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Title first published in 2003. Shamanism has a contradictory position within the Korean cultural system, leading to the periodical suppression of shamanism yet also, paradoxically, ensuring its survival throughout Korean history. This book examines the place of shamans within contemporary society as a cultural practice in which people make use of shamanic ritual and disputing the prevalent view that shamanism is 'popular culture', a 'women's religion' or 'performing arts'. Directly confronting the prejudice against shamans and their paradoxical situation in a modern society such as Korea, this book reveals the cultural discrepancy between two worlds in Korean culture, the ordinary world and the shamanic world, showing that these two worlds cannot be reconciled. This unique study of shamanism offers a significant contribution to growing studies in indigenous anthropology and indigenous religions, and provides a captivating read for a wide range of readers through retelling the stories-never-to-be-told involving shamanic ritual.
Contemporary Korean Shamanism by Liora Sarfati Pdf
Once viewed as an embarrassing superstition, the theatrical religious performances of Korean shamans—who communicate with the dead, divine the future, and become possessed—are going mainstream. Attitudes toward Korean shamanism are changing as shamanic traditions appear in staged rituals, museums, films, and television programs, as well as on the internet. Contemporary Korean Shamanism explores this vernacular religion and practice, which includes sensory rituals using laden altars, ecstatic dance, and animal sacrifice, within South Korea's hypertechnologized society, where over 200,000 shamans are listed in professional organizations. Liora Sarfati reveals how representations of shamanism in national, commercialized, and screen-mediated settings have transformed opinions of these religious practitioners and their rituals. Applying ethnography and folklore research, Contemporary Korean Shamanism maps this shift in perception about shamanism—from a sign of a backward, undeveloped Korea to a valuable, indigenous cultural asset.
Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF by Laurel Kendall Pdf
Thirty years ago, anthropologist Laurel Kendall did intensive fieldwork among South Korea’s (mostly female) shamans and their clients as a reflection of village women’s lives. In the intervening decades, South Korea experienced an unprecedented economic, social, political, and material transformation and Korean villages all but disappeared. And the shamans? Kendall attests that they not only persist but are very much a part of South Korean modernity. This enlightening and entertaining study of contemporary Korean shamanism makes the case for the dynamism of popular religious practice, the creativity of those we call shamans, and the necessity of writing about them in the present tense. Shamans thrive in South Korea’s high-rise cities, working with clients who are largely middle class and technologically sophisticated. Emphasizing the shaman’s work as open and mutable, Kendall describes how gods and ancestors articulate the changing concerns of clients and how the ritual fame of these transactions has itself been transformed by urban sprawl, private cars, and zealous Christian proselytizing. For most of the last century Korean shamans were reviled as practitioners of antimodern superstition; today they are nostalgically celebrated icons of a vanished rural world. Such superstition and tradition occupy flip sides of modernity’s coin—the one by confuting, the other by obscuring, the beating heart of shamanic practice. Kendall offers a lively account of shamans, who once ministered to the domestic crises of farmers, as they address the anxieties of entrepreneurs whose dreams of wealth are matched by their omnipresent fears of ruin. Money and access to foreign goods provoke moral dilemmas about getting and spending; shamanic rituals express these through the longings of the dead and the playful antics of greedy gods, some of whom have acquired a taste for imported whiskey. No other book-length study captures the tension between contemporary South Korean life and the contemporary South Korean shamans’ work. Kendall’s familiarity with the country and long association with her subjects permit nuanced comparisons between a 1970s "then" and recent encounters—some with the same shamans and clients—as South Korea moved through the 1990s, endured the Asian Financial Crisis, and entered the new millennium. She approaches her subject through multiple anthropological lenses such that readers interested in religion, ritual performance, healing, gender, landscape, material culture, modernity, and consumption will find much of interest here.
Author : Jung Y. Lee Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG Page : 268 pages File Size : 54,9 Mb Release : 2018-02-19 Category : Religion ISBN : 9783110811377
The series Religion and Society (RS) contributes to the exploration of religions as social systems– both in Western and non-Western societies; in particular, it examines religions in their differentiation from, and intersection with, other cultural systems, such as art, economy, law and politics. Due attention is given to paradigmatic case or comparative studies that exhibit a clear theoretical orientation with the empirical and historical data of religion and such aspects of religion as ritual, the religious imagination, constructions of tradition, iconography, or media. In addition, the formation of religious communities, their construction of identity, and their relation to society and the wider public are key issues of this series.
The Assemblage of Korean Shamanism by Joonseong Lee Pdf
The most unique aspect of Korean shamanism is its mysterious duality that continually reiterates the processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. This book approaches that puzzle of mysterious duality using an interdisciplinary lens. Korean shamanism has been under continuous oppression and marginalization for a long time, and that circumstance has never dissipated. Shaman culture can be found in every corner of people’s lives in contemporary Korea, but few acknowledge their indigenous beliefs with pride. This mysterious duality has deepened as the mediatization process of Korean shamanism has developed. Korean shamanism was revived as the dynamic of shamanic inheritance in the process, but these dynamics have also become the object of mockery. For this reason, any true understanding of Korean shamanism rests in how to unravel the unique puzzles of this mysterious duality. In this book, the duality is mapped out by playing with the puzzles surrounding the contextualization of Korean shamanism and mediatization.
Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits by Laurel Kendall Pdf
“This exceptionally well-written book is good reading, not only for specialists but also for beginning students interested in women, Korean culture, and shamanism.” —Journal of Asian Studies “Kendall maintains a closeness with and respect for her subject that keeps away the chill of academic distance and yet avoids sentimentality.” —Korean Quarterly, Spring 2001
Why do Koreans search for shamans? Confrontation with jarring reality, magnified in the context of immigration, pulls them to look for cultural roots in moral solidarity with their ancestors. Ancestral spirits travel by carrying culturally engrained remedial power to the “othered” life of the Korean immigrant community in the country of Protestantism. Korean shamans mediate the present with the past, life with death, the living with the ancestral spirits, and Confucian moral virtue with Protestant belief, and fill the geographical and collective mental gap in a life of transition. This book introduces Korean shamanism within the Protestant context of immigration in the United States, including an ethnography of Korean shamans in order to observe this landscape of not only conflictive but also ambivalent episodes through rituals and narratives of participants.
"Most studies of Korean shamanism--a popular religion that is both celebrated and stigmatized--have minimized regional differences, focusing on shamans from central Korea whose work involves spirit possession. Less attention has been paid to hereditary shamans, a number of whom have resided for centuries on Cheju Island, off Korea's southwest coast. Although simbang (native Cheju shamans) are relied upon to perform important rituals, for which they receive lavish offerings, they are often perceived as charlatans who swindle innocent people. This first study of the material exchange and politics of Korean shamanism describes interactions between shamans and their clients in order to show how this ritual exchange is distinct from other forms of transaction, such as barter, purchase, bribery, and gift-giving. The "ritual economy" of Korean simbang involves not only monetary payment, but also reciprocity, sincerity, and the expressive forms that practitioners use to authenticate ritual actions that both emphasize ritual exchange and distinguish it from other forms social and economic transactions"--
God Pictures in Korean Contexts by Laurel Kendall,Jongsung Yang,Yul Soo Yoon Pdf
Shamans walking on knives, fairies riding on clouds, kings with dragon mounts: They are gods and they are paper images. Some are repulsed and unsettled by shaman paintings, some cannot stop collecting them, and some use them as sites of veneration. Laurel Kendall, Jongsung Yang, and Yul Soo Yoon explore what it is that makes a Korean shaman painting magical or sacred. How does a picture carry the trace of a god and can it ever be “just a painting” again? How have shaman paintings been revalued as art? Do artfulness and magic ever intersect? Does it matter, as a matter of market value, that the painting was once a sacred thing? Navigating the journey shaman paintings make from painters’ studios to shaman shrines to private collections and museums, the three authors deftly traverse the borderland between scholarly interests in the material dimension of religious practice and the circulation of art. Illustrated with sixty images in color and black and white, the book offers a new vantage point on “the social life of things.” This is not a story of a collecting West and a disposing rest; the primary collectors and commentators on Korean shaman paintings are South Koreans re-imagining their own past in light of their own modernist sensibility. It is a tale told with an awareness of both recent South Korean history and the problematic question of how the paintings are understood by different South Korean actors, most particularly the shamans and collectors who share a common language and sometimes meet face-to-face.
During his years of teaching literature and drama at Sogang University in Seoul, the author became attracted to Korean shamanist ritual, or kut, as a sophisticated form of drama that has power to transform the daily realities of participants lives into events of spiritual significance.Korean shamanism centers at least as much on the ritual dramatization of symbolic signs and on the communitys belief in these signs as on the person of the shaman, or mudang. Without intending to undermine the importance of the mudang, this study focuses on the public dramatization of these symbols. It investigates the dynamics by which kut transform ordinary realities into freeing, harmonizing, objectifying signs of contract with the gods and spirits, who are believed to make their presence known at significant moments of life.The author was one of the recipients of the award for excellence in shamanist research presented by the International Society for Shamanistic Research in 2004.
