Korean Shamanism

The Cultural Paradox

Chongho Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138710511
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351772143
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Title first published in 2003. Shamanism has a contradictory position within the Korean cultural system, leading to the periodical suppression of shamanism yet also, paradoxically, ensuring its survival throughout Korean history. This book examines the place of shamans within contemporary society as a cultural practice in which people make use of shamanic ritual and disputing the prevalent view that shamanism is 'popular culture', a 'women's religion' or 'performing arts'. Directly confronting the prejudice against shamans and their paradoxical situation in a modern society such as Korea, this book reveals the cultural discrepancy between two worlds in Korean culture, the ordinary world and the shamanic world, showing that these two worlds cannot be reconciled. This unique study of shamanism offers a significant contribution to growing studies in indigenous anthropology and indigenous religions, and provides a captivating read for a wide range of readers through retelling the stories-never-to-be-told involving shamanic ritual.

Chapter 1

Shamanism in Trouble

In this chapter I argue that the field in which Korean shamans work is ‘the field of misfortune’, which exists separately from the field of health care (or the ‘healthcare sector’ in health science terminology) where medical practitioners work. In Korean society the two fields are clearly different. I argue that shamanism is not a sort of traditional medicine, and the utilization of shamanic healing is not a phenomenon of medical pluralism. The ‘field of misfortune’ can also be understood in another sense: my own field research, as described throughout this book, involved becoming acquainted with the contexts of misfortune within which people resorted to shamans. This first chapter introduces the reader to that field.

As the first chapter of a study of shamanism, this chapter naturally also deals with the definition of shamanism in Korean society. Many existing definitions of Korean shamanism, under the influence of such scholars as Eliade, are narrowly and exclusively focused on the shamans themselves, especially on their technique and mental experience. This approach leads to emphasis on problematic distinctions between different types of shaman (hereditary, charismatic, and so on) and shamanic technique (the use of trance, whether the shaman is possessed, and so on). Such definitions are too shaman-oriented to be helpful in understanding shamanism in the wider contexts of a society, since they leave out the perspective of the ordinary people who form the majority of a society and who use the shamans. What is most significant for the users of shamans, I shall argue, is not these factors, but something quite different. Among many forms of ritual in Korea, shamanic ritual is the only form of ritual in which spirits speak. This is what I emphasize as the defining characteristic of shamanism in Korean society. As I will show in the course of this book, this speech of the spirits is the critical feature which explains both why Koreans need shamans when they find themselves in the ‘field of misfortune’, and why they have such negative attitudes towards them.

Shamanism and Medical Pluralism

Before this study I regarded the utilization of shamanic healing as a phenomenon of medical pluralism. In fact, I published an article, entitled ‘The Informal Sector of the Local Health Care System in Rural Korea: An Anthropological Approach to Medical Pluralism’ (C-H. Kim, 1988a), in which I argued that shamans worked in the informal sector of the local health-care system, because people actually referred their illnesses to shamans. In that article, published in the Korean Journal of Public Health, I concluded that shamans should be regarded as a health-care resource for ‘socio-culturally acceptable’ health planning, although they had not been formally recognized by the Korean government. The argument I made at that time was based on my fieldwork in 1987 in Soy, exactly the same field site as for this research project.

Theoretically, as the title of the article implies, I was heavily influenced at that time by Professor Arthur Kleinman, a well-known medical anthropologist of Harvard University. He had developed an influential theory, the ‘local health care system’ model, in the subdiscipline of medical anthropology. According to him, biomedicine and other medical modalities, such as herbal medicine and shamanism, coexisted in the ‘local health care system’, where specialists such as shamans work in the folk sector:

The folk (non-professional, non-bureaucratic, specialist) sector shades into the other two sectors [the popular and the professional sectors] of the local health care system…. The folk sector of medical practice is more heterogeneous than professional medicine. Herbalists belong to the secular tradition, while Taoist priests, shamans, ritual specialists in ‘calling back to the soul, ’ and temple-based interpreters of ch Hen belong to the sacred tradition. But the division is not clear-cut. For example, tang-kis [shamans] while in a state of possession commonly prescribe Chinese medicine or local herbs. (Kleinman, 1980: 59 and 66, italics in original)

Indeed, many anthropologists have regarded ‘shamanism’ and similar practices, implicitly or explicitly, as a sort of traditional medicine under the name of ‘medical systems’ or ‘ethnomedicine’ (Foster and Anderson, 1978; Leslie, 1976; Leslie and Young, 1992; Nichter, 1992; Rubel and Hass, 1990). ‘Shamans’ and similar practitioners are often referred to as ‘traditional curers’ and included in ‘primitive’, ‘indigenous’, ‘folk’ and ‘non-Western’ medical systems, as a pioneer medical anthropologist George Foster clearly states (1978: 335). Although some studies do not mix ‘shamanism’ with traditional medicine in their definitions of traditional medicine or ethnomedicine (Chen, 1975; Jingfeng, 1987; Lock, 1990; Press, 1980), ‘shamanism’ and forms of traditional medicine are not kept exclusively separate in many existing studies of medical pluralism, medical systems or traditional medicine (for example, Bannerman et al., 1983; Bhatia et al, 1975; Bishaw, 1991; Connor and Samuel, 2001; Foster, 1978; Good et al., 1979; Minocha, 1980; Pedersen and Coloma, 1983). In fact, the classification of ritual healing has been an issue in medical anthropology. Leslie and Young are critical of some anthropologists who ‘did not think of themselves as medical anthropologists’ even though they were ‘interested in the symbolic aspects of ritual curing’ (1992: 7). Consequently, even geomancy is included in Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge, the book Leslie and Young edited, because, according to their argument, it is one of the ‘other forms of indigenous medicine’ historically embedded in Chinese ‘folk concepts of physiology and etiology’ (1992: 13-14). This wholehearted sympathy (or high enthusiasm) of medical anthropology towards ‘ethnomedicine’, however, often leads us to overlook the contradictions between ‘shamanism’ and traditional medicine contained in the field data. The following is an example of the conflation of shamanic-type practitioners (‘faith and spiritual healers’, here including zar shamans) with practitioners of traditional medicine:

Official attitude toward traditional medicine appears to have become more positive since 1974…. [However, ]… [contradictions persist between the stated government policy of promoting and eventually integrating of this policy by responsible officials. The harassment and persecution of traditional healers, particularly faith and spiritual healers, has continued [in Ethiopia]. (Bishaw, 1991: 199)

In 1988 when I published the article mentioned earlier, I was working as an anthropologist in a community health project supported by the World Health Organization. Like other anthropologists working in ‘the Domain of Biomedicine’ (Gains and Hahn, 1985) or ‘the Kingdom of the Sick’ (DiGiacomo, 1987), I tried to ‘demonstrate that traditional beliefs, social forms, patterns of perception and many other social, cultural and psychological factors bear importantly on the behavior of peoples who, for the first time, find themselves with the option of patronizing modern health care services’, as suggested by Foster (1978: 336). However, I was often frustrated about ‘how difficult it is to translate traditional anthropological knowledge into clinically useful data’ (Johnson and Sargent, 1990: 3). In a sense, the 1988 article was partly a reaction against the arrogance of ‘the ‘modern’, ‘scientific’, ‘professional’, ‘Western’, ‘organized’, ‘official'medicine’ (Elling, 1981: 89), in the hope that the Korean health-care system would become more socioculturally appropriate in future. Anyway, the idea was not my own, as similar ones are widely found in medical anthropological writings (Justice, 1986, 1987; Pflanz, 1975; Rubinstein and Lane, 1990). Among them, Justice exemplifies the critical tone towards biomedicine and health bureaucracies:¹

How can anthropologists and planners work together more fruitfully to gather pertinent sociocultural information and incorporate it into planning and programs?… Anthropologists need to understand the conditions under which planning is done and the limited alternatives available to planners trying to adopt policies and programs to local cultures [in Nepal]…. For their part, planners need to understand that sociocultural information is vital and worth the time and money invested in examining it.

In spite of some hopeful signs, there is no easy answer to give anthropologists who want to know how to help improve planning. As long as the structure and culture of health bureaucracies remain unchanged, social and cultural information about people at the grass roots level will have little impact. In designing culturally appropriate programs, the key question is not what information to provide or how to provide it…. The key question is how the health bureaucracies can transcend their own cultures to become more sensitive to the cultures they should serve. (Justice, 1986: 154, emphasis added)

In the sociocultural information which, Justice suggests, should be regarded by Nepalese health planners as ‘vital and worth the time and money invested in examining it’, information about shamanism is included:

If illnesses persisted, the next resort was traditional healers - jhankris, jharnes, and fuknes…. Frequently, when the health post was unable to treat a patient successfully, the patient consulted the jhankri [a shaman-type practitioner]² again or returned to using herbal medicine. Nepalis willingly used both traditional and modern medicine. It often appeared that only planners and government health practitioners perceived conflict between different medical systems. (Justice, 1986: 95, emphasis added)

In terms similar to those used by Justice, I argued in my above-mentioned article that shamans should be considered as part of ‘socioculturally acceptable’ health planning in Korea.

However, I have discovered throughout this study that I was wrong in 1988. The characteristics of Korean shamanism are so intrinsically different from those of medical modalities that it would cause great confusion not only for health practitioners, but also for ordinary Koreans, if shamanism was included in health planning as a health-care resource. Nor do shamans work in the field of health care (or the health-care sector) where medical practitioners work. Medical treatment and the shaman’s ritual business are quite different from each other, as will be discussed throughout the book (see also Kendall, 1985: 92-94). I never heard shamans complain that they should be treated as traditional medical practitioners, nor that they should be given medical licences.

I did not realize these facts, even though I worked as an anthropological researcher in the field of health care for five years, from 1986 to 1990, during which time I was involved in numerous health programmes both at community and government levels. Looking back, I worked mostly in the field of health care, not in the field of misfortune where shamans and their clients interact. I think that this was one of the principal reasons why I made my mistake. Furthermore the fieldwork method which I employed was not appropriate for the study of shamanism. In 1987, in the research which led to my article, I largely employed interview methods that are insufficient and inappropriate to the investigation of shamanism (as I realised later on, in 1995). This is mainly because of its inherent cultural paradox, which will be further discussed in Chapter 3. Korean culture in relation to shamanism is so perplexingly double-faced that I was confused. In addition, my life experience was not sufficiently extensive to understand the healing context of shamanism, although I was 35 years old at the time.

Thus, I here apologize for the misleading argument which I presented in that article and, since I included the same erroneous argument in some of my lectures, which I delivered in Korean universities between 1986 and 1991,1 apologize also to my students, including the physicians for public health (gongjungbogeoneui) who attended my lectures as part of the prerequisite courses before their three-year service in rural areas. However, I do not think that the physicians applied my mistaken hypothesis in their practice of health planning. Since the hypothesis was insufficiently realistic to be practised, I imagine that they regarded it merely as anthropological fantasy.

Throughout the 1995 fieldwork, during which I worked mostly in ‘the field of misfortune’ (or the field of ritual healing), I was amazed at how different this field was from ‘the field of health care’ (or the field of disease) in which I had worked before. In Korean society the field of misfortune, where shamans work, is clearly separate, and totally different, from the field of health care where biomedicine and traditional medicine coexist and compete. The Korean shaman is not a health-care practitioner, but a ritual practitioner dealing with matters of misfortune. The pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Maps, Photographs, Figures, and Tables
• Preface
• Romanization of Korean Terms
• Dramatis Personae
• Introduction
• 1 Shamanism in Trouble
• 2 Ritual without Audience
• 3 Two Faces of Korean Culture
• 4 A Practice of Cultural Rebellion
• 5 Against Shamanism
• 6 National Living Treasure
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index