The Contraction and Expansion of Shamanic Landscapes in Contemporary South Korea
CrossCurrents September 1, 2011 DOI: 10.1353/cro.2011.a782520 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Shamanism |
| Key points | Argues that in contemporary South Korea, shamans and gods actively inhabit and reconfigure sacred mountain spaces despite the dominance of urban development and official mapping, and that this ongoing contestation helps explain why shamanic traditions remain strong amid Christian and Buddhist presence. |
Abstract
The Contraction and Expansion of Shamanic Landscapes in Contemporary South Korea Laurel Kendall In contemporary South Korea, shamans and clients navigate a landscape of sacred mountain space, a map that is being reconfigured by urban development, roads, congestion, and tourism but remains a sacred landscape nonetheless. I am following other anthropologists and critical geographers in their definition of “landscape” as “the meaning imputed by local people to their cultural and physical surroundings (i.e., how a particular landscape ‘looks’ to its inhabitants)” (Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995, see also Basso 1996, Munn 2003). In Bender’s (1993, 3) characterization, landscape is “never inert”; “[P]eople engage with it, re‐work it, appropriate and contest it. It is part of the way in which identities are created and disputed, whether as individual, group, or nation‐state.”1 Borrowing on the theme of the urban walker, from Baudelaire through Walter Benjamin, de Certeau (1984, 91–114) offers a particular mode of spatial contestation, describing the totalizing master plan of a city as confounded and reimagined by “walkers” on the ground whose everyday practices and superstitions are “foreign to the ‘geometrical’ or ‘geographical’ space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical construction.” I will be speaking in particular of a “shamanic landscape” as the mutable stuff of visions, dreams, and spirit agency. The walkers in this chapter are shamans and gods. Their reimaginings occur among the sacred sites on Seoul’s mountainous periphery and on mountainsides throughout Korea—spiritually potent rocks, springs, sön’ang trees that harbor unquiet ghosts, and—for the last twenty years or so—a proliferation of commercial shaman shrines, or kuttang where shamans rent space to perform their rituals. The notion of a “shamanic landscape” comes from Humphrey’s (1995) 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. But where Humphrey describes a diachronic oscillation of the Mongol landscape, the contestation between urban developers’ maps and shamanic visions is a contemporary South Korean dynamic, with the official mapmakers’ panoptic clearly ascendant but with shamans and gods tenaciously inhabiting and reconfiguring sacred space. South Korea is a place of omnipresent displacement. Few adults live where they were born and no space is constant; seemingly in the blink of an eye, high‐rise cities have replaced rice fields and villages, a common Asian story. South Korea is also a place where shamanic traditions remain strong even despite massive Christian conversions and an active Buddhist sangha. This particular excursion through a sacred landscape will hint at why this might be so. Korean shamans (Mansin) and visions of tall buildings 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, conveying the immediacy of these experiences with their own bodies and voices.2 While heroic male shamans have dominated the literature (Eliade 1964, Lewis 1969), a majority of Korean shamans are women. Indeed, female shamans 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 descend and open her “gates of speech” (malmun) so that she bursts out with inspired words from the gods and is able to perform as a mansin. Through visions, bodily sensations, aural cues, and intuition, she is able to convey the gods’ will to clients—divining, offering advice, making effective petitions to the gods, and placating restless ancestors. Many initiations fail, and some initiates perform them several times before divine speech bursts out of them and they are recognized as true shamans. Clients seek out a successfully initiated mansin, initially for divinations to determine the cause of all manner of personal and familial trouble and then, if they accept the mansin’s diagnosis, to commission the rituals that she recommends. Korean shamans interact with gods and...
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on shamanism, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond | 2014 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Shamanism as the Original Neurotheology | 2004 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Cognitive Neuroscience, Shamanism and the Rock Art of Native California | 1998 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| From Culture to Experience: Shamanism in the Pages of the Soviet Anti-Religious Press | 2020 | Historical analysis | |
| Anthropology, Shamanism, and Alternate Ways of Knowing–Being in the World: One Anthropologist's Journey of Discovery and Transformation | 2010 | Reflective essay or personal narrative |