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David A. Mason, The Spirit of the Mountains: Korea's San-Shin and Traditions of Mountain Worship, Seoul: Hollym 1999. 224 pages. ISBN: 1-56591-107-5.

Reviewed by John Synott
Queensland University of Technology


A Reviewer's Encounter with San-Shin

Some years ago late in the afternoon of a grey, mild, autumn day in South Korea I walked through the woods behind Pusan National University and up the road to the fortress on the top of Mount Geumjeong. At the fortress I rambled along the broken stone walls enjoying the high solitude, with the city sprawled out far below. Mistiming the ultimate folding of the autumn dark I turned to retrace my steps and the path was nowhere to be seen. Night closed in eerily as I realised I had no choice other than to spend the night on the mountain. An experienced bushwalker, I felt no dread at spending a night in the open, and knew that it would be perilous to attempt to stumble my way out - that could lead me off a ledge into oblivion. So, rather uncomfortably as light rain set in, I formed a crude shelter from some picnic tables and settled in for the night.

I had read nothing of the Korean spirits of the mountains- San-Shin - yet my sense of the spiritual beings who are said to inhabit landscapes had been well-conditioned over my lifetime of wandering across the landscapes of Australia, where indigenous people tell us the spirits of the Dreaming continue to dwell and the local communities perform the ancient ceremonies that mark their relationships to the landscapes and the spiritual beings. "The land is my mother" is a literal rather than figurative expression of belief across Aboriginal Australia. I, too, had known the spiritual sense of awe and presence that seems to reside in remote places.

Resuming my story, during that night on Geumjeong-San at some deep dark hour a local wind stirred up, and whipped around me with the presence of a living creature whose habitat I had unwittingly invaded. It was not threatening, but something was definitely there letting me know that I was not alone, but not particularly wanted on the mountain peaks at night either. Certainly this spiritual meeting with the god of the mountain was a projection of my subjectivity as I huddled wet and hungry among the rocks, but it was vividly real to me at the time, and, ever the sceptic, I was nevertheless fascinated at the palpable reality of this happening. At first light I could not move on due to a heavy fog, but gradually it lifted and I was able to descend without much difficulty. Later that day I wrote a poem about my encounter with the god of the mountain. Sometime later I read about San-Shin in Covell's Folk Art and Magic in Korea. Then along came David Mason's book on the topic, Spirit of the Mountains (1999) which I opened with undoubtedly personal as well as academic interest.


Some Defining Features of Mason's San-Shin

In this book Mason has pursued a systematic study of his topic and gathered an impressive array of information from throughout South Korea regarding San-Shin. He has combined this information and his discussion/analysis of it with a most lovely set of photographs, largely taken from shrines and mountain landscapes across South Korea and the result is undoubtedly the most comprehensive book yet published in English on the subject of San-Shin. Mason's work has been beautifully presented by Hollym in a glossy coffee-table style format. The many photographs look good, though Mason informs us they were taken with non-professional equipment, and he apologises for 'these crude but authentic records' that were the results of 'one man's very long research-quest (p.24).'

Yet, it is the bringing together of these two key frameworks of the book- the aesthetic and the scholarly research - that has produced its core problems. On the one hand we have a glossy invitation to ramble amongst the photographs and descriptions of San-Shin images and legends, while on the other we are meant to follow and be convinced by Mason's exposition of his scholarly research into the topic. The author tells us quite early on that this book is a revised version of his Master's thesis at Yonsei University - in which discipline he does not say - and it is in this attempt to provide an apparently scientific and analytical basis to his exposition of San-Shin within the counter-frame of a coffee-table browser that the work fails to achieve cohesion, and instead provokes frustration.

The irritation I experienced at this contradiction was exacerbated by a further and quite idiosyncratic feature of Mason's book, a theoretical web he weaves around his discussion of his topic, that leads in the end to rather naïve proposals regarding cultural and political issues of national reunification of North Korea and South Korea. Actually Mason employs two theoretical constructs to make sense of his material. The first is a personalised categorisation that has no apparent relation to anything else in ethnographic literature: 'Over the course of this book I have developed my own theory dividing all manifestations of the Korean mountain spirit and its worship into three vertical levels' (p. 28). This theory is actually a typology. The second level of theory is an interpretive model on the meaning of San-Shin, to which I shall return later in this review essay.
Mason has asked the book to carry these different levels of discussion and he has worked assiduously to weave them together, but even the mighty topic of San-shin and the strength of mountains cannot hold up such an edifice. It is useful to deconstruct them, nevertheless, to try and identify the particular strengths and weaknesses of the book, for it has a plethora of both.


Presenting San-Shin

In introducing San-Shin to an English-language readership, Mason picks up from the earlier writings by Covell on the emergence of San-Shin in Korean religious/folk culture through discussion of the historical foundations of the San-Shin belief. This discussion is the lead in to the very long Chapter Two "Iconography of San-Shin" which is surely the central chapter of the book, containing the presentation and description of the various beautifully coloured and presented photographs that make the book so attractive to the eye. Initially Mason identifies the contexts of shamanist and foundational roots and early historical references in the early chronicle Samguk Yusa to San-Shin. This slight but useful orientation leads into an interesting discussion of gender aspects of San-Shin, which Mason concludes can be either 'ambiguously male and/or female'. While his previous discussion had clearly identified the spirits manifesting primarily as an wise old man or beautiful young woman, Mason resolves his authorial dilemna over gender forms by reverting to the neuter gender of 'it' to describe San-Shin. In fact, it is extremely difficult for Mason to maintain this neutral nomemclature throughout the book, for he reminds us often that the earlier shamanic tradition of depicting San-Shin as female fell away to dominant patriarchal representations of San-Shin, so that the mountain spirit figure is 'almost always depicted as a seated man' (p.55) and Mason tends to use the male form in most instances. However, his announcement that he is going to describe the San-Shin in gender neutral terms is an important statement in the way he attempts to position the subject in relation to the reader. By removing his subject from the anthropomorphic realm of human social and cultural construction (or attempting to) the author has suggested here so early in the text that San-Shin is an objective phenomenon that might be investigated somewhat scientifically. His extended treatment of the subject then proceeds with a systematic analysis of the phenomenon, through analysis of its various manifestations.

At first, David Mason engages the reader with an interesting discussion of generic features of San-Shin: the media where images of San-Shin have been produced, particularly paintings which date from around 1650. This discussion, as throughout the book, is illustrated by a range of charming and informative photographs demonstrating the different styles of San-Shin depictions. However, by now Mason's determination to categorise every example into his self-constructed evolutionary theory of Low, Middle and High levels of San-Shin portraiture has begun to intrude into the book. His categorisation is based on an unsupported aesthetic belief that the earlier village-based images of San-Shin are primitive while those to be found in, particularly, temples are of a 'higher artistic step up' (p.45) and deserve to be categorised into 'my Higher Level' (why the category should be capitalised in this usage I fail to see). One could well argue against this social evolutionist position from a 'minjung' perspective, proposing that the genuine cultural origins of San-Shin in rural farm culture were appropriated by the ruling classes over centuries of feudal hegemony and their stylised depictions represent not a more elaborated and sophisticated understanding of San-Shin but a decadent privileging of upper-class culture as opposed to the 'true' culture of the rural peasantry. In this perspective Mason's argument for an aesthetic priority of the more elaborated works is challengeable.

Over subsequent sections Mason discusses features such as the basic iconography of San-Shin images, the locations where San-Shin reside, the motifs of objects held by San-Shin, headgear images and symbols, icon-companions such as tigers, humans, other animals, and plants. The descriptions of these features largely are enjoyable reading and Mason demonstrates some keen observations of the paintings, guiding one's eye back to the reproductions to identify a range of symbolic features. This informative approach is undermined, however, by the quasi-scientific frame that the author seeks to use to, presumably, convince us of his authority on the topics under discussion. Time and again Mason tells us that a particular icon crops up in such and such a percentage 'of my collection' which, we were informed in Chapter One, is 550 photographs of San-Shin images. This constant invocation of the statistical occurrence of the particular images in Mason's collection is both off-putting to the casual reader and frustrating to the scholar, for 'my collection' is no verifiable reference point on which valid conclusions or future scholarship can develop. It is clearly the sample base of Mason's masters thesis but does not constitute knowledge that the academic readership collectively can regard as 'standard'. Quite obviously the author considers himself as pioneering the field of San-Shin studies, but his efforts to establish some quantitative base for San-Shin scholarship are not convincing.

The third, again long, chapter in this book is an historically-oriented discussion of the continuities and themes of San-shin in the main religious traditions of Korea over the centuries. From shamanism and the Dan-Gun origin myth, through Daoism, Confucianism Buddhism and Christianity, Mason traces the presence of San-Shin and the various responses to it. While the accomodation of traditional religions to San-Shin themes has been fairly seamless, there are clear conflicts between Christian belief and those views of relationships between humans and nature evident in San-Shin shrines and rituals. Yet Mason manages to find Christian absorption of San-Shin elements in such practices as, for example, charismatic prayer meetings in remote mountain locations. While it is difficult to demonstrate San-Shin's universality in Korean Christian religious belief , which is clearly Mason's thesis, it is a much easier task to find many instances of Buddhist accommodation to San-Shin beliefs and Mason's discussion of the relationship between Buddhism and San-shin is nicely contextualised in historical and philosophical discussion of Korean Buddhism, again beautifully supported by photographs of paintings, architecture and natural formations. Suprisingly, this scholarly discussion of the relationship between Buddhism and San-Shin takes a discordant and unnecessarily personal tone in the final section on 'San-Shin as Bodhisattva', whereby Mason exposes the reader to an experience that 'actually shocked me speechless' . The author's reaction is to what he regards as a heretical trend towards incorporating San-Shin into a Buddhist theography.

In the context of the book, the material is unimportant to the Western reader but, unnecessarily, Mason has placed himself and his views as the central subject of this last section of this chapter. His final comments on this matter are worth quoting in the context in what is to come in Chapter Four, for Mason concludes Chapter Three with these words: 'San-Shin is too native Korean to become merely a deity within an imported religion. It represents all Korea, not any one aspect, and it belongs to all Koreans, not just the Buddhists' (p.188). This emotive opinion may well seem out of context in respect to the general discussion of the chapter which is finishing, but it is a sharp warning of what is to follow in Chapter Four.

The final chapter of David Mason's book is titled 'Future Prospects for the Mountain Spirit', and it is here that the author attempts to predict, indeed shape, the future trends of Korean society through his mobilisation of the San-Shin concept as the 'root-axial element' of traditional Korean culture. For all of the previous discussion that has argued the ubiquity of San-Shin consciousness throughout Korean history, there has been no argument or evidence for the essentialist position that Mason adopts in his concluding chapter. Right back in the opening chapter he had told us of his 'own idea' regarding this foundational cultural concept of San-Shin. He even offered the presumptuous proposition that his view may be what 'traditional Koreans may really have (unconsciously) meant when they worshipped their San-Shin' (p.16). Mason argues this centrality of San-Shin traditions to Korean culture while at the same time reminding us that 'I have found extremely few Koreans who can tell me anything at all about them' (p.199). It would appear that he stands alone as a solitary bearer of the meaning of a cultural artefact that contemporary society has abandoned. However, Mason asserts that there are two contemporary challenges that will ensure a revival and continuity for San-Shin. Firstly, he claims, San-Shin is a 'green' icon in an increasingly polluted and environmentally degraded world. Mason comes out as a champion of environmental protection and claims that a revitalised San-Shin worship would help defeat the environmental destruction of modernization and industrial development in Korea. While this proposal can be understood as whimsical speculation on the part of the author, the next claim does tend towards the ludicrous. Mason advances a final thesis that San-Shin will play a 'central role' in national reunification of North and South Korea, through the a revitalisation of this common cultural heritage of Dangun/San-Shin in North Korea and South Korea. Mason offers his vision that the San-Shin tradition will provide a basis for cultural reunification and concludes with a shamanist-style invocation: 'May it be So! May this book assist it!'

Thus Mason concludes his treatise on San-Shin on a note far removed from the tone of measured erudition and statistically-based scholarship that he has used to set up his discussion in the earlier chapters. It is as if, in the end, he too lost belief in the rigour of his scholarship and opted for populist incantation.

In summary, Spirit of the Mountains left me disappointed in many respects. While I was able to enjoy the beautiful production by Hollym, particularly the photographs, I found myself having to get past the author in order to extract the information about San-Shin that was useful to me. There is much interesting reading and information in the text but I found the author's practice of introducing his opinions and his self-centred language as elements of the book that I had to filter out. Similarly I was not convinced of many aspects of his scholarship, particularly the half-baked Batesonian theory and the meaningless statistical data that seemed to be there to impress me with the illusion of academic rigour, yet achieved the opposite. There is no doubt that the topic is worthy of a book, and I don't doubt that Mason has developed his expertise on this topic. However a strong editorial hand was needed here, to curb the rash excesses and unwelcome intrusions of the author. Since there is a plan to release a paperback edition of the book, we can hope that the author will respond positively to critical feedback that has been offered in this and other reviews and take steps to let the most worthy subject be presented to readers without having to contend with distracting authorial intrusions.

Citation:
Synott, John 2001
Review of David A. Mason, The Spirit of the Mountains: Korea's San-Shin and Traditions of Mountain Worship (1999)
Korean Studies Review 2001, no. 8
Electronic file: http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr01-08.htm


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