The Shaman's Wages: Trading in Ritual on Cheju Island by Kyoim Yun

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Shaman's Wages: Trading in Ritual on Cheju Island by Kyoim Yun Maria Hasfeldt Long kyoim yun. The Shaman's Wages: Trading in Ritual on Cheju Island. Washington: University of Washington Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 240. In Korea, shamans are ritual professionals, which means that their livelihood is dependent on the ritual fees they charge their clients when hired by them. However, the question of the ritual fee often ends in a tug of war between the shaman and the client. The client wants to spend as little as possible on the ritual, while the shaman needs the fee to pay their wage. This economic tug of war is age old, with the first documentation of it dating back to the thirteenth century. This has contributed to shamans gaining a deep-rooted reputation of being greedy and deceitful swindlers. Not only has this reputation throughout history hurt their social status, but it has led [End Page 343] to a legacy that has construed the shaman's economic interests as immoral, which they still battle to this day. The Shaman's Wages centers on the issue of ritual consumption between the client and the ritual professional, the shaman. This is an issue that has its roots in Korean culture and history, and questions whether ritual expenditure is a waste of resources and whether people are manipulated into spending on rituals by shamans. Kyoim Yun begins her discussion with what she calls an overlooked issue through the indigenous shamanism of Cheju Island, South Korea. Intrigued by an awkward scene of haggling over a ritual fee while on a ritual field study in 2001, Yun began to question the importance of ritual, the economy of the shamans and their clients, and the controversy it often led to. Her main question became: "Given the controversy over ritual consumption … how can we understand it in a respectful way without dismissing the value of ritual consumption?" (5) But why is ritual consumption in Korean shamanism an overlooked issue? According to Yun, most scholars of Korean shamanism have focused on how shamans are a pristine part of Korean culture and how important it has been to preserve their songs and hymns. Cheju's "the Island of Myth" form of shamanism has been especially romanticized as primordial beauty because of its tradition of retelling origin myths (p'onpuri) and soul weeping (yŏngge uillim). These parts of the rituals have been the focal point of research over the past few centuries. The acknowledgment of the financial aspects of the rituals has almost been dismissed due to the naïve idea of shamans being mediators between humans and gods, who only seek their clients' wellbeing. Though that may be true, they are also professionals who have to make a living. Yun is aware that another reason the issue is overlooked is due to its level of sensitivity when discussing intimate matters such as economy and finances. Yun's research method is a combination of historical archival material and her ethnographic fieldwork on both private and large-scale shamanic rituals, also known as kut, which has helped her mediate between the past and the present. Historical material such as Illustrated Records of the T'amna Inspection and Geography of Korea represents the historical view of ritual consumption from the Chosŏn period (1392–1910) to modern-day Korea as a whole, but especially on Cheju Island, whose shamanic tradition, still to this day, is stronger than on the mainland peninsula. Confucianism, which had become the dominant ideology and religion in Korea, sought to get rid of shamanism because it was deemed chaotic in a society that sought to be harmonious. The shamans' practices were outlawed and deemed immoral. A heavy tax was placed upon them, as well as fines for when they were caught practicing, which they continued with, to live and answer the demand of ritual practice [End Page 344] from their clients. Cheju Island was especially known for its shamans openly practicing despite it having been outlawed. Such open practice was overlooked by its local government due to the tax and ritual fines collected from the shamans. Through her ethnographic studies on Cheju, Yun gives...