Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF | Free Book
Thirty years ago, anthropologist Laurel Kendall did intensive
fieldwork among South Korea’s (mostly female) shamans and their
clients as a reflection of village women’s lives. In the intervening
decades, South Korea experienced an unprecedented economic, social,
political, and material transformation and Korean villages all but
disappeared. And the shamans? Kendall attests that they not only
persist but are very much a part of South Korean modernity.
This
enlightening and entertaining study of contemporary Korean shamanism
makes the case for the dynamism of popular religious practice, the
creativity of those we call shamans, and the necessity of writing
about them in the present tense. Shamans thrive in South Korea’s
high-rise cities, working with clients who are largely middle class
and technologically sophisticated. Emphasizing the shaman’s work as
open and mutable, Kendall describes how gods and ancestors
articulate the changing concerns of clients and how the ritual fame
of these transactions has itself been transformed by urban sprawl,
private cars, and zealous Christian proselytizing.
For
most of the last century Korean shamans were reviled as
practitioners of antimodern superstition; today they are
nostalgically celebrated icons of a vanished rural world. Such
superstition and tradition occupy flip sides of modernity’s coin—the
one by confuting, the other by obscuring, the beating heart of
shamanic practice. Kendall offers a lively account of shamans, who
once ministered to the domestic crises of farmers, as they address
the anxieties of entrepreneurs whose dreams of wealth are matched by
their omnipresent fears of ruin. Money and access to foreign goods
provoke moral dilemmas about getting and spending; shamanic rituals
express these through the longings of the dead and the playful
antics of greedy gods, some of whom have acquired a taste for
imported whiskey.
No other book-length study captures
the tension between contemporary South Korean life and the
contemporary South Korean shamans’ work. Kendall’s familiarity with
the country and long association with her subjects permit nuanced
comparisons between a 1970s "then" and recent encounters—some with
the same shamans and clients—as South Korea moved through the 1990s,
endured the Asian Financial Crisis, and entered the new millennium.
She approaches her subject through multiple anthropological lenses
such that readers interested in religion, ritual performance,
healing, gender, landscape, material culture, modernity, and
consumption will find much of interest here.
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- Title: Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF | Free Book
- Author: Steven
- Created at : 2024-11-02 17:06:26
- Updated at : 2024-11-07 18:55:58
- Link: https://novels-ebooks.techidaily.com/96330992-9780824860899-shamans-nostalgias-and-the-imf/
- License: This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.