(Laurel Kendall) Shamans, Nostalgias, and The IMF

K O R E A N R E L I G I O N
{ Continued from front flap }
SHAMANS SOUTH KOREAN
SHAMANS, NOSTALGIAS, AND THE IMF

of shamans, who once ministered to
the domestic crises of farmers, as they POPULAR RELIGION THIRTY YEARS AGO , anthropologist
address the anxieties of entrepreneurs
whose dreams of wealth are matched by
their omnipresent fears of ruin. Money
“Laurel Kendall has written a study of contemporary Korean shamans
that is both entertaining and enlightening. Most studies of the topic treat NOSTALGIAS IN MOTION
Laurel Kendall did intensive fieldwork
among South Korea’s (mostly female)
shamans as an anachronistic remnant of the past. Kendall challenges shamans and their clients as a reflection
AND THE IMF

and access to foreign goods provoke of village women’s lives. In the interven-
that approach, drawing on several decades of close observation of
moral dilemmas about getting and LAUREL KENDALL
shamans in action to reveal how shamanism is constantly evolving. It is ing decades, South Korea experienced an
spending; shamanic rituals express these unprecedented economic, social, politi-
an important work that will appeal to a wide audience.”
through the longings of the dead and the cal, and material transformation, and
playful antics of greedy gods, some of —DON BAKER, University of British Columbia
Korean villages all but disappeared. And
whom have acquired a taste for imported the shamans? Kendall attests that they
whiskey. “With the publication of Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF, Laurel Kendall
not only persist but are very much a part
No other book-length study captures opens a new chapter in the study not only of shamanism in Korea, but
of South Korean modernity.
the tension between contemporary South also in many societies undergoing the process of industrialization and
This enlightening and entertaining
Korean life and the contemporary South modernization. It is distinguished by its rich ethnographic data and
study of contemporary Korean shaman-
Korean shamans’ work. Kendall’s famil- novel theoretical approach to the field of Korean popular religion. One
ism makes the case for the dynamism of
iarity with the country and long associa- of its many merits is that, unlike conventional studies that focus on
popular religious practice, the creativity
tion with her subjects permit nuanced ‘authentic’ shaman ritual performances, it reveals a wide spectrum of
of those we call shamans, and the neces-
comparisons between a 1970s “then” and shamans and rituals within a grand system of practice.”
sity of writing about them in the present
recent encounters—some with the same tense. Shamans can be found thriving in
— KWANG OK KIM, Seoul National University
shamans and clients—as South Korea the high-rise cities of South Korea, work-
moved through the 1990s, endured the ing with clients who are largely middle
“Laurel Kendall’s sympathetic and lucid writing consistently leads
Asian Financial Crisis, and entered the class and technologically sophisticated.
from vivid narratives to penetrating theoretical insights. In her hands
new millennium. She approaches her Emphasizing the shaman’s work as open
the IMF becomes a brilliant trope for the interplay between magical
subject through multiple anthropologi- and mutable, Kendall describes how gods
causality and the bewildering modernity which moulds our lives, as it
cal lenses such that readers interested and ancestors articulate the changing
does the lives of her shamans’ clients.”
in religion, ritual performance, heal- concerns of clients and how the ritual
ing, gender, landscape, material culture, —PIERS VITEBSKY, University of Cambridge
fame of these transactions has itself been
modernity, and consumption will find transformed by urban sprawl, private
KENDALL
much of interest here. cars, and zealous Christian proselytizing.
For most of the last century Korean
Laurel Kendall is Curator in Charge Jacket photograph: A mansin in the guise of a Spirit Warrior sings a song of self-praise with shamans were reviled as practitioners of
of Asian Ethnographic Collections in 10,000-won bills stuck under his/her hat, in the hatband at both cheeks, and as a “beard.”
antimodern superstition; today they are
the Division of Anthropology, American Jacket design: Julie Matsuo-Chun
nostalgically celebrated icons of a van-
Museum of Natural History, and also ished rural world. Such superstition and
teaches at Columbia University. tradition occupy flip sides of modernity’s
ISBN 978-0-8248-3343-5 coin—the one by confuting, the other by
90000 obscuring, the beating heart of shamanic
U N I V E R S I T Y OF practice. Kendall offers a lively account
H AWA I ‘I P R E S S 9 780824 833435
HONOLULU, HAWAI‘I 96822-1888 www.uhpress.hawaii.edu { Continued on back flap }
Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF
kendall text2.indd i 7/7/09 9:40:57 AM

kendall text2.indd ii 7/7/09 9:40:58 AM
Shamans, Nostalgias,
and the IMF
South Korean Popular Religion in Motion
Laurel Kendall
University of Hawai‘i Press 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
kendall text2.indd iv 7/7/09 9:40:58 AM

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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viii Contents
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 pros-
perous 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 “mahn-
shin”), 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 tradi-
tions 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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x Preface
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 full-
circling 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, par-
ticularly 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 “ances-
tors” 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. Tam-
biah’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 lan-
guage 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 romaniza-
tion 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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Preface xi
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 refer-
ence 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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kendall text2.indd xii 7/7/09 9:40:59 AM
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 assis-
tant 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 recon-
struct 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 schol-
arly 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 dur-
ing 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 Bus-
well, 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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xiv Acknowledgments
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 study-
ing 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 acknowl-
edged 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 Eth-
nologist 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. Köep-
ping, 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 Trans-
parency and conspiracy: Ethnographies of suspicion in the New World
Order, ed. H. G. West and T. Sanders, 38–64. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press.
2002. An old shaman in a tile-roofed house. Shaman 10 (1–2): 113–124.
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Acknowledgments xv
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 Anthropolo-
gist 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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kendall text2.indd xvi 7/7/09 9:40:59 AM
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 col-
lective “us” (uri ne), preceded her own initiation by at least two decades.
xvii
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xviii Introduction
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 prede-
cessors. 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 commodi-
ties 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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Introduction xix
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 muta-
ble 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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xx Introduction
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 Chris-
tian population today, reports of their inevitable demise are overstated.
Unlike many books on sale in South Korea and more than a few in Eng-
lish, 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, convey-
ing 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 sha-
mans 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 bless-
ings 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 peti-
tion, entice, pacify, and effectively persuade the gods.
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Introduction xxi
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 eco-
logical degradation.4 And like shamanic or mediumistic practitioners in
other places, Korean shamans incorporate new, sometimes radically con-
temporary 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 appro-
priate 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 immedi-
ate circumstances of the ritual. As in other kinds of improvisational perfor-
mance, 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 custom-
ers who pay “with cash and not credit,” and a shaman’s vision of raising a
“building” becomes a more generally auspicious prognostication for differ-
ent 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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xxii Introduction
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 per-
formance 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 resem-
blance 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 dis-
cuss the unsteady balance between skill and inspiration, training and impro-
visation, 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 West-
ern 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 quint-
essentially 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 econo-
mies 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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Introduction xxiii
(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 economi-
cally 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 indus-
trialization (Bendix 1997). A chorus of laments for vanishing Korean tradi-
tions 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 neigh-
bors, 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, bring-
ing 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 observa-
tion 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 promi-
nent 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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xxiv Introduction
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 part-
ners (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 Rosa-
lind 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 impas-
sioned 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. Nos-
talgic 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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Introduction xxv
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 connota-
tion 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 apart-
ment block communities. Although I had lived in Seoul as a Peace Corps vol-
unteer 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 some-
times 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 broad-
cast 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 sev-
eral years, rituals performed apart from extended communities of kin and
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xxvi Introduction
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 for-
eign 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 char-
acterize as a dynamic popular religious form includes increasingly abbrevi-
ated 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 cer-
tainly 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 mourn-
ing 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 subse-
quent chapters.
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Introduction xxvii
Transformations and the work of shamans, gods, and ancestors
Chapter 1 describes a late nineteenth-, twentieth-, and early twenty-first-

century 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 them-
selves 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 pro-
scenium 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 sha-
mans enact kut, how they are empowered to do this work, and how notions
of effective shamanship are being transformed and contested in contempo-
rary 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 differ-
ent 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 sha-
manic 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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xxviii Introduction
Chapters 5 and 6 are concerned with “gods and goods,” with clients,
shamans, and spirits in the contemporary South Korean marketplace. Chap-
ter 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 devel-
opment, 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 coun-
try 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 contradic-
tory 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 comma-
shaped 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
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2 Shifting Intellectual Terrain
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 Com-
munity 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 ances-
tor 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 per-
formed 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 acci-
dent, 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-

Shifting Intellectual Terrain 3
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 perva-
sive 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, anx-
ious 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 pro-

cess but rather, in Baudrillard’s sense (1987), as something like a viral ideol-
ogy that has infected most of the globe but mutated in local settings (Rofel
1992), then new questions can be asked. “Superstition” may, with “moder-
nity,” be interrogated as a historically contingent ideological construct, the
potent dark side against which modernities take shape and measure them-
selves. 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 practitio-
ners 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

periodically banned the shamans’ activities and attempted to transform sha-

manic 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 con-
noting 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 impe-
rial 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 understand-
ing 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

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 (Rob-
inson 1988; Wells 1990). Early Protestant Christian encounters with Korean
shamans yielded a complex legacy. Missionaries, and early Western travel-
ers 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 person-
age, 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’ parapher-
nalia, 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). Mis-
sionaries 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 Young-
sook 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;

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 strug-
gle 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) requir-
ing 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 missionar-
ies’ 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 con-
tact 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 con-
fronting 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, demand-
ing 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

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 politi-
cal institutions with Christianity” (Robinson 1988, 35). Some of these
early reformers joined forces with missionaries to produce the Indepen-
dent (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.

a game of deception. . . . It is the duty of the authority to make an effec-

tive 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 peo-
ple in Chemulpo [present-day Inch’ôn] collected money from the inhabit-
ants 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 acu-
puncture, condemning the lot as charlatans, as did the police orders used to
arrest them and destroy their paraphernalia (21 November 1896, 7 Janu-
ary, 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 sha-
man 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.

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 first-
generation professionals and entrepreneurs in colonial Korean cities (Eckert
1991, chap. 2; Robinson 1988). Following the rhetorical logic of the Inde-
pendent 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 attri-
bute 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 incanta-
tions and rites in order to rid himself of the possessing demons. I am grati-
fied 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

Chinese medicine and the irrationality of shamanic practice, an association

already made logical in the writings of the early reformers. A doctor of West-
ern medicine would have saved the patient; rural tradition killed him. But
this is emphatically not the logic of Korean popular religion, whose palimp-
sest 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 supersti-
tious countryside and a modern, enlightened city, would make anti-super-
stition 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 dic-
tatorship, 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 Chung-
hee 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 dam-
aged the shaman tradition, but they regard the New Community Movement
as even more pernicious for having caused much of the South Korean popu-
lation 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).

The equation of popular religion with rural backwardness, the supersti-

tious 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 nec-
essary 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, simultane-
ously backward and bucolic (R. Williams 1973), loci of a nostalgia-induc-
ing 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 Yong-
su’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

of things. The audience of mostly elderly women and young children drifts
into the bleacherlike seats. Officials of the sponsoring shaman society, obvi-
ous in their dark dress suits, busily exchange greetings and name cards. A
young man in a monk’s habit distributes the association’s newspaper, featur-
ing 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 sha-
mans 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 spir-
its appeared, however briefly. Even so, space and time are organized in the
manner of a cultural festival rather than a shaman ritual, and the mem-
bers 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 (includ-
ing 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 pro-
test 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

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.

mixing of northern and Seoul area gods so confused the deities that the sha-
mans 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’ divina-
tions 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 danc-
ing 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 grouch-
ily 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 partici-
pants, 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 Sha-
manistic 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

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 cam-
era, 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 folklor-
ist 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 experi-
ence. 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 geomanc-
ers 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 advo-
cacy associations, including the sponsors of the Ansan Tano kut. Spokes-
persons 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

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 “guid-
ance” 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 ren-
dered 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 sha-
man 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 nonmem-
ber 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-

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 immedi-
ately 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 offi-
cially 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 Trea-
sure (in’ganmunhuaje), appeared on a television talk show where the mod-
erator 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 impres-
sive 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 seven-
teenth-century England fed a growing sense that the citizens of town and
country inhabited different mental worlds, the rise of modern folklore stud-
ies in early twentieth-century Korea distinguished modern urbanites from
their rural past. As elsewhere, this past came to be regarded as a common

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 peo-
ple, 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 associa-
tions 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 primi-
tive 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 impas-
sioned shaman author, even posits a conscious Japanese plot to undermine
the Korean national essence through folklore studies (2001, 155). The con-
temporary 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

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, war-
time, and more recent industrial dislocations, against rural mass mobiliza-
tions 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 cam-
paigns 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 recuper-
ated 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

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 Wash-
ington, 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 well-
known 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 cel-
ebration, 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 perform-
ing 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’ae-
gon’s describing mudang as the source of Korea’s spiritual energy (chôngsin

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 West-
ern-inspired popular culture, seen as having stifled an indigenous Korean
spirit. But democratically minded social critics were also anti-elitist, scorn-
ing the conservative ethos of the old Confucian yangban nobility and draw-
ing 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 move-
ment drew ideological ballast from Minjung theology, the theology of the
masses, developed by progressive Christian clergy who saw factory work-
ers, 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 journey-
man heritage performer, suggests that the government’s intangible heritage
system also inadvertently fed into the protest theater of the Popular Cul-
ture 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).

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 spiritu-
ality 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 the-
ater (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 sha-
mans, long wary of government harassment and protective of their newly
favored status, avoided involvement with the students, but younger sha-
mans welcomed the attention of their more privileged age peers. Some con-
tinued 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 politi-
cal 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 pre-
lude to an off-campus political demonstration (Kwang-ok Kim 1994; N. Lee
2003). This evocation of communitas would be dubbed kongdongch’e, lit-
erally “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

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 mourn-
ing 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 con-
tinuing 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 for-
eign 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,

mansin, and posal continue to be harassed by officials, thugs, and cranky

neighbors. Shamans have every incentive to perpetuate an image and lan-
guage of cultural authenticity and to welcome cultural performance oppor-
tunities 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 curios-
ity in our conversation, proclaim that they are also “Buddhists,” and hover

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

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-the-
Wall 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 appear-
ance 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 sha-
man, 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:

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 Christ-
like 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 heal-
ing 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

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 pro-
duction who mesh the shifting needs and circumstances of their clients to a
broad but always reassuringly Korean religiosity, Auntie Cho sees a simple-
minded instrumental appeal to the “miraculous” that fails to provide a suf-
fering 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 wed-
ding 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-

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 posi-
tion 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

influence on all aspects of Korean culture. Minjung theology brought theo-

logians into the shaman world as researchers and writers comfortable with
the idea of a “mugyo,” or shaman religion, but bearing their own precon-
ceptions of what a religion must be. Following a procrustean sense of “reli-
gion,” the leaders of shaman advocacy associations describe themselves as
providing a strong organization with an effective leadership that will cham-
pion 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. Sha-
mans 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 Chris-
tian 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 contrib-
uting 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 scrip-
ture 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?

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 pro-
vide 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 ambi-
tions 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 proj-
ect from the energetic Ms. Shin, the young shaman who had so emphati-
cally described the associations as having a “gender problem.” Now she
was organizing the shamans themselves outside the male-dominated advo-
cacy 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

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 high-
profile kut to pray for national reunification on Tano day. In the immedi-
ate 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 sha-

mans claim new respect as national icons. At century’s end, Koreans regard-
less 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-disappear-
ing village rituals precariously maintained by fragmented communities of
elderly people whose ancestral communities were destroyed by urban devel-
opment 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.

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). Con-
temporary shamans are routinely criticized for charging high fees, encourag-
ing 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 argu-
ably modern ways, and each has roots early in the story of Korean moder-
nity. 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.

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 descrip-
tion 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 differ-
ent 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

Memory Horizons 35
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 assis-

tant 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.

36 Memory Horizons
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 Offi-
cials (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 hus-
band 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 daugh-
ters, 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

Memory Horizons 37
birth. When the family was still living in a shack, she had carried her young-
est 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 repeat-
edly 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 sister-
in-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 deep-
est bond to her natal home, a loss marked in time and space by her step out-
side 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 malevo-
lent 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 prepar-
ing the kut, and during the ritual, they would actively plead with the gods

38 Memory Horizons
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 evi-
denced 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 super-
natural 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 scape-
goat, “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

Memory Horizons 39
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 gravedig-
gers’ 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 rever-
sal 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. Chat-
terbox manifests the Mountain God of the family’s native place and then,
in blue and red military robes, the Warrior Official (Kunung Taegam), who

40 Memory Horizons
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.

Memory Horizons 41
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 man-
sin 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 com-
plete, 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, identi-
fied 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

42 Memory Horizons
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 great-
grandfather 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, grand-

mother 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!

Memory Horizons 43
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 con-
ception 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 prom-
ise 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 eigh-
teen-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

44 Memory Horizons
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 honor-
able 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 leg-
ible 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

Memory Horizons 45
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 War-
rior 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 War-
rior’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 impos-
sible 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

46 Memory Horizons
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. Chat-
terbox 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!”

Memory Horizons 47
Yongsu’s Mother shakes her head. She will tell me later that because Mrs.
Min was menstruating and had been bundled into makeshift sanitary pro-
tection, 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 manifest-
ing 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, draw-
ing 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. Strok-
ing 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 mar-
ried 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

48 Memory Horizons
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 poten-

tial 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 “thera-
peutic 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 man-
sin’s work and the other women’s coaxing. Words and acts of spirits simul-
taneously 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 problem-
atic 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 symbol-
ist 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 compel-
ling 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 obliga-
tions 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

Memory Horizons 49
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 medical-
ized analysis of the crazy kut, or a structural analysis focused on its suffer-
ing 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 histori-
cal 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 Man-
sin has now long since retired from the shaman profession, her sharpness
blunted as she slips into old age. Okkyông’s Mother, the gentle “little appren-
tice” 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

50 Memory Horizons
daughters. The $40 kut seems almost laughable in the contemporary sha-
man 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 south-
ernmost 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 sha-
man 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 profes-
sional 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

Memory Horizons 51
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 sell-
ing 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 house-
wife going on a shopping trip or meeting friends. Long, red artificial finger-
nails 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

52 Memory Horizons
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 commer-
cial 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 offer-
ings 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 supplement-
ing 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 celebra-
tion two days ago, hands plates around, and sends some to the staff work-
ing 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

Memory Horizons 53
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, paus-
ing 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 over-
hanging 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 communica-
tion 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 fam-
ily. The god speaks of a grandmother who prayed on mountains in the past

54 Memory Horizons
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 fam-
ily 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 man-
ages 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

Memory Horizons 55
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 offen-
sive 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

56 Memory Horizons
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 bal-
ances 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 Moth-
er’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-

Memory Horizons 57
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, con-
juring 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 with-
out 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 ances-
tral 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.”

58 Memory Horizons
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—par-
ticularly 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 10,000-
wôn 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 bounc-
ing 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 dis-
tress had brought her to Babe’s door.
Mrs. Yi draws a second flag, an auspicious red one, and the Spirit War-
rior 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.”

Memory Horizons 59
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 Offi-
cials 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 car-
rying 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 Mounte-
bank (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 con-
sequences 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

60 Memory Horizons
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 waft-
ing 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 cam-
era 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

Memory Horizons 61
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,

62 Memory Horizons
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 feel-
ings (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, simul-
taneously, 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 suc-
cessfully 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

Memory Horizons 63
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 alone-
ness—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 charac-
terized 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 curi-
ous 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 impro-
visation—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

64 Memory Horizons
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 con-
fused 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 dynam-
ics. 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 per-
form 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, laugh-
ing, 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 famil-
iar 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, Yong-
su’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 elic-
ited 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 incompe-
tent shaman once, much to her detriment.
When kut were performed in village houses and in low-rise urban neigh-
borhoods, 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, obser-
vations 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 work-
ing in other places have described similar community judgments, validating
both the efficacy of a particular ritual and the legitimacy of the perform-
ing shaman (Atkinson 1989, 117–249; Schieffelin 1996). But the isolated
mountain kuttang removes shamans from a community of knowing observ-

Memory Horizons 65
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 magi-
cal possibility, and my fieldnotes were riddled with references to “familiar
business,” “expected results,” and “old jokes.” When I found myself chuck-
ling, 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 dif-
ficult process whereby a prospective mansin gains this authority to speak in
a god’s voice.

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.
66

Initiating Performance 67
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 cho-
sen 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 suc-
cessful 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 per-

formance 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 sha-
man 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 ethno-
graphic 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.

68 Initiating Performance
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 ethnog-

raphy 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-cen-
tury 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” pos-
session 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 descrip-
tions of shaman rituals replete with such “theatrical” business as imperson-
ation, 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

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 ques-
tion 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 ini-
tially 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 (Bre-
cht 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 anthropolo-
gist and the avant-garde director Richard Schechner appears in the near-
parallel titles of their From Ritual to Theater (ibid.) and Between Theater

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 “per-
formance” 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, feel-
ing neither skilled nor yet sufficiently empowered. Her three shaman teach-
ers 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 sha-
mans 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 per-
formance 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,

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 organiz-
ing 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 initia-
tion kut, the would-be shaman becomes an active agent in her own transfor-
mation. 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?”

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 twenty-
three years old and had that dream, that’s when I should have
received the spirits and become a shaman. Instead, a matchmaker

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

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, inter-
laced 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 dis-
covery 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 intima-
tions of a calling. She visits diviners, and their response becomes predict-
able: “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.

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 perfor-
mance 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 dis-

ciple (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:

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 initia-
tion and lack of subsequent training, reveals the perils for any novice sha-
man 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

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 cus-
tom 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

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 seek-
ing 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 sha-

man teachers, on the other hand, will insist that Chini must take the ini-
tiative, 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 initia-
tions 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,

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 body-
governing 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 mis-
takes 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 dei-
ties, 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

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

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, con-
scious 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

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 embar-
rassment, 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 clear-
ing 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

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 obstreper-
ous god or ancestor stands in her path, and she is blocked because she can-
not 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 seg-
ment, 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 pock-
marked 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 Pong-
sun, 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

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.

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. Prin-
cess 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 but-
ton.” 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:

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 her-
self, 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 quick-
tempered. 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 sha-
man and her claim to the status of a guardian god: “How is my little sister

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 hus-
band’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, spend-
thrift 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 elabora-
tions 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

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 scat-
ters coarse grain to drive off malevolent forces. She leaps while the drum
throbs, but when she stops, she remains mute. In near desperation, the sha-
mans 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 pos-
sible 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-year-
old 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

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 head-
ache 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

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 sis-
ter-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 fam-
ily 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 pre-
dictable). 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

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 sha-
man 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

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

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 manifes-
tations—both gods and ancestors—in this and other kut thickens a common
family history of pain, casts individual affliction amid a web of family expe-
rience, 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 recogniz-
able 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, con-
joined in the performance of their collective story and experienced with
tears and laughter. If we were to interpret Chini’s initiation as primarily a

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 ini-
tiation 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, contrast-
ing 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 min-
ister 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 spir-
its, 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

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?

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

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 Knife-
Riding 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 sup-
plication. 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 gin-
gerly 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!

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 moun-
tains 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 anthro-
pologists). 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 over-
disciplined 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 man-
sin 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 disap-
pointment. Chini had gone to pray on a sacred mountain after her kut, but
this time she had not been granted a single vision.

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 Pong-
sun 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 frus-
tration she felt on that day.21
Conclusion: Will Chini ever become a shaman?
Kim Pongsun, Chini’s spirit mother, attributed Chini’s difficulties to tem-

perament:
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

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 Mes-
senger. You take an ordinary housewife who knows nothing about the sha-
man profession. Would she know anything about the Special Messenger?”
The Korean shaman world’s own myths fit tidily with a scholarly tra-
dition 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 initia-
tion 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 frus-
tration 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 inspira-
tion 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 com-
ments: “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

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 appren-
tices 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 Pong-
sun, 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.

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 inspira-
tion during her kut and failed at the expectations of apprenticeship, los-
ing 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 ini-
tiates 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

The Ambiguities of Becoming 103
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

104 The Ambiguities of Becoming
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 com-

parisons 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 teach-
ers. Some would-be shamans even practice without holding an initiation
kut, particularly when their attractiveness or performance skills prompt sea-
soned shamans to include them in their kut (C. Choi 1987, 132; Y. K. Har-
vey 1979, 191–195).2 Shamans echo complaints voiced by scholars in works
that also quote shamans (Hung-youn Cho 1990, 215–216; Huang 1988,

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 Trea-
sure 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 con-
trast 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 Tile-
Roofed 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 rig-
orous spirit mothers. She tries to be this sort of spirit mother when instruct-
ing 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

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 appren-
tice as a scullery maid and heaped scorn upon her head, the spirit daugh-
ter 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 ten-
year 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 infor-
mation 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 Grand-
mother (Taesin Halmôni), one of her guardian gods, and lambasted Chat-
terbox 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,

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 daugh-
ters 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

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 sha-
mans 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 illiter-
ate shamans in times past who memorized quantities of chants and ritual
lore sufficient to sustain a kut that lasted for several days. “The old grand-
mothers 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.

The text was more a study aid than a source of secret knowledge, and Yong-
su’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 intona-
tions 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 subse-
quently 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 rela-
tionship. 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 sha-
mans 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 pur-
chased 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,

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 sha-
mans or, depending on one’s perspective, give recent initiates a commer-
cial 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 three-
year curriculum for initiated but untrained shamans included drumming,
songs and dances, and ritual procedures (uri haengsaΔi pôpsu). The direc-
tor 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,” insuf-
ficiently inspired and badly trained.
Although Yongsu’s Mother spoke of gods expelled from sacred moun-
tains who descend into people, she also shared in the widespread perception

that as with unnecessary surgeries, many women and men are being initi-
ated 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 particu-
larly 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 pro-
spective 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 pro-
fession, 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 mod-
ern medicine replaced (ibid., 273). By a similar logic, impatience for finan-
cial 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, “[Initi-
ates] 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 Yong-
su’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

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 proclaim-
ing 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 tran-
scribers, 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 ini-
tiates—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), per-
forming 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 sha-
mans,” or “most shamans these days” are phony shamans. How seriously
should we take these statements?

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 contem-
porary 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 pro-
cedures. 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 com-
plains 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 criti-
cal 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 ser-
vice 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 educa-
tion 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

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 unan-
swerable 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-in-
law, 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-in-
law’s command performance, I learned that the pretty woman was Minju’s
Mother and that she was Yongsu’s Mother’s spirit daughter. Although Yong-
su’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 fail-
ures. 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 predict-
ably 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 Bud-
dhist 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

A lantern in the shape of

a lotus flower and a white
flag mark a shaman’s rented
office in downtown Righ-
teous Town, 1994. The sha-
man’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 misfor-
tune 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

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 agi-
tated 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 conscious-
ness, 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 Moun-
tain 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 sha-
man 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 jour-
neys, 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

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 ini-
tiation 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, com-
muting 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 divi-
nations 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 Moun-
tain 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, suf-
fered 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 Any-
ang, clean the shrine, polish the vessels, and make the requisite daily offer-
ing 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

husband’s family, but her husband’s uncle, an exorcist, guards this knowl-
edge 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 doc-
tor 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 sis-
ter,” from Minju’s Mother herself. In child voice, the god rejects the suck-
ers 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

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 inspira-
tion, or so he claimed. Ms. Kim and I seek them out and spend an interest-
ing 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 cul-
tivation 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 sulk-
ily, returning much later to resume his sermon while she sits silent, the sug-
gestion 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

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 daugh-
ter 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 daugh-
ter. 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 cli-
ent 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 knick-
knacks, and overbearing arrangements of artificial flowers. The lavishly fit-

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 advo-
cacy association. He nods a greeting and changes his shirt, and they leave
again.
The Fairy Maid emerges from her consultation, a glamorous appari-
tion 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 sug-
gest 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 impend-
ing 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 ritu-
als 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 bal-
ance 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 man-
ages 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 des-
tined 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

“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 con-
structed paper decorations in the style of southern kut. The Fairy Maid,
born in the southwest, performs kut in the manner of Seoul shamans (Han-
yang or Hansông kut), the style in which she was trained. She carefully
produces the words of the invocation, jumps in place, and then gives divina-
tions 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, promis-
ing 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 sha-
mans—when a Child God appears. We are in the middle of the 2002 World

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 sha-
mans 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 apprecia-
tion 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 rear-
view 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 for-
eign 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

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 relation-
ship,” 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. Now-
adays, 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 anthropologi-
cal 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.”

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 docu-
mented 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 claim-
ing loyalty to their own gods, complains about the ineffectual, self-serving
advocacy associations that do little for the shamans themselves, and empha-
sizes 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 specta-
tors. 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

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 dedi-
cated to performing a series of kut for the military comfort women. Cir-
cumventing 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 infec-
tious 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 fash-
ion, held a successful initiation kut, and is learning her craft from an exact-
ing 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 sha-
mans 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

shaman religion Ms. Shin envisions, at least for the kind of modest profes-
sional 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 tradi-
tion, she carries it in new directions.
Both the Fairy Maid and Ms. Shin function primarily—Ms. Shin exclu-
sively—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 chôm-
jangi, posal, tongja posal, or myôngdu (T’ae-gon Kim 1981, 369) find suf-
ficient incentive in the cultural celebration of Korean mudang to see them-
selves 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 cul-
ture (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 replenish-
ing bowls of clear water but exhibiting no other offerings because she felt
that the businessmen who were her primary clientele would be uncomfort-
able with a gaudy display.
Conclusion
Those who write shamanic nostalgia write from a Korean intellectual per-
spective that mourns the successive losses of the Korean nation through
colonialism, national division, and draconian modernization. The observa-
tions 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-

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 inspi-
ration 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.

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 Myông-
nyô 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

130 Korean Shamans and the Spirits of Capitalism
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 Offi-
cial 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 sha-
man 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

Korean Shamans and the Spirits of Capitalism 131
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 dyspep-
tic 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 imme-
diate 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 offer-
ing food, conspicuous spiritual consumption subsequently discarded in rot-
ting 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 contempo-
rary 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

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 Yong-
su’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 sha-
man, 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 Bud-
dhas in Yongsu’s Mother’s shrine. Nevertheless, his wife was swayed by a
Christian neighbor, and the couple abandoned their obligations to the gods

(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 get-
ting 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 dis-
cussion 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 appropri-
ate 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 imagi-

nation was a small family farm, a kin-based agrarian unit of production
and consumption embedded in a larger market economy. In the late 1970s,

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 televi-
sion 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 prac-
tices 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 work-
ers, 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 monopo-
lies (chaebôl) at the expense of small businesses, most petty entrepreneurs,
with a majority of Koreans, describe themselves as middle-class on statisti-
cal 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).

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 busi-
ness 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 thir-
ties, who were attempting to establish themselves through small-scale enter-
prises. 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 fam-
ily, 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 mira-
cle. 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 mar-
ket, 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

business will go well,” the bland summations that are offered in passing
to curious anthropologists, but in response to disastrous financial rever-
sals 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 hon-
ored 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 unprec-
edented 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 con-
firmed 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

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 com-
mercial 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 observ-
ing 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 hus-
band is ill.” “Things aren’t going so well.” Such pro forma remarks, pre-
cisely 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

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 regard-
ing 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 propri-
etress 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 spon-
sored the kut. Divinations revealed that in addition to these enterprises, sev-
eral 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 margin-
alized 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 encoun-
ter 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 “super-
star shamans” (Chungmoo Choi’s term [1991]). Shamans complained bit-
terly 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

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, high-
roller 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 industrial-
ized 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 prognos-
tications 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 some-
times 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 War-
rior 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 prog-
nostications in the imagery of client enterprises. For Mrs. Pok: “Bunches of

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 fam-
ily. 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 full-
bellied 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 claim-
ing 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 nobil-
ity who were politically dispossessed under Japanese rule and then saw the

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 self-
justifying 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 com-
ment 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 mate-
rial 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 prac-
tical 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 for-
tune, promising wealth in exchange for cash but always with the threat 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.” The mansin holds the divina-
tion 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 argu-
ably 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 Com-
merce 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 sha-
manic practices as fueling a particularly Korean “spirit” of high-risk capital-
ism. 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,

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 trac-
ing 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 produc-
tion, 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 some-
thing 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 ten-
ancy, and out-migration (Cumings 1997, chap. 3; Gragert 1994; H. F. Wil-
liams 1982). More recent decades saw intensive capitalization and mecha-
nization 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, sud-
den 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 recali-
brated 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.

Crisis
Writing in the mid-1990s, I had described the activities of shamans and cli-
ents 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 high-
risk game was also being played at the top. Korean banks had been receiv-
ing 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 initi-
ated 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 for-
eign commodities (S. Suh 1998). South Korea depends on imported petro-
leum 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

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 Kore-
ans viewed capitulation to the IMF demands as an act of national humili-
ation, 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 entrepre-
neurs 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 propri-
etor 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 per-
cent in the first quarter of 1999, a three- to fourfold increase over immedi-
ate 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 nonex-
istent 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

demise of certain chaebôl would command press attention, but most bank-
ruptcies 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 imme-
diately experienced as shrinking employment prospects. Manufacturing and
construction retrenched, and with the rationalization of corporate and pub-
lic 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 gradu-
ates. 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 dif-
ficulties and national disgrace” (S. Suh 1998, 34), the shorthand for a cli-
mate 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

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 cir-
cumstances 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 per-
formed 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 recog-
nized 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 trans-
formed 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, miser-
able 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

more costly repairs and yet more debt. Her pained and weathered face car-
ried 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 improve-
ment 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 cli-
ents 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 cir-
cumstances. 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.

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 con-
stant sound of their mourning and weeping ringing in my ears.” The word-
less 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 equiva-
lent situations in other places, the shaman’s clients understand full well that
the market is fraught with risk, with dangerous but inevitable elements of

unpredictability. The consultations and rituals that clients and shamans per-
form 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 warn-
ings 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 reli-
gious practice. In South Korean popular religion, such questions are posed
and answered within the frame of family and household, where the con-
sequences 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 exor-
cisms, 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 particu-
lar 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 sha-
mans’ 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 exor-
cisms 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 touch-
ing 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

there are moments when global politicoeconomic forces can be so well con-
cealed 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 prom-
ised 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 cli-
ents 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 Korean-
Chinese) 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

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 busi-
ness 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), Mar-
jorie 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 “reli-
gion,” “spirit possession,” and “shamanism” are not dead or fixed catego-
ries 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 entrepre-
neurs, lest we replicate older dichotomies: the oppressed practice an inar-
ticulate 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) cau-
tions 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 sha-
man 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 proletar-
ians 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-

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 mate-
rial into the magical space of a kut—in this instance the literal material of
physical props—to make meaning and induce therapeutic laughter.

6
Of Hungry Ghosts and Other
Matters of Consumption
This chapter extends the shamans’ observation that “money makes nobil-
ity.” It explores as contradictory impulses the desire for and the moral dis-
dain 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 expe-
riences 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 shar-
ing 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 them-
selves, 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

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

156 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 fol-
lowing 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 assist-
ing 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 Bud-
dhist 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

Of Hungry Ghosts and Other Matters of Consumption 157
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 10,000-
wôn 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 com-
monly 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

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 tri-
umphant 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 War-
rior. 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 West-
ern 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 cel-
ebrating 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 Tal-
lae gives me.” The gift has become an extension of our privileged relation-
ship, which Ms. Yang would like to replicate. Yongsu’s Mother will also
relate, as miraculous confirmation that the god, not the mansin, drank the

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 under-
score 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 com-
pelled 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 presi-
dential 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 Bar-
bershop 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—sym-
bolically charged and sensually significant offerings and ritual parapherna-
lia—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

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 transpar-
ent 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 interpreta-
tions 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 enact-
ment.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 com-
modities 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.

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 dictator-
ship (1961–1987) were gone, and austerity had given way to enthusiastic
conspicuous consumption. Brand-name commodities originally encoun-
tered as the forbidden fruit of the black market appeared on the bulging
shelves of supermarkets and in neighborhood convenience stores. Depart-
ment 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 thereto-
fore-protected domestic market, inspired passionate but ultimately ineffec-
tive resistance (Nelson 2000). In 1988, signs strung across Seoul streets pro-
claimed, “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 par-
ents 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 moder-
nity against a Western, usually an American Other, identified and to some

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 con-
sumption—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 face-
to-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 suc-
cessful middle-class woman’s nostalgia for what she remembers as the sim-
pler, poorer, and purer Korea of her youth. Domestic corruption scandals
in the 1990s, compounded by the daily frustrations of a more general eco-
nomic 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 disci-
plined 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 Protes-
tant 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 cen-
tury, 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

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 long-
standing 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 obvi-
ously 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 collectivi-
ties of “us” and the imagined community of nation. The bananas were not
Korean products and were therefore unsuitable offerings for Korean ances-
tors. 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 delight-
ful 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 speci-
fied in ritual manuals describing the procedures for making ancestral offer-
ings (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 contem-
porary Koreans gloss with ambiguity (Dix 1985; R. L. Janelli and Janelli
1982; K. Lee 1987). For Yongsu’s Mother, on the other hand, ancestors

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 pres-
ent 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?

In the marketplace of ritual goods, both gods and ancestors have

acquired a fondness for new commodities and foreign brand-name prod-
ucts. Offerings in shaman shrines and at kut might include cartons of Prin-
gles 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 pro-
prietor 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 tradi-
tion, 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 exces-
sive consumption as applied to other shamans, particularly “Seoul sha-
mans.” 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 time-
honored 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. Hav-
ing 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 roman-
ticize 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 enliv-
ened the anthropology of consumption in that same decade: do foreign

commodities undermine local culture, or are they, at the end of the day,
successfully appropriated to the local work of cultural production? The cli-
ent’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 inter-
est 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 hus-
band 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 Appadu-
rai (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 com-
modity 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 bro-
ken 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 encod-
ings 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 dra-
matic power from these same contradictions that South Koreans live with
every day.

A mansin tearfully manifests

one of the author’s own ances-
tors, 1998. She has bundled
a white jacket, offered to the
ancestor, against her own per-
son 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 out-
married 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 plea-
sures 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,

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 high-
end 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 offer-
ing 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, includ-
ing special celebratory feasts; clothing, including outfits for special occa-
sions; 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 long-
dead 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 Bac-
chus back when he was alive.” The little brown bottle of popular pick-me-
up 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 pur-
chase an apartment, and someone reminds him, “What did you know about

‘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 sha-
mans 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 con-
temporary 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 hard-
earned rewards. The ancestors’ tugs on their descendants’ bright new cloth-
ing, 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 examina-
tions (Abelmann 2003; Cho Hae-joang 1995), and the constant visual dis-
play 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.

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 Offi-
cial (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 “ciga-
rette 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 anthro-
pologist’s old and now generally discredited dichotomization between gifts
and commodities.13 Such offerings are gifts insofar as they affirm and per-
petuate 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

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 yok-
sim 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 fig-
ures 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 acquir-
ing a taste for foreign whisky, even without the assistance of an anthropolo-
gist 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, agricul-
tural 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 associ-
ated 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

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 pleas-
ant 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 con-
demned. As Michael Taussig, following Bataille, would have it, the coher-
ence 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 banter-
ing 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 perfor-
mance 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

Sober the next day, in every respect, he returned to ask if he had not mistak-
enly 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 Offi-
cial 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 nine-
teenth 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 ances-
tors 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

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’ for-
mative 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 dis-
cussion about popular religion, embodied gods and ancestors, and market
commodities? The Comaroffs have argued that commodities appear in pop-
ular 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 numer-
ous 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 deli-
cate 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 mate-
rially 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 ret-
rospect) as optimistic expectations and the moral implications of getting,
having, and desiring more.

The moral dilemma of new wealth, a matter of much concern in nine-

teenth-century Europe and North America, reappears in the newly success-
ful, 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 smok-
ing, amoral gangster gods who minister to the needs of freewheeling capital-
ists 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 thick-
ens 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 inscrip-
tion—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 his-
torian 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

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 tac-
tility 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 con-
sumption, 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 run-
ning 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 impro-
vised confrontation with contemporary South Korean life; the final chapter
describes a similarly improvisational encounter with a sacred landscape that
simultaneously shrinks and expands.

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 mem-
ory 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 south-
eastern 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 direc-
tions send us down blind alleyways or to a diviner’s office in a modern apart-
ment 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 wed-
ding (“Built it to placate a mischievous virgin ghost,” I thought). They had
all participated in the annual community ritual honoring the shrine’s tute-
177

178 Built Landscapes and Mobile Gods
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 sur-
rounded 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 per-
haps 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 shrine-
keeper. 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 out-
side 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.

Built Landscapes and Mobile Gods 179
No, the old house was never a kuttang, a shrine that rents space to sha-
mans, and this explains some of the confusion that had greeted our requests
for directions. We have stumbled upon the shrine of a powerful local tute-
lary 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 author-
ity 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 cul-
tural 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 “charis-
matic” [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 tra-
dition 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.

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 self-
image 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 vil-
lages.” The shrine-keeper’s remembered neighborhood landscape includes
other shrines that disappeared completely or are no longer adequately main-
tained. 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 his-
tory, died or moved away. The annual shrine ritual that had spiritually forti-
fied 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

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 two-
story 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 restau-
rant specializing in traditional Korean cuisine. Antique earthen food stor-
age 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 initi-
ate 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 spir-
its.” She laments again the loss of old shaman customs, the materialism of

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 disappear-
ing 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 ostenta-
tious 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 shrine-
keeper’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 twen-
tieth 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,

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 por-

table name, gods, and traditions, contrasts the fixity of buildings, monu-
ments, 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 land-
scape, 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 surround-
ings (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 cre-
ated and disputed, whether as individual, group, or nation-state” (1993, 3).2
Borrowing on the theme of the urban walker, from Baudelaire through Wal-
ter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau (1984, 91–114) offers a particular mode of

spatial contestation, describing the totalizing master plan of a city as con-

founded and reimagined by “walkers” on the ground whose everyday prac-
tices 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 Yong-
su’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 meta-
phor 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

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 sum-
mit!” 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 para-
phernalia, including an hourglass drum that Yongsu’s Mother and her col-
leagues 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 com-
manding view of North Korea across the Imjin River, we found ample evi-
dence 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 argu-
ment 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 dur-
ing 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

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 expla-
nation. 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 Grand-
mother, addressed Yongsu’s Mother, “You’ve gone to the mountain and
back. Now why should you be so heavyhearted? It’s because you and [Chat-
terbox] made so much noise [arguing with each other] on the mountain.”
The Great Spirit Grandmother did not mention Yongsu’s Mother’s declara-
tion 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 associ-
ated 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

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 sha-
man 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 com-
pleted 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 objec-
tion to Babe’s belting karaoke during the drive back home. More surpris-
ing, 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 estab-
lishment. 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.

As cars, vans, and mountain kuttang transformed the mountain pil-

grimage 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, approxi-
mately the size of the state of New Jersey. A van loaded with shamans, cli-
ents, 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 hill-

sides 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 com-
munity and shamans from the scrutiny of critical aficionados. It also sug-
gested how, for the shamans themselves, the kuttang is a networking node, a
place to witness the work of particularly skilled colleagues and observe dif-
ferent 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-

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 interna-
tional 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 enter-
prises. In addition to renting rooms with altar space and an appropriate con-
figuration 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 restaura-
teurs, 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 third-
generation 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 worship-
pers 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-

ration, the myôngdang, where the positive energy of the site converges. Like
any business site (or home, or grave), a kuttang benefits from a particu-
larly potent myôngdang, and the rumored efficacy or inauspiciousness of a
site adversely affects business. Kuttang that intersect with powerful moun-
tain 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 some-
times 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 attri-
bute 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 “conve-
nient parking facilities” on their business cards.
Kuttang thus combine something new—a nearly ubiquitous, automo-
bile 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 magistra-
cies (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

perpetuated by shamans, as in my tale of the old shrine. Several pugundang

along the Han River, now embraced by the sprawling boundaries of metro-
politan 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 cele-
brate 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 struc-
ture 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-supersti-
tion 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 worship-
pers (Pak H. 2001; Ryu 2000), not without quiet but persistent resistance
(Ryu 2008). Pak HΔng-ju’s survey of neighborhood shrines (2001) cata-
logues their physical displacement by the construction of new roads, high-

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, prob-
ably 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 out-
lived the shrine tree but did not survive more recent complaints of noise pol-
lution 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 sec-
ond 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 clos-
ing 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 ordi-
nary 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

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 tick-
ets 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 rees-
tablishing 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 shrine-
keepers 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

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 activi-
ties—were an expressed concern of hers. Recalling the fate of the Halmi-
dang 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 rent-
ing 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 condition-
ing. 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 loca-
tion for his shrine. He had gone to Taebaek Mountain, far to the south, to

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 moun-
tains, 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 moun-
tains. 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 enter-
taining 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 heri-
tage 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 wan-
dered 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 coloniza-
tion of Seoul’s landscape. Relocated on Inuang Mountain to the northwest,
a mountain also significant in the city’s geomancy (Chông 1999; Kim Y.

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 liv-
ing 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 trea-
sure” and the keeper of the Fortification Shrine to describe her once-more-
newly-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-keep-
ers 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 Kuk-
sadang a particularly potent geomantic site, or myôngdang (Kim Kibin
1993). The Sônbawi, a large twisted rock near the shrine, is a powerful con-
figuration. 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

monks’ eyes, pollute the mountain with rotting meat and interrupt medita-
tions 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 pro-
hibited 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 pro-
claimed 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 pos-
sible 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 contradic-
tion 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 Bar-
bara 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

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 Fortifi-
cation Shrine had succumbed to a massive urban development plan. Despite
its venerable lineage, the shrine-keeper could not mount a successful pres-
ervation 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 supersti-
tions 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 traf-
fic 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 out-
last 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 mod-
ern 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 Cer-
teau’s “anti-museums,” deploying the stuff of legend against a totalizing
vision of urban space, offering the possibility of escape “into another land-
scape,” 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.

Cheap and expedient construc-

tion: A shaman unbinds ances-
tral 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 kut-
tang. A vinyl canopy protects
the shaman and her clients from
the rain.
Mount Paektu
The recent history of shamanic landscapes describes adaptations to con-

striction 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

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 conglom-
erate 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

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 pil-
grimages, 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 Shaman-
ism 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 mem-
bership. 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 auspi-
cious 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

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 distin-
guished great shamans (k’Δn mudang), carry the aura of cultural perfor-
mance. 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 ciga-
rette 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, some-
thing 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

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 his-
tory 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.

Conclusion
I began this account of a changing South Korean shaman world with Yong-
su’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, creat-
ing 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 Wil-
liams’ terms, a space where a dominant system fails to “reduce all experi-
ence 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 the-
ater 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 Chi-
ni’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 art-
ful improvisers but in a manner that witnesses the ritual knowledge, skill,
and experience the shamans so clearly value themselves. I am concerned,
205

206 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. Supersti-
tion 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 conse-
quential 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 prac-
tice. 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 interlocu-
tors, I am aware that many shamans perform without sufficient training,
that contemporary lifestyles and the spatial isolation of shamanic perfor-
mances abet shoddy work, and that many who style themselves as mudang
function primarily if not exclusively as diviners. Yes, these shaman divin-
ers 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 contem-
porary South Korean life. I offer the gentle suggestion that popular religion
is dynamic religion, that those whom we think of as shamans are particu-
larly adept at engaging new material, and that we might find the like of
Yongsu’s Mother and her colleagues in other similarly prosperous and anx-
ious places.

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 conversa-
tion. 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 embod-
ied, 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 Har-
ner’s translation into workshop practice of shamanic techniques aimed at induc-
ing 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 Jorale-
mon (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).
207

208 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 respon-
sibility, mothers in Enduring Pine Village began investing in informal credit associa-
tions 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 circum-
stances 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 terminol-
ogy, 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 ideo-
graphs, 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.

Notes to Pages 8–18 209
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 mat-
ters range across the political spectrum from extremes of the Left and the Right,
were united in their opposition to “backward” and “superstitious” practices (Anag-
nost 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 phenom-
enon 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 wor-
shippers” 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 leg-
ends 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-

210 Notes to Pages 18–22
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, fig-
ure 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 then-
contemporary 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, folklor-
ist, 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 colo-
nial 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 Intan-
gible 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 con-
gratulatory remarks.
28. Sim’s writings, first published as newspaper editorials in the 1970s, influ-
enced 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-

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 experi-
ences 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 rela-
tionship between shaman and client.
34. While General Ch’oe Yông, a historical figure, appears in shaman panthe-
ons, sightings of President Park and his wife, Yuk Yôngsu, both victims of assassina-
tion, 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 ven-
erate 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 prob-
ably 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 sporadi-
cally 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 usu-
ally 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).

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 pow-
ers 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 affec-
tionate 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 sha-
mans 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 actu-
ally 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

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 overinter-
prets 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 inspira-
tion. 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).

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 lin-
eages (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 colloquial-
ism 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 super-
natural 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 pos-
sibility, 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

that they “learned” to perform kut from other shamans, emphasizing the force of
divine inspiration (1981, 81). This contrasts the younger shamans today who com-
plain 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 seventeenth-
century 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 absen-
tia 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).

16. See Seong-nae Kim’s thoughtful analysis (2001a, 2003b) of Korean sha-
man 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.

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 poten-
tial 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 schol-
ar’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 book-
length 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 mar-
riage 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 partici-
pated in them.
16. The notion of divine jurisdictions is pervasive in East Asian popular reli-
gion 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 then-
going prices and well below the rates in Seoul.
2. The facial expressions that mansin assume and hold while performing par-
ticular 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 Rose-
man (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

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 con-
sciousness 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 Appa-
durai (1986) for moving material culture studies away from the quid pro quo eco-
nomics 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 identi-
ties 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-

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, driv-
ing 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

220 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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Index and Glossary
Page numbers followed by the letter f refer to figures and photographs.
Abelmann, Nancy, 162 Beattie, John, 69

adultery, 124, 215n. 15 belief (sinang), 4, 27
aek (malevolent influences), 116 Bender, Barbara, 183
agency, 82, 135, 150, 159, 176; gods’ blocked fortune (uni makta), 81, 83–84,
agency, 194, 198; prop, 160, 174; 150
spiritual agency, 183, 192, 206 body-governing guardian god (momju
Alternative Culture Group (TtohanaΔi taesin), 79. See also guardian god
Munhua), 23 Bogoras, Waldemar, 68, 69
An, Hosun, 76, 79–82, 86–88, 94–95, Boym, Svetlana, xxiv, xxvi
103–104, 107–108 bribes, 2, 170
ancestors (chosang), x; appearances brother’s wife (olk’e), 37
by, 42–43, 54, 86–88, 167–170; Browne, Sir Thomas, 139
Confucian rite for (chesa), 163; Bruno, Antonetta, 100
desires of, 160, 163–164; as gods, Buddhism, 4, 25–31, 196
x; kut to send off ancestors (chinogi Buddhist Sage, summoning, 78–83
kut), 3, 34, 57; and mansin, 167;
offerings for, 163, 164f; possession capitalism and shamans, 129–153
by, 36; relationship with, 3, 49; self- causality, xxviii, 4
cultivation of, 26; transformations and Celestial Shrine, 194–195
work of shamans—gods and ancestors, Ch’ae (Park) Hi-a, 20
xxvii–xxviii, 93. See also chesa chae (wealth), 135
ancestral mountain (ponsan), 188 chaesu kut (kut for good fortune), xx, 14,
Appadurai, Arjun, 166, 175 34, 131, 135–136, 141, 196
apprentice shaman (chagΔn mudang): chagΔn mudang (little shaman). See
Babe as, 50, 53–56, 64; hardships of, apprentice shaman
76, 102–108; training of, 26, 70, 75, ch’a kosa (ritual on behalf of family car),
77, 98 132
arrows (sal), 38 Chaktu Changgun (Knife-Riding
Atkinson, Jane, 29 General), 94–97
Auntie Cho (shrine cook, aspiring charismatic shaman (kangsin mu,
shaman), 24–32, 102, 104 mansin), ix, 179
aura (kap’i), 25 Chatterbox Mansin, 35–49, 106–107, 184
auspiciousness (pok), 135 che (festival), 12
authenticity, xviii, xxiii, 2, 33, 181, 197. cheja (disciple), 75, 179
See also chinja chesa (ancestral rite), 163, 164f
Child Gods (Tongja), 50, 56, 157
Babe (Youngsu’s Mother’s apprentice), Chini’s kut, 66–101, 102
11–17, 50–53, 109–110, 156 chinja (real, authentic), xxvii, 12
Bataille, G., 172 chip (house), 133–134
Baudrillard, Jean, 3 ch’isông (minor offering and prayer), 37
245

246 Index
Cho, Hung-youn, 18, 111 desire. See ancestors; wealth

Ch’oe, Namsôn, 18 destined shamans (naerin saram), xviii
Ch’oe Yông, General (as shaman god), 30 Diamond Mountains, 200
Choi, Chung-moo, 100, 172 Dirks, Nicholas, 1
chonggyo. See religion disciple (cheja), 75, 179
Ch’ônha Taeuang (Heavenly King), 88, divination: The Fairy Maid and, 120–121,
95–96, 214 122; by horoscope (saju), 123–124;
ch’ônmin (outcast), 17 in initiation kut, 66, 67, 91; in kut
chosang. See ancestors (kongsu), 40, 43, 55, 138, 139;
Chosôn Kingdom, 7, 191, 209–210 Minju’s Mother and, 117; Ms. Shin
Chow, Rey, 16 and, 123–124; by shaman (mugôri), 3,
Christianity: modernity and, 3, 5–8; 25, 27, 31, 36, 50, 74, 104; websites
shamans and, x, 25–33 for, 127
Chukchi, 69–70 Dow, James, 62
Chung, Hyun Kyung, 23 dreams, 25, 53, 72, 74, 85, 108, 116,
Clark, Rev. Charles Alan, 6 164, 183, 189, 193–194, 198
Clear Spring Mansin, 50, 109, 186
cloth and clothing as gift, 168, 175 Eckert, Carter J., 141
colonial period, 8–10 Eliade, Mircea, xxiii, 68
Comaroff, Jean, 151, 152, 174 enactment, 205
Comaroff, John, 151, 152–153, 174 enchantment, anthropology and, xiii,
commercial shaman shrine. See kuttang xviii–xix
commodity: abducted agency of, 159; entrepreneurs, 129–153
brand-names, 161; consumption, Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 150
commodity and popular religion, exhaustion (momsal), 147
173–175; as offering, 154, 155f; as exorcism: missionaries and, 6; in shaman
prop, 154, 160 ritual, 6, 43–48
communitas. See kongdongch’e
Confucianism, 3–4, 18; and ritual, 4; and The Fairy Maid, 119–123, 194, 206
shamans, 3–4, 19, 165 favor (hoΔi), 46
consumer goods. See commodity; festival (che), 12
consumption Firth, Raymond, 68
consumption, 154–176; ancestors and, folklore, 17–20, 180–181; colonial
165–166; commodity, consumption and period and, 18; minsok (folklore), 18;
popular religion, 173–175; in South modernity and, 17–19; nationalism
Korea, 161–163; spirits and, 130, and, 18; nostalgia and, 20; revival,
139–141, 154, 173; thrift and, 145 18–20; scholarship, 210; shamans and,
contemporary shamans, 33 17–19
core shamanism, 207n. 5 Fortification Shrine, 189, 192, 193, 195
Cram, Rev. W. G., 6 fortune is blocked (uni makta), 150
crazy kut (mich’in kut), 34, 35–49, 64 foster mother (suyang ômma), 132
crazy person (mich’in saram), 35 funeral, for scapegoat (Mrs. Min’s kut),
credit card era (k’adΔ sidae), 151 38–41
Cultural Properties Protection Law, 19
Cultural Treasure (munhuaje), 12, 109, gates of commerce (sangôp mun), 58
119, 179, 201 gates of speech (malmun), xx, xxvii, 67
culture (munhua), shaman practices as, Gell, Alfred, xxviii
1–15 gender, xx, 15–17, 113, 123
custom (sok), 18 geomancy, 196
globalization, shamans and, 199–200
death messenger (saja), 38 gods: agency, 194, 198; as ancestors, x;
De Certeau, Michel, 198 Child Gods (Tongja), 50, 56, 157;

Index 247
consumption and, 173; desires of, Humphrey, Caroline, 183

71, 160, 163–164, 170; families and, husband’s sister (sinu), 37
53–54; greedy god, encounter with,
156–159; in initiation ritual, xx, IMF Crisis, xxiii–xxiv, xxviii, 121,
78–88; mansin’s body-governing, 79; 144–146, 161, 205; cosmic force,
offering to, 170–171; relationship IMF as, 149–152; shamans and,
with, 3, 30, 49; transformations and 146–149
work of shamans—gods and ancestors, improvisation, in ritual, xx–xxii, 153,
xxvii–xxviii, 93. See also body- 156–159, 173–174, 176
governing guardian god; guardian Independent newspaper, 7, 8
god influences (aek), 116
Gong Granny, 105, 106, 110, 146, 150 in’ganmunhuaje (Human Cultural
Grandfather Sage (Tosa Harabôji), 56, Treasure), xxii, 17, 210
140 initiation: body-governing gods and, 79;
Granny Shrine (Halmidang), 192, 198 failure and, 82–86; gods in initiation
great shaman (k’Δn mudang), 49, 202 ritual, xx, 78–88; of mansin, 66–101;
Great Spirit Grandmother (Taesin scholarship on, 30, 210; shamans
Halmôni), 56–57, 106, 186 and, 66–101; spirit mother and, 71,
greedy god, encounter with, 156–159 75–78
guardian god (taesin), 25, 26, 31, 106, inspiration (yông), 15, 75
179; Chini’s, 84–87, 213n. 3 inspired speech (kongsu), xxviii, 67, 76,
78–79, 81–82, 90, 92, 98, 100
Halmidang (Granny Shrine), 192, 198 intangible cultural heritage (muhyang
Hanyang or Hansông kut (Seoul style munhuaje), 12, 19, 21, 210nn. 24, 25
kut), 122 Inuang Mountain, 196–197
Hastings, Sally, 16 Irigaray, Luce, 16
healing: conflict between medicine and, Ivy, Marilyn, xxiv, xxvi
3; kut for affliction (uhuan kut), xx,
3, 34, 35–38, 57; mansin and, 48; Jung Mun San, 23
performance skill and, 70; rituals, 48,
94; superstition and, 3, 6, 8; symbolic, k’adΔ sidae (credit card era), 151
62 Kam’ak (Kambak) Mountain, 56,
Heavenly King (Ch’ônha Taeuang), 88, 184–185
95–96, 214 kangsin (charismatic), 179
hereditary shaman (sesΔp mu), 179 kap’i (aura), 24
heritage: intangible, 12, 19, 21, 210nn. 24, Keeper of the Fortification Shrine, 119,
25; kuttang as heritage site, 195–197; 121, 189, 192, 193, 215
shaman rituals as, 19 Keeper of the Tile-Roofed Shrine, 105,
Hogarth, Hyun-key Kim, 110 106, 111, 178–183
Hogu. See Princess Hogu Keith, Elizabeth, 8
hoΔi (favor), 46 kibok (praying for good fortune), 131
house (chip), 133–134; and household, kija (fully-realized shamans), 102, 108
133–134; structural and ritual, Kim, Chongho, 209n. 14
xxiv–xxvi, 48–49, 60, 133 Kim Geum-hwa, xi, 23, 24, 105, 106,
household, 133–134 109, 201–202
House Lord (Sôngju), 133 Kim, Mr., 132–134
House Site Official (T’ôju Taegam), 170, Kim, Ms., 137, 177, 178, 192
171 Kim, Seong-nae, xxiv
Huang, Ru-si, 111 Kim Su-nam, 19
Hultkrantz, Ake, xxii Kim Tong-hΔi, 19
Human Cultural Treasure Kim Tongni, 178
(in’ganmunhuaje), xxii, 17, 210 Kim Yông Sam, 196

248 Index
Knife-Riding General (Chaktu Changgun), Leiris, Michel, 68

94–97 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 63
kong (offerings and prayers, lit. little shaman (chagΔn mudang), 75
“service”), 55
kongdongch’e (the collective body, magic: anthropology and, xxiii; markets,
communitas), 14, 22 142–143; mountains and, 180, 184;
kongsu (inspired speech), xxviii, 67, 76, technology of, xxviii
78–79, 81–82, 90, 92, 98, 100 makkôlli (crude rice wine), 158, 171
Korea, national division of, x, 199–203 makta (blocked), 83. See also blocked
kosa (offering to household gods): on fortune
behalf of family car (ch’a kosa), 132; male shamans (paksu mudang), 16
at harvest, 170 malmun (gates of speech), xx, xxvii, 67
Kuksadang, 195–197 malmyông (restless souls), 83
k’Δn mudang (great shaman), 49, 202 Mani, Lata, 16
kut: for affliction (uhuan kut), xx, 3, manmulsa (shaman supply shops), 108
34, 35–38, 57; anjΔn (sitting) kut, mansin: ancestors and, 167; charismatic
53; city versus village, 14, 64–65; shamans, ix; costumes, xxi; crazy
comparison of two examples of, kut (mich’in kut), 34, 35–49, 64;
34–65; contemporary, xxviii, 51–52, definition, xx; divine calling of, xx;
63–65, 113; crazy kut (mich’in kut), fictive kinship, 63, 87–88, 106, 132;
34, 35–49, 64; for the dead (chinogi generation gap, xxvii, 126–128; and
kut), 3, 34, 57; enactment of, xxviii; healing, 48; incompetence, 111–112;
Fairy Maid’s, 122–123; for foreign initiation of, 66–101; inspired speech
audiences, 23; frequency, xviii; for (kongsu), xxviii; kut and skills of,
good fortune (chaesu kut), xx, 14, xx; life stories of, 102–128; mental
34, 131, 135–136, 141, 196; house illness, 82, 104. See also apprentice
structure and, xxiv–xxv; incompetence shaman; kija; mudang; shamans; spirit
in, 111–112; for initiation (naerim kut daughters; spirit mother
Chini’s story), 66–101, 102; mansin’s Mauss, Marcel, 166
skill during, xx, 64–65; mock funeral medicine: missionaries and, 6; modernity
(Mrs. Min’s kut), 38–41; Mrs. Min’s and, 1–3
kut, 34–48, 62–64, 205; mudang and, mich’in kut (crazy kut), 34
ix; private, 14; procedures for, 103, mich’in saram (crazy person), 35
107, 110; as public performance, Minjung Munhua Undong (Popular
11–15; regional variations in, ix, 20, Culture Movement), 21
53, 55, 122–123; spectators, role and Minjung theology, 21–22, 30
absence of, 14, 68, 122; Tano kut, Minju’s Mother, 114–119, 151
11–15, 19, 23; village versus city, 14, Min, Mrs.: kut, 34–48, 62–64, 205
65; Mrs. Yi’s kut, 51–65, 135, 148, misin (superstition). See superstition
205. See also kuttang; performance; (misin)
ritual Misint’ap’a Undong (Movement to
Kut Study Group (Kut hakhoe), 19 Overthrow Superstition), 10
kuttang (commercial shaman shrines), missionaries: exorcism and, 5–6; medicine
34, 51, 65, 110, 135, 137, 177, 179, and, 6; modernity and, 5–7
187–199 modernity, xxii–xxiii; anthropology of,
Kwan Myôngnyô, 75–76, 79–80, 84–85, xxiii; Buddhism and, 4; Christianity
88–97, 99, 102–103, 107–109, 111, and, 3, 5–8; Dirks, Nicholas, 1;
129–131 enchantment and, xiii, xviii–xix;
Kyoguryô Kingdom, 210 folklore and, 17–19; medicine and,
1–3; missionaries and, 5–7; nostalgia
landscape, 177–204; sacred, 183–184. See and, xxvi; shamans and, xxii–xxiii,
also mountains 127–128, 205–206; superstition

Index 249
(misin) and, xxii–xxiii, 1–33; 170–171; rice wine as, 158, 171–172;
traditions and, xxiii, 1 in shaman ritual, 156
môga makta (something is blocked), 150 Okkyông’s Mother (Chatterbox’s
momju taesin (body-governing guardian), apprentice), 38, 39, 43, 49, 51–57,
79 59, 64–65, 79, 101, 114, 140,
momsal (exhaustion), 147 156–158
mountains: Buddhists and, 27; Kam’ak olk’e (brother’s wife), 37
(Kambak) Mountain, 56, 184–185; oracles. See inspired speech (kongsu)
kuttang and, 34, 51, 64–65, 110, 135, outcast (ch’ônmin), 17
137, 177, 179, 187–199; as magical
space, 180, 184; Mountain God, Pak Ino, 110
184–186; pilgrimage and, Pak, Mr. (Mrs. Min’s husband), 35–48
xxviii, 184–188; shamans and, paksu mudang (male shamans), 16
xxviii Park, Chung-hee, President, 10, 30, 159
Mount Paektu, 199–203 Park, Ki-bok, 32
mudang: definition, 126–127, ix; kut performance: anthropology and, 69;
and, ix; tan’gol, ix. See also kija; k’Δn initiating performance, 66–101;
mudang; mansin; shamans; spirit props and, 156–160; proscenium
daughters; spirit mother stages and, xxvii, 11, 23; shaman
mugôri (shaman’s divination). See rituals as, xxi–xxii, 66–101; theater,
divination 67–70
mugyo (shaman religion), 29, 30 petty capitalist entrepreneurs, 136–139
muhyang munhuaje (intangible cultural phony (ôngt’ôri), xxviii, 105, 206
heritage), 12 phony shamans, xxviii, 102–128
munhuaje (Cultural Treasure), 12, 109, Pigg, Stacey, 11
119, 179, 201 pilgrimage, sacred mountains and, xxviii,
musindo (believers in the ways of mu), x 184–188
musogin (people who do shaman play (nolda), 58
practices), x pok (auspiciousness), 135
Pokhua, Ch’ôn, 106–107, 109, 111–112
naerim kut (initiation ritual), 67–101 Pok, Mrs.: story of, 136, 138, 139–140
Nelson, Laura, 165 Pongsun, Kim, 75, 77–84, 87–103, 108,
neo-shamanism, 207n. 5 130
nervous condition (sin’gyôngΔl ssΔda), 36 ponsan (ancestral mountain), 188
New Community Movement (SaemaΔl Popular Culture Movement (Minjung
Undong), 10 Munhua Undong), 21, 29, 138
noble (yangban), 130 popular religion: commodity,
nolda (play), 58 consumption and, 173–175;
Nolte, Sharon, 16 globalization and, 199–200; markets
nostalgia, xvii–xx, xxiv–xxvi, 162, and, 129–153; modernity and,
205, 206; anthropologists and, xxiv; xxii–xxiii, 1–33
definition, xxiv; folklore and, 20; Portrait of a Shaman (Munyôdo), 178
imagined, 106; modernity and, posal (bodhisattva), x; tongja posal, x
xxvi; poverty, memory of, 87; poverty, 87, 165
shamans and, xxiv; spirit daughters, praying for good fortune (kibok), 131
regarding, xxvi, 102–107, 127–128; prevention (yebang), 216
theories of, xxiv Princess Hogu (Chini’s guardian spirit),
83–87, 89–92
offering: ancestral offering (chesa), 163, prop: agency of, 160, 174; commodity
164f; Buddhist or shamanic (kong), as, 154, 160; definition, 159–160; in
55; clothing as, 175; commodity rituals, 154, 159–160; whiskey bottle
as, 154, 155f; to household gods, as, 156–159

250 Index
pugundang (tutelary shrines), 190–191, 25, 53, 72, 74, 85, 108, 116, 164,
194 183, 189, 193–194, 198; exorcism
p’umassi (reciprocal exchange), 218–219 in shaman ritual, 6, 43–48; folklore
and, 17–19; gender and, xx, 15–17,
Quesalid, 69–70 113, 123; and globalization, 199–200;
heritage, shaman rituals as, 19; IMF
reciprocal exchange (p’umassi), 218–219 Crisis and, 146–149; improvisation,
recognized shamans (kija), 102 xx–xxii; interaction with gods
religion: Mugyo as, 29, 30; problem of and ancestors, xx; modernity and,
defining, 28–29; shaman practices as, xxii–xxiii, 127–128, 205–206;
28–29; superstition (misin) as, 1–33. mountains and, xxviii; musogin
See also popular religion (people who do shaman practices),
ritual: Confucianism and, 4; healing and, x; New Age shamans, xxii; nostalgia
62; heritage, shaman rituals as, 19; and, xxiv; paksu mudang (male
improvisation, xx–xxii, 153, 156–159, shamans), 16; as performers, xxi–xxii;
173–174, 176; initiation ritual (naerim protest culture and relationship with,
kut), 66–101; materialism, 206, 218; 21–24; real (chinja) versus phony
measures (yebang), 136, 138; naerim (ôngt’ôri), xxvii, xxviii, 102–128;
kut (initiation ritual), 66–101; prop relationship with, 30; schools for,
in, 154, 159–160; ritual process, 49; 110, 211n. 35; superstition, modernity
shaman’s initiation, 66–101; space, and, xxii–xxiii, 1–33; suppression, xx;
xx, xxvii, 12, 78, 154; theater and, teacher (sônsaeng), 17, 75–78; theories
67–70; uri haengsaΔi pôpsu (our ritual about, xviii–xix; tourists and shaman
procedures), 110; yebang (preventive pilgrims, 200–202; transformations
measures), 136, 138. See also chesa; and work of shamans, gods and
kut; performance ancestors, xxvii–xxviii, 93; Western
perceptions of, xix–xx, 28–29. See also
sacred mountains (myongsan), xviii. See apprentice shaman; initiation; kija;
also mountains; pilgrimage kut; kΔn mudang; mansin; mudang;
SaemaΔl Undong (New Community performance
Movement), 10 shamanship, xxviii
saja (death messenger), 38 shaman shrines (sindang), 191–195;
saju (four pillars). See divination kuttang, 34, 51, 65, 110, 135, 137,
sal (arrows), 38 177, 179, 187–199; on mountains,
sangôp mun (gates of commerce), 58 187–191; peripatetic histories of, 198;
Schieffelin, Edward L., xxi pugundang as, 190–191, 194; urban
Seoul 1988 Olympics Arts Festival, 20 development and, xxviii, 19, 24, 32,
sesΔp mu (hereditary shaman), 179 195, 198
Seven Stars (Ch’ilsông), honoring, 54, 57, Shin, Ms., 123–126, 148–149, 206
59, 64, 83 shops (manmulsa), 108
shaman religion (mugyo), 29, 30 Sim U-sông, 21
shamans: actors and, 67, 69; as Sin, Ch’aeho, 81
agents of cultural production, xxii; sinang (belief), 4, 27
anthropology and, xix–xx, xxiii; sindang. See shaman shrines (sindang)
authors, 19, 109, 127; capitalism sindo (believers), x
and, 129–153; Chini’s story, shaman’s sin (gods), x
initiation, 66–101; Christianity and, sin’gyôngΔl ssΔda (nervous condition), 36
x, 25–33; Confucianism and, 3–4, 19, sin ômôni (spirit mother), xxvii, 102–107
165; contemporary, 33; definition, sin ttal (spirit daughter), 50, 102–107, 113
xx; destined shamans (naerin saram), sinu (husband’s sister), 37
xviii, 25–27, 70, 72–75, 84, 114–117; sin Δi kija (shaman who serves the spirits),
disunity among, 125; dreams and, 108

Index 251
sitting kut (anjΔn kut), 53 T’ôju Taegam (House Site Official), 170,
Sofer, Andrew, 175 171
sok (custom), 18 tonga posal (diviners), x
somatization, 62 Tongja (Child Gods), 50, 56, 157
Sôngju (House Lord), 133 Tosa Harabôji (Grandfather Sage), 56,
South Korea: consumption in, 161–163; 140
IMF crisis and, 121, 144–146, 161, 205 tourists and shaman pilgrims, 189,
spirit daughters (sin ttal), 50, 102–107, 200–202
113 transformations and work of shamans—
spirit mother (sin ômôni), xxvii, 102–107 gods and ancestors, xxvii–xxviii, 93
Spirit Warrior, 54–55, 58, 96, 142f, TtohanaΔi Munhua (Alternative Culture
157–159, 170, 171–172 Group), 23
Spirit Worshippers’ Anti-Communist Turner, Victor, xxv, 69
Association, 110
Spivak, Gayatri, 16 uhuan kut (kut for affliction), xx, 3, 34,
Starr, Frederick, 8 35–38, 57
Stewart, Susan, xxiv uni makta (fortune is blocked), 150
suicide, 41, 64, 83, 115–116
Sun, Soon-Hwa, 100 Walraven, Boudewijn, 191
Supernatural Official, 171 wealth: chae (wealth), 135; desire for,
superstition (misin): anti-superstition, 123, 131–132, 135
8–11; as culture (munhua), 1–33; Weber, Max, xxii–xxiii, 139, 142–143
definition, 4; Japan, anti-superstition Weller, Robert, 175
campaign, 8; kut described as, 3; Williams, Raymond, xxvi
modernity and, xxii–xxiii, 1–33; Williamson, Judith, 169
Movement to Overthrow Superstition
(Misint’ap’a Undong), 10; “Natives Yang, Jongsung, 21
in their superstitious services,” 7f; as Yang Posal, 151–152, 200
religion (chonggyo), 1–33 yangban (noble), 130
suyang ômma (foster mother), 132 Yangja’s Mother, 134
symbolic healing, 62 yebang (prevention), 216
Yi, Mrs., 51–65, 135, 148, 205
taesang (final mourning rite), 35 Yim Seuk Jai, 19
taesin (guardian god), 84–87, 179 yoksim, 170–171, 172
Taesin Halmôni (Great Spirit yông (inspiration), 15, 75
Grandmother), 56–57, 106, 186 Yongsu’s Mother (shaman), xvii–xix,
Tambiah, S. J., x 11–15, 35, 38–65, 108–109,
Tan’gun, 18, 31, 199, 209n. 20, 210n. 21 114, 116–119, 135, 147–148,
Tano kut, 11–15, 19, 23 156–158, 163, 165, 184–188, 194,
Taussig, Michael, 112, 139, 172 205, 206
theater: avant-garde, 67–70; ritual and, yôsông munhua (women’s culture), 124
67–70. See also performance Yuk Yôngsu, Mme., 30

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.

K O R E A N R E L I G I O N
{ Continued from front flap }
SHAMANS SOUTH KOREAN
SHAMANS, NOSTALGIAS, AND THE IMF

of shamans, who once ministered to
the domestic crises of farmers, as they POPULAR RELIGION THIRTY YEARS AGO , anthropologist
address the anxieties of entrepreneurs
whose dreams of wealth are matched by
their omnipresent fears of ruin. Money
“Laurel Kendall has written a study of contemporary Korean shamans
that is both entertaining and enlightening. Most studies of the topic treat NOSTALGIAS IN MOTION
Laurel Kendall did intensive fieldwork
among South Korea’s (mostly female)
shamans as an anachronistic remnant of the past. Kendall challenges shamans and their clients as a reflection
AND THE IMF

and access to foreign goods provoke of village women’s lives. In the interven-
that approach, drawing on several decades of close observation of
moral dilemmas about getting and LAUREL KENDALL
shamans in action to reveal how shamanism is constantly evolving. It is ing decades, South Korea experienced an
spending; shamanic rituals express these unprecedented economic, social, politi-
an important work that will appeal to a wide audience.”
through the longings of the dead and the cal, and material transformation, and
playful antics of greedy gods, some of —DON BAKER, University of British Columbia
Korean villages all but disappeared. And
whom have acquired a taste for imported the shamans? Kendall attests that they
whiskey. “With the publication of Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF, Laurel Kendall
not only persist but are very much a part
No other book-length study captures opens a new chapter in the study not only of shamanism in Korea, but
of South Korean modernity.
the tension between contemporary South also in many societies undergoing the process of industrialization and
This enlightening and entertaining
Korean life and the contemporary South modernization. It is distinguished by its rich ethnographic data and
study of contemporary Korean shaman-
Korean shamans’ work. Kendall’s famil- novel theoretical approach to the field of Korean popular religion. One
ism makes the case for the dynamism of
iarity with the country and long associa- of its many merits is that, unlike conventional studies that focus on
popular religious practice, the creativity
tion with her subjects permit nuanced ‘authentic’ shaman ritual performances, it reveals a wide spectrum of
of those we call shamans, and the neces-
comparisons between a 1970s “then” and shamans and rituals within a grand system of practice.”
sity of writing about them in the present
recent encounters—some with the same tense. Shamans can be found thriving in
— KWANG OK KIM, Seoul National University
shamans and clients—as South Korea the high-rise cities of South Korea, work-
moved through the 1990s, endured the ing with clients who are largely middle
“Laurel Kendall’s sympathetic and lucid writing consistently leads
Asian Financial Crisis, and entered the class and technologically sophisticated.
from vivid narratives to penetrating theoretical insights. In her hands
new millennium. She approaches her Emphasizing the shaman’s work as open
the IMF becomes a brilliant trope for the interplay between magical
subject through multiple anthropologi- and mutable, Kendall describes how gods
causality and the bewildering modernity which moulds our lives, as it
cal lenses such that readers interested and ancestors articulate the changing
does the lives of her shamans’ clients.”
in religion, ritual performance, heal- concerns of clients and how the ritual
ing, gender, landscape, material culture, —PIERS VITEBSKY, University of Cambridge
fame of these transactions has itself been
modernity, and consumption will find transformed by urban sprawl, private
KENDALL
much of interest here. cars, and zealous Christian proselytizing.
For most of the last century Korean
Laurel Kendall is Curator in Charge Jacket photograph: A mansin in the guise of a Spirit Warrior sings a song of self-praise with shamans were reviled as practitioners of
of Asian Ethnographic Collections in 10,000-won bills stuck under his/her hat, in the hatband at both cheeks, and as a “beard.”
antimodern superstition; today they are
the Division of Anthropology, American Jacket design: Julie Matsuo-Chun
nostalgically celebrated icons of a van-
Museum of Natural History, and also ished rural world. Such superstition and
teaches at Columbia University. tradition occupy flip sides of modernity’s
ISBN 978-0-8248-3343-5 coin—the one by confuting, the other by
90000 obscuring, the beating heart of shamanic
U N I V E R S I T Y OF practice. Kendall offers a lively account
H AWA I ‘I P R E S S 9 780824 833435
HONOLULU, HAWAI‘I 96822-1888 www.uhpress.hawaii.edu { Continued on back flap }

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K O R E A N R E L I G I O N

{ Continued from front flap }

SHAMANS SOUTH KOREAN

SHAMANS, NOSTALGIAS, AND THE IMF

AND THE IMF

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University of Hawai‘i Press  Honolulu

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free

Designed by University of Hawai‘i Press Production Department

Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

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1. Shifting Intellectual Terrain: “Superstition”

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Shamans and other conversation partners appear under pseudonyms

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A project of long duration engenders enormous debt. My gratitude to

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Sharp, Timothy Tangherlini, Barbara Tedlock, Edith Turner, Piers Vitebsky,

2008. Auspicious places in a mobile landscape: Of shamans, shrines,

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2001. The cultural politics of “superstition” in the Korean shaman world:

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Nowadays the mountains just don’t have the same power to

Like many South Koreans of her generation, Yongsu’s Mother bifurcates

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As in so many other reminiscences, in South Korea and in other places,

Around the time of the Korean War, there weren’t so many

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as in Siberia or Central Asia, where shamans were effectively suppressed

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As a central premise of this study, the shaman’s assumed ability to

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to contradict Ake Hultkrantz’ (1997, 2) much cited notion of the shaman as

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(1964) of shamans as practitioners of primordial religion, shamans are not

Writing on a new blank page

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The specter of nostalgia

Nostalgia stalks any project written with retrospective glances. It appears in

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neighbors, and interviews arranged by cell phone to accommodate the busy

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Transformations and the work of shamans, gods, and ancestors

Chapter 1 describes a late nineteenth-, twentieth-, and early twenty-first-

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Modernity, Nicholas Dirks suggests, is a story that a people tell themselves

Encounter 1, “Superstition”: A confrontation with

On a cold, dark night in the early spring of my first fieldwork, a family in

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University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu