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  • Korean Shamans and The Spirits of Capitalism

    Transféré par

    Karen Baraoidan
    11 vues14 pages
    Purpose of the Korean Shamans in historical times

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    Korean Shamans and the Spirits of Capitalism

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    Purpose of the Korean Shamans in historical times

    Droits d'auteur :

    © All Rights Reserved
    Téléchargez comme PDF ou lisez en ligne sur Scribd
    Signaler comme contenu inapproprié
    11 vues14 pages

    Korean Shamans and The Spirits of Capitalism

    Transféré par

    Karen Baraoidan
    Purpose of the Korean Shamans in historical times

    Droits d'auteur :

    © All Rights Reserved
    Téléchargez comme PDF ou lisez en ligne sur Scribd
    Signaler comme contenu inapproprié
    sur 14
    Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF South Korean Popular Religion in Motion Laurel Kendall 5 Korean Shamans and the Spirits of Capitalism ‘The flavor of the new Korea burst upon me one autumn day in 1989 when Kwan Mydngnyé arrived ata kut ina state of great laughter and excitement. Kwan's sister, who runs a clothing shop in the South Gate Market, had been told at one of Kwan's kut that the supernatural Official who governed her shop's prosperity wanted a drink of wine. The sister was instructed to fill ‘cup for him when she returned to her shop late that night. As Kwan Myéng~ nyd tells the story: She had intended to pour the wine and set it down right there [in front of her shop], but she may as well have done it in broad daylight [the South Gate Marker is always filled with people]. She bought the tiniest litle plastic cup, but even if she had tried to offer the wine in that, the people passing by would have thought that she ‘was crazy. My sister just couldn't bring herself to pour the wine. So she said, “Official mine, les go to South Mountain.” [Laughs] ‘Oh, that kid! My sister said, “It’s very congested here, so let's go to some breezy place where you can carouse in private.” And then she said, “Please get in the car so we can go.” She did all that. It was so funny to hear her tell She says she drove up South Mountain. There are spirits up there afterall. She drove up, and then she got out of her car and looked around. It was absolutely perfec. So then she said, “Dear Official, aren't you pleased? Why don't you get out of the car and look around.” She didn’t leave anything out. ["She did well,” An Hosuen interjects| She poured out a serving of rice heir business failed. In the South Gate Market there are some five hundred shops, and they say that only four of them are doing well just four. What can it mean that only four of them are doing well Kim Pongsun caps the discussion, “Yep, all you have to do is treat the Off man because they claimed to be members of noble) lineage. But when their father died, he had entered Kwan's pantheon as and Within a year of our father’s death, my sister began to make money ike wildfire. In the space of two years she'd taken in a billion 1 [by this inflated claim, over a million dollars}, Out father make money. Since my father’s death, all of my siblings are doing well... In the past, 1 was poor and my brothers and sisters didn't have anything either. Now it's so much better—they'ee driving heir own cars, they've all bought houses. Now that I've become a shaman, they take me here and there to treat me and buy me This wins a cynical affirmation from her client's mother: “You have to i what else is new? Money is nobility [toni y ki was surprised. The assertion that “money is nobility,” that the rich are Pine Vill had used similar words to describe the local gentry of their remembered considered noble, was not new to me, The old men of Endutit past. I would hear these sentiments again and again in the utterances of gods during kut performed by these and other shamans—for example, “In 1983, 49-51; Yoo 1988, 104; Y Yoon 2003) nck Mydngnyd's story was also familiar: treat the spirit well by you. But in the past, the claims made for suce ‘modest and vague: “And they're living well bit better for them.” Now I was Kwan Myé Fairy Maid revel in tales of the mi alth thai Other shamans, like Yon other and Ms, Shin tic view that their clients were obsessed with getting with great heat and humor about people who invest in rep fortune, even within the space of a single year, any sever their relationship with a shaman if a kut does 1 diate financial gain. Yongsu’s Mother h bs fortune were rare: “Who had money for i sick, then you would hold a healing kut. F 2 wen ww had to do it. Irwasa matter of life and death,” Kut tose 10 paradise were also more common in the 1960s and 197 do they concern themselves with the ancestors?” Yongs People only care about themselves. No one both being criticized for charging exorbitant fees and piling ing food, conspicuous spiritual consumption sul a ting piles around many of the shrines we visited (also Huai he aging researcher is once again tempted to join th disgeuntled discourse upon the mercurial preoccupation rary South Korean moment or join the equal n criticize greedy and wasteful contemporary shamans. I wil impulse to make a simple comparison n the material a more innocent time when all of us were younger, and con ambivalent space between celebrations of wealth as blessi and the cynical equation of money with nobility.|In this ase ‘Korean Shamans and the Spits of Capitalism next, I describe’ how shamans, clients, gods, and ancestors deal with some of the consequences of South Korea's economic transformation, with the enticements and seeming amoralty of new wealth and the lurking danger of potential ruin.) One summer evening in 1991, T went with Yongsu’s Mother toa client’s house in a quit residential district of Righteous Town, where she performed 4 small ritual honoring the spirits of a newly purchased family car (ch'a ‘kosa). This was my first opportunity to observe a ch'a kosa, although Yong- su’s Mother claimed that she and her colleagues routinely performed it as private car ownership proliferated among their clients. On this occasion, the sponsors were the son and daughterin-law of one of her long-standing clients. The man, Mr, Kim (no relation to my assistant, “Ms. Kim”), had purchased his car without letting Yongsu's Mother check his horoscope. Had he done so, he would have learned that this was not an auspicious year for him to bring a new vehicle into his household. A. precautionary placation was in order. I could appreciate the Kim family’s concern, having, heard tales of the huge sums of compensation money exacted after traffic accidents, to say nothing of South Korea's having one ofthe world’s highest traffic fatality rates. The logic of the ritual was also familiar to me: grain or ‘zoods brought into or removed from the household without some tribute to the divine Orfcials piques their ire and brings misfortune. Recall what happened to Mrs, Min when she carried rice grain away from her neglected household gods. In the 1970s, when village households brought in shiny things"—the newly available televisions, stercos, and refrigerators—they cither propitiated the House Site Official in advance or called on Yongsu’s Mother to deal with the consequences of causing the jealous god t0 “open his eyes wide” and make trouble (Kendall 1985, chap. 5}. In Yongsu's Mothers view, there were particular reasons why the gods might be vexed with the Kim family. As the son of a regular client, Mr. Kim had grown up under the protection ofthe gods in Yongsu's Mother’ shrine, Mz Kim himself told me that he respected Yongsu’s Mother’ skill as a sha ‘man, volunteering the information that he had known her for twenty years and considered her his foster mother (styang dma). His mother had “sold” him tothe Seven Stars in Yongsu’s Mother’ shrine, ensuring their protection and also establishing a fictive kinship of “mother” and “son” between the shaman and the child (ibid., 80-81). He had grown up in a village not far fom the village where I had lived in 1977 and 1978. After establishing his ‘own household, he and his wife had dedicated a prayer cushion to the Bud- ddhas in Yongsu’s Mother's shrine. Nevertheless, his wife was swayed by a ‘Christian neighbor, and the couple abandoned theie obligations to the gods Korean Shamans andthe Spirits of Capitalism 133 (and Yongsu’s Mother) by attending the Christian church, with disastrous results Suffering all manner of financial reverses, the husband lost his small factory, and the couple were forced to sell their house. They returned t0 Yongsu’s Mother and sponsored a kut, and now, she said, things were get- ting better for them. In 1991, Mr. Kim was working for another compat and the family lived in a modest but well-appointed apartment. Some of Me. Kim's and his wife's dialogue with their houschold gods would include a dis- ‘cussion of their prospects for building a new house. Later that night, when he drove me to the subway in his new ear, Mr. Kim would express profound relief at having completed the ritual. What is a “house”? When Yongsu's Mother set out the rice cake for the ch'a kosa, she, Mr Kim, his wife, and his mother all deliberated over the location of the main bbeam so that they could set the steamer of rice cake dedicated to the tutelary House Lord (Songju) beneath i.’ Visible in old-fashioned one-story village hhomes, the main beam is usually concealed by the dropped ceilings of new apartments and in the town house-style constructions that had gone up in Enduring Pine Village since the 1980s. If Thad begun my research in the 1990s, rather than the 1970s, I might never have seen the physical house (chip)as a primary metaphor for the household (also chip), an appropri- ate symbolic habitation for the household. gods associated with different features of the physical structure mustered in kosa and kut, I might never have written: ‘The household is the irreducible unit of the Korean peasant’s social, political, economic, and religious life... In affliction the household is the most immediate unit under siege; the physical house is an appropriate metaphor. Individual illness threatens the larger body with medical and ritual expenses, labor loss, anxiety, and death, Illness, business reverses, thefts, and intrafamilial quarrels are household afflictions. Any or, more ‘often, a combination of these sorry states can occasion a major shut... staged and choreographed about the house. (Kendall 1985, 108) ‘When I wrote these lines, “the household” of my ethnographic imagi nation was a small family farm, a kin-based agrarian unit of production and consumption embedded in a larger market economy. In the late 1970s, 14 Korean Shamans and the Sis of Capitalism when I frst lived in Enduring Pine Village, harbingers of what would soon bbe regarded as the Korean economic miracle were evident in the prevalence of new television sets and the absence of village daughters, gone to work in urban factories, whose labors sometimes made the purchase of televi- sion sets and other new appliances possible. More than half of the village hhouscholds described themselves as primarily nonagricultural, their income derived from taxicabs, from cottage industries, or as hired labor in the nearby town (ibid., 45). Daughters of village households who had macried and lived in the town appeared in my ethnography as the Rice Shop Auntie and Yangia’s Mother, whose husband drove a taxicab, The religious prac- tices of farm wives had followed their daughters into the brave new world of first-generation urban entrepreneurs, but as dynamic practice, not frozen In the shaman shrines of Seoul and its environs in the 1990s, I would encounter wage workers, farmers, and very occasionally white-collar work- ers, but the overwhelming majority of clients were, like Kwan Myéngny's sister and Mr. Kim, shop owners, restaurateurs, and proprietors of small ‘companies. An ill-

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