past have stopped visiting. They were a bad influence, she says, and her gods are now keeping them away in favor of a better class of customer. People learn of her by word of mouth and come from all over; she cites clients who have even come from distant Cheju Island to have her divine for them. And indeed we emerge from the shrine room at the end of our interview to find her living room, empty when we arrived, now filled with prospective clients, male and female, including a Buddhist Monk. At the kuttang on the designated day, the Fairy Maid is resplendent in a Korean hanbok of ecru ramie cloth and expensive traditional jewelry. She will be attended by a sickly-looking young woman who beats the gong and strikes the cymbals and receives divinations on behalf of the clients, and a young male disciple who found this calling after trying unsuccessfully to import shoes from China. The Fairy Maid will perform the kut without the aid of another shaman; indeed the Fairy Maid will actually be doing two kut today, stepping from one small chamber, lavishly piled with offering food, into the adjoining room, similarly prepared. More surprising, the clients deliver a bundle of cash, bow, and then return to work, leaving the Fairy Maid to perform their kut without them. Ms. Kim has seen this before and it seems to be a trend (Hung-youn Cho 1990, 215; Huang 2000, 273), but a kut without client interaction is a first for me, and I am astonished by this reduction of the ritual to pure commodity, sufficient that it be paid for and performed.13 The Fairy Maid’s kut mixes styles. The male disciple, who will drum throughout, tells us that he was trained to drum in the style of North Ch’ungch’ông Province, to the southwest of Seoul. He has also artfully constructed paper decorations in the style of southern kut. The Fairy Maid, born in the southwest, performs kut in the manner of Seoul shamans (Hanyang or Hansông kut), the style in which she was trained. She carefully produces the words of the invocation, jumps in place, and then gives divinations that address the concerns of the absent client family (“I’ll give you luck when you go around buying things. You need to find a more auspicious site for the business”), throwing in divinations for her two attendants, promising the pale apprentice an eventual successful initiation. She also divines for Ms. Kim and me. Performing each segment herself, she moves through the kut at a brisk pace without any extended song, dance, or feats of balance. The most memorable moments occur—as with so many young shamans—when a Child God appears. We are in the middle of the 2002 World


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Cup, the year when the South Korean soccer team exceeds all expectations. The much-anticipated match between South Korea and the United States will occur this very evening, and the Fairy Maid has already answered a game-related call on her cell phone: “Soccer? Forget about soccer. I’ve got to make money.” But the Child God does not share her feelings. He arrives after a lively dance in which the Fairy Maid shakes her rear end, decorously hidden under her full Korean skirt, and, jumping with her open palms raised upward, shouts the South Korean cheer “Taehan Min’guk! Taehan Min’guk!” The Child God predicts a two-to-one victory for Korea, but the evening’s game will be a tie. Ms. Shin I have already introduced Ms. Shin in chapter 1, the articulate woman who shared my view that the shaman advocacy organizations have a “gender problem” and who worked herself to exhaustion trying to unite the shamans in an officially recognized shaman religion. I met Ms. Shin through a professor friend who had gotten to know her in the early 1990s when a Seoul-based feminist group commissioned a group of shamans to perform a kut for the aggrieved souls of Korean “military comfort women.” My friend was attracted to Ms. Shin’s obvious intelligence and her distinctive vantage point on South Korean life as much as to her skills as a diviner, an appreciation I soon shared. 1992. Ms. Shin collects us from the Inch’ôn station, driving a bright red car with a Buddhist rosary and a talisman entwined around the rearview mirror. She is a heavy woman with long, unkempt hair, and her laconic movements belie her bright eyes and sharp wit. Her energy and emphatic conversation remind me of a younger Yongsu’s Mother. I have heard a great deal about Ms. Shin before meeting her but am surprised that she has already heard of me. When a folklore professor in the local university invited her to speak to his students, he had shown her my book, observing that if a foreign scholar could spend more than a year “suffering like a spirit daughter,” Korean students had no excuse not to match or better the foreigner’s efforts. She had been curious to meet me. On this occasion, Ms. Shin has much to say about young shamans who do not respect old shamans and about clients who sponsor kut in the hope of gaining great wealth: “The Pak family has to keep up with the Kim family.” I have heard these things before but enjoy her animated delivery. Although Ms. Shin maintains a shrine, as mansin do, I miss the clutter of offerings left by devotees. Ms. Shin does not perform kut; she divines for


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clients and makes them amulets. But unlike the Fairy Maid, who has little interest in learning from old shamans, Ms. Shin is passionately committed to preserving their knowledge. She seeks out the old North Korean shamans in Inch’ôn, the elders (noinne), and as an amateur folklorist, records their rituals with a video camera. As a diviner, Ms. Shin takes inspiration from the divine grandfathers in her shrine, but when inspiration eludes her, she resorts to her books and gives a divination on the basis of the “four pillars” (saju), the year, month, day, and hour of the subject’s birth. Diviners’ manuals and two geomancers’ compasses rest on the low table where she conducts her sessions. She does not cast and finger rice, as mansin do, but scribbles notations on a pad in the manner of a learned book diviner, all the while fingering a Buddhist rosary. Like many Korean diviners, she is as much a counselor and therapist as a fortune-teller and speaks of the necessity of establishing a good relationship with her clients so that they will leave her house in a happy frame of mind after a divination session.14 “You can’t think of it as just a money relationship,” she says. “You have to become close to them, be of like mind, or there’s no good resolution.” 1994. I meet Ms. Shin again two years later, an occasion when my friend and I both receive divinations that do, in fact, put us in a happy frame of mind. Ms. Shin seems to be prospering. I notice an impressive new inlaid lacquer cabinet and some framed calligraphy. Ceaseless telephone calls from clients punctuate our interview and divinations. We ask about the problems that her clients bring to her, and what she says surprises us: “In the past, sixty percent of the women were worried about adulterous husbands. Nowadays, if I ask a woman, ‘Do you have a lover?’ ninety percent admit to it.”15 Ms. Shin sprinkles her speech with statistics, like a social commentator in a woman’s magazine, and offers her own analysis. Although she repeats the then current media critique of self-indulgent, leisured middle-class wives, she adds the sympathetic observation that their romances are the inevitable consequence of lonely marriages with men who carouse after hours and return home drunk. She regrets the lack of a meaningful “women’s culture” (yôsông munhua) to occupy the time and energy of modern South Korean housewives. When my friend observes that the subjects of our anthropological interviews would probably never admit to adultery, Ms. Shin soon has us in giggles as she compares herself to a doctor: “You go to the doctor because you want to know what’s wrong, so you strip off your brassiere, you strip off your panties, you bare everything. It’s the same with me. They come to me because there’s something they want to know. They set their money down, and then it all comes out.”


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I ask if she is still videotaping kut. She says yes, but not so avidly as in the past, because the equipment is heavy and the kut that should be documented go on for several days and are difficult to record in full. But the topic that causes her to wax most passionate is the current state of the shaman world. Looking back on my notes from this interview, I see in embryo the ideas that will motivate her attempt to unite and register shamans as an organized religion. She speaks of the disunity among shamans, each claiming loyalty to their own gods, complains about the ineffectual, self-serving advocacy associations that do little for the shamans themselves, and emphasizes the need for the shamans to come together with an organization of their own. 1998. On this visit, Ms. Kim is in the maelstrom of her campaign. Again she meets us at the station, this time driving a van, which she uses to transport “the elders” to kut and other events. She has moved to a more spacious house, with the upstairs floor devoted to her shrine. Flushed with the success of her organization’s high-profile kut on Tano Day, she has us watch the video while she goes upstairs to divine for a client. On her return, she describes how all the old ladies wept when they performed this rite for national unification at the observation point on the Imjin River, within view of their lost North Korean home. She is thrilled that so many literary and scholarly figures attended and estimates a crowd of three thousand spectators. She talks on about her efforts to unite the North Korean shamans from Seoul and Inch’ôn, how she won the support of the famous shaman Nami, how far their group has come, and what they have yet to accomplish. People ask her why she bothers with all this and tell her that she will make herself sick with exhaustion, she says, but there is no swaying her resolve. She sees the creation of an officially recognized shaman religion as the only way to gain dignity and respect for the shamans. Back in Korea a few years later, I learn that Ms. Shin has dropped out of sight, deeply disappointed by the collapse of her ambitious project. My friend tells me that the projected association was undermined by acrimonies and rivalries within the shaman community and by what Ms. Shin perceived as a lack of sincere commitment on the part of her better-known ally. These tensions were present from the start, and no one is surprised. I do not see Ms. Shin again until 2005. 2005. A group of shamans are invited to an international conference at Ewha Womans University to hear what two scholars will be saying about their rituals. A strapping young paksu, a boyish shaman in traditionalist/ modern shirt and trousers who seems to be their leader, greets me by my Korean name: “Kyôngdallae-ssi! Don’t you know me? You’ve interviewed


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me at my house.” I smile but do not recognize him. “I’m Ms. Shin!” Happy to see her again but also flustered, I stammer an apology: “You’ve cut your hair. You look different.” “And lost weight,” she adds. She has, and her new cropped-haired appearance suits her. Where I remember a heavy and casually groomed young woman, the new Ms. Shin, dressed in immaculate white, walks with a boyish swagger. She seems more at home in her body than in the past, with gestures and stride to match the energy of her voice and intellect, or perhaps she is simply happier. Researchers who know her well tell me later that Ms. Shin is “still a woman underneath,” that she dresses like a man to be an effective manager for a team of shamans dedicated to performing a series of kut for the military comfort women. Circumventing the role usually provided by a male-run advocacy organization, the new Ms. Shin deals effectively with provincial officials who are not used to conducting business with a woman. Perhaps this is a small step toward unifying shamans around a common cause. I think of Joan of Arc, the heroic visionary who cut her hair and dressed like a boy to do battle. But who is a mudang? What do these three brief portraits tell us? The Fairy Maid, with her cavalier attitude toward kut and her unabashed willingness to take on spirit children despite her lack of training, fits the stereotype of a phony shaman. Even so, she seems successful as an inspirational diviner, aided in part by her tremendous store of self-confidence, obvious in my portrait, and an infectious warmth and charm that may be less evident in what I wrote. Although Minju’s Mother had divine speech “burst out of her” in a miraculous fashion, held a successful initiation kut, and is learning her craft from an exacting spirit mother, she struggles to make a living. If the Fairy Maid’s example gives credence to nostalgic shaman talk and critical scholarly inscriptions, Minju’s Mother’s struggle reminds us that what is said about “young shamans these days” does not apply to all young shamans these days. Some— Minju’s Mother, Babe, Kwan Myôngnyô, who can say how many?—pursue serious training with veteran mansin and spend several years mastering the art of performing kut. In juxtaposition, the two portraits make a cautionary tale about the perils of generalizing contemporary shamanship either as a conservative tradition or as a bankrupt practice. Ms. Shin’s utterly unique story suggests that some paths lie beyond easy generalization. As the number of educated and media-savvy young shamans rises, their potential as leaders becomes possible—if not for the organized


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shaman religion Ms. Shin envisions, at least for the kind of modest professional association she leads today, or as self-styled authors of their own experience, in the manner of shaman-author Ch’ôn Pokhua (2001). Ms. Shin took a step away from nostalgic folklore and national culture studies when she forged her continuing alliance with female scholars concerned with contemporary social and gender issues. Deeply respectful of her tradition, she carries it in new directions. Both the Fairy Maid and Ms. Shin function primarily—Ms. Shin exclusively—as diviners, but both women identify as mudang or mansin, albeit in different ways. Ms. Shin devotes herself to advancing the cause of mudang. The Fairy Maid found it necessary to perform kut, gaining such training as she could. Perhaps some of the women and men who in the 1970s would have styled themselves as inspirational diviners with such titles as chômjangi, posal, tongja posal, or myôngdu (T’ae-gon Kim 1981, 369) find sufficient incentive in the cultural celebration of Korean mudang to see themselves this way. “Mudang” who offer divinations via websites appear on their own homepages in the costumes and poses of kut.16 Sim Chin-song, who spectacularly predicted the death of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung in 1994, appears in costume on the cover of her memoir (1995) and presents herself as having been “chosen by the gods”; she claims fame as a diviner, but in the iconic image of a mudang. One may even speculate that some new categories of clients, particularly white-collar businessmen (hoesawôn), are attracted to the mudang’s positive association with Korean national culture (and to young, attractive mudang) but would just as soon avoid the potentially embarrassing instrumental premises of kut. In 2003, I met one young shaman who made only an austere display of artificial lotus flowers in her shrine, burning candles (one for each client company) and replenishing bowls of clear water but exhibiting no other offerings because she felt that the businessmen who were her primary clientele would be uncomfortable with a gaudy display. Conclusion Those who write shamanic nostalgia write from a Korean intellectual perspective that mourns the successive losses of the Korean nation through colonialism, national division, and draconian modernization. The observations of aging shamans are more personal. The shamans, after all, complain because they continue to have a stake in a living practice, one that at least some of their apprentices value sufficiently to try to master. Against a per-


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vasive awareness of phony shamans and shaman exploitation, the efforts of younger shamans like Kwan Myôngnyô, Babe, Minju’s Mother, and even the unfortunate Chini occur in a space where mansin deploy skill and inspiration to perform kut as a consequential transaction between humans, gods, and ancestors. In the next two chapters, I describe how, in the hands of experienced shamans, this artful form responds to the needs, desires, and anxieties of contemporary South Korean clients.


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5 Korean Shamans and the Spirits of Capitalism

The flavor of the new Korea burst upon me one autumn day in 1989 when Kwan Myôngnyô arrived at a kut in a state of great laughter and excitement. Kwan’s sister, who runs a clothing shop in the South Gate Market, had been told at one of Kwan’s kut that the supernatural Official who governed her shop’s prosperity wanted a drink of wine. The sister was instructed to fill a cup for him when she returned to her shop late that night. As Kwan Myôngnyô tells the story: She had intended to pour the wine and set it down right there [in front of her shop], but she may as well have done it in broad daylight [the South Gate Market is always filled with people]. She bought the tiniest little plastic cup, but even if she had tried to offer the wine in that, the people passing by would have thought that she was crazy. My sister just couldn’t bring herself to pour the wine. So she said, “Official mine, let’s go to South Mountain.” [Laughs.] Oh, that kid! My sister said, “It’s very congested here, so let’s go to some breezy place where you can carouse in private.” And then she said, “Please get in the car so we can go.” She did all that. It was so funny to hear her tell it. She says she drove up South Mountain. There are spirits up there after all. She drove up, and then she got out of her car and looked around. It was absolutely perfect. So then she said, “Dear Official, aren’t you pleased? Why don’t you get out of the car and look around.” She didn’t leave anything out. [“She did well,” An Hosun interjects.] She poured out a serving of rice 129


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wine [tongdongju] and said, “Please have a drink.” And then, she says, she kowtowed. In a little while, she poured out the wine in a line meaning “Drink your fill,” and came back down. The very next day, right then in the morning, she got the proceeds from an eight-million-wôn order [approximately US$11,430]. [“That’s great!” says An.] . . . And the shop right next to hers, a big shop that had been in the business for ten years, she says that this year their business failed. In the South Gate Market there are some five hundred shops, and they say that only four of them are doing well, just four. What can it mean that only four of them are doing well this year? Kim Pongsun caps the discussion, “Yep, all you have to do is treat the Official well, and then things will work out for you. That’s what it takes.” Later that same day, Kwan again returns to the subject of gods and money. She describes how her family had objected to her becoming a shaman because they claimed to be members of a yangban (noble) lineage. But when their father died, he had entered Kwan’s pantheon as a spirit, and thereafter things looked up for her family: Within a year of our father’s death, my sister began to make money like wildfire. In the space of two years she’d taken in a billion wôn [by this inflated claim, over a million dollars]. Our father died in the eighth month, and from the tenth month she began to make money. Since my father’s death, all of my siblings are doing well. . . . In the past, I was poor and my brothers and sisters didn’t have anything either. Now it’s so much better—they’re driving their own cars, they’ve all bought houses. Now that I’ve become a shaman, they take me here and there to treat me and buy me presents. This wins a cynical affirmation from her client’s mother: “You have to have money, and then they call you ‘noble’ [toni issôya yangban irago].” “So what else is new? Money is nobility [toni yangban iranikka muôlkΔrae],” a cynical shaman observes. I was surprised. The assertion that “money is nobility,” that the rich are considered noble, was not new to me. The old men of Enduring Pine Village had used similar words to describe the local gentry of their remembered past. I would hear these sentiments again and again in the utterances of gods during kut performed by these and other shamans—for example, “In


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our country, if you just have money, then they call you ‘noble.’ ” But never before had I heard a shaman make such an immediate connection between honoring the gods and quantified material success. I knew secondhand of such grand claims, knew that mainline Protestant theologians sometimes blame “shamanism” for predisposing Koreans to Pentecostal religions in which prayer is a magical means to a materialist end, that kibok (praying for good fortune) had taken on this negative gloss and was being bandied about as a general critique of all manner of popular religious practices (D. K. Suh 1983, 49–51; Yoo 1988, 104; Y Yoon 2003). The underlying logic of Kwan Myôngnyô’s story was also familiar: treat the spirits well and they will do well by you. But in the past, the claims made for successful rituals had been modest and vague: “And they’re living well today” or “Things have gotten a bit better for them.” Now I was hearing Kwan Myôngnyô, Babe, and the Fairy Maid revel in tales of the miraculous wealth that had befallen their clients. Other shamans, like Yongsu’s Mother and Ms. Shin, offered the dyspeptic view that their clients were obsessed with getting rich. Ms. Shin spoke with great heat and humor about people who invest in repeated kut for good fortune, even within the space of a single year, and those who promptly sever their relationship with a shaman if a kut does not bear fruit in immediate financial gain. Yongsu’s Mother held that in the past, kut for good fortune were rare: “Who had money for that sort of thing? If someone was sick, then you would hold a healing kut. Even if you went into debt for it, you had to do it. It was a matter of life and death.” Kut to send the ancestors to paradise were also more common in the 1960s and 1970s. “Nowadays, do they concern themselves with the ancestors?” Yongsu’s Mother asked. “People only care about themselves. No one bothers to send the ancestors off properly. They just add a small send-off at the end of a kut that they hold for their own benefit.”1 At the same time, the shamans themselves were being criticized for charging exorbitant fees and piling up excesses of offering food, conspicuous spiritual consumption subsequently discarded in rotting piles around many of the shrines we visited (also Huang 2000, 273).2 The aging researcher is once again tempted to join the shamans in their disgruntled discourse upon the mercurial preoccupations of the contemporary South Korean moment or join the equally disgruntled scholars who criticize greedy and wasteful contemporary shamans. I will resist a nostalgic impulse to make a simple comparison between the materialistic present and a more innocent time when all of us were younger, and confront instead the ambivalent space between celebrations of wealth as blessing from the spirits and the cynical equation of money with nobility. In this chapter and the


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next, I describe how shamans, clients, gods, and ancestors deal with some of the consequences of South Korea’s economic transformation, with the enticements and seeming amorality of new wealth and the lurking danger of potential ruin. One summer evening in 1991, I went with Yongsu’s Mother to a client’s house in a quiet residential district of Righteous Town, where she performed a small ritual honoring the spirits of a newly purchased family car (ch’a kosa). This was my first opportunity to observe a ch’a kosa, although Yongsu’s Mother claimed that she and her colleagues routinely performed it as private car ownership proliferated among their clients. On this occasion, the sponsors were the son and daughter-in-law of one of her long-standing clients. The man, Mr. Kim (no relation to my assistant, “Ms. Kim”), had purchased his car without letting Yongsu’s Mother check his horoscope. Had he done so, he would have learned that this was not an auspicious year for him to bring a new vehicle into his household. A precautionary placation was in order. I could appreciate the Kim family’s concern, having heard tales of the huge sums of compensation money exacted after traffic accidents, to say nothing of South Korea’s having one of the world’s highest traffic fatality rates. The logic of the ritual was also familiar to me: grain or goods brought into or removed from the household without some tribute to the divine Officials piques their ire and brings misfortune. Recall what happened to Mrs. Min when she carried rice grain away from her neglected household gods. In the 1970s, when village households brought in “shiny things”—the newly available televisions, stereos, and refrigerators—they either propitiated the House Site Official in advance or called on Yongsu’s Mother to deal with the consequences of causing the jealous god to “open his eyes wide” and make trouble (Kendall 1985, chap. 5). In Yongsu’s Mother’s view, there were particular reasons why the gods might be vexed with the Kim family. As the son of a regular client, Mr. Kim had grown up under the protection of the gods in Yongsu’s Mother’s shrine. Mr. Kim himself told me that he respected Yongsu’s Mother’s skill as a shaman, volunteering the information that he had known her for twenty years and considered her his foster mother (suyang ômma). His mother had “sold” him to the Seven Stars in Yongsu’s Mother’s shrine, ensuring their protection and also establishing a fictive kinship of “mother” and “son” between the shaman and the child (ibid., 80–81). He had grown up in a village not far from the village where I had lived in 1977 and 1978. After establishing his own household, he and his wife had dedicated a prayer cushion to the Buddhas in Yongsu’s Mother’s shrine. Nevertheless, his wife was swayed by a Christian neighbor, and the couple abandoned their obligations to the gods


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(and Yongsu’s Mother) by attending the Christian church, with disastrous results. Suffering all manner of financial reverses, the husband lost his small factory, and the couple were forced to sell their house. They returned to Yongsu’s Mother and sponsored a kut, and now, she said, things were getting better for them. In 1991, Mr. Kim was working for another company, and the family lived in a modest but well-appointed apartment. Some of Mr. Kim’s and his wife’s dialogue with their household gods would include a discussion of their prospects for building a new house. Later that night, when he drove me to the subway in his new car, Mr. Kim would express profound relief at having completed the ritual. What is a “house”? When Yongsu’s Mother set out the rice cake for the ch’a kosa, she, Mr. Kim, his wife, and his mother all deliberated over the location of the main beam so that they could set the steamer of rice cake dedicated to the tutelary House Lord (Sôngju) beneath it.3 Visible in old-fashioned one-story village homes, the main beam is usually concealed by the dropped ceilings of new apartments and in the town house–style constructions that had gone up in Enduring Pine Village since the 1980s. If I had begun my research in the 1990s, rather than the 1970s, I might never have seen the physical house (chip) as a primary metaphor for the household (also chip), an appropriate symbolic habitation for the household gods associated with different features of the physical structure mustered in kosa and kut. I might never have written: The household is the irreducible unit of the Korean peasant’s social, political, economic, and religious life. . . . In affliction the household is the most immediate unit under siege; the physical house is an appropriate metaphor. Individual illness threatens the larger body with medical and ritual expenses, labor loss, anxiety, and death. Illness, business reverses, thefts, and intrafamilial quarrels are household afflictions. Any or, more often, a combination of these sorry states can occasion a major kut . . . staged and choreographed about the house. (Kendall 1985, 108) When I wrote these lines, “the household” of my ethnographic imagination was a small family farm, a kin-based agrarian unit of production and consumption embedded in a larger market economy. In the late 1970s,


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when I first lived in Enduring Pine Village, harbingers of what would soon be regarded as the Korean economic miracle were evident in the prevalence of new television sets and the absence of village daughters, gone to work in urban factories, whose labors sometimes made the purchase of television sets and other new appliances possible. More than half of the village households described themselves as primarily nonagricultural, their income derived from taxicabs, from cottage industries, or as hired labor in the nearby town (ibid., 45). Daughters of village households who had married and lived in the town appeared in my ethnography as the Rice Shop Auntie and Yangja’s Mother, whose husband drove a taxicab. The religious practices of farm wives had followed their daughters into the brave new world of first-generation urban entrepreneurs, but as dynamic practice, not frozen custom. In the shaman shrines of Seoul and its environs in the 1990s, I would encounter wage workers, farmers, and very occasionally white-collar workers, but the overwhelming majority of clients were, like Kwan Myôngnyô’s sister and Mr. Kim, shop owners, restaurateurs, and proprietors of small companies. An ill-defined group, rarely mentioned in the scholarly literature on Korea, small entrepreneurs constitute a significant segment of the South Korean population (Koo 1987, 379–380; Leppänen 2007). By 1990 slightly less than one-third of all non-farmworkers in Korea were self-employed or worked for family businesses (Korea Statistical Year Book 1990, 75). While the Korean government’s developmental strategies favored large monopolies (chaebôl) at the expense of small businesses, most petty entrepreneurs, with a majority of Koreans, describe themselves as middle-class on statistical surveys and see themselves as capable of advancing through the system, an optimism manifest in the rituals they perform.4 On that evening in 1991 when the Kim family held its car kosa, beyond the curiosity value of placating a Car Official (Ch’a Taegam) and an Engine Official (Enjin Taegam), of a middle-class couple kowtowing in the street of a quiet residential neighborhood to the gods that inhabited their shiny black vehicle, I was intrigued by Mr. Kim’s history of sudden and dire financial reverses. The precipitous failure of his small factory would seem well-matched to perceptions of supernatural wrath, even as a successful gamble—Kwan Myôngnyô’s story of the shop in South Gate Market—implied tremendous blessing. In this chapter, I discuss the who and why of contemporary kut, arguing that South Korean urban and peri-urban petty entrepreneurs belie the Weberian assumption that the spirit of capitalism is incompatible with more literal dealings with spirits (Weber 1958, 117).


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Capricious fortunes In the early 1990s many of the kut and smaller rituals that Yongsu’s Mother and her colleagues were performing concerned the fortunes of small business proprietors. In the spring of 1992, Diana Lee and I had taken Diana’s camera and followed Yongsu’s Mother to two of Babe’s kut. Both client profiles matched Babe’s own as migrants from further south, in their thirties, who were attempting to establish themselves through small-scale enterprises. One of these clients was Mrs. Yi, the forlorn sponsor of the shrine kut I described in chapter 2. The sponsors of the second kut, the Pak family, seemed relatively successful. They and their small daughter were nicely dressed and drove to the kuttang in the family car. They were holding a kut to tend the ancestors of Mr. Pak’s family, but their overriding concern, as explained to me by the wife and as addressed by nearly every god and ancestor manifested by the shamans, was the family’s desire for a business of their own. Mr. Pak worked for a major corporation, and his wife ran a small clothing shop. Should Mr. Pak quit his job and combine forces with his wife to run an expanded family business? The spirits, through the agency of three shamans, urged caution, suggesting a delay of two or three years but promising the couple eventual success.5 (The gods and ancestors tend to be fiscally conservative.) Both the Pak family and the less fortunate Mrs. Yi, and probably many others as well, were told in that spring, “You don’t get rich in a single morning. You have to make a great effort and also honor the gods.” The experiences of the Kims, the Paks, and the Yis suggest motivations beyond the simple greed imputed to clients by cynical shamans. Like Kwan Myôngnyô’s sister, who took her supernatural Official to South Mountain, the Kim, Pak, and Yi families are (or were) engaged in high-risk enterprises at the margins of what was still being called the Korean economic miracle. The consequences of good and bad fortune had a crushing immediacy for people like the Kims, the Paks, and the Yis, compounded in the 1990s by their limited access to capital, circumstances that fostered an informal curb market for high-interest and more precarious loans (Janelli and Yim 1993, 64).6 Early in 1992, with a downturn in the South Korean stock market, 3,646 companies—mostly small and medium-sized businesses—went bankrupt (Korea Newsreview 1992a, 15; 1992b, 25; 1992c, 14, 15; 1993, 22–23). I began to suspect that many kut for good fortune (chaesu kut) were being held not merely for wealth (chae), auspiciousness (pok), or “so the


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business will go well,” the bland summations that are offered in passing to curious anthropologists, but in response to disastrous financial reversals and failing enterprises. The very volatility of the market, the seeming arbitrariness of success or failure, had much in common with the behavior of gods and ancestors: do well by them and they grant you good fortune, offend them and they harass you (Kendall 1977a; 1985, chap. 6). Consider, for example, Mrs. Pok’s story. The child of a shaman, Mrs. Pok has honored her family’s gods and ancestors all of her adult life. Her husband had worked for a major electronics firm but was forced into early retirement in his forties.7 Now it was Mrs. Pok who went into business. In 1994 she opened a florist shop in a neighborhood where there were several other similar shops. She had only been in the flower business for a short while when someone placed an order with her for 1.4 million wôn (US$1,750 in 1994). The shopkeepers in the neighborhood said that this was an unprecedented windfall for a new business, and she began to dream of securing a major account from her husband’s former company. Mrs. Pok, her shaman mother, and just possibly her neighbors attributed her early good fortune to the benevolence of gods that the shaman mother had zealously invoked and propitiated on Mrs. Pok’s behalf. But then, only a few months later, business was off. For three weeks, barely a customer a day visited her shop. Now the neighboring florists confirmed her dismay, telling her that this was not normal. This sudden falloff of business was ominous, suggesting divine displeasure. Mrs. Pok developed pains in her legs, a further confirmation that she needed a kut. The gods and ancestors who appeared at her kut affirmed that, yes, a ritual lapse had left her vulnerable to misfortune. They also suggested that her shopkeeping neighbors had taken ritual measures (yebang) to shore up their own good fortune at her expense.8 Gods, ancestors, and shamans told her to perform ritual countermeasures, avoid any food offered by her neighbors, and cast salt in the wake of any rival shopkeeper who might drop by for a visit. The petty capitalist client If kut such as these articulate the worldview of petty capitalist entrepreneurs who inhabit a new and precarious economic terrain, how representative are these people among the shamans’ clients? I gained my initial impression from kut performed by shamans with whom I have enjoyed long and close ties and who are used to my working among them. Certain shamans are renowned for particular specialties: astute divinations, curing, or successful initiations. I wanted to be certain that this new emphasis on business success


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and failure was not simply a specialty of the particular network of shamans I knew or, in their terms, of gods like the Official and the Spirit Warrior who “play well” with them, as they most certainly do with Yongsu’s Mother. In the summer of 1994 I made random observations of eighteen kut and minor offerings (ch’isông), which also included manifestations of the gods and ancestors in tragicomic portrayals.9 I went to two of these kut with Yongsu’s Mother, and for the rest, I bumbled into kuttang, the commercial shaman shrines in the mountains surrounding Seoul and, with the persuasive Ms. Kim as my research assistant, gained permission to observe and ask questions.10 The summer is a slow season, and the record-breaking heat of the summer of 1994 was particularly daunting at a time when most kuttang still relied on cross drafts for cooling or, at best, an electric fan. On those sweltering July days when even popular kuttang were silent, we could usually find some shaman at work with her clients on the mountain slope behind one particular shrine at an altar sacred to the Mountain God (Sansin’gak). Shamans and clients were necessarily suspicious of a foreign observer with a notebook and a camera, sometimes confusing the role of scholar with that of the journalist who would splash the intimate details of their kut onto the pages of the popular press. A few had suffered unpleasant exposure in the past, even literal exposure with published pictures of the shamans changing their clothes. Some clients were sponsoring covert kut and were anxious lest their husbands discover what they had been up to. Because many Seoul shamans are now aware and proud of international scholarly interest in their work, my academic credentials were helpful, up to a point, but I was more effective in establishing rapport when I described my own involvement in the shaman world as a client who had sponsored rituals, had prayed on sacred mountains, and was familiar with the ritual vocabulary. In each instance, I combined a brief interview with hours spent observing the interactions between clients, gods, and ancestors. The advice and recriminations put forth by the spirits revealed the client’s motivation for sponsoring a kut and allowed me to retrieve a more full-blooded story than could be garnered out of context by simply asking, “Why are you doing this kut?” Questions posed of clients before the start of a ritual usually prompted cursory summations: “I’m doing this for my business.” “My husband is ill.” “Things aren’t going so well.” Such pro forma remarks, precisely because they are pro forma, lend themselves to tabulation, and had I chosen to rush from ritual to ritual and shrine to shrine, firing questions on the way, I might have assembled a satisfactory universe of quantifiable data. I would not, however, have gained a textured sense of what these kut


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were all about, would never have retrieved the like of Mrs. Pok’s story, as recounted above. Before her kut, she had told me that she was holding the ritual because of the pain in her legs, but her illness, like Mrs. Yi’s aches and pains, was only the tip of the iceberg. After we had watched for awhile, Mrs. Pok went on at great length about her business and her suspicions regarding envious neighbors who were also her business competitors. “People are greedy,” she said. “They might even take ritual measures” (as she, herself, was taking ritual measures). My initial hunch was correct. Fully fifteen of the eighteen sponsors of kut were engaged in some form of small business, although they ranged across a spectrum of wealth and opportunity from the proprietors of small factories (for stainless steel and for quilt stuffing), a mushroom-importing business, restaurants, and shops to a freelance furniture mover, the proprietress of a hole-in-the-wall bar, and an electrician. In some instances the women who sponsored the kut also ran the family business, as Mrs. Pok did. The mushroom-importing business and the two restaurants were family enterprises, while the proprietors of the two small factories, the electrician, and the furniture mover were husbands or sons of the women who sponsored the kut. Divinations revealed that in addition to these enterprises, several of the female sponsors also dabbled in real estate. What then about the Popular Culture Movement’s romantic claim that shaman practices express the concerns of the most victimized segments of Korean society? Only three of the sponsors in my sample would in any sense fit the profile of marginalized proletarians: a laborer who had retired from a major newspaper to work in his brother’s factory and had incurred a huge debt through a fraud perpetrated by his own son-in-law, a domestic worker married to a laborer whose daughter had gone mad, and a floating bar hostess who aspired to a bar of her own. Conspicuously absent from my sample were the households of salaried corporate workers and civil servants, those who inhabit the more secure and respectable rungs of the South Korean middle class. I did hear in shrines, and in conversations with shamans, that the wives of these men would sponsor kut to secure their husbands’ promotions and that high monopolists would themselves sponsor kut, but I did not encounter them. Members of the upper middle class are discreet, and their kut are more likely to enter the fieldnotes of scholars who work closely with “superstar shamans” (Chungmoo Choi’s term [1991]). Shamans complained bitterly that prominent industrialists and politicians hold their kut in secret and that, as a consequence, the luster of these associations does not rub off on the mudang profession. It was also logical that the households of middle-rank white-collar workers or civil servants would be absent from my


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sample. In the early 1990s those whose futures rested on relatively stable and predictable salaried employment would be far less inclined to sponsor kut than those imbued with the “adventurous, aggressive, risk-taking, highroller element,” which, as Michael Taussig reminds us, has had as much or more to do with capitalism than has Calvin’s or Max Weber’s Protestant ethic (Taussig 1995, 394). Despite great variation in the circumstances of the petty capitalist entrepreneurs who were the majority of my sample, they have in common a need for gambler’s luck. The internal dramas of their kut turn on risk, uncertainty, and the potential for sudden and severe loss. These kut resonate with the observations of other scholars working in industrialized societies who find that ritual activity crops up with great intensity and elaboration in times and places characterized by uncertainty and chance (Bocock 1974; Gillis 1985, 260–261). Resonant, too, is an observation by the seventeenth-century folklorist Sir Thomas Browne: “ ’Tis not ridiculous devotion to say a prayer before a game at tables” (quoted in K. Thomas 1971, 115). With the exception of five kut, every ritual in my sample addressed issues of business success or failure as a primary concern and motive for ritual sponsorship, while the gods and ancestors routinely offered prognostications of wealth or good business in all eighteen rituals.11 Several kut addressed loss or the threat of loss—two failing restaurants, a fraudulent claim on an order of mushrooms, responsibility for a debt fraudulently incurred by another, and Mrs. Pok’s flower shop. Business concerns sometimes came bundled with other issues, like the pain in Mrs. Pok’s legs or Mrs. Yi’s aches and pains or the financial anxieties that caused husbands to drink to excess, undermine their health, and abuse their wives. Materialist spirits The gods that the shamans manifested in these eighteen kut and ch’isông solidly inhabited the world of family enterprise, announcing themselves through the shamans’ lips as “the Spirit Warrior of Business, the Spirit Warrior of Commerce, the Electrician’s Spirit Warrior, the Commerce Official of the XX Flower Shop” (Changsa Sinjang, Yôngôp Sinjang, Chônôpkisul Sinjang, XX Hwawôn Sangôp Taegam). For the proprietors of a faltering rib restaurant (kalbijip): “I am the Official of the Kitchen, the Official of the Kitchen Knife [important equipment in a rib house], the Official of the Restaurant Counter” (Chubang Taegam, Chubang K’al Taegam, K’aunt’ô Taegam). The shamans’ songs and divinations packaged auspicious prognostications in the imagery of client enterprises. For Mrs. Pok: “Bunches of


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flowers are going in [to fill a large order], whether sitting or standing you will hear the sound of the door [opening constantly for clients]. . . . Those who come in will not leave empty-handed. The luck of the XX Flower Shop will open wide.” For the electrician: “Though my client goes east, west, south, and north . . . I will help so that there will be no power failure.” For a family that runs a travel agency, the Official of the Vehicle (Ch’a Taegam) will “seize the front tire and seize the back tire and move the tour bus to an auspicious place.” Babe often claimed to spot, among her client families’ household gods, the active presence of Grandfather Sage (Tosa Harabôji). Okkyông’s Mother described him as “an ancestral grandfather who studied a great deal,” and she instructed, “Honor him and you will get lots of money.” I was not familiar with this god until I saw him in 1992, although the mansin assured me that he had a venerable pedigree. He enjoyed a surge of popularity in Babe’s visions, for in addition to the Yi and Pak family kut, held within a week of each other, a Grandfather Sage was also found, almost immediately thereafter, among the Protestant American ancestors of my husband’s family. Grandfather Sage appears in kut wearing the long, broad-sleeved robe and crownlike hat of a man of letters, the very costume worn by a manikin in scholarly pose in the American Museum of Natural History’s “Korea” exhibit. But when Babe manifests Grandfather Sage, she gives him the fullbellied waddle of a rich man, rather than the decorous gait of a scholar.12 This conflated imagery suits Grandfather Sage’s message. In a manner that reminded me of Kwan Myôngnyô’s enthusiasm, the similarly youthful Babe gushed to me about the great amounts of money her clients had made after honoring Grandfather Sage. Like Kwan Myôngnyô’s father, who entered her shrine as a Spirit Warrior and subsequently helped his children gain wealth, Grandfather Sage is among those potent ancestors who, if recognized and honored as gods, benefit the family but who, if neglected, bring hardship and strife. Grandfather Sage’s ancestral wisdom and virtue, his “cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1977, 188–189), are thus magically transformed into economic capital, not in the manner that pundits had in mind when claiming that a Confucian heritage predisposes Koreans for capitalism. Class acts The South Korean elite—a constellation of capitalist, military, and political interests—flowered in the late twentieth century from roots struck in the colonial period, an awkward replacement for the landed Confucian nobility who were politically dispossessed under Japanese rule and then saw the


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land reform that followed Liberation erode their economic dominance in the countryside (O. Cho 1987; Koo 1987; Eckert 1993). Eckert describes how early Korean capitalists of the colonial period found it necessary to construct an image of the businessman as a moral paragon in order to circumvent the old neo-Confucian contempt for commerce (Eckert 1991, 225). The new capitalist class finds compensation for the lack of a selfjustifying ideology in traditionalist assertions of familism and educational accomplishment, claiming the moral high ground to which a newly minted, broadly defined, and tenuous middle class might also aspire (Abelmann 2003; Cho Hae-joang 2002). At the same time, the elite mobilizes old school ties and family connections as an instrumental means of advancing its own interests while preserving a monopoly of privileged access to information and power (O. Cho 1987; D. Kim 1990).13 This new elite lacks the respect once accorded scholar-officials and learned gentry and will not likely gain it in the wake of periodic corruption scandals. Portrayals of the lifestyles of monopolist families in the popular press and in television soap operas convey an ambivalent image of wealth and power. For shaman and client alike, the assertion that money makes nobility is a counterhegemonic validation of their own experience, at once a wry comment upon and a celebration of contemporary materialism and those who benefit by it. Good clothes, comfortable housing, and private cars give the shamans’ clients visible evidence of new identities constructed upon material success. Shamans themselves maintain elaborately decorated shrines and flourish rings and necklaces as signs of a successful practice, advertisements for the efficacy of gods who have brought them many satisfied clients. Korean elites claim just the opposite, that social standing is a function, not merely of money and the visible consumption of the things that money can buy, but of education, breeding, and family background, attributes that are commonly invoked in discussions of Korean “values” and have a practical validity in elite and middle-class matchmaking (Kendall 1996a, part 2). Lower-strata entrepreneurs like the Kims, Paks, and Yis would claim to value these same qualities, and yet they also know that such significant social capital will not be theirs within the present generation. Instead, Babe manifests for them a noble ancestor in a waddling comic portrayal whose very existence is evidenced in their own business success. The gamble of the marketplace The supernatural Official who figures so prominently in kut for good fortune, promising wealth in exchange for cash but always with the threat of


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A Spirit Warrior sings a song of self-praise with 10,000-won bills stuck under his/her hat, in the hatband at both cheeks, and as a “beard.” The mansin holds the divination flags in her left hand.

ruin, becomes a ready parody of investment particularly well-suited to the current zeitgeist. If, as the shaman Yongsu’s Mother sees it, anxiety over money ultimately makes people ill, then the antics of greedy gods are arguably therapeutic, injecting a capacity for laughter into the serious business of finance. The gamble of the marketplace assumes the possibility of luck, nurtured in the Korean shaman shrines in abiding relationships with the spirits. The shamans who perform into being the Spirit Warrior of Commerce or the Commerce Official of the Florist Shop offer connections with a spirit world that matches their clients’ own, where relationships with the gods are conducted in the idiom of a bargain and the rituals themselves are risky investments against an uncertain future. Despite the wicked impulse to pun in my chapter title, it should be obvious by now that I do not see shamanic practices as fueling a particularly Korean “spirit” of high-risk capitalism. Max Weber, who held that advanced capitalism moved to the drumbeat of rationalization and had no place for spirits and magic, who explicitly distinguished his “spirit of capitalism” from “the impulse to acquisition,


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pursuit of gain, of money” (Weber 1958, 14, 17), would undoubtedly turn over in his grave at the things described here. These stories from the Korean shaman world are more in sympathy with R. H. Tawney’s remarks in his introduction to the English translation of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, suggesting that while much can be learned by tracing the influence of religious ideas on economic development, “it is no less instructive to grasp the effect of the economic arrangements accepted by an age on the opinion which it holds of the province of religion” (ibid., 11). The client entrepreneurs described here are a petit bourgeoisie in the classic Marxist sense; they control their own elementary means of production, be it a small shop, an electrician’s tool kit, a furniture-mover’s truck, or a stock of imported mushrooms, but they do not in any sense control or consciously influence the market forces that govern their enterprises. They accept the terms of the marketplace, but like many in similar circumstances, they regard the market as animate, arbitrary, and risk-ridden. In Taussig’s reading of Marx, they are, with the rest of the capitalized world, within the domain of the commodity fetish (Taussig 1980, 31). But this is not something that came upon them suddenly, as Taussig posited for the Colombian cane cutters; the lost world of their youth was not a place of precapitalist innocence. The story of Korean agriculture under colonial rule (1910–1945) is a tale of expanding markets, intense population pressure, increasing tenancy, and out-migration (Cumings 1997, chap. 3; Gragert 1994; H. F. Williams 1982). More recent decades saw intensive capitalization and mechanization as the rural population shrank (Sorensen 1988). The metaphoric linkage of house and household in the beliefs and practices I observed in the 1970s, a system that acknowledged the danger of wealth carried in and out of the house walls, was an appropriate reflection of the small family farm within an increasingly commercialized economy. A few decades ago, sudden and often inexplicable illness posed the most immediate threat to the integrity and continuity of a rural family. The shamans’ perception that, in the past, kut were usually held in response to life-threatening illness whereas by the 1990s most clients sought material wealth makes perfect sense in light of the medical options and economic possibilities available to them. Entrepreneurs’ households are vulnerable to human fallibility, bad debts, thieving employees, fraud, and the fluctuations of the overheated market, both local and global. A system of religious practices oriented toward the health, harmony, and prosperity of the small family farm has been recalibrated to match the aspirations and anxieties of petty entrepreneurs. In the early 1990s the fate of these families hung on external market forces in a moment of high opportunity and danger.


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Crisis Writing in the mid-1990s, I had described the activities of shamans and clients as “one means by which some ‘modern’ and ‘middle-class’ people both play and reflect upon a game whose odds are most likely stacked against them” (Kendall 1996c, 523), sadly prophetic words. While I had written from the vantage point of small shopkeepers and informal credit, a highrisk game was also being played at the top. Korean banks had been receiving short-term foreign currency loans at low rates, then loaning them out at higher rates valued in wôn, a profitable arrangement so long as the wôn remained stable and the foreign currency lenders remained willing to roll over the loans. In the fall of 1997, either spooked by sinking markets in Southeast Asia or simply in need of capital, lenders began to take money out of Korea, forcing Korean banks to call in their loans. This betrayed the magnitude of debt within the overextended chaebôl, the conglomerates that dominated the Korean economy, where money had been lent and loans guaranteed between divisions in such a complex way that no one outside the structure knew the precise figures or the source of liability (D. Park and Rhee 1998; Root et al. 1999). Despite a campaign for financial reform initiated well before the crash, government oversight had been inadequate at best. The bankruptcy of the Hanbo Iron and Steel Company in early 1997, a harbinger of other bankruptcies to come, revealed that state-controlled banks, the major creditors of Korean chaebôl, had extended loans to Hanbo well beyond the legally permissible limits (Pollack 1997). With the flight of foreign credit in the fall, the Bank of Korea went through billions of dollars of its own reserves in a futile attempt to arrest the wôn’s precipitous slide. It was not to be. Owing to the wôn’s free-fall, the foreign debt load doubled in the space of a month. In December 1997, nearly depleted of reserves and facing default, the Bank of Korea requested financial aid from the International Monetary Fund. The government agreed to accept the IMF’s conditions for stabilizing the economy, measures that would be widely resented in South Korea (S. Suh 1998). The regulation and tightening of credit limited flagging businesses’ access to cash, causing further defaults along precariously balanced chains of credit (Strom 1998). Devaluation of the wôn brought inflation, particularly with respect to foreign commodities (S. Suh 1998). South Korea depends on imported petroleum for fuel and on grain for food and animal feed, while iron ore and coking coal are also significant imports. The high cost of sugar was felt in every home, but poorer households, which devoted a larger portion of their income to food and fuel, bore the brunt of devaluation (Y. Y Lee and


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Lee 2000). The IMF’s insistence on “labor market flexibility” (widespread layoffs) combined with the business failures already precipitated by credit failures, increased the scope of unemployment. Although the government had been urging labor market rationalization and accountability in market transactions for some time, many South Koreans viewed capitulation to the IMF demands as an act of national humiliation, even as the citizenry, in happier times, had been encouraged to view South Korea’s prosperity as their common triumph. In intellectual circles there was talk of the IMF’s having established a “trusteeship” over South Korea (Cho Hae-joang 1998b, 1) and of the country’s “annexation” by the IMF, of “living under IMF rule” (H. Park 1997), the bitter language of the colonial past. The pervasive sense of powerlessness Koreans felt at that moment was effectively fetishized in small novelty dolls sold at rest stops along Korean highways, a little black figure, an image of foreignness, tightly bound and gagged and bearing on its chest the legend “IMF.” I returned to Korea in the spring of 1998, the IMF era (IMF sidae) as it was dubbed in promotions for IMF bargain sales and economy meals of IMF burgers or instant packaged noodles—attempts by struggling entrepreneurs to encourage consumption in the name of thrift. With rumors that the worst layoffs were still to come, everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like old ghosts from another time, images of unemployed men sleeping in public parks, abandoned children, and suicides haunted the media and nearly every conversation. While no precipitous disaster had as yet befallen my immediate contacts, everyone seemed to have been affected in at least some small way. The struggling shopkeeper or restaurant proprietor found it difficult to muster even a scrap of optimism for better times, the cab driver sat idle for hours in a queue of empty vehicles waiting for a fare, the dance instructor’s long-standing classes for bank employees were cancelled for lack of funds, the civil servant wondered if he would still have a job after the next anticipated round of layoffs. While the reforms imposed by the IMF had been touted as ushering in a new era of transparency and accountability in the banking and corporate sectors (E. H. Kim 1998), for people on the street, the future was illegible. And things would get worse. Unemployment would peak at 8.4 percent in the first quarter of 1999, a three- to fourfold increase over immediate precrisis rates and significantly higher than in the early 1980s, before the Korean economy had achieved its globally recognized “miracle” status (J. Lee and Rhee 2000).14 The number of homeless persons, all but nonexistent in precrisis Seoul, would rise to 2,550 by the fall of 1998. Into 1999, businesses would continue to fail at three times the precrisis rates. The


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demise of certain chaebôl would command press attention, but most bankruptcies would occur among small and medium-sized companies, touching the sorts of people that I have been writing about. Local governments would trim civil service jobs by 12 percent (Y. Y Lee and Lee 2000). By the turn of the millennium, the crisis was officially over, and South Korea’s gross domestic product was exceeding precrisis levels (J. Lee and Rhee 2000), but this model recovery had been won at some cost, most immediately experienced as shrinking employment prospects. Manufacturing and construction retrenched, and with the rationalization of corporate and public sector employment, college students who once anticipated professional or managerial careers and participation in a much-idealized middle-class lifestyle were competing for positions formerly held by high school graduates. The most marginal members of the economy—female, less educated, and less experienced workers—were the most likely to be unemployed. More generally, economic restructuring meant a notching down of the spectacular dreams of social and economic advancement that had typified South Korean life before the crisis (ibid; Y. Y. Lee and Lee 2000). The IMF and the Korean Shaman World In the spring of 1998, after the market collapse of the previous fall, I went to one of the Gong Granny’s kut. When the supernatural Official began to complain over the quality of the offerings, as Officials are wont to do, I heard a shaman shout from the sidelines in her clients’ defense, “It’s all because of the IMF. We’ll do better next time.” The shamans repeated this line in similar repartee throughout the afternoon. It had become a standard refrain. Greedy gods and the IMF: the former was an apt personification of the potent but volatile market bestowing both largess and ruin, and the latter, as invoked in those anxious days, had become something more than the international financial organization based in Washington, D.C., or even the list of stringent conditions that body had imposed on Korea the previous December in exchange for financial aid to alleviate the collapsing market. Instead, “IMF” had become “a household word symbolizing economic difficulties and national disgrace” (S. Suh 1998, 34), the shorthand for a climate of despair, a climate in the sense of a force of nature, invisible in its onset but devastating in its consequences. The IMF era had hit the shaman world. Shamans were seeing clients who had lost their jobs, clients at risk of losing their jobs, clients at risk of losing their businesses, clients at risk of losing their investments because


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they could not meet their payments, clients who had taken defaults on the credit they had extended to family or friends, clients experiencing domestic violence as a consequence of economic stress, and suicides. While none of this was beyond the shamans’ pre-IMF experience, and the link between financial anxiety and domestic stress was familiar, desperate financial circumstances had become the order of the day in the IMF era. In that cruel spring, Yang Posal opined, “There isn’t anything that doesn’t come from the IMF.” Yongsu’s Mother and some other shamans spoke of kut performed to preserve white-collar jobs, something relatively unknown when the corporate world promised relatively stable employment, leaving chance, volatility, and risk to small businesses. The potential instability of corporate employment, the fate of men like Mrs. Pok’s husband, had been recognized by the early 1990s, but now anyone in corporate employment could weigh the possibility of being “rationalized” out of a job.15 A climate of optimism—stoked by the palpable possibility of material advancement and embodied in greedy gods cackling over fistfuls of cash—had been transformed into a pervasive ambience of blocked opportunity and declining fortune. Yongsu’s Mother diagnosed her clients’ problems within the logic of her own experience, offering rituals to purge the spirits of frustration and anger and bring families to a more auspicious state. During one of my visits, a neighbor woman stopped by on her way home from the clinic, miserable with the aches, dizziness, and stomach pain that I would call “flu” but Koreans attribute to sheer exhaustion (momsal). I had first met this woman in the early 1980s, when she sold cups of sweetened instant coffee in the market, a cheerful and energetic vendor equipped with a large red plastic thermos. From her perch, she had studied the market and dreamed of bigger things, possibly a shoe stall. Her husband was handicapped, and she was the primary breadwinner for her three-generation family. Against the shaman’s advice (so Yongsu’s Mother claimed in retrospect), she had gone from her successful coffee enterprise to clothing, and when that failed, leaving her in debt, to vending the hearty soups that are said to be good for a hangover. She had recently entrusted the equivalent of several thousand U.S. dollars to a friend, but the friend had lost the money in some failed financial scheme. The betrayal was particularly galling because she had honored a second request for money from this same friend and given it in the firm belief that the entire debt would be honored. “These days, you can’t trust anyone,” she said. The loss was a cause of continuing upset, paired in her conversation with complaints of her aches and pains, and this was not her only problem. An attempt to repair the family bathroom had gone awry, requiring yet


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more costly repairs and yet more debt. Her pained and weathered face carried no trace of the buoyant market woman I remembered. Her story was like many others that I had heard before the IMF era. Physically ill, she had summoned Yongsu’s Mother a few nights previously, and Yongsu’s Mother had exorcised her with a pelting of millet to drive away ominous forces and verify supernatural agency through a slight improvement in the woman’s condition. Both shaman and client also accepted that the client’s aches and pains were somehow connected to her larger burden of anxiety, or as Yongsu’s Mother had said of Mrs. Yi and now said again, “people worry about money until it makes them ill.” In the shaman’s view, shared by the client who had called her to perform the exorcism, the things that made this woman anxious, her financial troubles, were a consequence of problematic relations between her family and their gods and ancestors. Yongsu’s Mother also saw her client’s situation within the frame of bad times and almost nil options. “Will they sponsor a kut?” I asked when the woman had left. “Don’t be silly. With all that debt, where would they get the money for a kut? We’ll just do a simple offering in the shrine.” Shamans inevitably felt the economic crisis reverberate in their own practice when clients in need of kut could not afford them, even at reduced prices. The South Korean media did not hesitate to berate shamans for profiting from the economic crisis, but this was a predictable reaction (Seong-nae Kim 1998). The shamans, too, were taking a loss. In some quarters, the shamans’ ability to see the future was in great demand, but the IMF era was confounding the Fairy Maid and Ms. Shin with clients who wanted something more than good words from a shaman. Both women were troubled by the expectations of clients in desperate circumstances. According to the Fairy Maid: I do a great deal of praying for them of course, but I can’t solve all their problems. It’s difficult for me because I can’t satisfy them. I say to such people, “I’m not a god. It’s beyond my power. You need to cultivate your own strength. In today’s language, it would be easier if you thought of this as ‘counseling’ [she uses the English word].” Like the Fairy Maid, but with more anguish than impatience, Ms. Shin expressed pain over her inability to help her clients: I tell them, “I’m not someone who has control over the economy.” I tell them, “I don’t even understand very much about the economy.


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I’m not connected to it.” What I really want to do is help them, set their minds at ease, but in these troubled times that’s almost impossible. I tell them, “It will be better in a few days. If you can just get by until next month, it’ll be all right. Don’t worry.” I can’t do much more than this for them. I don’t have the power to get them a job in a company. Since it’s the economy that weighs on their hearts, I can’t possibly give them a satisfactory resolution. . . . There are people who have nothing. It hurts me deep in my heart. There are so many cases where I can’t lift their spirits, and that hurts me too. I’ve been a shaman for fifteen years, and I’ve never felt so bad. . . . There are families in difficulties, families where they can’t afford to send their children to school. . . . There are people who can’t afford to go to a proper hospital. They could be crippled for life in some of those small clinics. . . . I don’t want to take their money, . . . Even though I might have nice things to tell them from the spirits, who can resolve their situation? . . . I’m a human being, just like everyone else. I eat, I shit, I piss. What I know is what the spirits have given me to know. . . . If I call them and they don’t come, then I can’t do anything. She had told my friend, Professor C., long before the crisis, that some disaster would befall Korea in the fall of 1997, something on the magnitude of a war. Now, several months after the onset of the crisis, Professor C. asks, “Was this it? Was it the IMF?” And the shaman answered, “Because the Grandfathers in my shrine are spirits, I don’t know whether they knew about the IMF or not. They didn’t tell me. What I heard was only the constant sound of their mourning and weeping ringing in my ears.” The wordless crying of her spirits was a fitting image of Ms. Shin’s frustration. The IMF as a cosmic force Anthropologists are no longer surprised when ethnographic accounts of witchcraft, spirit possession, or shamanic practices grapple with the ominous forces of a precarious market and with the risks attendant upon modernity processes more generally. In South Korea, as elsewhere, such things are not “false consciousness” in the sense that practitioners have a naïve, innocent, or even precapitalist perception of how markets work. Rather, as in equivalent situations in other places, the shaman’s clients understand full well that the market is fraught with risk, with dangerous but inevitable elements of


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unpredictability. The consultations and rituals that clients and shamans perform together articulate anxieties that are the very stuff of experience, no less global than local (cf. Meyer 1998, 768; Weller 1994, 162). Warnings from a few farsighted financial pundits aside (Pollack 1997), how many experts really anticipated the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997? Even warnings aside, economists have suggested that it would have been impossible to predict the precise conjunction of influences that caused the Korean market to fall exactly when it did (D. Park and Rhee 1998). It was as illegible as the weeping of spirits. As Evans-Pritchard (1976) recognized long ago, questions of “Why me? Why now? Why not my neighbor?” are at the core of much popular religious practice. In South Korean popular religion, such questions are posed and answered within the frame of family and household, where the consequences of economic and other crises are most directly experienced, a frame that also circumscribes the jurisdiction of gods and, by extension, the power of shamans.16 The failure of my own business, and my neighbor’s run of good luck, may be influenced by “preventive measures,” kut, and exorcisms, but these devices are relative to a larger economic climate over which gods, shamans, and small business owners have no control. A few celebrities aside, Korean shamans are typically reluctant to divine beyond the particular fortunes of client families. In the summer of 1994, war talk was rife in the wake of reports that North Korea was stockpiling nuclear weapons. The Gong Granny chuckled over clients who telephoned her wanting to know whether an attack was imminent, whether they should start stockpiling rice. She considered such questions as laughable, well beyond the capability of her gods. Momentous political and economic events are beyond the shamans’ agency, just as shamans are powerless to affect the cosmic system that sets one’s fate by the hour, day, month, and year of one’s birth. Kut and other offerings that secure the gods’ and ancestors’ good favor and exorcisms that expel ominous forces blunt the worst effects of a bad horoscope, but shamans claim no ultimate influence over the mechanistic forces that order the cosmos in which the gods and their human counterparts abide (Kendall 1985, 94–99). Likewise, in the spring of 1998 “the IMF” claimed a presence touching all lives, above and beyond the powers attributed to household gods and ancestors or the guardian gods that empowered individual shamans. On the order of a cosmic force, shamans aptly characterized their clients’ frustrations in the IMF era through their common expression for an impasse of cosmological fortune, “môga makta” (something is blocked) or “uni makta” (fortune is blocked). Shamanic voices from this time indicate that


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there are moments when global politicoeconomic forces can be so well concealed in their onset and so all-pervasively devastating in their consequences as to render the gods mute and impotent—at least for a time. In the spring of 1998 “the IMF” had taken on a life of its own, connoting not the promised transparency and fiscal accountability but a welter of concealed powers in distant places, both foreign and domestic, whose veiled operations had wreaked havoc not only on the abstraction of “nation” but on many simple lives. The image of a silent and powerless spirit world in the face of this thing called the IMF was a fair reflection of what many South Koreans were feeling. But the shamans I have been describing are too articulate to be silenced for long. By that spring they were drawing the dreaded IMF into the local logic of Korean shamanic practice as a force that must be recognized, even though it be beyond the reach of their own powers. Even as they had sung to their entrepreneurial clients about the sound of the shop door opening and closing, or had given their restaurateur clients a supernatural Official of the Kitchen Knife, shamans were confronting the IMF as “experienced practitioners” in the Comaroffs’ sense, as ritual specialists who are skilled in making “universal signs speak to particular realities” (Jean Comaroff and Comaroff 1993a, xxii). Shamans at the Gong Granny’s kut turned the blame for insufficient offerings back onto the IMF itself. A few days later I heard a client ask Yang Posal to work some harm on the supervisor who had caused her husband to lose his job. “Don’t worry,” the young shaman told her with a chuckle. “My gods tell me that it will all be resolved by the fall. The IMF will take care of it.” In the new millennium the long shadow of the IMF had receded, but in 2002 and 2003 Yang Posal saw its lingering influence in the number of clients who still feared losing their positions, or hoped to find one, or had gone into business on their own as a result of company layoffs. She saw the hand of the IMF when clients’ children overspent on their now easily acquired credit cards; she called it the credit card era (k’adΔ sidae). For clients who lived abroad or engaged in foreign trade, the mansin’s gods had broadened their reach in the new millennium. Minju’s Mother told a complicated story about some clients doing business in China whose son had been detained but was released unharmed, thanks to shamanic prayers. In 2002 the Fairy Maid also claimed several clients who were trading in China, people who asked her about the soundness of their investments, when the money would come in, and whether they could trust the local Chinese (probably KoreanChinese) brokers on whom they necessarily depended. In the late summer of 2001, Yang Posal, troubled by a dream about a client family living in New


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York, made a long-distance telephone call and urged them to placate the spirits. She relates how, a very short time after, their lower Manhattan business was spared damage from the collapsing World Trade Center, and they were all safe. Shamans continue to engage in “experienced practice” even as their world continues to change. Conclusion We have learned from the work of Ana Mariella Bacigalupo (2007), Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer (1996b, 2001), Jean Comaroff (1985), Caroline Humphrey (1999), June Nash (1979), Aihwa Ong (1987), Lesley Sharp (1993), Michael Taussig (1980, 1987), and, for Korea, Seong-nae Kim (1989a, 1989b, 1992, 2003a) and me (Kendall 1996c, 2003) that “religion,” “spirit possession,” and “shamanism” are not dead or fixed categories but mobile instruments of popular consciousness that respond to the “particular realities” of politics and economics, sometimes on a global scale. Most of this work addresses the religious experiences of disadvantaged and marginalized peoples, a perspective that must necessarily be broadened to places like South Korea and people like tenuously middle-class entrepreneurs, lest we replicate older dichotomies: the oppressed practice an inarticulate and natural-seeming popular religion (Bourdieu’s doxa), while the dominant class espouses rationality or at least rational-seeming orthodoxies (Bourdieu 1977, 169; K. Thomas 1971, 666). Jean Comaroff (1994) cautions against stereotypic dualisms that make the cosmic chaos of modernity the flip side of traditional order and that spatialize this contrast as “the West and the rest.” I am concerned lest an otherwise fruitful interest in the religious consciousness of the oppressed lead us to swallow uncritically a just-so story about modernity and class. While the notion that Korean shaman rituals articulate the grievances of the oppressed minjung is compatible with a historical narrative South Koreans tell about themselves, an active shamanic practice that grapples daily with business risk has left the minjung far behind. Small-scale entrepreneurs like the Kims, Paks, and Yis are no less in need of enchantment as they grapple with an uncertain market. Their religious practices, no less than those of the peasants, miners, and proletarians described in other places, are a means of apprehending, of attempting to exert some control over seemingly arbitrary market motion. The work of shamans, spirits, and clients described here offers another instance of how, in the Comaroffs’ words, “lived realities defy easy dualisms”: “Worlds everywhere are complex fusions of what we like to call modernity and magi-


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cality, rationality and ritual, history and the here and now” (John Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, 5). The emergent quality of shaman rituals addresses the world of struggling entrepreneurs through the appearances of Officials and Spirit Warriors of Business and Commerce and songs improvised to celebrate the appearance of customers who pay with cash and not credit. The next chapter offers a close-in example of shamans, gods, and ancestors incorporating new material into the magical space of a kut—in this instance the literal material of physical props—to make meaning and induce therapeutic laughter.


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6 Of Hungry Ghosts and Other Matters of Consumption

This chapter extends the shamans’ observation that “money makes nobility.” It explores as contradictory impulses the desire for and the moral disdain of new wealth and what it can buy. Shamans, gods, and ancestors enact this contemporary paradox through the medium of material goods, as well as words, making the business of kut resonant with the emotions and experiences of clients like the struggling but optimistic entrepreneurs described in the last chapter. We have already encountered ritual play with things, gods cackling appreciatively over tubs of steamed rice cake that they hoist triumphantly to their heads, contemptuously scrutinizing a pig’s head or bantering over the scrawny chicken. We have seen Chini’s dead father sharing a cup of wine with his long-suffering wife, even as he lamented the heavy drinking that precipitated his own early death, Princess Hogu breathlessly fingering her pretty new crown, and the Child Gods in Yongsu’s Mother’s shrine simpering over the chocolate I brought them “on an airplane.” Through the aperture of offerings, and offerings turned into props, new marketplace commodities—exotic fruit, foreign whisky, that gaudy box of chocolates—enter ritual space. As static offerings, such goods index changing tastes and the ability to finance them. When taken up as props, these same objects provoke mime and commentary about and around the things themselves, no less than does the more traditional kut fare of pigs’ heads and tubs of rice cake. In recent rituals some object-centered commentary addresses the moral ambiguities of consumption, and the nuances of this commentary are best appreciated by focusing on the props themselves. More generally, a focus on props enriches interpretations of shamanic and mediumistic rituals 154


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Offerings in a mansin’s shrine in the early 1990s. The toys, snack food, cookies, and candy are for the Child Gods.


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Of Hungry Ghosts and Other Matters of Consumption

as emergent, situation-contingent performances, a theme that runs through this entire study. Consider how a whisky bottle becomes a prop in the following incident, reconstructed from my fieldnotes for June 1992, an event both recognizable to type and unique in its specific improvisations. Encounter with a greedy god On this particular occasion, the bantering client is me. I sponsored this kut to thank the gods and ancestors (and their shaman counterparts) for assisting Diana Lee and me in a filmmaking project and as an opportunity to garner extra footage of our subjects in action.1 Between 1977 and 2003, I sponsored five kut in addition to attending so many others that I long ago lost count. Yongsu’s Mother performs the kut, assisted by her colleague, Okkyông’s Mother, and her then apprentice, Babe. The setting is Yongsu’s Mother’s shrine, decorated today with carefully constructed piles of fruit, candy, steamed rice cake, fried flour pancakes, and a large brass offering vessel piled with rice grain. Babe shows me how she has carved a Buddhist swastika into the green rind of a large watermelon. As centerpiece and index of the lavishness of my offerings, Yongsu’s Mother bought a full side of pork ribs and a steamed cow’s head, the ribs flanked with cans of beer and a token bottle of traditional milky rice wine. From my lump-sum cash payment, the mansin pile bills in 10,000-wôn denominations (each roughly equivalent to US$10) on top of the vessel of rice, on all of the offering trays, and on the laps of the devotional images in the shrine. As a common practice for kut in and around Seoul, Yongsu’s Mother gives me back a thick wad of cash to dole out during the kut to satisfy the gods’ and ancestors’ demands. I have, in effect, already “spent” the cash; it comes to me as stage money that can be used only for my dealings with gods and ancestors in the ritual frame of the kut. As in other kut I have sponsored, the spirits’ demands will exceed the returned cash, forcing me to dig into my own pockets, blurring pure play with playful extortion. Within the logic of shamanic performance, great piles of money inspire the shamans to make robust manifestations of the gods who guffaw with pleasure and dance and sing, casting their favor on the client. When I invited her to this kut, my former landlady and fictive mother—knowing my academic frugality—was worried that I would not make an appropriately lavish display and win the gods’ necessary favor, would not inspire them to raise their arms in lively dancing and shriek with delight. She offered to lend me money. Several other gods, appearing in sequence, precede the arrival of the Spirit Warrior, making predictable complaints about my offerings, asking


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for additional paraphernalia, and then promising me good fortune after I have bantered and doled out sufficient cash. The Child Gods demand more candy. When I try to joke that too much candy is not good for them, Okkyông’s Mother reprimands me, “Tell them to eat a lot,” so they will like me. The kut turns on displays of largess, not adult cautions. The most demanding, and consequently the most amusing, gods are, of course, the Official and the Spirit Warrior, who tweak giggling clients’ breasts and demand dancing partners, or exhibit the god’s lusty appetites by making phallic thrusts in the client’s direction with dried fish and other stiff, straight objects. Officials might show their contempt for the client’s cash by wiping their rumps with it. Because the Official is identified with the success of the family enterprise, and the Spirit Warrior with business, the two gods’ antics are often conflated in contemporary kut, as they will be today. Okkyông’s Mother hits the drum and Babe strikes the cymbals as Yongsu’s Mother starts to dance, picking up speed to a throbbing rhythm when Yongsu’s Mother starts to jump, rotating on the balls of her feet. The music stops. In the persona of the Spirit Warrior, Yongsu’s Mother cackles as she throws her arms out wide and high to indicate the piles of offerings it would take to satisfy her. The god surveys the meat, fruit, and rice cake, his mouth scrunched into a masklike scowl resembling the snout of a pig, and regards me with theatrical contempt.2 With comic overstatement, the god gives my ears a tug that brings me to my knees and then pantomimes playing a Korean flute and fiddle; I should have hired musicians for the kut. Stepping out of character on my behalf, Yongsu’s Mother removes a wad of bills from her purse and piles them on the cow’s head with a 100,000-wôn money order on top, then motions for me to roll two of my own 10,000wôn bills and stick them in the cow’s ears. In the Spirit Warrior’s persona, the god asks a standard question: “My lady client, what are we doing here?” “The Spirit Warrior’s play!” I reply. “The Official’s play!” Okkyông’s Mother proclaims, because this god commonly receives the cow’s head or (more often) pig’s head offering and mimes dissatisfaction, often by tugging on the client’s ears. “That’s right, the Spirit Warrior’s play!” the god declares, as Okkyông’s Mother and I catch each other’s eyes and giggle because Okkyông’s Mother, at this time almost twenty years a shaman, got it wrong. The Spirit Warrior has me decorate both sides of his chin band with bills, the first bill a solitary “widower,” the second greeted with another cackle, “as nice as a widower going into a widow’s room”—predictable but we laugh anyway. The god points to his empty chin and pantomimes stroking an absent beard. He snatches my next offering and shoves it under his hat, as I knew he would. He points to his


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empty chin again. I hold out more money, and he snatches it into his chest band, still hooting with pleasure. Like other clients, I try to resist the god’s demands with bargaining humor: “First make me rich and next time I’ll give you more. Make me rich and next time I’ll take you to a rib restaurant.” Festooned with cash and in a better mood, the Spirit Warrior spies the three bottles of whisky on the altar in front of the god’s portrait: a bottle of Chivas Regal (my gift), a bottle of Johnny Walker Red (from Diana Lee), and a bottle of Korean whisky (another client’s gift). His eyes open wide, and he drags all three bottles off of the altar and surveys them with a triumphant shout, “Ah ha, ha, ha!” “That one’s domestic,” someone says, pointing to the third bottle. “Domestic?!” He contemptuously places it back on the altar to demonstrate the exclusive tastes of an American Spirit Warrior. He drinks a tiny cupful of the Chivas and offers cups to the other shamans, to me, and to all the spectators in place of the soju (domestic vodka) the Spirit Warrior usually drinks and shares with clients for a small fee, and the traditional makkôlli (crude rice wine) the shamans pour out in a libation to the House Site Official and sell to clients for luck during the Official’s play. This is the first time that Okkyông’s Mother has drunk Western liquor; it burns like fire, and she does not like it. The Spirit Warrior, on the other hand, expansively pours himself a second cup, staggers drunkenly, and comments in a conflation of shaman and spirit, slurring his/her speech, “Sweetie, you know, if I drink too mush of thish, I won’t be able to do the kut.” “Stop! Don’t do it!” Okkyông’s Mother, Babe, and I all shout at her, giggling but also sharing real concern that Yongsu’s Mother, unaccustomed to whisky, will intoxicate herself. Yongsu’s Mother mines the moment for full suspense. Finishing his second cup with a slow and deliberate flourish, the Spirit Warrior eyes the bottle with thoughts of a possible third. One of my Seoul friends observes, “This is the brand that President Park Chung-hee drank,” was drinking at the very moment of his assassination. The Spirit Warrior registers this information with pleasure, “If the President could drink it, so should I!” The god scrutinizes the bottle and commands me to bring Chivas Regal to Yongsu’s Mother’s shrine whenever I visit Korea. Twelve years later, Yongsu’s Mother will tell me how the mansin and her regular clients all drank down my latest contribution at the kut celebrating her seventieth birthday and how she ordered Ms. Yang, a younger shaman who likes to work with and learn from her, to bring another bottle on her next visit to the shrine, “expensive foreign liquor like the one Tallae gives me.” The gift has become an extension of our privileged relationship, which Ms. Yang would like to replicate. Yongsu’s Mother will also relate, as miraculous confirmation that the god, not the mansin, drank the


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whisky that she awoke on the morning after this divine carousing without the slightest trace of a hangover. In 1992, aided by the whisky, we are all in a buoyant mood as the kut continues, the Spirit Warrior extracting more money for divinations with the five-direction flags and making lavish promises of good fortune for me and for individual members of my family, boasting in song as he bestows a blessing, “My Spirit Warrior is a wonderful Spirit Warrior, too wonderful for words.” The kut will continue for several hours more, until all of the gods and ancestors of my household are satisfied and all inauspicious forces cast away. This brief description, however, should be sufficient to underscore the play of gods and goods. The bottle of foreign whisky exercises its own pleasurable and potentially dangerous agency over the shaman/Spirit Warrior through the doubled enchantment of an intoxicating offering and a pricy foreign commodity (cf. Gell 1988). Like Velazquez’ Venus, inspiring “Slasher Mary” to vandalism (Gell 1998, 62–65), or the lace that compelled eighteenth-century ladies to commit acts of shoplifting (Pinch 1998), the imported whisky compels the god to keep drinking and threatens to derail the kut with the shaman’s intoxication; it renders desire as palpable, funny, and dangerous. As props can do, it propels action and repartee. Joining in the improvisational moment, a spectator spontaneously recalls the luxurious private tastes of the late President Park Chung-hee, ironically the man most immediately identified with policies of domestic austerity and tight import quotas. The Spirit Warrior promptly equates corrupt presidential prerogatives with those claimed by the god. The bottle of foreign whisky inhabits a distinctively South Korean historical landscape, to which we now turn. Props and ritual play Props are mobile, not static. The whisky moved from the altar to the mansin to the cups that were passed between us. Theater scholars define props as “small items (a sword in an historical play, for instance, or a briefcase) which actors carry onto or around the stage” (SouthWestern District of the Barbershop Harmony Society n.d.), and theatergoers recognize them as “often central in performance”—Desdemona’s handkerchief, for example (Sofer 2003, vi–vii). Ethnographers of ritual also describe objects in motion—symbolically charged and sensually significant offerings and ritual paraphernalia—as integral to the affecting work of ritual (Roseman 1991, 2000, 2001; Valeri 1985) and sometimes, if only in passing, call such things “props” (cf. Balzer 1996b, 311; Laderman 1996, 130–131). In the Wana rituals described


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by Atkinson, the shaman carries a packet of betel fixings on his ascent to the sky; the packet, as the focus of a transaction between human and divine, returns with the shaman as a vehicle for the deity’s “gift of breath” and a stand-in for its human recipient (1989, 183). In the wisdom of Deep Throat’s Watergate-era injunction to “follow the money,” the anthropologist follows the packet of otherwise mundane material as it traverses the heart of the ritual and makes the Wana shaman’s work not just symbolically transparent but possible. In Desjarlais’ Nepalese account, the Yolmo shaman (like many other shamans) does things with things—incense, sacred objects, and grain—to induce in his patient “the visceral sense of renewed health” (1996, 151). A specifically prop-ish understanding of sacred objects and offerings abets the work of those who would go beyond purely symbolist interpretations of ritual objects to more contextual and sensate understandings of the messages that rituals convey and the manner in which ritual business is effectively tailored to or emergent from the specific circumstances of enactment.3 Props move events and cause things to happen (again, Desdemona’s handkerchief but also Princess Hogu’s crown and the bottle of whisky), and props evoke emotional responses (Yorick’s skull but also the cup of wine shared between a dead man and his living wife; Sofer 2003). In Gell’s sense (1998), props have agency—they are regarded as having caused or prompted things to happen—but their agency transpires within the frame of ritual expectations and improvisations. As the two Shakespearean examples suggest, a prop-centered analysis need not throw the symbolist baby out with the bathwater of distanced, intellectualized interpretation. The play of props conveys otherwise elusive nuances regarding the play of things in everyday life, and the ritual prop in the hands of a mansin has much to tell us in places like South Korea, where cash and new commodities shape daily experience, not always comfortably. In the South Korean shaman world a discussion of props and new commodities turned into props becomes a discussion of how hungry ghosts and greedy gods engage and contest the possibilities of consumption in South Korea. I begin by considering how the Official’s bottle of whisky and other foreign commodities signified in the historical context of 1990s South Korea, a time and place where unprecedented material possibility cohabited with memories of an impoverished past. Injunctions to frugality and new outlets for domestic consumption both trafficked in the memory of that past. The story of a disagreement between a shaman and her client’s husband over a bunch of bananas will reveal how the times engendered complex and often contradictory attitudes toward material things and how Korean shamans linked the desires of gods and ancestors to new market possibilities.


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South Korea’s “Gilded Age” In South Korea, a war-ravaged and impoverished nation in the 1950s, industrial projects of the 1960s and 1970s were accompanied by years of government-ordained austerity, “no rice” days, injunctions to frugal rituals and celebrations, and restrictions on foreign goods that were tantalizingly present for some through the back door of American military bases. By 1992, when the Spirit Warrior encountered the bottle of Chivas Regal, South Korea had become a tiger economy, had hosted the 1988 Olympics, and was in the final phase of a transition to a civilian democratic government. The disciplines and surveillances of South Korean life under military dictatorship (1961–1987) were gone, and austerity had given way to enthusiastic conspicuous consumption. Brand-name commodities originally encountered as the forbidden fruit of the black market appeared on the bulging shelves of supermarkets and in neighborhood convenience stores. Department stores featured top-line labels (maeka) and private cars clogged the roads. New patterns of consumption and leisure—from designer blue jeans to health clubs—blossomed, most of them identified as “foreign” but soon firmly rooted in contemporary South Korean social practice (Moon 1997). But even amid this new abundance, consumption remained a patriotic and moral issue. The import of beef, rice, and tobacco, threatening the theretofore-protected domestic market, inspired passionate but ultimately ineffective resistance (Nelson 2000). In 1988, signs strung across Seoul streets proclaimed, “Smoking is bad for your health, smoking foreign cigarettes is bad for the nation’s health,” a moral equation of the human body and the body politic that would be used in the 1990s to encourage the consumption of “healthy” domestic rice rather than “harmful” hamburgers and pizza (Bak 1997; Nelson 2000). In 1991 a Newsweek feature detailing the excesses of South Korean consumption and titled “Too Rich, Too Soon” (Emerson and Martin 1991) provoked indignation and shame and caused advocates of thrift to demonstrate in front of major Seoul department stores.4 The “IMF crisis” raised new alarms about uncontrolled consumption in general and the consumption of foreign goods in particular; schools instructed upper middle-class students to buy only domestic blue jeans and to urge their parents to refrain from foreign travel. But as Nelson (2000, 25) shrewdly notes, South Koreans were also celebrating the sheer abundance of material life as a measure of national accomplishment—at least until the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997. Since 1945, South Koreans have measured their trajectory of modernity against a Western, usually an American Other, identified and to some


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degree apprehended through once-elusive, now widely available consumer goods (Abelmann 2001, 2003; Lie 1998; Nelson 2000). When my own interlocutors expressed dismay over particularly excessive instances of consumption—and people seemed to love talking about it every bit as much as the media thrived on writing about it—I could not but suspect that they relished the notion of South Korea as a place where such shocking things were now possible. This paradoxical mix of new appetites and attendant moral dilemmas continues to be aired in both national discourses and faceto-face encounters (Abelmann 2003; Bak 1997; Kendall 1996a; Nelson 2000). Some Koreans have even opined that in their rush to modernity and prosperity, they have lost a critical national essence, an ability to endure and triumph in hard times (Cho Hae-joang 2000). Nostalgia talk appears in widely varied contexts of ethnographic writing about South Korea, from my own discussion of commercialized revivals of the traditional Korean wedding (Kendall 1996a), to Richard Grinker’s account of South Korean fantasies of finding their lost former selves in the harsh and economically deprived North (1995, 1998), to Nancy Abelmann’s description of a successful middle-class woman’s nostalgia for what she remembers as the simpler, poorer, and purer Korea of her youth. Domestic corruption scandals in the 1990s, compounded by the daily frustrations of a more general economic downturn, sharpened the perception that great wealth is acquired by illegal or at best improper means (2001, 2003). This paradox between desirable but simultaneously sordid wealth recalls a Euro-American experience where, by the mid-nineteenth century, new patterns of intensive market consumption, made possible by successful industrialization and changes in merchandising, had confounded the disciplined and restrained Protestant ethic with its own entrepreneurial success (Felski 1995, 61–62; Miller 1987, 147–148). Social historian Nancy Cott notes how the growth of the market posed a particular problem for Protestant Christian Americans, who had long equated worldliness with carnal sin (1977, 64–65). Ironically, notions of selling as seduction and consumption as the satisfaction of lust have been used to good effect in marketing, as students of popular culture remind us (Felski 1995; Ross 1992; Williamson 1986). The sexual sell was also evident in 1990s South Korea, but Koreans over the age of thirty generally regarded it as a new thing, a side effect of democratization, a novel response to the lifting of censorship. Protestant Christianity has been a significant presence in Korea for more than a century, but the moral disapprobation surrounding getting and spending could as easily be traced to a Buddhist understanding that appetite and craving impede spiritual development and salvation, and the Confucian tradition’s


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disdain of commerce as an improper and sometimes immoral activity, an attitude that has colored the rise of modern Korean capitalism (Eckert 1991, 225) and the less-than-commendable perceptions of successful monopoly capitalists today (Eckert 1993; R. L. Janelli and Janelli 1993, 83, 99; 1997). How do these contradictions between disdain and desire, between longstanding moral injunctions to thrift and the enticements of new, sometimes foreign luxury goods play out in social and ritual practice in the lives of those who are neither conspicuously wealthy nor desperately poor, people like the shaman Yongsu’s Mother and her clients? The object of an argument It began with a bunch of bright yellow bananas. Shamans like to use the large colorful fruit for offerings, easily arranged to good effect and obviously expensive. Yongsu’s Mother was making a fine display when she set out the ancestors’ offerings at a client’s home in preparation for their kut. Her client’s husband, however, took offense at the bananas. They were imports, he said, not indigenous to Korea, not “urigôt,” not “ours. “Uri,” South Koreans use this word to make a link between intimate collectivities of “us” and the imagined community of nation. The bananas were not Korean products and were therefore unsuitable offerings for Korean ancestors. Yongsu’s Mother, surprised but never at a loss for words, defended her choice. “We offer bananas,” she said, “so that the ancestors can enjoy them. They weren’t able to eat them in the past. A single banana used to cost thousands of wôn.” The man was adamant, and a purist, “When you do rituals in our house, you should just set out pears and apples as we have done from long ago.” Yongsu’s Mother, astonished by his rigidity, could not comprehend his unwillingness to share with the ancestors all of the delightful gustatory possibilities of the contemporary moment. Yongsu’s Mother and her interlocutor reflect two distinct polarities in Korean attitudes toward, and dealings with, the ancestors. The apples and pears that the man considered as traditionally appropriate are foods specified in ritual manuals describing the procedures for making ancestral offerings (chesa), including placements of food and the directional orientation of the offering table and the participants. In the neo-Confucian tradition, this proper and precise enactment of rites expresses propriety (ye, Ch. li), an act of morality, an expression of virtue, regardless of whether or not the ancestors literally imbibe the offering food, a fine point that many contemporary Koreans gloss with ambiguity (Dix 1985; R. L. Janelli and Janelli 1982; K. Lee 1987). For Yongsu’s Mother, on the other hand, ancestors


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A shaman performs the kut for the dead in 1998. The tray of offering food for the ancestors includes a bunch of bananas decorated with small tomatoes (top right, beside the candlestick).

have unquestionably human appetites and feelings. Indeed, she experiences their hunger, sorrow, and desire when she manifests the dead (and the gods) through her own body, conveying immediacy, spontaneity, unpredictability, and sometimes playfulness alien to the premises of liturgical rites performed according to a ritual text (Atkinson 1989, 14). In the shamans’ scheme, the dead respond to the affairs of the living as an active and hungry presence capable of making their displeasure known through appearances in dreams or by causing illness or misfortune. Because the dead also inhabit the present tense, their tastes, like those of the living, can expand to new horizons of consumption. Why should they not crave a taste of banana, something that would have been beyond their means in this lifetime? If living family members can afford to enjoy bananas, how could they not share them with the ancestors?


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In the marketplace of ritual goods, both gods and ancestors have acquired a fondness for new commodities and foreign brand-name products. Offerings in shaman shrines and at kut might include cartons of Pringles or a small but expensive package of imported kiwi fruit along with bottles of beer, champagne, and imported whisky and cognac. In a market stall that vends dried fish and confections used in ancestor rites and shaman ceremonies, I found bags of tiny Snickers bars such as Americans buy in anticipation of Halloween trick-or-treaters. “These are imported,” the proprietor chuckled. “These days, the Child Gods don’t like traditional sweets. This is what they want to eat.” Yongsu’s Mother and her client’s husband assume their parts in a play between Confucian and shaman, man and woman, form and substance, textual and oral tradition, the dichotomies that loomed large in the last generation of Korean ethnography (Brandt 1971; Dix 1979; R. L. Janelli and Janelli 1982; Kendall 1985; Sorensen 1983).5 Their respective stances are conveniently heuristic: while the client’s husband hews strictly to tradition, ancestral offerings in a South Korean home can also memorialize a loved one’s favorite food and drink, including foreign beer and whisky,6 and on other occasions, Yongsu’s Mother levels her own critiques of excessive consumption as applied to other shamans, particularly “Seoul shamans.” In 1990s Korea, the bananas’ identity as foreign goods adds a new layer of contradiction. The man who considered foreign bananas unfit for Korean ancestors was, in Laura Nelson’s apt characterization, a “consumer nationalist” for whom the use of domestic goods assumed both moral and emotional qualities, in this instance reinforced by the authority of a timehonored ritual text (2000). But Yongsu’s Mother’s advocacy of the bunch of bananas was no less moral and emotional than her interlocutor’s. She also positions herself in relation to the past, but in a different way. Having known extreme hunger and poverty during the Korean War and its aftermath, she speaks of the comforts of her present life with a mingling of pride and wonder: “Could I ever have imagined myself living the way I do now?”7 She and others like her, those who knew not merely the relative deprivations of underdevelopment but bitter, bitter poverty, seldom romanticize the vanished Korea of their childhoods. It is thoroughly consistent with her worldview and experience that filial children should want to share the sweet taste of imported bananas with ancestors who once ate coarse barley and millet. Yongsu’s Mother and her client’s husband, arguing across their 1990s South Korean moment, thus also replay a discussion that enlivened the anthropology of consumption in that same decade: do foreign


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commodities undermine local culture, or are they, at the end of the day, successfully appropriated to the local work of cultural production? The client’s husband would side with those who viewed the incursion of imported commodities from the global marketplace as an assault on the social and cultural meanings previously embodied in local goods, a prompt to diverse and sometimes unpredictable forms of resistance (such as revivalist interest in the traditional form and accoutrements of Korean ancestor worship) (Jean Comaroff and Comaroff 1990; Pred and Watts 1992; Williamson 1986).8 Yongsu’s Mother would agree with those who regard consumption as itself constitutive of local culture and see commodities from the global marketplace—like imported bananas for Korean ancestors—as reinscribed with local significance.9 But while Yongsu’s Mother and her client’s husband disagree on the proper form of offerings to the ancestors, might even disagree as to the precise definition of an “ancestor,” both are in agreement that apples, pears, and even bananas express a moral relationship with the ancestors, are indeed the very stuff of it. Both might accept a long tradition in anthropological writing, from Marcel Mauss (1969) to Arjun Appadurai (1986), that regards things as more than things, sees objects—like my gifts of Chivas Regal and chocolates—as embedded in social relationships, holds that transactions in things convey multiple meanings, and finds that even the most ordinary objects can be encoded with moral and emotional significance.10 Appadurai has been credited with bringing the mass-produced commodity into the domain of anthropologically significant goods and with focusing our attention upon an object’s shifting signification as it moves from one domain of experience to another (1986; Miller 1995a), the broken bottle as the “biographical object” of a young traffic fatality (Hoskins 1998), a spirit medium’s talismanic inscription, “Made in China,” from the bottom of a plate (Tsing 1993), quotidian artifacts of the modern state imbued with magical properties (Taussig 1997), supermarket groceries coming home invested with love (Miller 1998). The disagreement between Yongsu’s Mother and her client’s husband underscores how such encodings may be multiple and contradictory, reflective of a particular moment in which new wealth and attendant new patterns of consumption call forth contradictory emotional responses, sentiments, and moral positions. When shamans take up commodities in kut—like the Chivas Regal bottle and its association with the illicit tastes of a dead dictator—their props draw dramatic power from these same contradictions that South Koreans live with every day.


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A mansin tearfully manifests one of the author’s own ancestors, 1998. She has bundled a white jacket, offered to the ancestor, against her own person and clutches other clothing in her hands.

Ancestors, ghosts, and goods The ancestors in kut constitute a broader category of being than the strictly patrilineal ancestors of formal ancestor veneration; they can include outmarried women, ancestors from women’s natal families, family members who died young or without offspring to venerate them, and very rarely close friends who have no blood tie at all. Those who died without direct descendants appear in the wake of proper ancestors who have “opened the path” to the kut (R. L. Janelli and Janelli 1982, chap. 6; Kendall 1985, chap. 7). Ancestors, when they speak through shamans in kut, articulate longing and craving, longing for those left behind and craving for the pleasures they missed while in this world. The Buddhist notion that emotional bonds hold souls back from release and salvation, causing them to wander in pain, is braided with the Confucian obligation of the living to succor the dead. Parents who died young constantly remind their children that, in life,


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they worked hard and had scant opportunity to enjoy themselves. Dead first wives express venomous jealousy toward their successors, pulling their clothes from the wardrobe cabinet and threatening to trample them. The emotional bonds that hold the dead to this world are unwholesome, since the presence of even well-intentioned dead brings illness and misfortune, or such madness as the caress of a dead mother inflicted on Mrs. Min. In the sometimes wrenching, sometimes humorous dramas of ancestral manifestation performed by shamans in kut, the dead call upon living kin to provide them with gifts of food, drink, clothing, and travel money, gifts intended to speed them on their way. Cloth and clothing are a common medium of Korean gifting, from token presents of socks and handkerchiefs to the lengths of fine cloth and elaborate outfits bestowed on affines in highend matrimonial exchanges. In preparation for a kut, a shaman purchases sets of traditional clothing in thin synthetic fabric from a shaman supply shop—trousers and jackets for men, blouses and skirts for woman—for each significant ancestor who is likely to appear in the ancestor’s sequence, then burns them at the end of the kut to simultaneously complete the offering and remove the potentially baleful influence of the dead.11 In the 1970s these outfits were usually small, resembling dolls’ clothes, but now they are full-sized. In a common bit of business, the ancestor holds up his or her new clothing and subjects it to playful scrutiny, either commenting with gratitude on the quality of the goods or making unfavorable comparisons with the clothing worn by living kin. All of these services are extensions of the gifts that filial children provide for the elders—food and drink, including special celebratory feasts; clothing, including outfits for special occasions; and money for excursions. When the dead finally accept these tokens of obligation and express their gratitude, they resolve a cycle of grief and recrimination. The living have, for a time at least, made peace with old ghosts.12 In contemporary kut, many meetings between the living and the dead occur in a borderland between the impoverished past and the thoroughly commoditized present. Sometimes these encounters are painful, as when Chini’s dead sister recalled the sorrows of her childhood, or when a longdead child accuses, “You didn’t buy me medicine,” and someone answers, “We didn’t have any medicine back then.” Sometimes the gesture is more playful: “Give the old man a bottle of Bacchus tonic; he couldn’t enjoy Bacchus back when he was alive.” The little brown bottle of popular pick-meup is given over to the ancestor, and the mansin gratefully chugs it down. Or the long-dead ancestor claims credit for a child’s recent ability to purchase an apartment, and someone reminds him, “What did you know about


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‘apartments’ back when you were alive?” The material comforts enjoyed by living kin become palpable when the dead tug on the synthetic and knitwear outfits of their daughters and daughters-in-law, prompting clients or shamans to shout back, “No, Grandmother, the one we’ve given you is much nicer. The one we’ve given you is pure silk.” One dead mother-in-law, noting the fine quality of her daughter-in-law’s blouse, asked, “Did it cost a million wôn?” “No, only five thousand” (a bargain), her son said, with a chuckle. Another dead mother-in-law itemized all of the clothing that she expected to receive at the next kut: “Don’t forget my panties . . . and rubber shoes. I used to run around in my bare feet.” She got even more specific, asking for a “pretty ramie-cloth vest”: “I wasn’t able to wear one when I was alive.” Manufactured ramie cloth was fashionable and cheap in the summer of 1994, a revival of older tastes, but in the past it had been hand-loomed and expensive. Now it was available in inexpensive factory-made garments; nearly everyone could wear it. Judith Williamson’s characterization of the commodity as an object of “congealed longing” (1986, 12) takes on added poignancy here, where longing is not only congealed but also entombed. Recent ancestral encounters provide two very different takes on contemporary South Korean life. On the one hand, the dead remind the living of the distance between hard times and this time, a better time, playing to an often-recounted South Korean story about hard work, struggle, and hardearned rewards. The ancestors’ tugs on their descendants’ bright new clothing, the transfers of cash, and even the playful swigs of Bacchus tonic offer material, tactile evidence of things beyond the experience of the remembered dead. But by mapping desires for contemporary consumer goods onto older notions of hungry souls who are never completely satisfied, who reappear in subsequent rituals through the duration of living memory, the play of the dead also becomes a dramatization of desire within the frame of capitalist consumption. None of us, living or dead, will ever be satisfied with what we have. The market would not have it so. The economy would grind to a halt. Consumer societies tantalize us with the relentless possibility of newer, better products, and we are all hungry ghosts. And some have more reason for dissatisfaction than others. The inflated South Korean real estate market (Nelson 2000; J. P. Thomas 1993), the high cost of preparing a child to pass the all-important college entrance examinations (Abelmann 2003; Cho Hae-joang 1995), and the constant visual display of seemingly boundless and very expensive things to buy have brought with them an uncomfortable awareness of those who have been left behind, and of things beyond one’s own reach. The have-nots are sometimes seen as objects of pity, sometimes as having an ominous potential for social unrest.


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Their frustrations are akin to those of the unsettled dead, the beggarlike hungry ghosts who receive scraps of food outside the house gate at the end of a kut. Divine appetites If the dead experience desire as a lachrymose emotion, greedy gods, like the Spirit Warrior who acquired a taste for foreign whisky, make appetite an ebullient game. The robust offerings and entertainment bestowed upon demanding gods are modeled on ambiguous transactions with powerful and influential beings in the everyday South Korean world. Within the logic of Korean popular religion as I experienced it in a village near Seoul in the late 1970s, housewives marked a harvest or a major purchase or sale with a large or small offering to the household gods (kosa), the House Site Official (T’ôju Taegam) in particular. My shaman informants explained these acts as akin to the sort of payoff one might make to the local authorities lest they cause trouble in order to seize an even larger share of one’s good fortune. In 1977, a time of anti-superstition campaigns, Yongsu’s Mother gifted the village chief and the district policeman with envelopes of “cigarette money,” wine, and elaborate snacks on the day before a particularly elaborate kut, asking them to “watch out for her” during the big event. When I asked the shamans, “Isn’t this like dealing with the supernatural Official?” they responded with mirthful agreement. The play of greedy gods in kut is a bald assertion of prerogative where deities initially proclaim that the meat, wine, and entertainment are insufficient and the god must be won over with subsequent disbursements of cash, eventually promising abundant good fortune. A god with the power to demand is a god with the power to protect and bestow blessing. Characterizing these transactions as gifts, fees, or bribes is as clumsy and unsatisfying in a Korean context as the anthropologist’s old and now generally discredited dichotomization between gifts and commodities.13 Such offerings are gifts insofar as they affirm and perpetuate a relationship—in this instance, a relationship with different kinds of spirits. Offerings to the gods—the greediest of whom appear in the guise of low-level officials—also have the quality of fees or bribes insofar as this is an asymmetrical relationship in which the gift is intended to nurture the recipient’s favorable regard to the giver’s future advantage.14 Shamans and clients characterize the gods’ antics in kut as fueled by their yoksim. Translated as “greed” or “rapacious appetite,” but also as “desire” or “ambition” (cf. Abelmann 2003), yoksim is a rich and complex emotion. In the dialogues Nancy Abelmann conducted with middle-aged


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Korean women regarding Korea’s “compressed modernity” and their place within it (2001), her conversation partners generally invoke yoksim with disapprobation as the selfish drives that have corrupted Korean modernity, but they also describe yoksim as an energizing emotion and consequently necessary if one is to make a satisfactory place for oneself and one’s family in contemporary South Korea. The gods who appear in kut have had yoksim for all the thirty years that I have known them, and I suspect far longer, since greedy officials—the prototype for greedy gods—have been stock figures in the Korean imaginary for several centuries. It would be difficult to find a Korean unfamiliar with the corrupt and libidinous magistrate in the eighteenth-century ballad opera Tale of Ch’unhyang (Ch’unhyangjôn). Even so, yoksim takes on a particular salience, freighted with ambivalence, amid the material possibilities of the contemporary South Korean moment when a smirking shaman in the persona of a greedy god teases an ambitious client by saying, “Your yoksim is even greater than my own.” Where Yongsu’s Mother used the Spirit Warrior’s yoksim for imported whisky and his contempt for domestic brands to mark the high-class tastes of an American Spirit Warrior, other gods in other shrines were also acquiring a taste for foreign whisky, even without the assistance of an anthropologist who had access to an airport duty-free shop. When the Supernatural Official of a tiny bar appeared in another kut, he refused a cup of makkôlli, the traditional coarse fermented rice brew normally offered to this god, and insisted on drinking whisky. A similar spirit at another kut was slow to take the proffered cup of makkôlli and was accused of having developed a taste for beer. Although Koreans have been brewing beer for many decades and beer halls have long been a part of the urban scene, beer was not widely consumed in the countryside at the time of my first fieldwork. Beer drinking is identified with Western tastes, in part because one’s own beer glass cannot easily be drunk down, ceremoniously passed to another drinker, and refilled in accord with traditional Korean drinking etiquette. In an older, agricultural Korea, housewives and shamans poured out makkôlli made from new grain for the House Site Official when they made offerings after the harvest. In kut the Supernatural Officials, the gods whose influence can make or break a family’s fortunes, routinely carouse with cups of makkôlli made from fermented rice, an old idiom of wealth and fertile abundance associated with burgeoning fields but now poured out of a commercial plastic bottle. Where the Officials and Spirit Warriors crave whisky, they have left farming behind and become cosmopolitan in their tastes, and their influence on a family’s good fortune extends to new realms of entrepreneurship and investment. The whisky demanded by the bar proprietress’s Official was


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her very source of livelihood, at least potentially a “biographical object” in Hoskins’ sense (1998). Yoksim is not an admirable quality, but its satisfaction can be very pleasant for gods and humans alike. This is, after all, the contradiction at the heart of most consumption discourses; excessive consumption is routinely condemned and, simultaneously, desired, desired and consequently condemned. As Michael Taussig, following Bataille, would have it, the coherence and equilibrium of the social world are perpetually traumatized by the thrill of “giving and spending for the hell of it” (1995, 392). But counter to Bataille’s language of absolute excess, destruction, and ultimate sacrifice (1988), the play of greedy gods in kut reveals tension and contradiction, an awareness of both desire and danger, with the bargaining and bantering between client and god as its central dynamic, the game that Yongsu’s Mother and I played when I decorated the Spirit Warrior’s face with cash, trying to withhold while she demanded, a game played over and over from kut to kut. The materiality of the kut makes yoksim palpable in performance with slabs of meat, cans of beer, bottles of high-priced whisky, heads of cows and pigs, and fists full of real cash, the props that propel the action and make the predictable excesses of greedy gods into the tractable stuff of comedy. Relationships with the greedy gods, conducted in the idiom of a bargain, and rituals that function as investments in the spirits’ goodwill unfold with a touch of self-parody and a bubble of wry humor. Chungmoo Choi (1989a) suggests that in kut the constant boundary crossings between real and unreal, between obvious performance and claims for the literal presence of the spirits, engage the participants in a manner akin to Brechtian theater, causing them to reflect upon their own immediate condition. If this is true, then the greedy gods’ antics and the ancestors’ desires can be seen to parody the very ambitions they extol, the very blessings that the gods promise to bestow, becoming a fun-house mirror of client (and also shaman) aspirations. Yongsu’s Mother tells a droll story about a kut held for the proprietress of a small bar, the sort of place where men are extravagantly overcharged for small amounts of liquor and titillation; indeed, the bar is almost its own parody of conspicuous consumption. The proprietress had boasted that although her rent is high, clients run huge tabs and she can easily take in a million wôn (US$1,250 in 1992) in an evening. On one occasion, a sodden company president, drinking alone, produced a million-wôn money order to cover his tab, and when the proprietress claimed she had no change, he staggered off into the night leaving the ridiculously large sum in her hands.15


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Sober the next day, in every respect, he returned to ask if he had not mistakenly given her a million-wôn money order. She callously told him that it was too late, the deed was done. When the supernatural Official played at her kut he/Yongsu’s Mother stretched out his/her hand and demanded, “Give me a million-wôn money order.” “Auntie, how ever did you know?” “This isn’t any auntie. This is the Official.” “I don’t have it anymore. I spent it all on the business.” The bantering transactions between extortionate supernatural Official and bar proprietress, exploitative proprietress and hungover patron, demanding shaman and resisting client blur like the whirling riders on a carousel, spun round to the rhythm of the contraption. Discussion: Commodities, Consumption, and Popular Religion The Spirit Warriors and Officials who appear in kut are not newly greedy, and the Korean dead are not newly desirous. Reports from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggest that demanding spirits were already a well-established feature of shaman practice.16 The idea that gods and ancestors crave and consequently attach themselves to material things, particularly clothing, seems to be an old and pervasive notion in Korean popular religion. It would be difficult to imagine a Korean shamanic practice that did not, in tandem with Buddhist belief, see the unquiet dead as subject to worldly craving (the antithesis of a Buddhist soul’s liberation) and did not imagine its gods in the image of demanding, comically corrupt officials who inhabit the historical imagination. However, some elements, emphases, and nuances were new to me when I returned in the 1990s to the Korean shaman world that I had known in the 1970s and went to kut performed by some of the same shamans. Hungry ancestors now provoked specific commentary about particular things that “we didn’t have in the past,” from Bacchus tonic and ramie-cloth jackets to purchased apartments, and the gods’ greed embraced new luxury commodities that were physically present as props. As if recalibrating the f-stop on a predigital camera, the gods and ancestors were addressing what shaman and client have experienced as the rapid arrival of once-inaccessible and tantalizing luxury goods, the generational break between remembered poverty and lived comfort, and the uneasy sense of having what others, living and dead, have been denied. They are able to do this through the re-presentation of older idioms precisely because each kut is an emergent phenomenon, a quasi-improvisational form that enables


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the older anticipated desires of greedy gods and hungry ghosts to become resonant with a particular South Korean moment, expressed through the agency of new props in a world brimming with new material goods. I have been careful to mark that moment as “the 1990s” (extending into the early new millennium), when middle-aged shamans and clients carried firsthand experiences of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Recalling my own parents’ formative memories of the Great Depression, I surmise that another generation of shaman adherents will, by and by, laugh and cry over differently nuanced messages from their gods and ancestors.17 What does this particular South Korean moment bring to a larger discussion about popular religion, embodied gods and ancestors, and market commodities? The Comaroffs have argued that commodities appear in popular religious practice where “poets, prophets, even witch finders . . . try to make universal signs speak to particular realities” (Jean Comaroff and Comaroff 1993a, xxii). The literature on spirit possession contains numerous examples of divine demands for new commodities, usually interpreted as “an embodied critique of colonial, national, or global hegemonies whose abrasions are deeply, but not exclusively felt by women” (Boddy 1994, 419). Somali sar adherents demand “luxurious clothes, perfume, and delicate foods” (Lewis 1966), bori devotees of Niger give expensive white sugar to a prostitute spirit (Masquelier 2001), and Temiar shamans who have lost their Malaysian forest home receive river-fish songs from canned sardines (Roseman 2000, 2001). Cash and new commodities take on a demonic cast when Ghanaian Pentecostals perform prayers to neutralize purchased goods of any diabolic spirit that might be imbued in them (Meyer 1998), a Moscow New Age shaman uses exotic global kitsch to cleanse new lucre of suspect associations (Lindquist 2002), the money earned in a Romanian pyramid scheme is devil-tainted (Verdery 1995), Colombian agricultural laborers respond to the “commodity fetishism” of cash by using it to make devil pacts (Taussig 1980), and all manner of South African “occult economies” embody the hope and hopelessness of a “free” but by no means universally accessible market (Jean Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). But in contrast to the subjects of these accounts, economically marginal or destabilized by the precipitous collapse of a political, economic, and moral order, the sponsors of kut that I have been describing are at least lower middle class and materially successful beyond the expectations of their own largely rural youths. The same could be said of the shamans who minister to them. The antics of their gods and ancestors address not so much deprivation (unless in retrospect) as optimistic expectations and the moral implications of getting, having, and desiring more.


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The moral dilemma of new wealth, a matter of much concern in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, reappears in the newly successful, although by no means new, market economies of East and Southeast Asia and the emerging markets of former socialisms (Hefner 1998a, 1998b; Humphrey 1995b; R. L. Janelli and Janelli 1993, 1997; Malarney 1998; Weller 1999). In recent studies the tension between ideology and lived experience has largely been cast within the either-or language of sermons, policy statements, and religious tracts. Critiques of marketplace morality are implicit, but also more ambivalent in popular religious expressions, as when Robert Weller describes a Taiwanese cult focused on cigarette smoking, amoral gangster gods who minister to the needs of freewheeling capitalists and gamblers. The cult celebrates the market and encourages people’s participation in it while at the same time imaging the market “as an amoral beast, red in tooth and claw” (Weller 1994, 163). Aided by its polyphony of gods, ancestors, and living counterparts, the Korean shaman’s kut enables similarly ambivalent portrayals of wealth as a reflection of living paradox. Open to the incorporation of new commodities as things desired by spirits, a kut provokes tears and comic banter around and about the things that claim a presence in contemporary South Korean life. Conclusion In kut the commodity becomes agentive and constitutive of relationships as students of material culture studies would have it (Myers 2001, 8); it thickens ties between clients and their gods and ancestors and between clients and shamans. But if that were all, we could simply call the Chivas Regal and the ancestors’ clothing “offerings”—material bearers of meaningful inscription—and leave it at that (cf. Bell 1997, 114; Ferro-Luzzi 1977, 508). When mansin deploy new commodities as props, the things become in theater historian Andrew Sofer’s words, “Enlivened by the actor’s touch, charged by the playwright’s dialogue, and quickened in the spectator’s imagination” (2003, vi–vii). The anthropology of material goods has always assumed motion—trajectories of exchange transacted by Pacific Argonauts around the island Kula ring, between affines, up and down the status hierarchy, and more recently across regimes of value from sacred or ceremonious object to commodity to resacralized museum artifact or work of art. Deep Throat said, “Follow the money”; Appadurai (1986) told us to follow the things themselves. When the things in question are ritual props and the setting is a kut, they move in the hands of gods and ancestors, “propelled through stage space and real time before historically specific audiences at a given


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performance event,” “take on a life of their own as they weave in and out of the stage action,” and “become central to the performance” (Sofer 2003, vi–vii). When ancestors appear as specters from the impoverished past, the tactility of new clothing and 10,000-wôn notes, the taste of bananas, even the little bottle of tonic enable commentary about new desires and what “we didn’t have back then.” Greedy gods offer a parody of unbridled consumption, at once comic and grotesque, through the ludic distance of comic play. The foreign whisky puffs up the ego of a greedy god and threatens to derail the kut with his drunken excess. Such kut simultaneously mock both anticonsumption discourses and the act of consumption per se. Consumer goods become the substance of dramas of ambivalence, a site for both the celebration and satire of consumption as a paradox that many Koreans live with every day. The spirits’ own changing tastes testify to their presence and agency in the mundane world where fashions are fickle and desires never satisfied. The expense and effort of a kut offer only temporary satisfaction for the appetites and desires of gods and ancestors, passing respite from the demands they inflict on the living. Less or more than a moral resolution, the play of things in kut yields contradictions that are ultimately irresolvable, even as desire itself. Like the bananas offered to a Korean ancestor and the whisky given to a greedy god, the commodity as a ritual prop enables a running commentary on those contemporary moments where the paradoxical attributes of new wealth can be both literally and figuratively digested. The play of props casts shamans, gods, and ancestors in an improvised confrontation with contemporary South Korean life; the final chapter describes a similarly improvisational encounter with a sacred landscape that simultaneously shrinks and expands.


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7 Built Landscapes and Mobile Gods

This story falls somewhere between a field anecdote and a fairy tale. As anecdote, I have reconstructed it from my fieldnotes, transcripts, and memory without conscious embroidery, elaboration, or fabrication. As fairy tale, it resembles a genre of stories sometimes attributed to Buddhists or Taoists where illusions are at play and a lesson may be learned by confronting them. Such tales were very much with me as these events unfolded. Prelude: An Old Shaman in a Tile-Roofed House In the summer of 1994 a blind diviner mentions an old shrine in the far southeastern corner of the city. I am intrigued, and Ms. Kim, my field assistant in these endeavors, has a keen interest in old Seoul traditions. We emerge from the subway station in an urban neighborhood that was a rural village not so long ago. We ask directions from a student, who seems to know exactly what we mean. The shrine was in his old neighborhood and he remembers watching kut there as a child, but his directions lead us nowhere. We ask others about “a kuttang, a place where shamans hold kut.” Some people give us only blank stares while others nod with recognition, but their directions send us down blind alleyways or to a diviner’s office in a modern apartment building. The shrine retreats from us, like a mirage. A gaggle of old men who are passing the afternoon in the lobby of the district office affirm that, yes, the neighborhood shrine has existed for three to four centuries. A scholar built it to memorialize his daughter who had died before her wedding (“Built it to placate a mischievous virgin ghost,” I thought). They had all participated in the annual community ritual honoring the shrine’s tute-

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lary god, but the neighborhood no longer sponsors the ritual. They point to a hillside path on the far side of a broad boulevard and tell us to look for the shrine just below the old people’s home on the summit. We follow the winding lane through a neighborhood of modest houses, none of them more than twenty years old. Just below the summit, we come upon a crumbling tile-roofed house set apart in some tall grass and surrounded by a wall, a house from another time. The big wooden gate bears the t’aegΔk symbol, the circular swirl of red, blue, and yellow that signifies the cosmos and marks a shrine. This must be it. We knock and shout, but the place seems deserted. Ms. Kim asks if I have ever read Kim Tongni’s novella Portrait of a Shaman (Munyôdo). The evocative opening passage has been running through my head as well: “. . . an antiquated tile-roofed house with one of the upper corners already crushed out of shape. On the roof tiles mushrooms sprouted dark green, yielding a sickening smell. . . . The house was like a haunted den, long deserted by human inhabitants—deserted perhaps over scores of years” (Kim Tongni 1971, 60). We climb the path to the old people’s home, where the residents, ghostly pale from living indoors, totter ’round to inspect us. One particularly spry old woman, her wispy hair dyed flaming orange, dances out creakily from the dark interior, gesturing with a wave of an aqua paper fan, some aged mountain fairy pointing the way, “The front gate is over there.” We go back and pound on the gate, the right gate this time, and the door opens. A pleasant-faced woman leads us inside to meet “Mother,” the shaman shrinekeeper. The airy and immaculate interior of the house belies its decaying shell. The woodwork is polished, the floors sparkle with varnish, the door lattices are covered with fresh white paper, and a tidy garden flourishes outside the kitchen door. I remember Seoul houses like this from the early 1970s, houses that might have been built before the Korean War but upgraded with modern plumbing, running water, and appliances and maintained until the high cost of urban real estate transformed old Seoul neighborhoods into anonymous blocks of multistory construction. The shrine-keeper, a gracious woman of almost sixty years, is like her house, vintage but well-groomed. She wears her hair in an immaculate old-fashioned chignon, the mark of a self-consciously traditional shaman. The wrinkles on her still-handsome round face crinkle into view when she expresses frustration at the current state of the shaman world, and she does this often during our conversation. Charming and intelligent, she seems happy to sit and chat with two visiting researchers on a quiet midsummer afternoon, surrounded by her spirit daughters, all dressed in loose house clothing.


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No, the old house was never a kuttang, a shrine that rents space to shamans, and this explains some of the confusion that had greeted our requests for directions. We have stumbled upon the shrine of a powerful local tutelary god, a princess of Kija Chosôn who fled south with the collapse of her ancient kingdom more than two millennia ago. The shrine-keeper speculates that this powerful lady would have wreaked a series of disasters on the community until her will was heeded and her worship established. How different from the pathetic dead daughter that the old men had conjured for a shrine god! Owing to the ancient princess’ protection and the authority of her royal house in northern lands, the Manchu invaders of the early seventeenth century passed the village by as though it were invisible. When People’s Army soldiers commandeered the shrine during the Korean War, they all got diarrhea and promptly fled. The neighborhood office designated the shrine as a neighborhood cultural treasure (tong munhuaje), a local version of a national monument. The shrine-keeper’s immediate family have maintained it and provided it with shamans for four generations. Our hostesses’ shaman grandmother had served Queen Om, the second royal consort of Korea’s last king. No, the women of this family were not hereditary shamans; the gods chose them (she uses the Korean folklorists’ terms for “divinely inspired” or “charismatic” [kangsin] versus “hereditary” [sesΔp] shamans). Her shaman mother and grandmother had both married into the family. The gods revealed the current shrine-keeper’s destiny when she was only seven years old, and she had been initiated as a shaman in her early teens. Her grandmother instructed her in all of the old ways and helps her now as a guardian god (taesin) enshrined on her altar. The shrine-keeper evokes her grandmother’s time to recall a purer tradition that was practiced in the twilight years of the Chosôn dynasty, but Korea had been annexed into the Japanese Empire a full generation before her own birth. With a pained expression, she catalogues her complaints about present-day shamans who no longer meticulously tend their shrines, who see their sacred work as merely the means to a livelihood, and who shamelessly abbreviate their rituals. She deplores the current tendency for shamans to style themselves as teacher (sônsaeng) and disciple (cheja) or to call themselves posal as inspirational diviners do. “In dynastic times,” she tells us, “they would say ‘Kijanim has arrived’ or call us ‘sabuin.’ 1 Male shamans were not called paksu, but kyôksa, and among ourselves, we called them tôrôni.” We scribble in our notebooks. She smiles and tells us more, lamenting the loss of old shaman ways.


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Several distinguished professors of folklore have already been to her door. We recognize the names she cites. When she read what one of them had written, she was horrified to see how he had distorted her words. She advises a local folklore group interested in preserving the traditions of her shrine, but their approach also displeases her. Her vexation with those who are ostensibly dedicated to recording her tradition compounds her selfimage as the last of her line, a shaman who can no longer perform a proper ritual for calling the house tutelary because no other shaman remains who can match her chanting with the proper refrain. Her observations are not unique. Any shaman over the age of fifty who has been practicing for more than twenty years can be counted on to express similar sentiments. But the setting gives this shrine-keeper’s remarks an added poignancy, the old shrine and the aging shaman’s deep-rooted connection to it. It has been a long time since I sat in a tile-roofed house with lattice and paper doors. Perhaps I am nostalgic for the Seoul I had first known in the early 1970s, or for the Seoul I had never seen, because by the early 1970s so much of it had already been bulldozed away. South Korea is a place of displacement; few adults live where they were born, and old tile-roofed houses are most accessible in theme park “folk villages.” The shrine-keeper’s remembered neighborhood landscape includes other shrines that disappeared completely or are no longer adequately maintained. As new residents poured into the area after the Liberation in 1945, her family moved their shrine to what was then a desolate hillside. In the shrine-keeper’s youth, wolves sometimes appeared at the summit. But her grandmother had remembered yet another move, early in this century when the shrine was displaced by a rail line, a fitting image of modernity’s assault on local religion. The former village became a part of the city, and many of the old residents, those who shared a sense of community and common history, died or moved away. The annual shrine ritual that had spiritually fortified the community through its veneration of a most Durkheimian tutelary spirit lapsed. The shrine-keeper shows us an old snapshot of her younger self performing this ritual sometime in the 1960s or early 1970s. Now the shrine itself is in danger. Urban planners have designated the area as parkland. All of the buildings in the neighborhood will be torn down. The shrine-keeper has already received three eviction notices but continues to fight fiercely for the right to remain. She has nowhere else to go. She sees the threatened eviction as of a piece with all of the forces that have besieged her world over the course of the twentieth century: the Christians who call her practices “uncivilized,” the successive regimes—colonial and national—that have waged anti-superstition campaigns against the shamans, and perhaps


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most pernicious, the materialism and impatience of the current moment. She is fierce, but also pessimistic, presenting herself as the uncompromising standard-bearer of a dying tradition. Her claims to authenticity are not what seduces my interest, but her sheer tenacity. In my mind she is inextricably linked to her old house and through it to a nearly vanished system of local shrines, of tutelary gods in place and village communities that honored them. I have read about this world in the work of Korean and Japanese folklorists and am intrigued to have stumbled on its vestiges in 1990s Seoul. When I return to Korea, four years later, Ms. Kim and I go back to the neighborhood and look for the shrine. Once again, it eludes us. Could it have been torn down? This time, we have the shrine-keeper’s business card and place a telephone call. She answers, seems happy to hear from us again, and sends a grand-daughter down the path to guide us to the house. The neighborhood has not become a park, but it has changed completely. Fancy town houses and apartments, all newly built, line the path. Near the summit, the old tile-roofed shrine is gone, replaced by an imposing twostory brick structure with blond wood trim and a roof of glazed blue tiles, allusions to traditionalist style such as one might find on a fancy restaurant specializing in traditional Korean cuisine. Antique earthen food storage jars, relics from the shrine-keeper’s mother, stand by the kitchen door as if they were still in use, enhancing the ambience of a folkloric restaurant. The shrine rooms have the colorful rainbow trim of a Buddhist temple, and the house interior boasts some additions of Western furniture, including a Formica-topped kitchen table, vinyl–upholstered chairs, and a sofa. The shrine-keeper seems renovated too, in a happier mood and with a fuller face, less inclined to crinkle into a pained expression. Had the tension of the threatened eviction produced the pain? Even now, the issue of the proposed park remains unresolved, but she and her neighbors would not have made such serious investments in construction if they feared eviction. She tells us again how the shrine had stood since the Imjin War of the late sixteenth century and the Manchu invasions of the seventeenth. She elaborates on her past complaints about women who are initiated as shamans without evidence of a strong calling from the spirits. A true initiate is desperate, has no other recourse: “ ‘If she vended salt, it would rain, and if she vended flour, the wind would blow.’ You haven’t heard that before, have you?” Beaming as we scribble in our notebooks, she dispenses bits of shaman lore, like sweets to children. “In the old days,” she says, “when the grandmothers went to pray on mountains, there could not be so much as one scorched particle in the steamed rice they offered to the spirits.” She laments again the loss of old shaman customs, the materialism of


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the contemporary moment, and the disappearance of the Korean hanbok from everyday wear. But today her laments for the past ring hollow as we chat together, sitting on the floor beside the sofa in her totally renovated house. When she sees us out at the gate, she again criticizes the current tendency for shamans to call each other posal and emphatically affirms the distinction between “real” Korean mudang, like herself, and the inspirational diviners who are possessed by child spirits and “scream out insults at everybody.” “We used to be called kija. Next time I’ll tell you all about it,” she promises. Our exit line makes a full circle back to where our conversation began four years earlier. Walking down the path, Ms. Kim and I allow ourselves to feel let down. What we had heard before as an earnest voice from a disappearing tradition of old shrines and shrine-keepers now resembles a fixed patter, polished in conversations with others like ourselves. “When shamans sit too long with folklorists, they lose their spiritual energy,” Ms. Kim observes. I experienced these two visits as a folktale in reverse. In the old stories the deluded person awakens to discover that the enchanted palace is nothing more than a crumbling ruin. In my story, disenchantment occurred when the crumbling ruin was transformed into a comfortable and somewhat ostentatious traditionalist-modern Korean house. My own nostalgia produced the illusion; I had let the old house color my view of the aging shrine-keeper. Ms. Kim and I had worked ourselves into the mood with a literary allusion even before the house gate opened to admit us. Who in 1990s Seoul would live in such a place? The shrine-keeper must, somehow, be of another time, or at least fiercely loyal to it. But she had wanted a convenient kitchen and a vinyl upholstered sofa after all. Was that so unusual? Perhaps the shrinekeeper’s uncertainty about the public park had artificially prolonged the life of the old house. I had confused a physical structure with rootedness, material fixity, gods in place in organized space, but had it ever been so? The shrine was a portable entity. The spirits, their trappings, and the practices associated with their veneration had moved about the neighborhood twice in the twentieth century; this was part of the history the shrine-keeper had shared with us on that first afternoon. Her neotraditionalist building was only the most recent in a series of three new shrines built in this century, and the “old house” that had so impressed me predated my own birth by only two years. The “old shrine-keeper” was no older than I am at the time of this writing. Her claim for her shrine as a neighborhood cultural treasure had nothing to do with the physical building that she had been happy to tear down and replace. She had rebuilt the shrine, with its blue tile roof and rainbow trim,


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as a container for the “tradition” she carried, even as she fashioned herself to be a living reliquary. Such fashioning may be a family tradition. A colleague reminded me that Youngsook Kim Harvey had interviewed a shaman in this same neighborhood in the early 1970s, a daughter living with an elderly shaman mother who had served one of the last queens. Harvey speculated that the daughter’s niece, the elderly shaman’s granddaughter, would become the next shrine-keeper. She describes “an old fashioned house, hedged in tightly by houses that seem to have sprung up hodge-podge in the urban sprawl”, and a shaman informant who “exudes an aura of legitimacy that is absent for the most part from the other shamans I have met” (Y. K. Harvey 1979), 19. Distinguished scholars were frequent visitors (ibid., 22). At this remove, I cannot verify that the “old shrine-keeper” of my tale is the granddaughter and niece of the women that Harvey describes, but the correspondences between Harvey’s experience at an old house and mine, some twenty years later, suggest that at least three generations of shaman shrine-keepers have performed the self-conscious traditionalism that so charmed Ms. Kim and me on our first visit and bored us on the second. Sacred landscapes The ultimate immateriality of the “shrine” in my story, the shrine as a portable name, gods, and traditions, contrasts the fixity of buildings, monuments, and maps. It begs an understanding of shamanic landscapes as the mutable stuff of visions, dreams, and spirit agency. The contrast comes from Caroline Humphrey’s analysis of Mongol history as a shifting ascendancy of fixed and legible maps and shamanic landscapes infused with the more fluid stuff of the imagination—including the agency of spirits (1995a). But where Humphrey describes a diachronic oscillation of the Mongol landscape, the struggle between the shaman shrine-keeper and the urban planner assumes contradictory, simultaneous, and interpenetrating perceptions of the landscape they both inhabit. Landscape in this emergent sense is “the meaning imputed by local people to their cultural and physical surroundings (i.e., how a particular landscape ‘looks’ to its inhabitants)” (Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995, 1; see also Basso 1996; Munn 2003). In Barbara Bender’s characterization, landscape is “never inert”: “People engage with it, re-work it, appropriate and contest it. It is part of the way in which identities are created and disputed, whether as individual, group, or nation-state” (1993, 3).2 Borrowing on the theme of the urban walker, from Baudelaire through Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau (1984, 91–114) offers a particular mode of


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spatial contestation, describing the totalizing master plan of a city as confounded and reimagined by “walkers” on the ground whose everyday practices and superstitions are “foreign to the ‘geometrical’ or ‘geographical’ space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical construction.” The walkers in this chapter are shamans and gods. Their reimaginings occur among the sacred sites on Seoul’s mountainous periphery—spiritually potent rocks, springs, sôn’ang trees that harbor unquiet ghosts, and—for the last twenty years or so—a proliferation of commercial shaman shrines, or kuttang. Shamanic engagements with space provide a final example of the tenacious mutability of their practice. Mountain pilgrimages During my first fieldwork, Yongsu’s Mother and her colleagues regarded mountains as barely accessible pilgrimage sites, albeit more accessible than these same mountains had been in their own youths when poorly shod worshippers made excruciating journeys on foot. In the 1970s many of the mountains near the capital housed military observation posts, but Yongsu’s Mother described them as wild, uninhabited, magical spaces where the gods’ force was strongest and the shamans’ visions the most vivid. Then, as now, shamans visited mountains with clients or to periodically recharge their own inspirational batteries (one shaman shrine-keeper used this metaphor himself). Because of the mountain’s power, the pilgrim risks danger from pollution and other ritual lapses. I was told many cautionary tales before setting off for Kam’ak Mountain with Yongsu’s Mother, Chatterbox, the Clear Spring Mansin, and a client couple of Clear Spring’s in the pearl gray dawn of an April morning in 1977.3 We had observed the three-day fast from bloody food and bathed and washed our hair the previous day. My landlady, a veteran of mountain pilgrimage, told me to mitigate the requisite early-morning splash of cold water on my face by rinsing first with warm water from the kitchen: “It’s good enough.” Yongsu’s Mother and Chatterbox Mansin had debated whether I should make an offering on the mountain at all or merely tag along and satisfy my ethnographic curiosity. Initially, they had been inclined to spare me the burden and possible danger of a reciprocal relationship with the Mountain God. Could I keep this up when I returned to the United States? I would like to think that they encouraged me to set down fruit and cooked rice with everyone else because the unfolding process of my fieldwork was thickening my relationship to Yongsu’s Mother and her gods. By incurring a reciprocal and enduring relationship with the Mountain God, I was deepening my ties


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with them as well, and the ties have endured. When clients are surprised to see me scribbling notes on the sidelines of a kut, Yongsu’s Mother boasts on my behalf, “Ha! Grandmother, you’ve heard of Kam’ak Mountain, but you’ve never been there. Right? This one has been all the way to the summit!” I have even overheard clients echoing Yongsu’s Mother’s summation of my first pilgrimage, “She prayed on the mountain for a PhD, a husband, and a baby. She made three wishes, and all of them were granted,” one more story to underscore the efficacy of mountain prayers. On that first occasion, my own gear, offering food, camera, tape recorder, and notebook, all stuffed into a bulging day pack, was minor in comparison with the volume of food, cooking equipment, and ritual paraphernalia, including an hourglass drum that Yongsu’s Mother and her colleagues carried up the mountain with the help of a porter. To reach the mountain, we went by bus to a nearby town and commissioned taxis to take us as far as the mountain footpath. We spent most of the daylight hours on the mountain, making offerings at a shrine tree beside the path, holding the first segments of a kut at a sacred spring, and climbing to the summit to complete the kut in front of an old memorial stone. On the way, Yongsu’s Mother complained about Chatterbox, who was withholding the rice cake that she had promised to contribute to Yongsu’s Mother’s kut the next day. However justified her anger, Yongsu’s Mother should not have complained on the mountain, and when we reached the summit, she announced loudly that her feet hurt, violating another prohibition. At the summit, with a commanding view of North Korea across the Imjin River, we found ample evidence of other shamans’ visits, but when a security patrol happened by, they threatened to curtail our kut. We offered them what was left of our Fanta soft drinks and assured them that I would not use my camera. Before the kut could continue, Chatterbox and Clear Spring had a loud and stubborn argument about the proper placement of offering food in front of the memorial stone. None of this was auspicious. We were tired and hungry all the way down the mountain and seemed to have chosen the wrong trail, a steeper trail of viscous mud. My assistant, Ms. S., who had inadvisably worn dress sandals, was having a particularly difficult time. And because Yongsu’s Mother had hastily bundled my day pack onto my assistant’s back, and because, through her haste, I had not secured a small coin purse with some extra cash that I had removed during the kut, the coin purse bounced out of the top of the pack during our descent and was lost. Or as Yongsu’s Mother saw it, because my assistant was a Christian, she had refused to bow to the Mountain God. Because she was a Christian, she should never have joined the pilgrimage. Because the


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Mountain God was angry with her, he had grabbed at her legs and made her stumble on the path, and he had snatched my coin purse, thinking that it belonged to my stumbling assistant. This was Yongsu’s Mother’s explanation. I, however, thought guiltily of the centipede that I had heedlessly squashed in my room that morning before setting forth, another violation. My three wishes would eventually be fulfilled, but for Yongsu’s Mother the spring pilgrimage to Kam’ak Mountain was a failure that brought her bad health and little business in the following months. This was common knowledge among her colleagues. At a kut the next month, Clear Spring Mansin’s initiate, speaking as the Great Spirit Grandmother, addressed Yongsu’s Mother, “You’ve gone to the mountain and back. Now why should you be so heavyhearted? It’s because you and [Chatterbox] made so much noise [arguing with each other] on the mountain.” The Great Spirit Grandmother did not mention Yongsu’s Mother’s declaration of sore feet, much less the squashed centipede. The necessity of making another pilgrimage was very much on Yongsu’s Mother’s mind, but it was not until the deep midnight of a lunar New Year’s Eve that we made a short hike to the village shrine and Yongsu’s Mother returned with a lighter step. I have told this pilgrimage story to convey the magic and danger associated with mountains and to make a contrast between our daylong hike and present-day mobility. In the shamans’ busy spring season of 1985, when I lived in Yongsu’s Mother’s house, I noticed that she frequently fasted from meat, fish, and eggs in anticipation of mountain journeys, either with her own clients or with other mansin and their clients. Going to the mountain so often was something new, and when we went to Kam’ak Mountain together the following fall, I realized how streamlined the mountain pilgrimage had become. She called a cab driven by the husband of one of her most steadfast clients, a man she affectionately addressed as “Brother-in-law Yun” and coddled with a generous fee, a share of the rice cake and offering fruit, and a good breakfast at journey’s end. On the chosen day, Brother-in-law Yun dutifully appeared before dawn to ferry us, and our paraphernalia, along well-surfaced roads to the base of the mountain. According to Yongsu’s Mother, we could no longer climb to the summit of Kam’ak Mountain, or even to the Water Grandmother’s well, since the area had been closed “for security.”4 We made our offerings at a shrine tree on the bank of a mountain stream, perhaps the same tree where we had bowed and tied strips of paper years before, but I did not recognize the place amid new vegetation. The mansin assured me that there had been “a shrine tree here from long ago.” That several trees in the immediate vicinity were all adorned with strips of cloth


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and paper festoons left by other pilgrims suggested a lack of consensus over the proper shrine tree. When another shaman arrived with her own party of clients, Yongsu’s Mother and her friend and colleague Songjuk Mansin tried to point her in the direction of the “real” shrine tree. When the shaman persisted in leading her party to another tree, in their eyes the “wrong” tree, they muttered that she was a crazy woman. They also impressed upon me, with pride in their own work, that the other shaman’s observances were conducted in a rushed manner, begun sometime after our arrival and completed before our departure. My most salient memories of this second trip to Kam’ak Mountain are of the warming effects of the vodka left over from our libations and of Yongsu’s Mother discovering that she had forgotten her kitchen knife and exorcising me with her pocket fingernail clipper. Thanks to Brother-in-law Yun, we were back home by nine in the morning, in time for a late breakfast. By 1991 the conditions of pilgrimage had changed again. We traveled in the evening, Babe’s husband driving his van, and despite a prohibition against loud noise on a mountain journey, Yongsu’s Mother made no objection to Babe’s belting karaoke during the drive back home. More surprising, we went not to a desolate hillside but to a fully functioning kuttang, where we drew water from a cement well, made our offerings on a cement platform, and prostrated ourselves on woven mats provided by the establishment. When I expressed surprise, Yongsu’s Mother assured me that there had been a kuttang on this site “from long ago.” “But not when we came here in 1985?” “Not then,” she said, reminding me of how quickly in Korea my own recent memories became “long ago.” However much Yongsu’s Mother laments that the mountains’ power is diminished and however convenient the journey has become—most recently in her family SUV—she still fasts carefully before each visit to Kam’ak Mountain. When I tried to tell her through circumlocution that the friend who would travel to the mountain with us in 2003 was “clean,” free of menstruation, she winced in warning lest even such a conversation pollute our enterprise. On the mountain a few days later, it began to rain when we set out our offerings on an altar dedicated to significant gods in the shaman pantheon, forcing us to remove the offerings to a covered pavilion and hold our ritual there. It was clear to Yongsu’s Mother that the gods had caused the rain, since on the mountain she was making offerings only to lower and less clean gods as a prelude to the kut she would do for me later in the week. The higher gods had been offended when she placed these offerings on their altar. “Didn’t you see?” she asked me. “It stopped raining as soon as we removed the offerings.” And indeed, it had.


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As cars, vans, and mountain kuttang transformed the mountain pilgrimage into a convenient excursion, paved roads and national highways opened up the possibility of a relatively quick, relatively painless trip to a sacred mountain anywhere in South Korea. In the 1970s, migrants and North Korean refugees living in or near Seoul made special offerings on a mountain near their present home as a stand-in for an ancestral mountain (ponsan) in another part of the peninsula (Kendall 1985, 130–131). Today Yongsu’s Mother thinks nothing of hiring a van and escorting her clients to their ancestral mountain in the far south. South Korea is, after all, approximately the size of the state of New Jersey. A van loaded with shamans, clients, offerings, and ritual paraphernalia traveling after peak evening traffic can reach significant mountain sites in a few hours and return home in the early morning after a sleepless night of ritual and driving. Where shaman traditions in Seoul enjoined initiates to make a circuit of potent mountains, this may have been a once-in-a-lifetime experience. By the 1990s, however, some of the shamans I met described frequent journeys from mountain to mountain to rejuvenate their own powers, journeys abetted by private cars and good roads. If the mountains’ power is less than in the past, it has become more immediately accessible. Tang and kuttang As on Kam’ak Mountain, commercial kuttang have sprouted up on the hillsides around Seoul and other South Korean cities like mushrooms after the spring rain. Built on quiet and relatively isolated hillsides, many kuttang soon find themselves surrounded by ballooning residential neighborhoods and unfriendly neighbors, if not other kuttang. Infrastructure risks diluted magic. Shamans complain that some important mountain prayers cannot be accomplished in the vicinity of bustling, noisy kuttang. If, for example, they are trying to induce the Birth Grandmother into an infertile womb, they take their client up a quiet trail. Our journey to a mountain kuttang for Mrs. Yi’s kut (in chapter 2) revealed how this institution has removed kut from neighborhood and community and shamans from the scrutiny of critical aficionados. It also suggested how, for the shamans themselves, the kuttang is a networking node, a place to witness the work of particularly skilled colleagues and observe different regional styles, their distinctive rhythms and stories spilling into the common courtyard like the scraps from the paksu’s exorcism. In addition to shamans, kuttang bring together a variety of people who feel a close asso-


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ciation with the spirits: shrine-keepers, musicians (chaebi) who often come from shaman families, and maids-of-all-work (kongyangju) like Auntie Cho who are destined shamans but lack either money or sufficient inspiration for a successful initiation ritual. Kuttang also receive visits from an international community of students and scholars, as shamans and shrine-keepers often remark. The last time I visited the Kuksadang, in the fall of 2005, I met a new group of visitors, Western tourists clutching their copies of the Lonely Planet’s guide to Korea.5 Kuttang, like inns, restaurants, and wedding halls, are service enterprises. In addition to renting rooms with altar space and an appropriate configuration of god pictures, the kuttang staff provides vessels for the offering food; cooks the offering rice; steams the rice cake; caters meals on request; vends cigarettes, drinks, and tonics at inflated prices; and rents costumes and equipment to novice shamans who have not yet acquired their own. Kuttang personnel know how to fix offerings, anchor a full pig’s carcass on a trident, and prepare the chopper blades for a shaman to balance on. Like other service enterprises, kuttang compete to offer upgraded facilities such as indoor plumbing, air conditioning, and expansive parking space. One of the kuttang I visited was equipped with an electric dumbwaiter for hauling offering food to shrine rooms on the upper floors of the multistory building. While some proprietors of kuttang have the air of innkeepers or restaurateurs, others are shamans themselves or have strong links to the gods, whom they feel obligated to honor on a daily basis as shamans do. The thirdgeneration keeper of the Fortification Shrine told us that while she is in no sense a shaman, she has portentous dreams, as shamans do, and in one such dream she was given the appropriate rhythm for hitting the hourglass drum during kut, a task she happily performs on request for an extra fee. Kuttang on or at the base of potent mountains offer outdoor places for prayers to the Mountain God and the Seven Stars. Many efficacious sites, like the Pohyôn Sansingak on Samgak Mountain, were known to worshippers long before the appearance of kuttang bearing their name (Yi C. 1996). Elsewhere, shrine-keepers construct new sites with wells of pumped water to simulate mountain springs, cement platforms for offerings, and vinyl canopies to protect worshippers from the rain. Mountain kuttang connect shamanic notions of mountains as places infused with spiritual and visionary power and the geomancer’s scheme of a systematically magical landscape charged with invisible veins that make the kuttang successful and the rituals performed there efficacious. Some kuttang inhabit the particularly auspicious space below a potent mountain configu-


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ration, the myôngdang, where the positive energy of the site converges. Like any business site (or home, or grave), a kuttang benefits from a particularly potent myôngdang, and the rumored efficacy or inauspiciousness of a site adversely affects business. Kuttang that intersect with powerful mountain geomancy advertise this as a selling point.6 But while geomancers map energy flows through the veins in the landscape, the following encounters with shamans and shrine-keepers suggest that in the mutable South Korean landscape, gods make their presence known in less predictable and sometimes utterly surprising ways. In the mid-1970s, researchers all seemed to know the Kuksadang and Halmidang as places where one could usually find a kut in process, but for the nearly two years that I followed their activities, Yongsu’s Mother and her colleagues performed most of their kut in private homes, going only occasionally to the Kuksadang and other kuttang. An observer described this same pattern a century ago (Anonymous 1903). Some scholars attribute the more recent spread of mountain kuttang to anti-noise ordinances and “anti-superstition” campaigns in the 1970s, all blatantly intended to suppress the shamans’ activities (Huang 1988, 18; Seong-nae Kim, pers. comm., 31 August 2003). Cramped apartments and life lived on industrial time also enhance the appeal of the relatively isolated kuttang that boast ample space for offerings, dancing, and feats, and no neighbors to complain about the noise. With rising standards of consumption, shaman households acquired vans to transport clients, offering food, and ritual paraphernalia. From at least the early 1990s, shrine-keepers have been advertising “convenient parking facilities” on their business cards. Kuttang thus combine something new—a nearly ubiquitous, automobile accessible commercial service—with two things old, shrines dedicated to significant tutelary spirits (tang or pugundang), like the tile-roofed shrine of my tale (that was never a kuttang), and pilgrimages to sacred and potent mountains. In dynastic times, government clerks maintained “pugundang,” shrines to spirits associated with different government offices and magistracies (Walraven 1995, 112; H. Yi 1972, 1283). The Kuksadang, Seoul’s most venerable kuttang, was one among several protective shrines in the sacred landscape of the Chosôn capitol. Potent local deities, like the maiden of the old shrine in my opening tale, gained official recognition and resided in pugundang, and shamans honored them with seasonal kut (Pak H. 2001; Yi C. 1996; Yi N. 1976). With the passing of the kingdom, local shrines lost their association with any national administration, and their periodic rituals came to be regarded as village festivals, in most instances maintained and


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perpetuated by shamans, as in my tale of the old shrine. Several pugundang along the Han River, now embraced by the sprawling boundaries of metropolitan Seoul, remain tenuous sites of ritual activities and folkloric inquiry (Pak H. 2001). It is not clear when shamans began to rent space in these shrines for their own kut in addition to performing officially sponsored kut to celebrate the resident deity. An early twentieth-century observer records how shamans performed their most impressive and lavish kut in public shrines where, in addition to the cost of offering food, “a certain sum must be paid as rental” to the proprietor, probably the shrine-keeper or responsible civil servant (Anonymous 1903, 203–204). Walraven suggests that the shamans used public shrines for private kut only in the waning years of the Chosôn Kingdom and that the impropriety of these events may have contributed to the vehemence of government campaigns to remove the shamans from the shrines (Walraven 1995, 129; 1998, 56–59). The anonymous early observer records a significant list of shrines that accommodated private kut around 1900. Of these, the Kuksadang, the Sasindang, and the Halmidang were all well-known kuttang in the 1970s, the Sasindang continued into the new millennium, and the Kuksadang still functions today. Shrines, gods, and power One morning in 1994 I found the young attendant of a small kuttang glumly surveying the wreckage of a metal frame and nylon canopy, a tentlike structure intended to shield supplicants at a sacred well. The neighborhood authorities had torn it down because the kuttang sits on officially designated parkland where further building is prohibited. The kuttang itself was safe, he told us, because it had been registered as a shrine for more than twenty years, but a payment of “fees” had not been sufficient to spare the new structure. This small encounter, combined with the story of the old shrine and other stories to come, reveals the spatial conflicts and ambiguities that conspire around shrines, conflicts as old as a century of Korean modernity (Walraven 1995, 1998). Even without the blunt instrument of anti-superstition campaigns, which sanctioned the destruction of village shrines in the early 1970s, master plans for urban renewal, parkland, and security areas have dislocated shrines and placed many sacred sites off limits to worshippers (Pak H. 2001; Ryu 2000), not without quiet but persistent resistance (Ryu 2008). Pak HΔng-ju’s survey of neighborhood shrines (2001) catalogues their physical displacement by the construction of new roads, high-


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ways, and apartment blocks, the subsequent dispersal and dying off of old communities of adherents, and the tenuous perpetuation of old rites, the old shrine-keeper’s complaints in multiple. The Granny Shrine (Halmidang) grew up around a shrine tree at the northwest pass of the highway north from the capital city. In one version of the legend, tigers used to prey on travelers navigating the pass until a wise old woman related that the spirit in a tree beside the path demanded offerings. The tree became a sôn’ang shrine, and the wise old woman was eventually apotheosized as the “granny” of the shrine (or perhaps it was a “white-haired grandmother” that the original visionary had seen, or both). The shrine outlasted the tree, which was cut down in colonial times, probably as an anti-superstition measure. According to oral tradition, it fell on the man who wielded the ax, crushing him to death. The teller gave the tale a nationalistic spin, of a piece with geomancy stories abroad in Korea as the government prepared to tear down the old capitol: the colonial government cut down shrine trees to make telephone poles even as it cut the auspicious veins of Korea’s geomancy with iron bars and axes. The Granny Shrine outlived the shrine tree but did not survive more recent complaints of noise pollution from Christians in the neighborhood; by 1990 it had disappeared. I heard the legend of the Granny Shrine from the keeper of another old shrine originally in the same neighborhood, the Fortification Shrine, which her family had managed for three generations. The story of this second shrine is a tale of more recent but no less fantastic spiritual agency. Four years before, the current shrine-keeper’s brother had sold the shrine to settle a gambling debt. She did not tell us about the debt. Ms. Kim and I had heard about it in the sideline gossip at another kut that same summer. What she did relate—lowering her voice for Ms. Kim on the assumption that her story was not fit for a foreigner’s ear—was that within one hundred days of closing the deal, all three parties to this transaction—the man who had made the introduction, the man who fronted the money, and the new manager—were killed in a traffic accident, widely interpreted as a divine punishment.7 This, too, the foreigner had already heard from the musicians at another kuttang, but the shrine-keeper brought the story up-to-date. The deaths cast a pall over the enterprise, and the shrine was torn down and replaced by an ordinary building with no connection to the shaman world. The shrine-keeper, by her account the only member of her family who seriously serves the gods, the only one willing to reestablish the Fortification Shrine in a new (and less expensive) location, persisted despite her husband’s objections and her own lack of resources. She received a dream from the shrine gods telling her to look for a new site in a hilly northern neighborhood of the city. To


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her surprise, she received a telephone call from a potential backer within days of this auspicious dream and had soon set herself up in business in an old house near a Buddhist temple. Here, she reinstalled the god images and paraphernalia from the old shrine and maintained the name. When we met her, she had been in this new location for about four years, but business was slow that summer and her only regular clients seemed to be the old shamans who had patronized the shrine in her father’s day. In her present location, she could not meet the rising standards of clients who expected parking space and indoor plumbing. In the summer of 1998, Ms. Kim and I went back to the Buddhist temple, wondering if the shrine proprietress had managed to sustain her business in the precarious economic climate following the Asian Financial Crisis. The Fortification Shrine was gone, replaced by a cinder-block house, an ordinary house with a pile of shoes by the door and a child’s plastic toys abandoned in the front yard. No one was at home. The proprietor of the snack shop down the road remembered kut in the neighborhood, but all that had stopped “long ago”—he may as well have been recalling events from his childhood and not a mere four years past. The monk taking tickets at the temple had no memory of the kuttang, but young monks are not long in one place. Another monk, overhearing our conversation, told us that the proprietress had moved away. We would hear later that the temple had been unhappy with a kuttang at its front door. As a final gesture, we called the telephone number on the shrine-keeper’s old business card and, to our surprise, she picked up. She had relocated to the far north of the city, once again taking the old shrine fittings and shrine name with her and reestablishing the Fortification Shrine beyond the then northernmost extension of the orange subway line, in a place of fields and trees. It was a spacious shrine in a large and well-maintained tile-roofed house—four shrine rooms and a broad parking lot. The shrine-keeper’s face had softened; the anxious lines were gone. Things were going well for her. The old kuttang had been “someone else’s house,” she said, but this one she owns. Her clients had loaned her the money to buy and repair it. She had been here for two years, having moved in on the ninth day of lunar September, “the day the swallows fly south of the Han River.” Once again, the location of her kuttang had been foretold in a dream: Her junior uncle and aunt, described as “the parents who had raised her,” and the spirit grandfathers in her shrine (with whom the former shrinekeepers were now merged) led her to a lotus pond with a waterfall cascading down. She thought that she could not pass through the curtain of water, but somehow she managed. She was standing with her uncle in some house, this


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very house, and her uncle put an official certificate into the storeroom above the kitchen. She recognized the house from her dream when she came here for the first time, and she learned from the neighbors that there had been a lotus pond nearby in the past. In her dream, she had felt a need to relieve herself. A male and a female god led her to a place where there was water pouring down. She was reluctant to relieve herself there, thinking of the people downstream, but the male god told her, “I’m the president, and I’ve set my seal to it.” Complaints from neighbors—the bane of shamanic activities—were an expressed concern of hers. Recalling the fate of the Halmidang and her own difficulties with the Buddhist temple, perhaps the gods in her dream were reassuring her about the viability of her kuttang in this new neighborhood. When we visited her again in 2002, she had hung up a sign describing the shrine as an “important folk property.” The gods’ agency in selecting the place where they will reside recurs in the dreaming of shamans and shrine-keepers. Pak HΔng-ju’s survey of pugundang along the Han River provides several historical and recent examples of shrines relocated with the aid of dreams (2001, 108–109, 167, 182). The Fairy Maid claimed that her divine grandfathers had helped her to secure an ideal site for her home and personal shrine under favorable rental terms in a neighborhood of other shamans and diviners near one of Korea’s major universities. Yongsu’s Mother described how, earlier in her career, her gods had insisted that she install them in the spare room that she was renting out to strangers. “We’ll give you the rent money,” they told her, making good on their promise by bringing her clients and giving her a successful practice (Kendall 1985, 56). Years later, in a splendid new bungalow, her gods insisted that she move their shrine from a side room to a more central location; in the gods’ eyes, the side room was like a servants’ quarters built against the side wall of the outer courtyard in a traditional Korean house. The Celestial Shrine, a popular and well-appointed kuttang, claimed patronage by Korea’s premier Cultural Treasure shaman. In the hot summer of 1994 this was the only shrine where Ms. Kim and I found air conditioning. The proprietor decided to build on this site after seeing it in a vision during a mountain pilgrimage. We heard his story in 1998, when he had just returned from another pilgrimage to various mountains to revitalize his spiritual energies. His efforts had been immediately rewarded when he returned to find preparations underway for a kut, welcome business in that difficult spring of the so-called IMF Crisis. Perhaps the unforeseen business put him in an expansive mood (he had refused to talk to us in 1994), and he spoke of many things, including the story of how he had found the location for his shrine. He had gone to Taebaek Mountain, far to the south, to


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pray at a particularly potent site and there had a waking vision (huansang) of a plateau surrounded by mountains, a configuration resembling an old woman sitting on her haunches (he struck a pose to illustrate). It was exactly this place, a sacred site where women came to pray, and here he built the Celestial Shrine, naming it after the site in the Taebaek Mountains where he had experienced his vision. But however divinely decreed, in 1998 the Celestial Shrine’s days seemed to be numbered. Road crews would soon cut a tunnel through the mountains, and the surrounding area had been declared parkland. The Celestial Shrine, along with several other shrines in the immediate neighborhood, was scheduled for demolition within the next two years. Where would he go next? He did not know, perhaps to a small retreat somewhere in the mountains. It seemed as though he would wait for another vision. Four years later, it was nearly a replay of the story of the old tile-roofed shrine. We found the shaman shrine-keeper—and his neighbors—still in business. He was entertaining his cronies on a busy Sunday. When I reminded him of the projected demolition that had thrown its shadow over our last interview, he smiled as at a distant memory, “Oh yes, there had been that talk.” When a kuttang becomes a heritage site In the face of complaining neighbors and seemingly arbitrary threats of demolition, some shrine-keepers have begun to deploy a language of heritage sites as a protective strategy. But a language that equates shrines with buildings risks eliding their primary claim as supermaterial gathering places for spirits. The Chosôn Kingdom’s collapse uncoupled the oldest shrines in this discussion from the geomantic scheme of the old royal capital, from the fixity of a geomancer’s master plan for a capital city, and they have wandered from their original sites. The Fortification Shrine, relocated twice in the 1990s after its near loss in an inauspicious real estate deal, had already been relocated once in the 1960s when the northbound road that ran beside it was widened in an early spurt of urban development. The “old shrine” of my opening story had been displaced twice, first by a railroad, then by urban sprawl. Korea’s most famous kuttang, the Kuksadang, carries a well-known story of colonial displacement. Originally located on South Mountain, the Kuksadang marked the southern extension of a geomantic axis that began with Pugak Mountain, north of the city, and ran through Kyôngbok Palace. A Shinto shrine displaced the Kuksadang in 1925 as part of the colonization of Seoul’s landscape. Relocated on Inuang Mountain to the northwest, a mountain also significant in the city’s geomancy (Chông 1999; Kim Y.


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2003), the Kuksadang bridges the divide between a functioning kuttang and a material monument. Its very exceptionality highlights the contradiction between shamanic versus mapped landscapes, between functioning shrines and what Pierre Nora (1989) characterizes as monumental lieu de mémoire, embodiments of official history rather than spaces for the enactment of living memory. It would be difficult to find a shaman or a folklorist who has not heard of the Kuksadang. An important national shrine in dynastic times, many shamans regard the Kuksadang as Korea’s premier kuttang. In traditionalist circles of Seoul shamans, doing a kut at the Kuksadang confers the status of a fully realized professional shaman. A national heritage site since 1979,8 the Kuksadang’s example may have inspired the keeper of the tile-roofed shrine to post a signboard describing her shrine as a “neighborhood cultural treasure” and the keeper of the Fortification Shrine to describe her once-morenewly-relocated shrine as an “important folk property.” Given that shaman practices are popularly regarded as Korea’s “deep cultural root” and that some shamans earn distinction as Human Cultural Treasures, shrine-keepers might well assume that heritage designations will protect shrines that can claim long pedigrees. In the case of the Kuksadang, however, heritage status has been a mixed blessing. Inuang Mountain, the “white tiger” in the geomancers’ tiger/dragon configuration of northern mountains protecting the capital, gives the Kuksadang a particularly potent geomantic site, or myôngdang (Kim Kibin 1993). The Sônbawi, a large twisted rock near the shrine, is a powerful configuration. Yongsu’s Mother, the Fairy Maid, and other destined shamans had been drawn to the rock by an involuntary compulsion as an early but unmistakable sign of their divine calling. Ordinary women come to the rock to pray for conception and good fortune, and shaman initiates pray for the visions and inspired speech that will make their initiation kut a success. In the 1970s my visits to Inuang Mountain were constrained by the whims of the local gendarmes, who did not encourage visitors, particularly foreign visitors with cameras, to wander far from the shrine. With the end of security restrictions and the opening of the mountain to hikers during the Kim Yông Sam administration, people have come to pray all over the mountain, often leaving piles of trash behind them. The sound of drums and gongs and the detritus left in the wake of ritual activity provoke the ire of the many Buddhist establishments that have also grown up in recent years on Inuang Mountain. In this now-crowded space, the monks assume an adversarial posture toward the shamans and their followers, who, in


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monks’ eyes, pollute the mountain with rotting meat and interrupt meditations with their percussive rituals. Noise complaints are a major issue for the Kuksadang, where kut must end by the late afternoon lest the monks from one of the surrounding hermitages complain, once again, to the authorities. The Buddhist establishment has assumed the management of the Sônbawi, improving the site by creating a broad smooth patio in front of the rock where worshippers can make their offerings, but the monks have also prohibited the initiation kut that used to take place on the narrow rock ledge in front of the spiritually potent boulder. The aura of the Kuksadang’s national heritage status does not seem to have conferred any particular privilege on this shrine in the micropolitics of Inuang Mountain. In 1994 a signboard just outside the Kuksadang proclaimed the authorities’ limited tolerance of kut: “In accord with official policy we beseech you to abridge your activities, refrain from drinking and rowdy behavior, and conduct your work in a dignified manner, scrupulously adhering to the designated time.” In 2003 a sign proclaimed, “Prayers and shamanic activities [musok haengwi] and the like are prohibited within the Inuang Mountain Municipal Nature Park.” This official decree has had no visible effect on activities both inside the Kuksadang and all over the mountainside. Policies intended to protect the old wooden structure of the shrine are at cross-purposes with its role as an active kuttang. The lighting of candles, an important element of shrine worship, is technically prohibited. In the summer heat, the shrine-keeper carefully monitors the electric fans set up in the shrine, for fear that overheated wiring will cause a fire. It is not possible to install air conditioning in the shrine, because efficient insulation would require modifying the sliding lattice doors and violate the original architecture. The shrine-keepers also find themselves caught in a contradiction that besets the owners of heritage property in other places (cf. Herzfeld 1991). As private owners, they are expected to maintain the building and cover necessary repairs out-of-pocket, but using only approved traditional methods and materials. State-of-the-art authenticity is costly. As a possible resolution, there is talk of the Bureau of Cultural Property Preservation taking over the shrine and maintaining the old building as a historic site. What, then, would it represent? As one more lieu de mémoire of old Seoul and of the ruptures imposed by its colonizers, would it become, as in Barbara Bender’s critique of Britain’s Stonehenge, “a socially empty view of the past” (2002a, 169)? However it might speak to “history,” the Kuksadang would cease to be an active kuttang. Devoid of gods, visions, and shamanic


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performances, it would become a monumental shell. The gods, presumably, would go elsewhere. The subversive power of peripatetic shrines and mobile shamans One can read the peripatetic histories of shrines as I initially read them, as reactive responses to the hegemony of maps—colonial and national—and see disenchantment implicit in real estate development, zoning laws, noise ordinances, and complaining neighbors. Sometimes these things best even the most tenacious spirits; on my last trip to Korea I learned that the Fortification Shrine had succumbed to a massive urban development plan. Despite its venerable lineage, the shrine-keeper could not mount a successful preservation campaign because the building itself was not very old, something almost incidental to a shrine. Kuttang make their claims on the landscape through the unmappable and unpredictable agency of gods as manifest in extraordinary happenstance—in Nora’s terms, the stuff of memory, not monument. De Certeau would call these dreams and visions the superstitions that muddle and confound a totalizing city plan. Popular imagination keeps alive small but fantastic acts of resistance: the Granny Shrine’s sacred sôn’ang tree fell on and crushed whatever agent of modernity had cut it down; the businessmen who brokered the Fortification Shrine died in a traffic accident. The sum of these encounters suggests that disenchantment is seldom absolute and that the shamans’ gods are innately resilient, possessed of a regenerative capacity to inhabit and reinscribe new landscapes with what de Certeau calls “the magical power of proper names” (1984, 104). Buildings may crumble or be torn down, but gods have the capacity to outlast the material substance of shrines. Shrine-keepers and shamans proudly renovate, demolish, rebuild, and enlarge their own shrines, assuming that their gods and ancestors, like mortal Koreans, take pleasure in more modern and spacious accommodations. “Old shrines” persist in the names they bear, the gods they house, and their reputation among practicing shamans, and most kuttang are not very old at all. As unruly memory sites, kuttang and sacred sites function as de Certeau’s “anti-museums,” deploying the stuff of legend against a totalizing vision of urban space, offering the possibility of escape “into another landscape,” albeit not one of picturesquely crumbling tile-roofed houses but, like much of the urban periphery, one hastily constructed of cheap and expedient materials because it will be torn down and reconfigured soon enough.


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Cheap and expedient construction: A shaman unbinds ancestral longing by whisking open the knots in a length of cloth, 1994. She works on one of the several open-air platforms that have been constructed on the hillside outside a mountain kuttang. A vinyl canopy protects the shaman and her clients from the rain.

Mount Paektu The recent history of shamanic landscapes describes adaptations to constriction and loss, but also the reclamation of sacred sites abandoned in the disjuncture of domestic migration. Globalization and the possibility of international travel are stretching the shamans’ magical map even further. On a hot August afternoon in 2003 a cranky Child God arrived unbidden at a kut in the Kuksadang and chased a young shaman around the offering table, angry with her because she had cancelled a planned pilgrimage and deprived him of a trip to Mount Paektu, on the Chinese border with North Korea. Pilgrimages to Mount Paektu make a fitting end to my account of a transformed and still-transforming Korean shaman practice. At the apex of Korea’s mountain geomancy, Mount Paektu sends energy (ki) through every mountain on the peninsula. As the birthplace of Tan’gun, the national ancestor and purported first Korean shaman, Mount Paektu assumes the


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aura of a mythic place of origin (cf. Stewart 1984, 23; Ivy 1995, 10 n. 17),9 but for most of the second half of the twentieth century, owing to the impermeable borders of the cold war, the mountain was a distant memory to South Koreans who evoked its majesty in the first bars of their national anthem. In the 1990s, as China opened to South Korean trade, investment, and tourism, and as South Korea’s democratic transformation and new prosperity conferred the mobility of package tours and more accessible passports, South Korean tourists began to visit Mount Paektu from the Chinese side.10 Mount Paektu and the fantastically configured Diamond Mountains loom large in the South Korean imagination of a once and future unified Korea. In 1998 the Hyôndae Asan Corporation, a South Korean conglomerate whose northern-born founder and heirs have espoused commitment to national reconciliation, began to offer boat tours and, from 2003, less expensive bus tours to the Diamond Mountains. Tours take place under careful control and surveillance by the North Korean hosts and with periodic breaks in service, depending on the diplomatic climate and such unforeseen mishaps as the 2008 shooting of a tourist who wandered into a restricted area. Early reports described how some among the tourists, northerners living in the South, made quiet offerings at the side of the path on behalf of ancestors and family members whose fates in the North are unknown (Seong-wou Kim 1998). Yang Posal and other shamans used the opportunity of a Diamond Mountains tour to invoke the gods at the foot of the mountains and absorb their power (Kim Sung Ja, pers. comm., 12 June 2002). At the time of this writing, the Korean slopes of Mount Paektu remain inaccessible to organized tour groups from South Korea, but both secular tourists and shamans have been visiting the Chinese slopes for more than a decade. Tourists and shaman pilgrims English-language guidebooks on China devote little if any space to Mount Paektu (Ch., Changbai Shan), but the place has become a veritable mecca of South Korean tourism and domestic Han Chinese tourist contemplation of China’s own Korean minority.11 Tourists scramble up to the rim of Heavenly Lake (Ch’ônji; Ch., Tian Chi), an enormous turquoise crater, and pose for a requisite souvenir photograph with the distant North Korean lakeshore as backdrop, then scale a steep stairway past a spectacular waterfall to the shore of the lake itself. In the early 1990s some visitors mixed the lake water


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with dirt from Cheju Island, the far southernmost extension of Korea, in an act of magical reunion. Into this transnational space, South Korean shamans make their pilgrimages, beginning with the renowned Cultural Treasure shaman Kim Geum-hwa, who accompanied a South Korean cultural delegation to the Chinese slopes of Mount Paektu in the early 1990s and performed a kut for national unification. A refugee from northwestern Hwanghae Province, Kim is deeply concerned with this issue, locating her own World Shamanism Center on Kanghua, a South Korean island across a narrow strait from northern territory. Because many shamans take Kim as a role model, it was perhaps inevitable that television broadcasts of her Mount Paektu kut would inspire shaman advocacy associations to organize their own public kut on the mountain, featuring the most renowned shamans in their membership. The Spirit Worshippers’ Anti-Communist Association prominently displayed photographs and a video from their own trip in the association headquarters when I visited in 1994. A shaman active in a rival association described her experiences when she was invited to perform at the Yanbian College of Arts in China’s Korean Autonomous Region. She preceded her public kut with a journey up Mount Paektu to invite the gods to attend, a journey undertaken in full cognizance of the mountain’s power and danger.12 The weather was bad, but because the gods themselves had ordained the day for the ritual, she felt that she had to go, “even if it killed me.” She was very much aware that three months earlier a South Korean journalist had fallen from the mountain to his death. Her hosts advised her to wear trousers for the ascent, but she insisted on wearing the full-skirted Korean costume that the gods expected; she would do things properly. Because of the weather, she and her small entourage were all alone on the mountain, and it was eerily quiet. When they reached the halfway point, the skies cleared and they had a spectacular view of the peak, a replay of the experience of the exiled eighteenth-century scholar official Sô MyôngΔng when, after carefully purifying himself and performing the mountain offering with a sincere heart, he was granted not only a sudden clearing but also news of his political rehabilitation (Eggert n.d., 18–19). When the South Korean shaman began to divine, she saw gods of both the North and South descending from heaven to meet their counterparts. She saw good fortune pouring down on Korea. She saw a rainbow, an auspicious sign. She was reluctant to state everything the gods told her: “It wasn’t as though I was doing a ritual for an individual client. Everything I said would have national implications.” She did not want to risk losing face with


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expansive oracles recorded by a broadcast crew, but she did predict that within the next four to five years, a road would connect North and South Korea. In this, she felt vindicated because by the time of this interview in 1998, South Korean airplanes were flying over North Korea. “I was right, wasn’t I?” she said with a chuckle. These journeys, by Kim Geum-hwa and by less famous but still distinguished great shamans (k’Δn mudang), carry the aura of cultural performance. Remarkable and remarked-upon events in the shaman’s career, their public intentions and “national implications” distinguish these journeys from the mountain pilgrimages shamans undertake either to petition the gods on behalf of clients or to recharge their own inspirational batteries. But Mount Paektu has also become the site of these more ordinary pilgrimages, like the one the young shaman had cavalierly abandoned, to the disappointment of the Child God. In 2002, I overheard a shaman team discussing during a cigarette break a forthcoming trip to Mount Paektu, one shaman complaining that she could not join the group because of her busy schedule. Could they really be talking so casually about a visit to Mount Paektu? Indeed they were, and they were not alone. I learned from Ms. Kim that Yang Posal had also been there. When I asked about journeys to Mount Paektu during another break with another group of Seoul shamans, they all treated the journey as a matter of course, pointing to one of their number who had been there “even before Kim Geum-hwa” and had subsequently gone back four more times. The shamans in these conversations represent a range of regional origins and local traditions of shaman practice, sharing the notion of numinous Korean mountains and the particular power of Mount Paektu. The view from a distant mountain Auspiciousness pours down on Korea from a ritual performed on Chinese territory. A Child God makes trouble when his promised trip to Mount Paektu is thwarted. With the irony of history, the permeability of post–cold war boundaries and developments in global tourism enable shamans, with other South Korean travelers, to reconnect with a space they regard and experience as a quintessentially Korean site. At the same time, they vest these pilgrimages with the cachet conferred by international travel, something that successful shamans now undertake with other successful South Koreans. The mountain enables visions of unity and reconnection, but at the heart of the mountain, the view from Heavenly Lake reveals the inaccessible shore of a divided nation. Shamanic pilgrimages to Mount Paektu bespeak a


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global moment when gods and shamans travel routes that override national division, inhabiting an expanded and visionary landscape of “Korea” even as these same journeys underscore its complicated and still unresolved history as a divided nation. Mount Paektu journeys make a fitting end to my description of shaman practices in a place like South Korea, where change is palpable, a commonplace that also partakes of the fantastic and uncanny.


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Conclusion

I began this account of a changing South Korean shaman world with Yongsu’s Mother’s nostalgic observation that Korean mountains have less power to inspire shamans than in the past, that war and precipitous real estate development drove gods down from the mountains and into people, creating an overabundance of lackluster shamans. In the final chapter, I returned with her to her own sacred mountain, where she had occasion to observe that when we placed our offerings in an inappropriate place, the rain forced us to remove them and then stopped with uncanny precision. Nostalgia is a commonplace of modern life, and Yongsu’s Mother is a product of modern Korea, but the mountains—at least her mountain—continues to hold some magic for her. For Yongsu’s Mother and others like her, the South Korean shamans’ world is a domain of “creative imagination,” in Raymond Williams’ terms, a space where a dominant system fails to “reduce all experience into instrumentality and all things into commodities” (1977, 151). Cars have proprietary officials in their engines, and cash, clothing, and bottles of imported whisky propel grief, contempt, and blessing in the projective theater of a kut. The spirits sing of customers who pay with cash and not credit, and they promise an electrician a bright future “with no power failure.” Even the IMF steps in to perform a vengeful act requested of the spirits. The quotidian becomes fantastic in the space of a shamanic performance. For South Koreans, modernity is a moving target, and gods, ancestors, and skillfully inspired shamans have adroitly managed to move with it. As with other shamans in other places, the work of mansin in kut enacts personal and collective knowledge as a mimetic act that brings the “out there” into the here and now. “Enactment” implies a range of inspiration, knowledge, and skill, as exhibited in the kut for Mrs. Min and the kut for Mrs. Yi, in the deployment of whisky bottles and rice cake by experienced practitioners, in the struggles of aspiring apprentices, and in the initiate Chini’s failure to become an inspired shaman because she lacked the confidence to perform herself as a shaman. I have described ancestors and gods as artful improvisers but in a manner that witnesses the ritual knowledge, skill, and experience the shamans so clearly value themselves. I am concerned, 205


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Conclusion

however, that an overemphasis on the mechanics of preservation, as in the many well-intentioned efforts to celebrate the kut as national heritage and performance art, has objectified “tradition” in a nostalgic valorization of the past that necessarily denigrates living shamans in the present. Superstition and tradition sit on flip sides of modernity’s coin denying the agency of shamanic acts, the one side by explicit confutation, the other by eliding the beating heart of shamanic practice, the announcement of something consequential from out there, now. The discomfort inflicted by modern common sense gets compounded when spirits do not confine themselves to things spiritual but address preoccupations with the material world, with money and goods, as they often do in contemporary South Korean shaman practice. Ritual materialism becomes a topic of moral disapprobation for critics, clients, and the shamans themselves. I have tried to map this contradictory ground as shamans themselves traverse it, stretching the notion of ritual therapy to include Yongsu’s Mother’s observation that “people worry about money until it makes them ill” and suggesting how new commodities are sometimes conscripted to the work of healing. The realization of shamanship is a difficult and by no means certain process, no less in Korea than elsewhere. And as in other societies with active shaman traditions, the question of “true” versus “phony” shamans abides. Like the critics of present-day shamans, and my mansin interlocutors, I am aware that many shamans perform without sufficient training, that contemporary lifestyles and the spatial isolation of shamanic performances abet shoddy work, and that many who style themselves as mudang function primarily if not exclusively as diviners. Yes, these shaman diviners are part of the changing popular religious landscape too, in some ways particularly well adapted to it, and some, like the Fairy Maid and Ms. Shin, provide their clients with a therapeutic lift such as one might find in many talking cures, from Freudians to tea-leaf readers. There is ample work here for another generation of researchers. My aim has been to show how the seemingly “old-fashioned” sort of shamans I got to know during my first fieldwork, and some of their younger colleagues, effectively engage contemporary South Korean life. I offer the gentle suggestion that popular religion is dynamic religion, that those whom we think of as shamans are particularly adept at engaging new material, and that we might find the like of Yongsu’s Mother and her colleagues in other similarly prosperous and anxious places.


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Notes

Introduction 1. A Chinese li, or Korean ri, equals approximately a third of an English mile. 2. Balzer (1993, 1996a, 1996b, 2001), Hamayon (1995, 1998), Johansen (1997), Tedlock (2005, 270–276), and Vitebsky (1995a). 3. This definition is generally consistent with those provided by William P. Lebra (n.d., cited in Y. K. Harvey 1979, 4), Merete Demant Jakobsen (1999, 3–8), and Piers Vitebsky (1995b, 10–11), and it enables a broad ethnographic conversation. I do not hold with Alice Kehoe’s suggestion (2000) that the term be restricted to its Siberian homeland. While acknowledging shamanic practices as vividly embodied, I have avoided the problematic and sometimes inapplicable terms “ecstasy” or “trance” (as critiqued by Hamayon 1995, 1998). 4. Bacigalupo (2004a, 2004b), Balzer (2001), Conklin (2002), Humphrey and Onon (1996), and the several contributions to N. Thomas and Humphrey (1994). Korean shamans’ involvement in the pro-democracy movement is discussed in chapter 1. 5. “Neo-” or “core” shamanism generally follows anthropologist Michael Harner’s translation into workshop practice of shamanic techniques aimed at inducing soul flight (1982). Neo- or core shamanism has significant followings in North America and Europe. See Atkinson (1992, 321–323), Hoppál and Kosa (2003), Hoppál and Siikala (1992), Jakobsen (1999), Johnson (2003), and Vitebsky (1995a; 1995b, 150–153). 6. I know of one shaman active outside Korea who has adapted the North Korean tradition in which she was initiated to a New Age workshop format aimed at enabling participants to encounter the spirits. There may be others. 7. For example Bacigalupo (1998, 2007), Balzer (1996a, 1996b) and Omar (2003). For Korea, see C. Choi (1991), Kendall (1998b), and Seong-nae Kim (1989b). 8. See Churchill (2003), Jakobsen (1999, chap. 4), Johnson (2003), and Joralemon (1990). 9. Bastian (2003), Jean Comaroff and Comaroff (1993a, 1993b, 1999), Geschiere (1997), Lindquist (2002), Meyer and Pels (2003), Sanders (2003), and Taussig (1980, 1997).

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Notes to Pages xxvi–8

10. In 2005 the War Museum mounted its surprisingly popular exhibition “Oh! Mother” (Ah! Ômôni), commemorating the hard decades of urbanization and industrialization. 1. Shifting Intellectual Terrain 1. Because weddings were both a major expense and a major parental responsibility, mothers in Enduring Pine Village began investing in informal credit associations years in advance of the event and usually long before a prospective groom had been identified. In this period, most village daughters worked. Where family circumstances permitted, substantial chunks of their earnings were invested as marriage money (see Kendall 1996a, chap. 6). 2. Sometimes zealous officials challenged the efficacy of specific spirits honored in particular local shrines, and in rare instances of intellectual speculation, called the very existence of spirits into question (Walraven 1996). Suppression of local shaman shrines on Cheju Island in the early eighteenth century seems to have been particularly brutal, a measure of the metropolitan Confucian governor’s contempt for indigenous Cheju culture (Nemeth 1984, 130). 3. See Ch’oe K. (1974), Ch’oe S. (1999), and, for China, Cohen (1994) and Yang (2003). In the absence of Korean-language dictionaries for modern terminology, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers and translators consulted readily available Korean-Japanese dictionaries (Schmid 2002, 111). Andre Schmid argues that the growth of modern newspapers throughout the region enabled a remarkably consistent shared terminology as publishers, literate in Chinese ideographs, used each others’ publications as sources of regional news (ibid., 112). 4. Sung-Deuk Oak describes how English-speaking Protestant missionaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries followed the language used by the French priests who had preceded them, retaining these terms even as missionary scholars began to write a more complex understanding of the Korean folk pantheon (Oak n.d.; cf. Jones 1902; Anonymous 1895, 146). 5. In this, they had the reinforcing work of the Reverend John L. Nevius, a China missionary who had collected from the mission field wide-ranging accounts of “demonic possession” and, on the basis of his own experience, suggested the efficacy of exorcisms performed by native converts reading appropriate Bible passages (Oak n.d., 15–16; Nevius 1893). 6. One believer told me that kut most certainly cure affliction because the devil would have it so. 7. The Independent appeared in 1896 and suspended publication in 1899. 8. Also Independent, 21, 23, and 28 May, 6 June, and 17 October 1896; 30 March and 15 April 1897; and Walraven (1995, 110–111). 9. Also 13 and 18 June 1896; 1 November 1898. 10. Also 12 September 1896; 2 January and 28 May 1898.


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11. Hung-youn Cho reports that many decades after these events, his elderly shaman informants still shuddered at the mention of the colonial police (1990, 47–48). 12. I am grateful to Kyeong-hee Choi both for introducing me to this work and for her insightful interpretation of it (K. Choi 1996). 13. See my discussion of “the ideology of affliction” (Kendall 1985, 97–99, chap. 5). 14. In his naïve recounting of this campaign, Chongho Kim (2003) projects the virulent attacks of the early 1970s onto the period of my own fieldwork, five years later. 15. Modern China’s political and intellectual elites, whose views on other matters range across the political spectrum from extremes of the Left and the Right, were united in their opposition to “backward” and “superstitious” practices (Anagnost 1994; Cohen 1991, 113; Duara 1991; Yang 2003). Kapferer (1983, 18, 29) describes the Sri Lankan middle class’s identification with “science” or with more rational-seeming religious practices as a means of asserting and naturalizing class domination. In urban India, middle-class households adopt new “rationalized” devotional practices that disassociate them from rural “superstition” (Babb 1990). In rural Nepal, those whose occupations define them as agents of “development” are most likely to reject shamanic practices as a way of asserting their own claims to “modernity” (Pigg 1992, 1996). Argyrou (1993, 266) describes a similar phenomenon on Cyprus. 16. Over the last three decades, differently organized government entities have overseen cultural activities in South Korea: the Ministry of Culture and Information, the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Culture and Sports, and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism—the current incarnation. “Ministry of Culture” is used in the text to avoid confusion, since programs affecting culture heritage were essentially continuous from one renamed ministry to the next. 17. These activities recall attempts to organize shamans and other “spirit worshippers” during the colonial period, both to give them a legal identity in the eyes of the Japanese state and also to “enlighten” them and correct “superstitious” practices (Ch’oe S. 1999, 4, 90–100). 18. Kim, a role model for many shamans, has authored a book of shamanic practices (Kim G. 1995) and has opened a high-profile shaman training institute. 19. C. T. Allen (1990), Ch’oe K. (2003), Ch’oe S. (1999), R. L. Janelli (1986), and Robinson (1988) for Korea, compared with Bauman (1989, cited in Bauman and Sawin 1990, 288), Bendix (1997), Burke (1978, chap. 1), and Linke (1990) for Europe and Ivy (1995) for Japan. 20. The Chosôn Kingdom (1392–1910) had already historicized disparate legends and folk practices by enshrining Tan’gun as the national ancestor and honoring him with periodic court-sponsored worship, affirming a cultural genealogy distinct from that of China (Han Y. 1975, 26–33). The Tan’gun story comes from the foun-


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dation myth of the ancient Koguryô Kingdom (commonly attributed to 37 BC–AD 668). As told in “an ancient text” the son of the sky god descended to Mount Paektu and formed a union with a she bear who, by following his instructions, had been magically transformed into a mortal woman. Their union produced Tan’gun, the culture hero and ancestor of the Korean people who reigned for 1,500 years and then became the god of another mountain (Henthorn 1971, 228–229). The oldest surviving version of the tale dates from the thirteenth century, long after the end of the Koguryô Kingdom. Contemporary readings of the story, some quite literal, figure prominently in South Korean nationalist discourse today. See Baker (2002) for a discussion of the sometimes problematic ways this text has been interpreted. 21. Ch’oe Namsôn was not the first to describe Tan’gun as the progenitor of contemporary shamans. Boudewijn Walraven notes that the Mudang naeryôk (Chronicles of the Mudang), dated to 1885, made this link while disparaging thencontemporary shaman practices (Walraven 1993, 10). Ch’oe and Sin made the Tan’gun story and its shamanic associations tractable to a modern understanding of national history. 22. Early Korean folklore scholarship offers a complex and difficult legacy. Critics cite the example of Ch’oe Namsôn, an early cultural nationalist, folklorist, historian, and author of Korea’s 1919 Declaration of Independence who later abetted Japanese propaganda during the Pacific War. On the other side of the colonial divide, and against an assimilationist colonial vision, Japanese folklorist Akiba Takashi argued for the autonomy of Korean custom (Ch’oe K. 2003). 23. In addition to the work of Korean folklorists Ch’oe Namsôn, Yi NΔng-hua, Son Chin-t’ae, and Song Sôk-ha, the Japanese folklorist Murayama Chijun theorized a shamanic essence for Korean culture (Ch’oe S. 1999, 99–100). 24. This same ritual recently received a UNESCO designation as a World Intangible Cultural Heritage, to great national and local celebration. 25. The South Korean press created the term “Human Cultural Treasure” (in’ganmunhuaje), but it is more widely used than the official title, “Poyuja” or “(Title-)Holder,” even among the Human Cultural Treasures themselves (Yang 1994, 102). 26. This kut is documented with a descriptive text and photographs in Kim I., Ch’oe, and Kim (1983) and described in Huang (1988, 32–42). 27. At the ground-breaking ceremony for Kim Geum-hwa’s World Shamanism Center on 9 August 2003, distinguished speakers recalled this struggle in their congratulatory remarks. 28. Sim’s writings, first published as newspaper editorials in the 1970s, influenced how folk culture would be discussed in the Popular Culture Movement. When his work was anthologized in 1985, my student assistants urged me to read the book as the source of important ideas about popular culture. 29. Hung-youn Cho justly faults these protest kut for oversimplifying a more complex ritual whose primary aim is to reestablish harmony between the living fam-


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ily or community and its gods. The send-off of dead souls is only one element of a larger ritual (Hung-youn Cho 1987; 1990, 223, 300–307). 30. She uses the term “posal.” 31. I have suggested that stories of hardship and struggle against a shamanic fate constitute a genre and that a woman’s ability to recount these common experiences gives legitimacy to her claim of a divine calling (Kendall 1988). Examples of such stories may be found in Ch’oe K. (1981), Y. K. Harvey (1979, 1980), Kwang-iel Kim (1972), and T’ae-gon Kim (1970, 1972, 1981). 32. Although she told us to call her “Auntie Cho,” her employer would have known her as “Auntie from such and such a place,” a common way to address a maid-of-all-work. 33. See Kendall (1985, 7, 9–85, 131–143) for descriptions of the tan’gol relationship between shaman and client. 34. While General Ch’oe Yông, a historical figure, appears in shaman pantheons, sightings of President Park and his wife, Yuk Yôngsu, both victims of assassination, are more idiosyncratic. The speaker seems to be sensationalizing for effect. 35. A shaman school supported by the Spirit Worshippers’ Anti-Communist Association also installed tablets bearing the names of Tan’gun and his celestial father and grandfather. Hyun-key Kim Hogarth’s assertion that many shamans venerate this trinity in their own shrines and that initiates’ “gates of speech” often open with the assertion “I have come here by the order of Grandfather Tan’gun” is probably a consequence of her heavy reliance on shaman consultants affiliated with this organization (Hogarth 1999, 272). 36. Nami’s earlier career is described by C. Choi (1991). 37. Some Christian Korean-American communities, whose members are often not aware of the respectability now accorded shaman rituals in Korea, have sporadically opposed exhibits and performances featuring Korean shamans. 38. Yôngmae drew a record audience for a documentary film during its first week of screening in 2003 (Korean Film Newsletter, no. 18, http://www.koreanfilm .org/news18.html). 2. Memory Horizons 1. I recall, in particular, a kut for the dead in a spooky-seeming old country house with only the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law present. 2. Two years by Western reckoning. 3. Two mal equal approximately 36 liters, or 9.5 gallons. A sack of rice is usually a mal. 4. The Birth Grandmother is also known as Samsin Chesôk, Sambul Chesôk, and Andang Chesôk. 5. For more about sal and the danger posed by funerals, see Kendall (1985, 105–107, 192–193 nn. 7, 9, 10).


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6. There should also have been three pairs of shoes. Yongsu’s Mother said that because the kut was held in a rush, the family had not been able to purchase them, but perhaps they were being thrifty. 7. Although she began with potentially malevolent officials, Chatterbox was probably now manifesting a Spirit Warrior (Sinjang), who has major exorcistic powers and uses the five-direction flags, but I did not catch this transition at the time. 8. The pseudonym blends “aegi” or “agi” (baby), a term of address for a daughter-in-law or an apprentice shaman (aegi mansin); Yongsu’s Mother’s affectionate reference to her as “ae,” “the kid;” and my memories of Babe’s flirtatious posturing. 9. In Seoul in the 1970s the offerings at kut performed by distinguished shamans to celebrate their own gods were at least as elaborate as these. 10. This card game was the only activity that we were told not to film. 11. The mansin called him a paksu, but the men who do sitting kut, chanting sutras while drumming in the Ch’ungch’ôngdo style, are locally known as pôpsa (MCIBCPP 1976, 7:174). 12. Kong is a ritual offering in a Buddhist temple, a term appropriated into the mansin’s lexicon. 13. In the 1970s an active Seven Stars, like the one in Mrs. Yi’s pantheon, would have been invoked atop the family’s tall earthen storage jars on an outdoor storage platform (Kendall 1985, 128). Large earthen jars have been supplanted by refrigerators in most South Korean homes. Babe told Mrs. Yi to place her offering to the Seven Star ancestress in the inner room, spatially assimilating this deity to the Birth Grandmother (Samsin Chesôk), even as the manifestation of these gods had been conflated in a single sequence in both kut. 14. See also Antonetta Bruno’s discussion of the difference in a neophyte’s responses versus those of a regular client during kut (2002, 17). 15. Writing as a shaman, Ch’ôn Pokhua observes, somewhat cynically, that in most kut, it is sufficient to say, “I’m this grandmother, I’m that grandmother,” but the country grandmothers will interrogate the ancestor for verification, and only when they are satisfied, will they weep and hug (2001, 186). Yongsu’s Mother also speaks of the difference between performing for anyone and performing for the old women who will object to the deletion of any significant segment or ritual business. 3. Initiating Performance 1. To keep consistency with the ethnographic video of Chini’s kut, I violated my usual practices of using pseudonyms that are closer to the terms these women actually use to address each other (e.g., “Okkyông’s Mother”) and used the legal names they requested for the film credits. The shamans address and refer to “Chini” by her own child’s name, a usage I retain. 2. Because a naerim kut does not require a period of isolation and secrecy, Alexandre Guillemoz (1989) suggests that it be called a passage rite rather than an


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initiation. Huang Ru-si (1988, 41–49) also characterizes this ritual as a passage rite (t’onggua cheΔi) to underscore the total transformation of the shaman’s identity and worldview. I use “initiation” to suggest admission to more exclusive statuses or associations than those implied by “passage rites.” 3. These were the Five-Direction Generals (Obang Sinjang), the Heavenly Guardian God (Ch’ônha Taesin), the Knife-Riding Guardian God (Chaktu Taesin), Hogu Special Messenger (Hogu Pyôlsang), the Heavenly King (Ch’ônha Taeuang), the Mountain God (Sansillyông), the Healing Sage (Yaksa Tosa), the Seven Stars (Ch’ilsông), Sambul Chesôk (birth and fertility—“the Birth Grandmother” in my gloss), and the Buddhist Sage (Pulsanim). With the ancestors, these make a full set of twelve divine categories. 4. An Hosun distinguished between a hôt’Δn (or hôch’in) kut, to drive out malevolent forces so that the purified initiate can receive her gods, and a sosΔl kut to call in the spirits. She thus presented Chini’s second kut as a logical stage in the process of becoming a shaman. Huang (1988) glosses hô’tΔn kut and sosΔl kut as variant names for a naerim kut, the blanket term for an initiation kut. 5. For example, Kessler (1977), Tambiah (1979), and Turner (1968, 1969). 6. The “Kwakiutl” of this text self-identify as Kwakwaka’wakw. 7. Siikala (1978), Hamayon (1995), and Lambek (1988) maintain this divide in their otherwise insightful discussions of trance and performance. Hamayon makes reference to an early presentation of mine describing Chini’s initiation but overinterprets the material as “just” theater. Michael Taussig (1993) is uniquely provocative in his claim for a performative mimesis that blurs the boundaries of performance and becoming. 8. Shamans often claim that they discern a potential initiate by the presence of a powerful guardian god hovering around them. 9. Chungmoo Choi (1987, 131) suggests that in bringing such apprehension to a divination session, women “self-select” to enter the shaman profession. This is likely, as in Chini’s story, but not inevitable; I have heard Yongsu’s Mother laugh away a client’s fears of being a destined shaman. 10. Consistent with the use of fictive kinship in shaman circles, An Hosun refers to herself as Chini’s maternal aunt (imo) because she is the “sister” of Chini’s spirit mother, Kim Pongsun. Similarly, Kwan Myôngnyô, as a disciple (cheja) of Kim Pongsun, is Chini’s “sister” (ônni) and “senior classman” (sônbae). 11. Korean shamans often deploy an imagery of blocked paths and closed or open gates emitting or obstructing fortune, like the gate of commerce evoked in Mrs. Yi’s kut. In an initiation kut, the gates of speech must be open to divine inspiration. Obtrusive spirits block both the flow of words and the initiate’s potential good fortune. 12. Dancing itself carries the potential for release and abandon as a vehicle for both possession and the expression of strong emotions. Dancing at kut is both an instrument of release and blessing and a potentially dangerous, slightly disreputable activity (Kendall 1983, 1991–1992).


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13. A good death is peaceful and occurs at home, in the bosom of one’s family, at a ripe old age, with no pressing concerns or grievances. Anything less than this may yield restless souls who cling inauspiciously to the living. 14. A literal but cumbersome translation would make him “King of All under Heaven.” The mansin describe him as “descending from heaven,” suggesting that he views his domain from a high perch. 15. The Heavenly King sometimes appears in the pantheons of illustrious lineages (Kendall 1985, 133–134). 16. She says that she has “cleared a path” (torΔl takta), an expression that Auntie Cho also used to describe a devotee’s spiritual progress. 17. I am grateful to Chungmoo Choi for this insight. 18. Some viewers of the video have been troubled by this English colloquialism in the subtitle. Since Kim Pongsun actually used a “Konglish” expression, “wôn p’ΔrôssΔ” (one plus), this approximation seems merited. 19. The verb “nolda” subsumes notions of play, amusement, and performance. Shamans commonly describe the action of spirits at a kut as nolda, as in “The supernatural Official plays well with me.” 20. For descriptions of mugam, see Kendall (1983; 1985, 10–12, 16–17; 1991–1992). 21. Viewers of our video have asked if the presence of the camera impeded Chini’s progress. I am fairly certain that if the mansin had even considered this a possibility, they would have asked us to turn the camera off, Chini’s initiation being far more important to them than our project. The mansin and the gods they manifested thought nothing of elbowing Diana and her camera out of their way when the action required it. 22. As in Eliade (1964, chap. 2), Lewis (1969, 88–190), and Peters (1982), and, for Korea, Huang (1988, 31, 41–49) and T’ae-gon Kim (1981, 245, 417). 23. For example, T’ae-gon Kim (1981, 357–372); I. Kim, Ch’oe, and Kim (1983); Huang (1988, Ch 1); and Guillemoz (1988–1989). Note that two of these sources describe the most remarked-upon and best-documented initiation kut of the 1980s, that of Ch’ae (Park) Hi-a, a skilled dancer at the time of her initiation. 4. The Ambiguities of Becoming 1. Pyông-yang Mansin, Youngsook Kim Harvey’s informant, claimed that a spirit mother would be lucky if three out of ten spirit daughters she initiated become successful shamans (Y. K. Harvey 1979, 126–127). Other women’s accounts recorded by Ch’a (1997, 45), Ch’oe K. (1981, 66–67), C. Choi (1987, 117, 129–130; 1989b), and Y. K. Harvey (1979, 37–83) tell of disjunctive careers. 2. Cho Yông-ja, who was Ch’oe Kilsung’s informant (1981, 66–67), and the Gong Granny, who appears in this chapter, claimed that they became fully inspired without the benefit of an initiation kut. According to Ch’oe, shamans would deny


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that they “learned” to perform kut from other shamans, emphasizing the force of divine inspiration (1981, 81). This contrasts the younger shamans today who complain about inadequate training. 3. Chungmoo Choi (1991) also describes apprentices using audiotape. 4. She had piled them on her divination tray, originally out of sight under the altar, but the “grandfathers” in her shrine wanted the books and tray elevated. 5. Princess Pari, the seventh daughter of a sonless king and queen, was cast away. Her parents were stricken with a fatal illness for their crime, but Princess Pari braved the perils of the underworld to find the elixir that would restore them. Her grateful parents offered her the kingdom, but she returned to the underworld to guide lost souls. The tale is sung during the kut for the dead (T’ae-gon Kim 1966; Kendall 1985, 154). 6. In the colonial period, Murayama Chijun reported a training school for hereditary shamans (cited in Hogarth 2003, 53). 7. The Keeper of the Fortification Shrine would echo these sentiments, adding that shamans have better status now because they are better educated than in the past and that “however you look at it, society has changed.” 8. Probabilities based on information compiled by Homer Williams from the 1944, 1955, and 1990 Korean censuses (http://kosis.nso.go.kr/cgi-bin/SWS_1020 .cgi?KorEng=1&A_UNFOLD=1&TableID=MT_ATITLE&TitleID=BA&FPub=). 9. For examples dispersed in space and time, see Taussig (1987, 246) for late twentieth-century Colombia, Holmberg for late nineteenth-century Siberia (1927, 512), and Nowak and Durrant (1977, 49–45) for remarks imputed to seventeenthcentury Manchu. 10. Significantly, twenty-one days marks the postpartum period during which a mother and newborn baby are sequestered inside the birth room. A twenty-one-day period of isolation and transformation also figures in the Korean foundation myth. 11. During the Korean War, Yongsu’s Mother had been captured by the People’s Army and marched north. The Mountain God appeared in a dream and prompted her miraculous escape, a portent of her shaman destiny. The beard-stroking gesture is always a part of her story (Kendall 1988, 56). 12. In 1998 these ostentatious surroundings might have reflected the joint income of the Fairy Maid and her husband, who worked as a diviner, but by any measure the Fairy Maid was doing well. 13. And yet Yongsu’s Mother has been making my seasonal offerings in absentia for years and once sent audiotapes of an absent client’s kut to Guam. 14. For ethnographic accounts of Korean divination in learned, inspirational, and mixed styles, see Dawnhee Yim Janelli (1977, 1982) and Barbara Young (1980, 1983). 15. On the strength of this interview, I asked the Fairy Maid about adultery among her clients, and she also confirmed its prevalence. The real or imagined affairs of middle-class women received media attention in the 1990s (S. Lee 2002).


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16. See Seong-nae Kim’s thoughtful analysis (2001a, 2003b) of Korean shaman websites and the ways they both confound the tradition and push it in new directions. 5. Korean Shamans and the Spirits of Capitalism 1. The inflated costs of kut, figured in millions of won (or thousands of U.S. dollars), also discouraged the performance of double-length rituals. 2. As a consequence of television coverage, the issue of wasted offering food was very much on Ms. Kim’s mind when we encountered piles of rotting food around the shrines in the summer of 1994. Shamans are also critical of kuttang that allow refuse to pile up on a sacred mountain. 3. The House Lord resides in the main beam and is the spiritual alter ego of the male household head. Recall how Babe verified Mrs. Yi’s understanding of the main beam when she instructed her on the placement of household offerings. 4. See Nancy Abelmann (2003), Seung-Kuk Kim (1987), Hagen Koo (1987, 1993), and Denise Lett (1998) for discussions of class and local perceptions of class and class mobility in South Korea. In general, perceptions of class are vague, and expectations of possible mobility widely held. In recent years, the term “sômin” (commoners or ordinary people) has come into political and popular discourse to describe those who, while not poor, do not enjoy the full benefits of a middle-class lifestyle (Leppänen 2007, 24, chap. 8). 5. As in all other kut, the gods and ancestors commented on a range of family issues, on this occasion the husband’s lack of diligence, the (absent) mother-in-law’s health, the wife’s prospects of reversing a tubal ligation, and the daughter’s minor medical problems. 6. In 1979 the government extended protection to small enterprises in certain areas of manufacture and, in 1985, simplified procedures for licensing businesses (Eun Mee Kim, pers. comm., 9 April 1990, 24 June 1992). In 1992, protections extended to small manufacturing enterprises were terminated (Korea Newsreview 1992c, 14). 7. Roger Janelli and Dawnhee Yim, writing of the salaried elite within a major South Korean conglomerate in the late 1980s, describe a relatively stable pattern of employment (Janelli and Yim 1993, 152–155). In the increasingly troubled economy of the early 1990s, Denise Lett observed that many white-collar workers were either terminated at midcareer or given the incentive to resign through lack of promotion (1994, 109, 150–151). My field assistant readily recognized the early retirement of Mrs. Pok’s husband as part of a trend. 8. The term “yebang” means “prevention” or “prophylaxis.” I had heard it used to describe an exorcistic cleansing to prevent future misfortune, but here it implies sorcery and countersorcery. 9. Four ch’isông are included in the eighteen rituals.


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10. I visited both upmarket and down-market shrines. Some of the kut were performed by great shamans (k’Δn mudang) and some by obvious incompetents. 11. Three of these kut were intended to satisfy the troubled souls of the dead (chinogi kut), including one “ghost wedding” so that a dead bachelor would stop hampering the marriage prospects of his nieces and nephews. One kut was for an insane daughter (not present), and one small ritual addressed the inauspicious potential of a bad horoscope year, but the sponsor’s difficulties with her stepchildren were the major concern. 12. For example, the Yangju Pyôl Sandae Nori masked play parodies the scholar’s swaybacked gait. 13. Matrimonial links among monopolist families, and between monopolist and well-placed political families, so intrigued the popular imagination that they were described in women’s magazines (Pae 1984; Yi K. 1983), elaborated in a booklength monograph (reviewed in Korea Newsreview 1992b, 32), and even prompted the Wall Street Journal to publish an elaborate kinship diagram (Darlin 1992, A8). In the mid-1990s scandal over the finances of former president No, his family’s marriage alliance with a monopolist family was frequently mentioned in the press. 14. In comparative perspective, even the peak unemployment rate appears low, but it was generally regarded as an underestimate, particularly with respect to the informal sector. Following upon two decades of nearly stable, “virtually full” employment, it constituted a shock to the system (J. Lee and Rhee 2000, 17). 15. I did not witness these kut myself but spoke with shamans who had participated in them. 16. The notion of divine jurisdictions is pervasive in East Asian popular religion and is derived from the conceptualization of the Confucian polity as a nested hierarchy of administrative authorities, the smallest unit of which is the small polity of the household (Wolf 1974). 6. Of Hungry Ghosts and Other Matters of Consumption 1. This kut cost two million wôn (approximately US$2,580 in 1992), including the food and drink and the shamans’ honoraria. This was on the low end of thengoing prices and well below the rates in Seoul. 2. The facial expressions that mansin assume and hold while performing particular gods recall the facially simulated “masks” of Jerzy Grotowski’s avant-garde “poor theater” (1968). 3. See, for example, Kapferer (1983), Laderman (1991), Laderman and Roseman (1996a, 1996b), Schieffelin (1976, 1985, 1996), and Vitebsky (1993), as well as C. Choi (1989a) and Kendall (1985, chap. 1) for Korea. 4. The Wall Street Journal had already reported on a “South Korean shopping binge” (Darlin 1990), but without the color photographs of university co-eds in designer clothing (for a special event, unstated) that helped spur local reaction to the


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Newsweek piece. In both instances, foreign reporters were responding to concerns already well articulated within South Korea. 5. The authors of most of these works received their graduate training during the ascendancy of French structuralism in the 1960s and 1970s, although Akamatsu Chijo and Akiba Takashi first described a gendered dichotomization of shamanic and Confucian domains in the 1930s (Akamatsu and Akiba 1938; Akiba 1957, 57, 98–106). 6. As in South Korean filmmaker Im Kwon-taek’s 1996 film, Festival (Ch’ukche), when the prodigal daughter offers packaged cookies and a libation of cognac at her father’s grave. 7. The remembered hardships of her early life loom large in Yongsu’s Mother’s personal narrative (Kendall 1988). 8. See Cho Hae-joang’s discussion (1998a) of the conservative turn in South Korean popular culture after the 1980s and the place of Confucian forms and consciousness within it. 9. For example, Howes (1996), Miller (1994, 1995a, 1995b, 2002), Tobin (1992), and Watson (1997). 10. Fred Myers gives particular credit to the work of Weiner (1992) and Appadurai (1986) for moving material culture studies away from the quid pro quo economics of classical exchange theory to a new emphasis on how “objects come to convey and condense value and, in doing so, are used to construct social identities and communicate cultural differences between individuals and groups” (Myers 2001, 3). 11. Oksun, Chungmoo Choi’s primary informant, described how in consulting with a client over the spirit clothes and making her shopping list, a shaman is able to “dig out” the family history from clients whose background might be unfamiliar to her (C. Choi 1989a, 238). 12. For descriptions of encounters with ancestors in kut, see Anonymous (1903, 205), Bruno (2002, 138–147), C. Choi (1989a); Guillemoz (1985), R. L. Janelli and Janelli (1982, chap. 6), Kendall (1977a, 17–18; 1984; 1985, chap. 7), and Kister (1997, chap. 5). 13. See critiques by Appadurai (1986), Miller (2001), Myers (2001, 6), and N. Thomas (1991). 14. Many South Korean commentators have been troubled by the unabashed materiality of Korean shaman rituals and have attempted to explain away the gods’ demands as a colonial-period deviation or a Western encrustation upon a purer, more authentic tradition (e.g., Hung-youn Cho 1995; Ch’ôn 2001, 266–267; Pak I. 1999; and critiqued by Seong-nae Kim 2002a). Seong-nae Kim (2002b) offers an alternative characterization of the transactions between gods, ancestors, and humans as “reciprocity.” While I agree with her premise that these encounters approximate human relations and that contemporary excesses reflect contemporary market dynamics, I am uncomfortable with her use of the Korean term “p’umassi” (recip-


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rocal exchange). “P’umassi” suggests a strict quid pro quo, eliding a fundamental asymmetry that constructs gods as powerful (cf. Atkinson 1989, 182; Valeri 1985, 193) and, in the case of the Korean kut, enables them to issue demands. 15. Money orders were often used in casual transactions in those years, owing to the absence of large-denomination bills. 16. See the Independent, 7 June 1998; Anonymous (1917); Bishop (1970, 227– 228, 411) and the complaints of irate Chosôn-period officials cited in Yi (1976). 17. Where cash provoked mirth in these kut, in fishing villages in the 1970s and early 1980s, the shamans chants’ rendered money as demonic or cursed, driving a young man to risk his life at sea (Kister 1997) or prompting the suicide of one migrant worker and the madness of another (Seong-nae Kim 1992, 2003a). 7. Built Landscapes and Mobile Gods 1. Mansin use this term in self-reference, as when Babe explained that she must collect rice from several kut in order to become a kija and Chini was enjoined at her initiation to “become a kija.” “Kijanim” is the honorific form. 2. See also Bender (2001, 2002a, 2002b), Kuchler (1993), Kuper (2003), and Morphy (1993). 3. I have written about mountain prayers and pilgrimages in several different places (Kendall 1977b, 1985, 1988, 1998a). 4. Even with the general relaxation of security in the 1990s, Yongsu’s Mother and her colleagues have not returned to the summit. 5. I may be partly to blame, having mentioned the Kuksadang in a 1983 article I wrote for the Insight Guide’s first volume on Korea. 6. One of the kuttang that I visited southeast of the city advertises itself as basking in the energy flow (maek) of three famous mountains on the surrounding skyline. 7. Pak HΔng-ju (2001) records a similar story about another shrine whose owner and a broker met bad ends owing to their profit-motivated sale of a shrine. 8. The paintings inside the Kuksadang, the oldest-known shaman paintings in Korea, received Cultural Treasure status in 1974. 9. While acknowledging Tan’gun, North Korea also claims Mount Paektu as the birthplace of the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il. 10. South Korean tours to the North Korean slopes are under negotiation (W. Lee 2007). 11. South Korea’s enthusiasm for old Koguryô lands makes for some wariness in Sino–South Korean relations when Koreans enthusiastically describe Koguryô territory in Manchuria as “ours.” In the summer of 2004 the Koguryô Kingdom’s association with Korea disappeared from the Chinese government’s official history website, igniting a firestorm of diplomatic and media fury. The prospect of a united and consequently stronger Korea, and what this might mean for ethnic Koreans on


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Notes to Page 201

the Chinese side of the border, contributes to these uneasy moments, but for the present, South Korean tourism remains mutually satisfactory and, for the Korean Chinese, a profitable enterprise. 12. It is a common practice to make a pilgrimage to a potent mountain or visit the shrine on a hillside behind the village before holding a kut.


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———. 2003. Cultural protection policy in Korea: Intangible cultural properties and living national treasures. Vol. 3. Seoul: Jimundang. Yi Chaegon. 1996. SeoulΔi min’gan sinang [Folk beliefs of Seoul]. Seoul: Paeksan Ch’ulp’ansa. Yi HΔisΔng. 1972. Kugô taesajôn (Comprehensive dictionary of the national language]. Seoul: Minjungsôgwan. Yi Kyôngnam. 1983. Han’gugΔi honbôl [Korea’s marriage cliques]. Chubu Saenghwal 4 (April): 251–267. Yi NΔng-hua. 1976 [1927]. Chosôn musokko [Reflections on Korean shaman practices]. Trans. C. G. Yi. Seoul: PaengnΔk. Yim Seuk Jai (Im Sôk-chae, Im Sôk-jae). 1970. Han’guk mosok yôn’gu sôsôl [Introduction to Korean “mu-ism”]. Journal of Asian Women 9:73–90. Yoo, Boo-Woong. 1988. Korean Pentecostalism: Its history and theology. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Yoon, Soon-young. 1976. Magic, science, and religion on Cheju Island. Korea Journal 16 (3): 4–11. Yoon, Yee-Heum. 2003. The diversity and continuity of shamanism in Korea religious history. In Rediscovery of shamanic heritage, ed. M. Hoppál and G. Kosa, 255–263. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. Young, Barbara. 1980. Spirits and other signs: An ethnography of divination in Seoul, R.O.K. PhD diss., University of Washington. ———. 1983. City women and divination: Signs in Seoul. In Korean women: View from the inner room, ed. L. Kendall and M. Peterson, 139–157. New Haven, CT: East Rock Press.


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Index and Glossary

Page numbers followed by the letter f refer to figures and photographs. Abelmann, Nancy, 162 adultery, 124, 215n. 15 aek (malevolent influences), 116 agency, 82, 135, 150, 159, 176; gods’ agency, 194, 198; prop, 160, 174; spiritual agency, 183, 192, 206 Alternative Culture Group (TtohanaΔi Munhua), 23 An, Hosun, 76, 79–82, 86–88, 94–95, 103–104, 107–108 ancestors (chosang), x; appearances by, 42–43, 54, 86–88, 167–170; Confucian rite for (chesa), 163; desires of, 160, 163–164; as gods, x; kut to send off ancestors (chinogi kut), 3, 34, 57; and mansin, 167; offerings for, 163, 164f; possession by, 36; relationship with, 3, 49; selfcultivation of, 26; transformations and work of shamans—gods and ancestors, xxvii–xxviii, 93. See also chesa ancestral mountain (ponsan), 188 Appadurai, Arjun, 166, 175 apprentice shaman (chagΔn mudang): Babe as, 50, 53–56, 64; hardships of, 76, 102–108; training of, 26, 70, 75, 77, 98 arrows (sal), 38 Atkinson, Jane, 29 Auntie Cho (shrine cook, aspiring shaman), 24–32, 102, 104 aura (kap’i), 25 auspiciousness (pok), 135 authenticity, xviii, xxiii, 2, 33, 181, 197. See also chinja Babe (Youngsu’s Mother’s apprentice), 11–17, 50–53, 109–110, 156 Bataille, G., 172 Baudrillard, Jean, 3

Beattie, John, 69 belief (sinang), 4, 27 Bender, Barbara, 183 blocked fortune (uni makta), 81, 83–84, 150 body-governing guardian god (momju taesin), 79. See also guardian god Bogoras, Waldemar, 68, 69 Boym, Svetlana, xxiv, xxvi bribes, 2, 170 brother’s wife (olk’e), 37 Browne, Sir Thomas, 139 Bruno, Antonetta, 100 Buddhism, 4, 25–31, 196 Buddhist Sage, summoning, 78–83 capitalism and shamans, 129–153 causality, xxviii, 4 Celestial Shrine, 194–195 Ch’ae (Park) Hi-a, 20 chae (wealth), 135 chaesu kut (kut for good fortune), xx, 14, 34, 131, 135–136, 141, 196 chagΔn mudang (little shaman). See apprentice shaman ch’a kosa (ritual on behalf of family car), 132 Chaktu Changgun (Knife-Riding General), 94–97 charismatic shaman (kangsin mu, mansin), ix, 179 Chatterbox Mansin, 35–49, 106–107, 184 che (festival), 12 cheja (disciple), 75, 179 chesa (ancestral rite), 163, 164f Child Gods (Tongja), 50, 56, 157 Chini’s kut, 66–101, 102 chinja (real, authentic), xxvii, 12 chip (house), 133–134 ch’isông (minor offering and prayer), 37

245


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246

Index

Cho, Hung-youn, 18, 111 Ch’oe, Namsôn, 18 Ch’oe Yông, General (as shaman god), 30 Choi, Chung-moo, 100, 172 chonggyo. See religion Ch’ônha Taeuang (Heavenly King), 88, 95–96, 214 ch’ônmin (outcast), 17 chosang. See ancestors Chosôn Kingdom, 7, 191, 209–210 Chow, Rey, 16 Christianity: modernity and, 3, 5–8; shamans and, x, 25–33 Chukchi, 69–70 Chung, Hyun Kyung, 23 Clark, Rev. Charles Alan, 6 Clear Spring Mansin, 50, 109, 186 cloth and clothing as gift, 168, 175 colonial period, 8–10 Comaroff, Jean, 151, 152, 174 Comaroff, John, 151, 152–153, 174 commercial shaman shrine. See kuttang commodity: abducted agency of, 159; brand-names, 161; consumption, commodity and popular religion, 173–175; as offering, 154, 155f; as prop, 154, 160 communitas. See kongdongch’e Confucianism, 3–4, 18; and ritual, 4; and shamans, 3–4, 19, 165 consumer goods. See commodity; consumption consumption, 154–176; ancestors and, 165–166; commodity, consumption and popular religion, 173–175; in South Korea, 161–163; spirits and, 130, 139–141, 154, 173; thrift and, 145 contemporary shamans, 33 core shamanism, 207n. 5 Cram, Rev. W. G., 6 crazy kut (mich’in kut), 34, 35–49, 64 crazy person (mich’in saram), 35 credit card era (k’adΔ sidae), 151 Cultural Properties Protection Law, 19 Cultural Treasure (munhuaje), 12, 109, 119, 179, 201 culture (munhua), shaman practices as, 1–15 custom (sok), 18 death messenger (saja), 38 De Certeau, Michel, 198


desire. See ancestors; wealth destined shamans (naerin saram), xviii Diamond Mountains, 200 Dirks, Nicholas, 1 disciple (cheja), 75, 179 divination: The Fairy Maid and, 120–121, 122; by horoscope (saju), 123–124; in initiation kut, 66, 67, 91; in kut (kongsu), 40, 43, 55, 138, 139; Minju’s Mother and, 117; Ms. Shin and, 123–124; by shaman (mugôri), 3, 25, 27, 31, 36, 50, 74, 104; websites for, 127 Dow, James, 62 dreams, 25, 53, 72, 74, 85, 108, 116, 164, 183, 189, 193–194, 198 Eckert, Carter J., 141 Eliade, Mircea, xxiii, 68 enactment, 205 enchantment, anthropology and, xiii, xviii–xix entrepreneurs, 129–153 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 150 exhaustion (momsal), 147 exorcism: missionaries and, 6; in shaman ritual, 6, 43–48 The Fairy Maid, 119–123, 194, 206 favor (hoΔi), 46 festival (che), 12 Firth, Raymond, 68 folklore, 17–20, 180–181; colonial period and, 18; minsok (folklore), 18; modernity and, 17–19; nationalism and, 18; nostalgia and, 20; revival, 18–20; scholarship, 210; shamans and, 17–19 Fortification Shrine, 189, 192, 193, 195 fortune is blocked (uni makta), 150 foster mother (suyang ômma), 132 funeral, for scapegoat (Mrs. Min’s kut), 38–41 gates of commerce (sangôp mun), 58 gates of speech (malmun), xx, xxvii, 67 Gell, Alfred, xxviii gender, xx, 15–17, 113, 123 geomancy, 196 globalization, shamans and, 199–200 gods: agency, 194, 198; as ancestors, x; Child Gods (Tongja), 50, 56, 157;

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Index

consumption and, 173; desires of, 71, 160, 163–164, 170; families and, 53–54; greedy god, encounter with, 156–159; in initiation ritual, xx, 78–88; mansin’s body-governing, 79; offering to, 170–171; relationship with, 3, 30, 49; transformations and work of shamans—gods and ancestors, xxvii–xxviii, 93. See also bodygoverning guardian god; guardian god Gong Granny, 105, 106, 110, 146, 150 Grandfather Sage (Tosa Harabôji), 56, 140 Granny Shrine (Halmidang), 192, 198 great shaman (k’Δn mudang), 49, 202 Great Spirit Grandmother (Taesin Halmôni), 56–57, 106, 186 greedy god, encounter with, 156–159 guardian god (taesin), 25, 26, 31, 106, 179; Chini’s, 84–87, 213n. 3 Halmidang (Granny Shrine), 192, 198 Hanyang or Hansông kut (Seoul style kut), 122 Hastings, Sally, 16 healing: conflict between medicine and, 3; kut for affliction (uhuan kut), xx, 3, 34, 35–38, 57; mansin and, 48; performance skill and, 70; rituals, 48, 94; superstition and, 3, 6, 8; symbolic, 62 Heavenly King (Ch’ônha Taeuang), 88, 95–96, 214 hereditary shaman (sesΔp mu), 179 heritage: intangible, 12, 19, 21, 210nn. 24, 25; kuttang as heritage site, 195–197; shaman rituals as, 19 Hogarth, Hyun-key Kim, 110 Hogu. See Princess Hogu hoΔi (favor), 46 house (chip), 133–134; and household, 133–134; structural and ritual, xxiv–xxvi, 48–49, 60, 133 household, 133–134 House Lord (Sôngju), 133 House Site Official (T’ôju Taegam), 170, 171 Huang, Ru-si, 111 Hultkrantz, Ake, xxii Human Cultural Treasure (in’ganmunhuaje), xxii, 17, 210


247

Humphrey, Caroline, 183 husband’s sister (sinu), 37 IMF Crisis, xxiii–xxiv, xxviii, 121, 144–146, 161, 205; cosmic force, IMF as, 149–152; shamans and, 146–149 improvisation, in ritual, xx–xxii, 153, 156–159, 173–174, 176 Independent newspaper, 7, 8 influences (aek), 116 in’ganmunhuaje (Human Cultural Treasure), xxii, 17, 210 initiation: body-governing gods and, 79; failure and, 82–86; gods in initiation ritual, xx, 78–88; of mansin, 66–101; scholarship on, 30, 210; shamans and, 66–101; spirit mother and, 71, 75–78 inspiration (yông), 15, 75 inspired speech (kongsu), xxviii, 67, 76, 78–79, 81–82, 90, 92, 98, 100 intangible cultural heritage (muhyang munhuaje), 12, 19, 21, 210nn. 24, 25 Inuang Mountain, 196–197 Irigaray, Luce, 16 Ivy, Marilyn, xxiv, xxvi Jung Mun San, 23 k’adΔ sidae (credit card era), 151 Kam’ak (Kambak) Mountain, 56, 184–185 kangsin (charismatic), 179 kap’i (aura), 24 Keeper of the Fortification Shrine, 119, 121, 189, 192, 193, 215 Keeper of the Tile-Roofed Shrine, 105, 106, 111, 178–183 Keith, Elizabeth, 8 kibok (praying for good fortune), 131 kija (fully-realized shamans), 102, 108 Kim, Chongho, 209n. 14 Kim Geum-hwa, xi, 23, 24, 105, 106, 109, 201–202 Kim, Mr., 132–134 Kim, Ms., 137, 177, 178, 192 Kim, Seong-nae, xxiv Kim Su-nam, 19 Kim Tong-hΔi, 19 Kim Tongni, 178 Kim Yông Sam, 196

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248

Index

Knife-Riding General (Chaktu Changgun), 94–97 kong (offerings and prayers, lit. “service”), 55 kongdongch’e (the collective body, communitas), 14, 22 kongsu (inspired speech), xxviii, 67, 76, 78–79, 81–82, 90, 92, 98, 100 Korea, national division of, x, 199–203 kosa (offering to household gods): on behalf of family car (ch’a kosa), 132; at harvest, 170 Kuksadang, 195–197 k’Δn mudang (great shaman), 49, 202 kut: for affliction (uhuan kut), xx, 3, 34, 35–38, 57; anjΔn (sitting) kut, 53; city versus village, 14, 64–65; comparison of two examples of, 34–65; contemporary, xxviii, 51–52, 63–65, 113; crazy kut (mich’in kut), 34, 35–49, 64; for the dead (chinogi kut), 3, 34, 57; enactment of, xxviii; Fairy Maid’s, 122–123; for foreign audiences, 23; frequency, xviii; for good fortune (chaesu kut), xx, 14, 34, 131, 135–136, 141, 196; house structure and, xxiv–xxv; incompetence in, 111–112; for initiation (naerim kut Chini’s story), 66–101, 102; mansin’s skill during, xx, 64–65; mock funeral (Mrs. Min’s kut), 38–41; Mrs. Min’s kut, 34–48, 62–64, 205; mudang and, ix; private, 14; procedures for, 103, 107, 110; as public performance, 11–15; regional variations in, ix, 20, 53, 55, 122–123; spectators, role and absence of, 14, 68, 122; Tano kut, 11–15, 19, 23; village versus city, 14, 65; Mrs. Yi’s kut, 51–65, 135, 148, 205. See also kuttang; performance; ritual Kut Study Group (Kut hakhoe), 19 kuttang (commercial shaman shrines), 34, 51, 65, 110, 135, 137, 177, 179, 187–199 Kwan Myôngnyô, 75–76, 79–80, 84–85, 88–97, 99, 102–103, 107–109, 111, 129–131 Kyoguryô Kingdom, 210 landscape, 177–204; sacred, 183–184. See also mountains


Leiris, Michel, 68 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 63 little shaman (chagΔn mudang), 75 magic: anthropology and, xxiii; markets, 142–143; mountains and, 180, 184; technology of, xxviii makkôlli (crude rice wine), 158, 171 makta (blocked), 83. See also blocked fortune male shamans (paksu mudang), 16 malmun (gates of speech), xx, xxvii, 67 malmyông (restless souls), 83 Mani, Lata, 16 manmulsa (shaman supply shops), 108 mansin: ancestors and, 167; charismatic shamans, ix; costumes, xxi; crazy kut (mich’in kut), 34, 35–49, 64; definition, xx; divine calling of, xx; fictive kinship, 63, 87–88, 106, 132; generation gap, xxvii, 126–128; and healing, 48; incompetence, 111–112; initiation of, 66–101; inspired speech (kongsu), xxviii; kut and skills of, xx; life stories of, 102–128; mental illness, 82, 104. See also apprentice shaman; kija; mudang; shamans; spirit daughters; spirit mother Mauss, Marcel, 166 medicine: missionaries and, 6; modernity and, 1–3 mich’in kut (crazy kut), 34 mich’in saram (crazy person), 35 Minjung Munhua Undong (Popular Culture Movement), 21 Minjung theology, 21–22, 30 Minju’s Mother, 114–119, 151 Min, Mrs.: kut, 34–48, 62–64, 205 misin (superstition). See superstition (misin) Misint’ap’a Undong (Movement to Overthrow Superstition), 10 missionaries: exorcism and, 5–6; medicine and, 6; modernity and, 5–7 modernity, xxii–xxiii; anthropology of, xxiii; Buddhism and, 4; Christianity and, 3, 5–8; Dirks, Nicholas, 1; enchantment and, xiii, xviii–xix; folklore and, 17–19; medicine and, 1–3; missionaries and, 5–7; nostalgia and, xxvi; shamans and, xxii–xxiii, 127–128, 205–206; superstition

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Index

(misin) and, xxii–xxiii, 1–33; traditions and, xxiii, 1 môga makta (something is blocked), 150 momju taesin (body-governing guardian), 79 momsal (exhaustion), 147 mountains: Buddhists and, 27; Kam’ak (Kambak) Mountain, 56, 184–185; kuttang and, 34, 51, 64–65, 110, 135, 137, 177, 179, 187–199; as magical space, 180, 184; Mountain God, 184–186; pilgrimage and, xxviii, 184–188; shamans and, xxviii Mount Paektu, 199–203 mudang: definition, 126–127, ix; kut and, ix; tan’gol, ix. See also kija; k’Δn mudang; mansin; shamans; spirit daughters; spirit mother mugôri (shaman’s divination). See divination mugyo (shaman religion), 29, 30 muhyang munhuaje (intangible cultural heritage), 12 munhuaje (Cultural Treasure), 12, 109, 119, 179, 201 musindo (believers in the ways of mu), x musogin (people who do shaman practices), x naerim kut (initiation ritual), 67–101 Nelson, Laura, 165 neo-shamanism, 207n. 5 nervous condition (sin’gyôngΔl ssΔda), 36 New Community Movement (SaemaΔl Undong), 10 noble (yangban), 130 nolda (play), 58 Nolte, Sharon, 16 nostalgia, xvii–xx, xxiv–xxvi, 162, 205, 206; anthropologists and, xxiv; definition, xxiv; folklore and, 20; imagined, 106; modernity and, xxvi; poverty, memory of, 87; shamans and, xxiv; spirit daughters, regarding, xxvi, 102–107, 127–128; theories of, xxiv offering: ancestral offering (chesa), 163, 164f; Buddhist or shamanic (kong), 55; clothing as, 175; commodity as, 154, 155f; to household gods,


249

170–171; rice wine as, 158, 171–172; in shaman ritual, 156 Okkyông’s Mother (Chatterbox’s apprentice), 38, 39, 43, 49, 51–57, 59, 64–65, 79, 101, 114, 140, 156–158 olk’e (brother’s wife), 37 oracles. See inspired speech (kongsu) outcast (ch’ônmin), 17 Pak Ino, 110 Pak, Mr. (Mrs. Min’s husband), 35–48 paksu mudang (male shamans), 16 Park, Chung-hee, President, 10, 30, 159 Park, Ki-bok, 32 performance: anthropology and, 69; initiating performance, 66–101; props and, 156–160; proscenium stages and, xxvii, 11, 23; shaman rituals as, xxi–xxii, 66–101; theater, 67–70 petty capitalist entrepreneurs, 136–139 phony (ôngt’ôri), xxviii, 105, 206 phony shamans, xxviii, 102–128 Pigg, Stacey, 11 pilgrimage, sacred mountains and, xxviii, 184–188 play (nolda), 58 pok (auspiciousness), 135 Pokhua, Ch’ôn, 106–107, 109, 111–112 Pok, Mrs.: story of, 136, 138, 139–140 Pongsun, Kim, 75, 77–84, 87–103, 108, 130 ponsan (ancestral mountain), 188 Popular Culture Movement (Minjung Munhua Undong), 21, 29, 138 popular religion: commodity, consumption and, 173–175; globalization and, 199–200; markets and, 129–153; modernity and, xxii–xxiii, 1–33 Portrait of a Shaman (Munyôdo), 178 posal (bodhisattva), x; tongja posal, x poverty, 87, 165 praying for good fortune (kibok), 131 prevention (yebang), 216 Princess Hogu (Chini’s guardian spirit), 83–87, 89–92 prop: agency of, 160, 174; commodity as, 154, 160; definition, 159–160; in rituals, 154, 159–160; whiskey bottle as, 156–159

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250

Index

pugundang (tutelary shrines), 190–191, 194 p’umassi (reciprocal exchange), 218–219 Quesalid, 69–70 reciprocal exchange (p’umassi), 218–219 recognized shamans (kija), 102 religion: Mugyo as, 29, 30; problem of defining, 28–29; shaman practices as, 28–29; superstition (misin) as, 1–33. See also popular religion ritual: Confucianism and, 4; healing and, 62; heritage, shaman rituals as, 19; improvisation, xx–xxii, 153, 156–159, 173–174, 176; initiation ritual (naerim kut), 66–101; materialism, 206, 218; measures (yebang), 136, 138; naerim kut (initiation ritual), 66–101; prop in, 154, 159–160; ritual process, 49; shaman’s initiation, 66–101; space, xx, xxvii, 12, 78, 154; theater and, 67–70; uri haengsaΔi pôpsu (our ritual procedures), 110; yebang (preventive measures), 136, 138. See also chesa; kut; performance sacred mountains (myongsan), xviii. See also mountains; pilgrimage SaemaΔl Undong (New Community Movement), 10 saja (death messenger), 38 saju (four pillars). See divination sal (arrows), 38 sangôp mun (gates of commerce), 58 Schieffelin, Edward L., xxi Seoul 1988 Olympics Arts Festival, 20 sesΔp mu (hereditary shaman), 179 Seven Stars (Ch’ilsông), honoring, 54, 57, 59, 64, 83 shaman religion (mugyo), 29, 30 shamans: actors and, 67, 69; as agents of cultural production, xxii; anthropology and, xix–xx, xxiii; authors, 19, 109, 127; capitalism and, 129–153; Chini’s story, shaman’s initiation, 66–101; Christianity and, x, 25–33; Confucianism and, 3–4, 19, 165; contemporary, 33; definition, xx; destined shamans (naerin saram), xviii, 25–27, 70, 72–75, 84, 114–117; disunity among, 125; dreams and,


25, 53, 72, 74, 85, 108, 116, 164, 183, 189, 193–194, 198; exorcism in shaman ritual, 6, 43–48; folklore and, 17–19; gender and, xx, 15–17, 113, 123; and globalization, 199–200; heritage, shaman rituals as, 19; IMF Crisis and, 146–149; improvisation, xx–xxii; interaction with gods and ancestors, xx; modernity and, xxii–xxiii, 127–128, 205–206; mountains and, xxviii; musogin (people who do shaman practices), x; New Age shamans, xxii; nostalgia and, xxiv; paksu mudang (male shamans), 16; as performers, xxi–xxii; protest culture and relationship with, 21–24; real (chinja) versus phony (ôngt’ôri), xxvii, xxviii, 102–128; relationship with, 30; schools for, 110, 211n. 35; superstition, modernity and, xxii–xxiii, 1–33; suppression, xx; teacher (sônsaeng), 17, 75–78; theories about, xviii–xix; tourists and shaman pilgrims, 200–202; transformations and work of shamans, gods and ancestors, xxvii–xxviii, 93; Western perceptions of, xix–xx, 28–29. See also apprentice shaman; initiation; kija; kut; kΔn mudang; mansin; mudang; performance shamanship, xxviii shaman shrines (sindang), 191–195; kuttang, 34, 51, 65, 110, 135, 137, 177, 179, 187–199; on mountains, 187–191; peripatetic histories of, 198; pugundang as, 190–191, 194; urban development and, xxviii, 19, 24, 32, 195, 198 Shin, Ms., 123–126, 148–149, 206 shops (manmulsa), 108 Sim U-sông, 21 Sin, Ch’aeho, 81 sinang (belief), 4, 27 sindang. See shaman shrines (sindang) sindo (believers), x sin (gods), x sin’gyôngΔl ssΔda (nervous condition), 36 sin ômôni (spirit mother), xxvii, 102–107 sin ttal (spirit daughter), 50, 102–107, 113 sinu (husband’s sister), 37 sin Δi kija (shaman who serves the spirits), 108

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Index

sitting kut (anjΔn kut), 53 Sofer, Andrew, 175 sok (custom), 18 somatization, 62 Sôngju (House Lord), 133 South Korea: consumption in, 161–163; IMF crisis and, 121, 144–146, 161, 205 spirit daughters (sin ttal), 50, 102–107, 113 spirit mother (sin ômôni), xxvii, 102–107 Spirit Warrior, 54–55, 58, 96, 142f, 157–159, 170, 171–172 Spirit Worshippers’ Anti-Communist Association, 110 Spivak, Gayatri, 16 Starr, Frederick, 8 Stewart, Susan, xxiv suicide, 41, 64, 83, 115–116 Sun, Soon-Hwa, 100 Supernatural Official, 171 superstition (misin): anti-superstition, 8–11; as culture (munhua), 1–33; definition, 4; Japan, anti-superstition campaign, 8; kut described as, 3; modernity and, xxii–xxiii, 1–33; Movement to Overthrow Superstition (Misint’ap’a Undong), 10; “Natives in their superstitious services,” 7f; as religion (chonggyo), 1–33 suyang ômma (foster mother), 132 symbolic healing, 62 taesang (final mourning rite), 35 taesin (guardian god), 84–87, 179 Taesin Halmôni (Great Spirit Grandmother), 56–57, 106, 186 Tambiah, S. J., x Tan’gun, 18, 31, 199, 209n. 20, 210n. 21 Tano kut, 11–15, 19, 23 Taussig, Michael, 112, 139, 172 theater: avant-garde, 67–70; ritual and, 67–70. See also performance


251

T’ôju Taegam (House Site Official), 170, 171 tonga posal (diviners), x Tongja (Child Gods), 50, 56, 157 Tosa Harabôji (Grandfather Sage), 56, 140 tourists and shaman pilgrims, 189, 200–202 transformations and work of shamans— gods and ancestors, xxvii–xxviii, 93 TtohanaΔi Munhua (Alternative Culture Group), 23 Turner, Victor, xxv, 69 uhuan kut (kut for affliction), xx, 3, 34, 35–38, 57 uni makta (fortune is blocked), 150 Walraven, Boudewijn, 191 wealth: chae (wealth), 135; desire for, 123, 131–132, 135 Weber, Max, xxii–xxiii, 139, 142–143 Weller, Robert, 175 Williams, Raymond, xxvi Williamson, Judith, 169 Yang, Jongsung, 21 Yang Posal, 151–152, 200 yangban (noble), 130 Yangja’s Mother, 134 yebang (prevention), 216 Yi, Mrs., 51–65, 135, 148, 205 Yim Seuk Jai, 19 yoksim, 170–171, 172 yông (inspiration), 15, 75 Yongsu’s Mother (shaman), xvii–xix, 11–15, 35, 38–65, 108–109, 114, 116–119, 135, 147–148, 156–158, 163, 165, 184–188, 194, 205, 206 yôsông munhua (women’s culture), 124 Yuk Yôngsu, Mme., 30

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About the Author

Laurel Kendall first encountered Korean shamans in the 1970s when she lived in South Korea as a Peace Corps volunteer. Graduate work in anthropology, a Fulbright grant, and a Foreign Area Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council led her back to South Korea and into a close association with shamans and their clients that has lasted for more than thirty years. Kendall is the author of Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1985), The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1988), Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity (University of California Press, 1996), all considered classics in the field. Dr. Kendall is Curator in Charge of Asian Ethnographic Collections in the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History and also teaches at Columbia University.


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K O R E A N

R E L I G I O N

{ Continued from front flap }

—DON BAKER, University of British Columbia “With the publication of Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF, Laurel Kendall opens a new chapter in the study not only of shamanism in Korea, but also in many societies undergoing the process of industrialization and modernization. It is distinguished by its rich ethnographic data and novel theoretical approach to the field of Korean popular religion. One of its many merits is that, unlike conventional studies that focus on ‘authentic’ shaman ritual performances, it reveals a wide spectrum of shamans and rituals within a grand system of practice.” — KWANG OK KIM, Seoul National University “Laurel Kendall’s sympathetic and lucid writing consistently leads from vivid narratives to penetrating theoretical insights. In her hands the IMF becomes a brilliant trope for the interplay between magical causality and the bewildering modernity which moulds our lives, as it does the lives of her shamans’ clients.” —PIERS VITEBSKY, University of Cambridge

KENDALL

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.

“Laurel Kendall has written a study of contemporary Korean shamans that is both entertaining and enlightening. Most studies of the topic treat shamans as an anachronistic remnant of the past. Kendall challenges that approach, drawing on several decades of close observation of shamans in action to reveal how shamanism is constantly evolving. It is an important work that will appeal to a wide audience.”

SHAMANS, NOSTALGIAS, AND THE IMF

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.

Jacket photograph: A mansin in the guise of a Spirit Warrior sings a song of self-praise with 10,000-won bills stuck under his/her hat, in the hatband at both cheeks, and as a “beard.” Jacket design: Julie Matsuo-Chun

ISBN 978-0-8248-3343-5

U N I V E R S I T Y OF H AWA I ‘I P R E S S HONOLULU, HAWAI‘I 96822-1888

90000

9 780824 833435 www.uhpress.hawaii.edu

SHAMANS NOSTALGIAS AND THE IMF

SOUTH KOREAN POPULAR RELIGION IN MOTION

LAUREL KENDALL

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 can be found thriving in the high-rise cities of South Korea, 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

{ Continued on back flap }

Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion (Hawai'i Studies on Korea)

Min Yong-Hwan: A Political Biography (Hawaii Studies on Korea)

Sitings: Critical Approaches to Korean Geography (Hawai'i Studies on Korea)

Transformations in Twentieth Century Korea (Routledge Advances in Korean Studies)

The Development of Modern South Korea (Routledge Advances in Korean Studies)

Korea Confronts Globalization (Routledge Advances in Korean Studies)

South Korea (Country Explorers)

Litigation in Korea (Elgar Korean Law)

Market and Society in Korea: Interest, Institution and the Textile Industry (Routledge Advances in Korean Studies)

Politics and Religion in the White South (Religion in the South)

Social and Economic Policies in Korea: Ideas, Networks and Linkages (Routledge Advances in Korean Studies, 3)

Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor

Gender and the Political Opportunities of Democratization in South Korea

Frommer's South Korea (Frommer's Complete)

South Korea (Modern World Nations)

Religion And Violence In South Asia

Religion and Conflict in South and South-East Asia: Disrupting Violence (Asian Security Studies)

The Korean Conundrum: America's Troubled Relations with North and South Korea

Eye on Korea: An Insider Account of Korean-American Relations

The Global Korean Motor Industry (Routledge Advances in Korean Studies)

Shamans Crossing

Shamans Crossing

South Asian Religions on Display: Religious Processions in South Asia and in the Diaspora (Routledge South Asian Religion)

Hawaii

Hawaii

North Korea in the World Economy (Routledge Curzon Advances in Korean Studies, 4)

Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge Studies on the American South)

Shamans in Asia

Note on AEther and Motion

Shamans Crossing

Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion (Hawai'i Studies on Korea)

Min Yong-Hwan: A Political Biography (Hawaii Studies on Korea)

Sitings: Critical Approaches to Korean Geography (Hawai'i Studies on Korea)

Transformations in Twentieth Century Korea (Routledge Advances in Korean Studies)

The Development of Modern South Korea (Routledge Advances in Korean Studies)

Korea Confronts Globalization (Routledge Advances in Korean Studies)

South Korea (Country Explorers)

Litigation in Korea (Elgar Korean Law)

Market and Society in Korea: Interest, Institution and the Textile Industry (Routledge Advances in Korean Studies)

Politics and Religion in the White South (Religion in the South)

Social and Economic Policies in Korea: Ideas, Networks and Linkages (Routledge Advances in Korean Studies, 3)

Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor

Gender and the Political Opportunities of Democratization in South Korea

Frommer's South Korea (Frommer's Complete)

South Korea (Modern World Nations)

Religion And Violence In South Asia

Religion and Conflict in South and South-East Asia: Disrupting Violence (Asian Security Studies)

The Korean Conundrum: America's Troubled Relations with North and South Korea

Eye on Korea: An Insider Account of Korean-American Relations

The Global Korean Motor Industry (Routledge Advances in Korean Studies)

Shamans Crossing

Shamans Crossing

South Asian Religions on Display: Religious Processions in South Asia and in the Diaspora (Routledge South Asian Religion)

Hawaii

Hawaii

North Korea in the World Economy (Routledge Curzon Advances in Korean Studies, 4)

Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge Studies on the American South)

Shamans in Asia

Note on AEther and Motion

Shamans Crossing

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