Korean Shamanism
  • Home
  • Glossary
  • Shamanic Deities in Korean Buddhism
  • Images
    • Vintage Shaman Photos
    • Mudang in Performance
    • Talismans and Amulets
    • Mushindo - Shamanic Deities
    • Mugu - Shaman Implements
    • Sacred Trees and Stone Altars
  • Resources
  • About
  • Contact

New Technologies in Korean Shamanism:
Cultural Innovation and Preservation of tradition


by Liora Sarfati (2014)
in A. Citron, S. Aronson-Lehavi, D. Zerbib (Eds.), Performance Studies in Motion: International Perspectives and Practices in the Twenty-First Century, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, pp. 233-245.
http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/performance-studies-in-motion

In contemporary South Korea, the performance of shamanic rituals (kut) is an appreciated  cultural  trait  and  a  valuable  commodity  that  produces  economic gain.1 Kut rituals have been documented for hundreds of years; kut are performed both privately for clients (sonnim) who wish to appease their ancestors or other spirits, and publicly as symbols of national heritage. the cost of private rituals begins at 2,000 US dollars/day.2  Since the 1980s, the South Korean government and several municipalities have begun to sponsor apt performers of this tradition by monthly stipends. this is a new form of turning kut into a high-yield asset. The fast integration of new media into the shamanic world marks the vitality of  this  vernacular  religion  and  its  ability  to  adapt  to  changing  cultural  and technological contexts. It also demonstrates that continuity in tradition does not mean maintaining the same practices that existed in prehistory, rather constant adjustment to social conditions. New media has opened innovative arenas for discourse and communication among practitioners, and between them and the rest of the world.

In the past 100 years, Korea has undergone fast modernization coupled with occupation by the Japanese (1910–45) and a harsh civil war (1950–53), which ended in division of people and land into North and South Korea. One of the outcomes of this unstable period is a robust national effort to preserve traditional performances in order to construct a unique cultural identity. In the early 1900s, imperial powers, mainly the Japanese, often stated that Korea lacked a culture of its own, and therefore does not deserve political autonomy. South Korea has been struggling against such claims already before its independence and throughout its fast transformation from an agrarian society in the 1950s to a post-industrial one.

Korean shamanism (musok) has survived this political turbulence and is still widely practiced. During kut, Korean shamans (manshin)  induce  themselves into altered states of consciousness through dancing and drumming. Spirits of natural elements and ancestors descend into their bodies and are available for consultation by other ritual attendants for the purposes of healing, fortune- telling and blessings. In village settings and in Seoul during the 1970s, altars were mounted at houses of clients or manshin, and audiences included mainly villagers and their  acquaintances.3

Twenty-First-century  post-industrial  Seoul  offers  a  variety  of  technologies that  enhance  public  visibility  and  easy  access  to  musok  practices.  Manshin and clients travel a few hours by car to distant mountain shrines that used to require long foot-pilgrimages. These shrines provide larger and more impressive offering altars than the ones depicted in photographs from the late nineteenth century, because now, with relatively small investment of time, a manshin can purchase  artefacts  at  stores  rather  than  labour  to  prepare  them.  Electric  light and  sound  amplification  enhance  the  ritual’s  effect.  Practitioners  advertise their services on websites, and people can watch filmed rituals at home before they  choose  a  manshin.  These  technological  innovations  suggest  that  the framework of musok has changed significantly in terms of choosing a personal manshin,  ritual  locations,  ritual  preparation  and  altar  presentation.  At  the same time, public and scholarly discourses in Korea echo the idea that a ritual is more valuable when it follows the ‘original form’ (wonrae ŭi mosŭp). In the discourse of Korea’s cultural preservation policy, original form means that rituals ‘remained truest to the celebration’s original form, capturing the very essence of this ancient festival’.4  In the Korean Cultural Heritage Administration (CHA)’s website, Kim Chan explains that ‘The Cultural Heritage Administration strives to conserve our precious cultural heritage in its original condition to bequeath to future generations, while promoting it as a catalyst for national development’.5 Since the 1980s, this effort to produce a homogenized genuine independent local culture brought musok to the fore.

Musok is viewed as the only indigenous religion of Korea, because Buddhism, Confucianism  and  Daoism  were  imported  from  China.  Despite  Confucian and  Christian  objections  to  religious  aspects  of  musok,  the  beautiful  rituals have attracted policy-makers who offered official recognition of kut as artistic manifestation of the ‘Korean spirit’. This essay explores the context of Korean shamanism in the early twenty-first century describing how rituals and their role in society have changed following technological innovations. My anthropological research also revealed that musok is more prevalent in Korea than most Koreans are  willing  to  admit.  The  official  stance  of  the  South  Korean  government  has been that ‘Today, only token traces of this ancient indigenous religion can be found  –  and  then  rarely  –  in  rural  areas.’6   Such  statements  ignore  more  than 200,000 active registered practitioners.7

The official recognition of musok’s value as a national heritage is a novelty because throughout Korea’s history, the educated elites have regarded manshin with disdain because of their contacts with dangerous spirits and their strange behaviour.8 However, in the 1980s, the government began to acknowledge manshin as Holders of Intangible Cultural Assets (ingan munhwaje).9 Nominated manshin are expected to perform and teach specific rituals in a prescribed manner.10  The nomination  committee  ignores  technological  innovations  in  contemporary musok.  It  determines  the  correspondence  of  a  kut  to  ancient  ‘original  forms’ using  only  verbal  and  musical  criteria.  Analysing  the  evaluation  criteria  that the  Korean  government  uses  in  order  to  nominate  rituals  demonstrates  that the main characteristic sought is affinity with historic performances, judged by comparison of the performed songs to documented ritual texts from 50 to 100 years ago.11  I suggest that the Korean CHA observes technological innovation in  kut  with  caution  because  if  technology  incorporation  is  considered  an alteration of the ‘original form ’, then it would be difficult to find performances that  deserve  preservation.  Modern  technology  has  become  such  an  integral part of contemporary musok that it would be hard to imagine a kut without it. Had the nomination committee insisted on restricting the use of technological devices in kut for the sake of ‘authenticity ’, there would have been few manshin able to practise it. However, acknowledging that technology plays a part in the ritual would require constant updating of the preserved kut protocol. Finally, CHA itself uses multiple venues of mass media in all of its efforts to disseminate Korean heritage. Therefore, it would be unimaginable for CHA to demand that manshin  would  not document  their  own  rituals.  Such  pragmatic  arguments resulted in CHA’s overlooking technological aspects throughout the designation process.


During my fieldwork, I worked closely with Dr Yang Jonsgsung, whose research focused on the designation process of Korean performers.12 He has been a member of the Korean Committee for Cultural Assets since 1998, thanks to his academic and artistic acquaintance with musok that extends over three decades. A unique feature of his knowledge is that in his early twenties, he was an apprentice of a famous manshin. Two decades later, in 2007, he was the folklore researcher in charge of planning the kut ritual that was performed as the opening event of the first Korea Traditional Performing Arts Festival.


New Technologies in the Shamanic Artefact Market
On  a  rainy  evening  in  September  2007,  Manshin Sǒ Kyǒng-uk  performed  at the World Cup Stadium Park. Near a lovely pond, altars for a staged kut were constructed and decorated. The ritual served as the opening performance of the first Korea Traditional Performing Arts Festival, which has been repeated yearly, enabling  wide  public  exposure  to  various  traditional  performances  including kut. The rainy weather complicated mounting altars and background screens. Manshin Sǒ often performs in open air events and has therefore created unique, synthetic, factory-made ritual props that can endure stormy weather. Instead of displaying delicate gods’ paintings on paper, as manshin have apparently been doing for generations, she took photographs of some fine examples of this art at her home shrine, and used those images to create polyester banners. The banners can be rolled into plastic water-proof tubes. In harnessing technology to improve her paraphernalia, the manshin deviates from norms of producing musok goods by hand from natural materials. Many manshin in Seoul maintain their habit of hanging paper paintings even in wet weather, thinking that these artefacts signify the traditional value of the ritual. The academic discourse on ritual preservation that  is  practised  by  scholars  who  choose  rituals  for  nomination  as  assets  has thus increased the value of being true to ‘original form’. However, the vagueness of this term allows for different interpretations of its meaning and application. Interestingly, practitioners put much effort in material aspects that are hardly commented upon by scholars, who in turn avoid designing evaluation criteria for this aspect of the ritual.

Most  manshin  buy  ritual  artefacts  from  specialized  stores  that  keep  a constant  inventory  of  drums,  costumes,  paper  flowers,  paintings  and  statues of  gods.  The  Korean  government  did  not  nominate  any  musok  craft  artist  as a  Cultural  Asset.13   Such  designation  would  have  entailed  a  new  evaluation process and budget. With no official supervision, musok artists and art dealers are free to alternate the material aspects of kut to suit clients’ tastes and price ranges. Some shop owners have become so knowledgeable in ritual production that manshin ask for their advice when planning a kut. A common practice in the busy lifestyle of famous manshin is to send a driver to pick up ritual props trusting that the shop owner’s choice fits the needs of both the manshin and the gods. Old manshin have told me how in the past, the need for a new ritual prop was initiated by dreams in which gods and spirits asked them to prepare specific items.  Nowadays,  while  associating  with  friends  and  shop  owners,  manshin are  often  tempted  to  buy  various  items  on  display.  Shop  owners  intentionally exhibit beautiful kut costumes and decorations in order to entice manshin to purchase them.14 This alters the ritual both in the extent of personal involvement of manshin in the creation of ritual props, and in aspects of communication with the  supernatural.  Another  outcome  of  commodification  is  that  manshin  have fewer opportunities for socializing within the performance team.

Manshin often gather with their assistants in the days before rituals in order to prepare together a pile of paper decorations. In such sessions of work  that I observed, a sense of feminine communities was created. In urban settings, there are few other occasions for the whole team to get together outside rituals. Ready-made props result in loss of important opportunities for transmission of tradition and for group solidarity construction.

The commercialization  of  ritual  props  has  influenced  also  the  cosmology of  musok  because  manshin  show  interest  in  costumes  that  attract  clients’ appreciation rather than centring their choice on the identity of the worshipped supernatural entity. A beautiful costume presented in a store downtown might result in the incorporation of a less appreciated spirit into a kut, as happens with the nymph spirit (Sǒnnyǒ).  That outfit was rarely purchased by newly initiated manshin in the past, but its bright pink sateen together with a decorated crown and sparkly hairpin have made it so popular that it is sold just as much as outfits for more powerful gods.15

Ordering musok costumes from famous wedding-dress designers or from specialized artists results in a homogenization of gods’ attires, which was not the case before commercialized musok artefacts took root. Manshin Kim Nam-sun states that she keeps her tradition of designing costumes individually, and indeed I have not seen similar ones in other practitioners’ collections.16 Designs appear while she dreams, and accordingly, she explains to the dressmaker how to draw them. Using the services of well-known costume designers rather than taking part in practices of commercial mass production asserts the manshin’s status as a successful professional. Popular new designs are later copied and mass manufactured. Mrs Lee, a musok goods shop owner in downtown Seoul, showed me several academic books that she consults while preparing kut outfits. I have seen her offer several design options to manshin clients while presenting drawings of historic attires and musok regalia from those books as proofs to her abundant  knowledge  and  cultural  expertise.  The  use  of  academic  research  in material religious context blurs the boundaries between the intended academic audience  and  artefact  producers.  Academic  knowledge  is,  in  this  manner, disseminated through the print industry and applied to the religious realms of musok,  reducing  the  need  of  direct  inspiration  from  gods  and  spirits  to  earn the necessary knowledge about appropriate costume preparation. Filmed rituals also avail manshin with images of various costumes that other manshin use. The commodification of musok artefacts reduced the need of personal apprenticeship for manshin and musok artefact producers, and increased reliance on knowledge mediation by factory-produced images and texts.

During the first Korea Traditional Performing Arts Festival in 2007, Dr Yang introduced the ritual as an ancient practice, ignoring completely the production process of the artefacts. As a senior curator of the National Folk Museum and an  avid  collector  of  musok  art,  Dr  Yang  knew  that  many  artefacts  were  mass manufactured or prepared with new synthetic materials, but he did not mind this, as long as the ceremonial words matched officially legitimized ancient texts. The  contradiction  between  the  ritual’s  reliance  on  technological  innovations and its declaration as ancient was also not perceived by the manshin and her audience, who were concerned mainly with the ritual’s efficacy.


New Media Changes Musok Knowledge Dissemination
New media has become a lively arena for musok practitioners to communicate, advertise services and learn of upcoming staged rituals. Films and other digital documentations also serve as a means for learning about musok. Interestingly, while  many  Korean  scholars  are  photographed  and  quoted  on  practitioners’ websites, discourse of new media usage in musok is absent from most academic publications by Korean scholars. The effort and time that is dedicated to filming and promoting the broadcasting of kut rituals on television and internet venues marks a shift of practice from word-of-mouth self-promotion and knowledge acquisition to media-mediated activities.

Professional manshin organizations established internet portals such as www. kyungsin.co.kr in the 1990s, when internet usage in South Korea expanded.17


Picture
Figure 16 Manshin Kim Mi-ja performing in front of cameramen at a yearly ritual on Bonghwa Mountain. Photo by Liora Sarfati.

The portal www.neomudang.com offers an interactive map where one can click on a region of Korea and find a list of manshin who practise there along with their specialties. Service providers such as musok goods stores and shrines for rent use such portals for advertising. The result of online flows of knowledge has been increased numbers of manshin who practise a hybridized style of musok, overlooking the strict regional classification that Korean scholars regard as very important.

A  common  product  of  online  musok  is  manshin’s  personal  website  – hompeiji – in which visitors can learn basic facts about their line of religious practice,   read   their   biography   and   communicate   with   them.   Manshin Seo Kyeong-uk hired a professional IT specialist in the mid-1990s to construct her website www.mudang.co.kr. She updates her website regularly with photos and information of upcoming performances. She also replies to readers’ queries, and has included part of her introduction in English translation. She introduces herself with photos that can be interpreted as traditional dance. Those images convey elegance and grace without depicting intense ritual sequences that might be repulsive to some viewers, such as animal sacrifice or lewd humour. In other words, the website does not expose visitors to visuals that might cause uneasiness (especially people who have not been to such rituals), by limiting its scope to activities that do not contradict perspectives of modernity and progress. This is an intentional choice of the manshin in hope to diversify the clientele.

Manshin Lee Hae-gyǒng, the main protagonist of the documentary film Between, was interviewed in many newspapers, and has maintained a personal blog, www.manshin.co.kr since 2006.18 Such success in the media has often been criticized by colleagues and scholars as a sign for negligence of real healing in order to become a ‘superstar shaman’.19 However, as expected from a sincere spiritual healer, the daily practice of Manshin Lee consists mainly of treating the problems of her clients through supernatural communication.

Most manshin homepeiji are written solely in Korean. However, several manshin have  extended  their  practice  globally.  Manshin Shin Myǒng-gi  had a full version of her website, www.chuonbokhwa.com, in Japanese for several years as she used to also conduct services in Japan. Manshin Hi-ha Park, a UCLA graduate who has been initiated as a manshin in Korea, has been living in Germany for many years. Her website, www.hiahpark.com, which she calls Global Shamanic Healing, is in English and in German because she caters mostly to European clientele. On her website, Manshin Park advertises various workshops and performances that are far from being copies of ancient kut. Her terminology includes new age ideas that are absent from the Korean discourse of musok, such as unity of body and soul.20 Her musok practice marks a new intercultural communication through rituals that used to be more locally oriented.


Documentation and Evaluation of a Kut Ritual
In the spring of 2007, Manshin Kim Nam-sun was getting ready to commence a  kut in a rented  shrine near Seoul’s downtown.  The  ritual  was documented by Dr Yang. His positive impression of that performance contributed to Kim’s nomination  as  Regional  Intangible  Cultural  Asset  Holder. Manshin  Kim  was excited about obtaining the title and therefore initiated a special ritual for this occasion. She proposed to her acquaintances to sponsor a kut for a minimal fee in order to allow Dr Yang to film and interrupt it freely for better documentation.

Before the ritual began, Manshin Kim attached a portable wireless microphone to her chest and handed a printed booklet to Dr Yang, telling him that it is a transcription by Professor Kim Tae-gon of the same ritual performed a few decades earlier  by  her  shinomoni  (spirit-mother).  In  Korean  society,  a neo-Confucian tradition of not doubting superiors results in a tendency to consider findings of previous scholars as objective truths. Well aware of this approach, Manshin Kim obtained and learned the booklet that she handed to Dr Yang. The performer and the evaluator followed the rules of the designation game. She performed a close version of the old transcription, and he in return could convincingly confirm that it is true to the ‘original form’. No mention of the technological aspects of the performance appeared in the recommendation letter.

In the rented shrine, Manshin Kim began to sing and turn around repeatedly when the photographer noticed that the wireless microphone faltered. Dr Yang strode  to  the  centre  of  the  room  and  touched  her  wrist  to  suggest  that  she stops. A bit surprised, she stood still and allowed the two men to arrange the microphone again and test it before resuming her possession-trance dance. In an ordinary kut, a performer would not pause while becoming entranced, but in this new context, she was attentive to the scholars’ needs. Furthermore, her ability to control herself during possession signified high level of professional skills and strengthened her plea to be nominated Ritual Holder. The assistants were  clearly  annoyed  at  the  interference,  but nobody  protested.  They  all understood  the  implications  of  the  event  on  their  professional  futures  and accepted  the  need  of  technology-aided documentation.  In  stepping  into  the ritual arena, Dr Yang became an integral part of the performance. The evaluator who used electronic recording intervened in the ritual process and determined its pace.


Musok as an Emblem of the ‘Korean Spirit’
The need to choose preservation nominees among more than a hundred thousand practising  manshin  produced  a  complex  designation  process.  A  number  of Korean folklore scholars, such as Dr Yang, are hired to evaluate various kut, and their conclusions are handed to a special committee to decide which rituals are the most valuable.21  When people become clients of manshin, they search for ritual efficacy, its power to heal them or solve their personal problems. When folklore  scholars  look  for  kut  to  designate,  they  search  for  well-established practitioners whose work has already been appreciated by many clients. Within the relevant candidates, scholars then evaluate rituals by measuring their affinity with what is deemed to be the ritual’s original form.

In  the  late  1800s  and  early  1900s,  musok  was  documented  mainly  by Japanese  ethnographers  and  by  Christian  missionaries.22   The Japanese used musok  to  prove  that  Koreans  and  Japanese  shared  the  same  ancient  culture, and  through  this  common  origins  theory,  they  justified taking  over  Korea. Christian missionaries utilized their knowledge of folk religion to conceptualize Christianity  in  an  appealing  manner.23   Pre-modern Korean  scholars  did  not describe  musok  because  it  was  deemed  a  lowly  tradition.  However,  when  the Japanese  used  Korea’s  vernacular culture  for  promoting  their  imperial  goals, Korean  scholars  began  to  show  interest  in  these  folk  beliefs.  Local  folklorists such as Ch’oe Nam-sŏn and Yim Suk-Jay discussed and documented kut in the early twentieth century and their valuable work became the oldest database for comparing contemporary rituals.24

Evaluating  contemporary  rituals  through  comparison  with  historic  kut  is problematic for various reasons. A lack of filming devices in the past produced mainly transcriptions of ritual songs with little attention to other performative aspects.  The  transmission  of  tradition  is  perceived  in  this  comparison  as an intergenerational imitation with no notice of manshin’s agency and creativity in adapting text to context and altering ritual form and meaning according to their personal preferences. Events that precede and follow the actual ritual, such as altar construction, have not been studied. Cultural performances are sponsored through the Cultural Heritage Protection Act only if they are proven to be ‘carrying great  historic,  artistic  or  academic  values’.25   This statement  demonstrates  how the evaluation criteria are based on analytic categories formulated by scholars, and not by performers and patrons who would emphasize the efficacy which is based on religious belief.

Designating  kut  as  Important  Intangible  Cultural  Heritage  encapsulates a  paradox  because  the  wish  to  petrify  rituals  in  order  to  connect  the  present with pre-modern Korean culture requires detaching the performance from its religious intention. Tradition is ever-changing, as shown in various case studies.26 The Korean culture preservation policy seeks to establish a coherent corpus of officially recognized performances as a canonical representation of ‘the Korean Spirit’. Most preserved kut are a living tradition in the performers’ repertoire. However, contemporary kut are not always comparable to the ones archived by a previous scholar. Officially scripted rituals often prevent manshin from adapting the performance to specific needs of clients and are therefore performed for a general cause such as ‘blessing the audience’ or ‘the wellbeing of the nation’. These kut are not perceived as fake or secular re-performances because blessing the audience and the nation is regarded a worthy purpose. As they follow the ritual’s script, manshin feel comfortable to use various technologies such as sound amplification, lighting and impressive, commercially manufactured offerings to ensure the ritual’s success that is measured in this case not by its efficacy but by achieving audience solidarity and enjoyment.

This examination of affinity with an ‘original form’ resembles discourses of authenticity. A survey of authenticity-related debates conducted by Regina Bendix demonstrated that it has been embedded in most academic cultural analysis from the initiation of folklore studies about 200 years ago.27  While terminology such as authentic shamanic rituals has been utilized by many scholars of musok, it must be treated with prudence.28 Performance authenticity is judged by different criteria  depending  on  context  and  participants,  thus  producing  contradictory meanings and usage.29  Paradoxes and conflicts arise when some members of a community  look  for  performers’  sincerity  and  ritual  efficacy  while  others  are concerned  with  ‘historic  accuracy’.30   Rituals  and  performances  that  have  no antecedents  in  history  have  often  been  called  invented  tradition,  folklorism  or fakelore.31   These  labels  suggest  that  some  traditions  are  genuine  and  properly performed,  while  others  are  fake  or  contemporary  inventions  that  have  little value.  Many  of  the  examples  set  in  Hobsbawm  and  Ranger’s  book  Invented Tradition  analyse  technological  innovation  as  contradictory  to  performance authenticity.  However,  invented  tradition  as  a  means  for  value  judgement  has been  challenged  by  many.32    Contemporary  musok  events  in  Korea  might be  labelled  by  some  critics  with  the  above  quoted  derogative  terms,  given  all the  technological  innovations.  Even  musok  practices  that  could  be  labelled genuine ‘old ways’ (following a continuous line of transmission), according to Hobsbawm’s terminology, have often been restructured to it new contexts and interests. An undisrupted line of transmission does not necessarily mean that contemporary  performers  are  mere  bearers  of  ancient  traditions.  Similar  to Sponsler’s  observation  regarding  European  rituals,  kut  are  produced  in  our times after ‘creative shaping to meet new ends’.33

The  ‘original  forms’  sought  by  Korean  scholars  are  established  on  a  shaky basis even in their own terms because the presumed originality of the earlier event to which they compare contemporary kut cannot be determined using the same  standards.  The  documented  performance  eventually  lacks  a  comparable antecedent. The scholars are let with the undisputable judgement of an earlier scholar  as  the  sole  originality  determinant.  The  documentation  process  of  an earlier scholar can be imagined as a quite arduous task as he writes down full transcription of ritual texts and a bit about the ritual’s sequence and segments. The scholar becomes a mediator between the past performance and contemporary audiences  that  might  include  manshin  and  other  scholars.  Richard  Bauman theorizes  that  mediation  is  an  indexical  relationship  between  a  sequence  of dialogues. In our case, the source dialogue is transcription of a historic kut, and the target dialogue is contemporary ritual. The source dialogue, which is an artefact of scholarship, reaches ahead to and has formative effect on the target dialogue, which is a shamanic performance.34  The target dialogue reaches back and has a formative efect on the source dialogue because ‘the source utterance anticipates repetition’ and therefore ‘the shaping of the source utterance prepares it for this decontextualization and recontextualization’.35  Having a future repetition of the ritual in mind probably resulted in the scholar’s inserting some intentional and unintentional deviations from the actual occurrence.

Let us imagine that several manshin participating in kut began arguing about the  proper  dance  sequence.  The  early  scholar  would  have  probably  excluded this dispute from the transcription and taken side with the prevailing party by recording only their version. Richard Schechner showed how in the documentary film Altar of Fire in 1976, disagreements between different ritual organizers were perceived by scholars and film-makers as irrelevant to the documentary because they  disrupted  the  expected  flow  of  the  performance.36   Dynamic  attitudes  to cultural  research  view  such  discrepancies  and  disagreements  as  opportunities to expose unspoken hierarchies and debates. However, the general tendency in early-modern Korea was to produce clear and consistent culture descriptions that seemed objective. Early scholars ignored not only moments of fuzziness within the research community, but also their own role in the event, as did the filming crew  of  Altar  of  Fire.  Consequently,  valuable  descriptions  of  historic  kut  are lacking in context. Such stripped documentation processes used to be perceived as prerequisite for texts to outlive their time. Without filtering the complex and somewhat chaotic kut atmosphere, it would have been impossible to prepare a coherent ritual transcription that could serve future re-enactments.

Contemporary   Korean   scholars   are   expected   to   use   these   stripped descriptions when writing recommendations for designating rituals as National Assets. They are forced to speculate on aspects that are lacking in the historic document,  such  as  altar  settings  and  dance  movements.  As  explained  above, it  is  impossible  to  grasp  a  full  effect  of  performance  including  its  non-verbal aspects when it is transferred into an archived textual representation.37  In order to enrich the documentation, designated rituals are photographed and filmed, acknowledging more performative aspects, but few of the contextual elements. Such  documentation  is  prepared  mainly  in  order  ‘to  ensure  that  if  a  current heritage holder dies without leaving a successor . . . people will be able to revive their heritage by using these resources as points of reference’.38 In spite of existing video  documentation,  the  official  demand  of  designated  manshin  remains  to re-perform the ritual, following closely the texts and sequences that have been described in words by the evaluator, while very little attention is dedicated to the mise-en-scène.


Conclusion
In  contemporary  South  Korea,  musok  has  been  appreciated  and  preserved  as an  ancient  indigenous  tradition.  The  South  Korean  government  understands the importance of indigenous culture to the nation-building process and funds selected manshin. Korean scholars participate in this enterprise by evaluating kut rituals for the government. During the process of nomination as National Cultural Assets, manshin attest that they are mediating a genuine tradition by striving to follow texts that transcribe historic kut rituals, rather than emphasizing their religious sincerity.

As  members  of  a  highly  commercialized  consumer  society,  contemporary manshin in South Korea enjoy the technological enrichment of their tradition. They  buy  factory-made  props  and  offerings,  including  some  made  of  durable synthetic materials. Rituals’ filming and recording are used for self-promotion, are  sold  in  musok  goods  stores  as  ritual  learning  aids,  and  are  broadcast on  television  and  through  the  internet.  Such  innovations  in  musok  are  not perceived by Korean manshin and scholars as a signifier of tradition alteration because  the  evaluation  of  kut  is  based  on  assessing  ‘original  form’  by  verbal measures.  Material,  performative  and  communicative  aspects  of  kut  beyond the ritual itself are absent from the evaluation criteria. The examples set in this essay demonstrate how technology is an integral part of culture and how Korean scholars and government agencies ignore the effect of technology on musok in order to maintain their stance of preserving ‘original rituals’ while at the same time  using  technology  for  the  dissemination  of  ritual  documentation  in  their effort to promote a unique national image.

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.