Laurel Kendall
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824833435
- eISBN:
- 9780824870577
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824833435.003.0004
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
This chapter continues the discussion of inspiration and skilled performance that began in Chapter 3, asking what it means to become a shaman in the present Korean moment. It introduces three ...
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This chapter continues the discussion of inspiration and skilled performance that began in Chapter 3, asking what it means to become a shaman in the present Korean moment. It introduces three flesh-and-blood shamans, all under the age of forty in the 1990s. 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. They include the Fairy Maid, with her cavalier attitude toward kut and her unabashed willingness to take on spirit children despite her lack of training, who fits the stereotype of a phony shaman; Minju's Mother who has held a successful initiation kut, and is learning her craft from an exacting spirit mother, but struggles to make a living; and Ms. Shin who believes that the shaman advocacy organizations have a “gender problem” and has worked herself to exhaustion trying to unite the shamans in an officially recognized shaman religion.Less
This chapter continues the discussion of inspiration and skilled performance that began in Chapter 3, asking what it means to become a shaman in the present Korean moment. It introduces three flesh-and-blood shamans, all under the age of forty in the 1990s. 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. They include the Fairy Maid, with her cavalier attitude toward kut and her unabashed willingness to take on spirit children despite her lack of training, who fits the stereotype of a phony shaman; Minju's Mother who has held a successful initiation kut, and is learning her craft from an exacting spirit mother, but struggles to make a living; and Ms. Shin who believes that the shaman advocacy organizations have a “gender problem” and has worked herself to exhaustion trying to unite the shamans in an officially recognized shaman religion.
