Laurel Kendall
The 2006 Surjit Singh Lecture in Comparative Religious Thought and Culture

Dr. Laurel Kendall is Curator in the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. An anthropologist who specializes in Korean cultural studies, she has written extensively on shamans, issues of gender, and, more recently, the cultural constructions of “tradition” and “modernity.” Dr. Kendall is also Adjunct Professor, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University. She is the author of many books, including Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits and Getting Married in Korea.

The paper begins with a field anecdote told in the manner of a fairy tale: the anthropologist and her field assistant meet an old shaman in a crumbling tile-roofed house and are enchanted with her tales of old traditions.  The moldering house is a shrine, dedicated to a powerful community tutelary god, and the shrine keeper is the third generation in her family to maintain the shrine, now designated as a “neighborhood cultural treasure” (munhwaje).  Despite this pedigree, the shrine’s days seem to be numbered; the area has been designated as urban parkland and the shaman has been served with an eviction notice.  When we return, a few years later, the old building has been replaced with a new shrine on the same site, a modern tile-roofed two-story structure resembling a restaurant specializing in “traditional” Korean food.  The shrine-keeper is still in residence, proud of her sparkling new accommodations, but we feel that that romance is gone.  My story becomes a fairy tale in reverse.  In the fairy tale, the deluded traveler goes to sleep in a palace and awakes to find a ruin; in the ethnographic tale, the seductive ruin becomes a commodious modern house.   The nostalgic setting had initially caused me to overlook the old building’s history; before its present reconstruction,  this shrine had already been forced to relocate twice within the present century.  The crumbling “old shrine” on its present site predated my own birth by only a few years. On what basis does the shine-keeper continue to claim that her shrine is a neighborhood “cultural treasure” (munhwaje)? This anecdote establishes the central theme of the paper: “shrines” (tang) have less to do with the fixity of buildings and monuments then with the more mobile spirits they house. 

The ultimate immateriality of the “shrine” (tang, sindang) in my story, the shrine as a portable name, gods, and traditions, confounds the hard materiality of an urban master plan which, in their radical geographies, Michel de Certeau and David Harvey describe as an exercise of power and domination (de Certeau 1984: 91-114; Harvey 1989: 70-71). The founders of Korea’s Chosŏn Kingdom understood the authority implicit in a master plan when they organized their city in accord with a geomancer’s reading of a power-charged landscape, and the Japanese understood it in waging architectural and symbolic warfare against that same city plan.[i]  The peeling back of remaining colonial sites and the restoration of Seoul’s old royal center, the assertion of a dynastic Korea unblemished by foreign occupation, fits Pierre Nora’s characterization of  “lieux de mémoire,” sites for the memorialization of  “history” as distinct from a living “memory” which claims its past through repetitive and quotidian evocations. Living memory does not require monuments, and reconstructions in the name of history without literal memory are necessarily problematic and incomplete (Nora 1989). A shrine building could be monumentalized, but a functioning shrine is something else.  I will return to this contrast below.

Peripatetic Shrines 

The action now shifts from a landscape of reconstructed palaces and gardens at the old city’s core—to a mountain vista, and from the fixity of maps and even geomancy charts to the mutability of dreams, visions, and the agency of spirits.  In my story of the old shrine, the urban planner’s designation of “parkland” confronted the shaman’s claims to a shrine tradition as a “neighborhood cultural treasure.” I heard similar tales in other places.  Nestled on the slopes of Seoul’s mountainous periphery are sacred sites—spiritually potent rocks, springs, sŏn’ang trees that harbor unquiet ghosts, and—for the last twenty years or so--a proliferation of  “kuttang,” commercial shrines where shamans rent rooms where they perform elaborate rituals called kut to invoke and entertain gods and ancestors with percussive music and song, dancing, mime, and comic play, embodying and speaking for the gods and ancestors of their clients.  Here, room-by-room, different regional styles are performed simultaneously, their distinctive rhythms and stories spilling into the common courtyard in a montage of action and sound, a post-modern ritual happening.  A few kuttang have significant histories linking them to dynastic times and royal recognition, but most of them have sprouted up in the last twenty years or so, like mushrooms after the spring rain.[ii] Built on once quiet and relatively isolated hillsides, several of these kuttang are already surrounded by ballooning residential neighborhoods. The spread of kuttang has been linked to anti-noise ordinances and “anti-superstition” campaigns in the 1970s, all blatantly intended to suppress the shamans' activities (Hwang 1988:18, Sun 1991: 163, Kim Seoung-nae, personal communication, 31 August 03).  Cramped apartments and life lived on industrial time further enhanced the appeal of the relatively isolated kuttang where there was space for offerings, dancing, and feats, and no neighbors to complain about the noise.  With rising standards of consumption, shaman households acquired vans to transport clients, offering food, and ritual paraphernalia to mountain kuttang.

Modernity projects both during the colonial period (1910-1945) and in more recent decades have forced the relocation of both old and new kuttang.  When this happens, the gods may take a hand in selecting the place where they will reside.  Visions foretelling shrine locations recur in the dreaming of shamans and shrine-keepers, past and present (Pak 2001:108-9, 167, 182; Kendall 1985: 56).  The third-generation keeper of the venerable Fortification Shrine, although not a shaman herself, lived within this world and received dream messages from deities.  At the time of our first interview, her shrine had been relocated twice, once in response to urban renewal, and more recently, after a complicated real estate transaction.   Deciding to open the shrine in a new place, the shrine-keeper had received the gods’ assurance in a dream that a backer would come forward to help her secure a new location. The backer had appeared within three days of the dream.  Four years later, forced out by pressure from the neighboring Buddhist temple, she had relocated in a more commodious location on the northern rim of the city, a house she had first seen in an auspicious dream that included a miraculous journey accompanied by the shrine’s tutelary gods.  Despite these several moves, and like the old shrine-keeper in the renovated tile-roofed house, she maintained claims to tradition with a signboard that described her shrine as an “important folk property.”

The keeper of the popular “Celestial Shrine” found his site when he was granted a waking vision (hwansang) while praying at a potent site on Taebaek Mountain, far to the south.  He had seen a plateau surrounded by mountains, a configuration resembling an old woman sitting on her haunches.   He found the exact place in the mountains north of Seoul, a sacred site where women came to pray, and here he built the Celestial Shrine, naming it after the site in the Taebaek Mountains where he had experienced his vision.  In 1998, the projected path of a tunnel through the surrounding mountains threatened the existence of the Celestial Shrine, but in 2002, the shrine and its visionary keeper were still in place. Disputes over shrine locations, real estate, and urban parkland are informed by contradictory, simultaneous, and interpenetrating perceptions of  “landscape,” landscape in its emergent anthropological sense as “the meaning imputed by local people to their cultural and physical surroundings (i.e. how a particular landscape “looks” to its inhabitants”(Hirsch 1995: 1; Basso 1996; Munn 2003). Caroline Humphrey has analyzed Mongol history as a shifting ascendancy of maps and shamanic landscapes, the one fixed, legible, and consequently finite, the other infused with the more fluid stuff of the imagination—including the agency of spirits (Humphrey 1995). Her characterization is useful in thinking about confrontations between Korean shamans and urban planners, but where Humphrey posits a diachronic relationship of alternately dominant visions, the shrine-keepers of this telling and the authorities that designate parkland, widen roads, and extend tunnels through mountains are engaged in a synchronic and unequal contestation.  In Barbara Bender’s words, "The landscape is never inert, people 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." (Bender 1993: 3; Bender 2002a; Bender 2002b; Bender and Winer 2001; Kuchler 1993; Kuper 2003; Morphy 1993).   Borrowing on the theme of the urban walker, from Baudelaire through Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau describes 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” (de Certeau 1984: 93, 106).  I am suggesting that such reimaginings are also the work of shamans, spirits, and shrines.

When a Kuttang Becomes a Heritage Site

Articulate shamans and representatives of shamans’ advocacy organizations describe the harassment of kuttang and the closing off of sacred mountain sites through a new language of religious discrimination, claiming that Buddhist temples and Christian churches would not be subject to arbitrary demolition.  Some shrine-keepers have begun to deploy a language of heritage sites as a protective strategy.  But as I learned from the demolition and reconstruction of the tile-roofed shrine, a language that equates shrines with buildings misses their primary claim as super-material gathering places for spirits.  With the end of the Chosŏn Kingdom, the oldest shrines in this discussion were unhinged from the geomantic scheme of the old royal capital, and have wandered from their original sites.  The Fortification Shrine, relocated twice in the 1990s after having nearly been lost in an inauspicious real-estate deal, had already been relocated once in the 1960s when the north-bound road was widened in an early spurt of urban development.   The “old shrine” of my opening story had been displaced twice, first by a railroad, then by urban sprawl.  Korea’s most famous kuttang, the Kuksadang, carries a well-known story of colonial displacement.  Originally located on South Mountain, the southernmost extension of a geomantic configuration that begins with Pugak Mountain in the north, creating an axis through Kŏngbok Palace, was displaced in 1925 by a Shinto shrine in a further colonization of the Korean landscape (Chŏng 1999; Kim 2003).  The Kuksadang was relocated on Inwang Mountain to the northwest, a mountain also significant in the city’s geomancy.[iii] 

The Kuksadang: Can a Shrine Be a Monument?

As a site of living shamanic practice and a material monument to dynastic memories and colonial displacements, the Kuksadang bridges the divide between a functioning kuttang and a material monument, an exception that, by its exceptionality, highlights the contradiction between shamanic versus mapped landscapes, between functioning shrines and monumental lieu de mémoire.  A national heritage site since 1979,[iv] the Kuksadang’s example may have inspired the old shrine-keeper to post a signboard describing her shrine as a “neighborhood national treasure” and the keeper of the Fortification Shrine to describe her once-more-newly-relocated shrine as an “important folk property.”  Within the Korean shaman world, folklorists’ and cultural historians’ claims for a “deep cultural root” of shaman practices have won for shamans a measure of public recognition and have lead to the appointment of some shamans as Human Cultural Treasures (Ingan munhwaje).  These developments are generally seen as both preserving endangered cultural practices and enhancing the self-esteem of the practitioners.  It follows that official designations of monumentality might confer respect, bestowing a mantle of protection upon those precarious shrines that claim genealogies dating back to dynastic times.  In the case of the Kuksadang, however, heritage status has been a mixed blessing.

It would be difficult to find a shaman or a folklorist in Korea who has not heard of the Kuksadang.  An important national shrine in dynastic times, the Kuksadang is widely regarded as Korea’s premier kuttang.  Among traditionalist circles of Seoul shamans, doing a kut at the Kuksadang confers the status of a fully realized professional shaman.[v]   Inwang Mountain, where the shrine is located, is important to the geomancy of Seoul as the “white tiger” in the configuration of mountains protecting the capital from the north (Kim 1993) and the auspicious site (myŏngdang) on which the shrine is located is said to be extremely powerful.  The Sŏnbawi, a large twisted rock near the shrine, is considered a potent locus of prayers.[vi]  Lay people come here to pray for conception and good fortune, and shaman initiates pray for the visions and inspired speech that will make their initiation a success.  With the end of security restrictions and the opening of the mountain to hikers during the Kim Yŏng Sam Administration, people have come to pray all over the power-charged landscape of Inwang Mountain, often leaving piles of trash and rotting offering food in their wake.  This activity provokes the ire of the many Buddhist establishments that have also grown up in recent years on Inwang Mountain.  In this now-crowded space, the interests of the monks are pitted against the activities of shamans who, to monks’ eyes, pollute the mountain and interrupt meditative practices with the clanging of drums, gongs, and cymbals.  Noise complaints are a major issue for the Kuksadang, where kut must end by the late afternoon lest the monks from one of the surrounding hermitages complain, once again, to the authorities.  The Buddhist establishment has assumed the management of the Sŏnbawi, improving the site but prohibiting the initiation kut that used to take place on the narrow ledge in front of the spiritually potent boulder. 

The aura of the Kuksadang’s national heritage status does not seem to have conferred any particular privilege on this shrine in the micro-politics of Inwang Mountain.  In 1994, a signboard just outside the Kuksadang proclaimed the authorities’ limited tolerance of kut: “In accord with official policy we beseech you to abridge your activities, refrain from drinking and rowdy behavior, and conduct your work in a dignified manner, scrupulously adhering to the designated time.”  In 2003, a sign proclaimed that, “Prayers and shamanic activities (musok haengwi) and the like are prohibited within the Inwang Mountain Municipal Nature Park.” This official decree has had no visible effect on activities both inside the Kuksadang and all over the mountainside.

Policies intended to protect the old wooden structure of the shrine are at cross-purposes with its role as an active kuttang.  The lighting of candles, an important element of kut offerings, is technically prohibited.  In the summer heat, the shrine-keeper carefully monitors the electric fans set up in the shrine for fear that overheated wiring will cause a fire.  It is not possible to install air conditioning in the shrine because efficient insulation would require modifying the doorframes and so violating the original architecture.  The shrine-keepers are also caught in a contradiction that besets the owners of heritage property in other places (Herzfeld 1991).  As private owners, they are expected to maintain the building, covering necessary repairs out of pocket, but all repairs must carried out using approved traditional methods and materials. State-of-the-art authenticity is often very costly.  As a resolution to this contradiction, there is talk of the Bureau of Cultural Properties Preservation taking over the shrine and maintaining the old building as a historic site.  What then, would it represent?  As one more lieu de mémoire of old Seoul and of the ruptures imposed by its colonizers, would it become, as in Barbara Bender’s critique of Britain’s Stonehenge, “a socially empty view of the past” (Bender 2002a: 169)?   However it might speak to “history,” the Kuksadang would cease to be an active kuttang.  Devoid of gods, visions, and shamanic performances, it could only be a monumental shell. [vii]  The gods, presumably, would go elsewhere.

Conclusion

One can read the peripatetic histories of shrines as I initially read them, as reactive responses to the hegemony of maps, state projects, and the encroachment of disenchanted real estate.  But disenchantment is seldom absolute and perhaps the spirits have a regenerative capacity to inhabit and reinscribe new landscapes with  “the magical power of proper names” (de Certeau 1984104).  Buildings may crumble, but spirits are not one with the material substance of shrines. Shrine-keepers and shamans proudly tear down and enlarge their own shrines, assuming that the spirits, like mortal Koreans, take pleasure in more modern and spacious accommodations.    “Old shrines” persist in the names they bear, the gods they house, and the recognition of practicing shamans, and most kuttang are not very old at all.  With other commercial enterprises, they are free to wander the landscape. Kuttang make their claims on the landscape through the unmapable and unpredictable agency of spirits as revealed in dreams, visions, shamanic performances, and extraordinary happenstances.  In Nora’s terms, this is the stuff of “memory” not “monument.”   In de Certeau’s scheme, these are the “superstitions” that muddle and confound a totalizing city plan.   Popular imagination keeps alive small but fantastic acts of magical resistance: it is said that the Granny Shrine’s sacred sŏn’ang tree fell on and crushed whatever agent of modernity had cut it down; the businessmen who brokered the Fortification Shrine all died in a traffic accident.  As unruly memory sites, the kuttang function as de Certau’s “anti-museums” deploying the stuff of legend against a totalizing vision of urban space, offering the possibility of escape “into another landscape” (de Certeau 1984: 106-108), albeit not one of picturesquely crumbling tile-roofed houses, but like much of the urban periphery, hastily constructed of cheap and expedient materials because it will be torn down and reconfigured soon enough.

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