New Book
- Contemporary Korean Shamanism: From Ritual to Digital Once viewed as an embarrassing superstition, the theatrical religious performances of Korean shamans—who communicate with the dead, divine the future, and become possessed—are going mainstream. Attitudes toward Korean shamanism are changing as shamanic traditions appear in staged rituals, museums, films, and television programs, as well as on the internet. Contemporary Korean Shamanism explores this vernacular religion and practice, which includes sensory rituals using laden altars, ecstatic dance, and animal sacrifice, within South Korea's hypertechnologized society, where over 200,000 shamans are listed in professional organizations. Liora Sarfati reveals how representations of shamanism in national, commercialized, and screen-mediated settings have transformed opinions of these religious practitioners and their rituals. Applying ethnography and folklore research, Contemporary Korean Shamanism maps this shift in perception about shamanism—from a sign of a backward, undeveloped Korea to a valuable, indigenous cultural asset.
Related Guides
About Shamans and Shamanism
This guide provides selected course-specific resources for AN243 / RN243: Shamans and Shamanism
Featured Resource: Associated Press Images Collection
- Associated Press Images Collection This link opens in a new window Associated Press Images Collection is a searchable collection of recent and historical photos from the Associated Press, plus AP graphics, articles, and brief sound clips.
Shamanism (Human Relations Area Files)
Featured Article
- Grant, Bruce. "Slippage: An Anthropology of Shamanism." Annual Review of Anthropology 50, no. 1 (2021): 9-22. If our knowledge of shamanism has been so abidingly partial, so impressively uneven, so deeply varied by history, and so enduringly skeptical for so long, how has its study come to occupy such pride of place in the anthropological canon? One answer comes in a history of social relations where shamans both are cast as translators of the unseen and are themselves sites of anxiety in a very real world, one of encounters across lines of gender, class, and colonial incursions often defined by race. This article contends that as anthropologists have cultivated a long and growing library of shamanic practice, many appear to have found, in a globally diverse range of spirit practitioners, translators across social worlds who are not unlike themselves, suggesting that in the shaman we find a remarkable history of anthropology.
This guide was originally authored by Chris Smith, April, 2023.
