Korean Shamanist Ritual:  Symbols and Dramas of Transformation, by Daniel A. Kister.  Bibliotheca Shamanistica, 5.  Budapest:  Akadémiai Kiadó, 1997.  (ISSN 1218-988x).  178pp.

Reviewed by Kang-Nam Oh
University of Regina

[This review first appeared in
Acta Koreana 2 (1999), pp.156-59]

Would you like to read an informative, comparative, reliable, and most importantly, readable book on Korean shamanism?  I believe you can find just such a book in Daniel A. Kister's recent work which has just been published as volume 5 of a series called Bibliotheca Shamanistica by the International Society for Shamanistic Research of Budapest, Hungary.

The book is composed of three parts and seven chapters.  Part One introduces various facets of Korean kut ritual; Part Two discusses its "dramatic aspects;" and Part Three deals with the worshipping community.  The first chapter tells of the various forms of shamanist rituals in Korea.  Kister is interested especially in the village Pyôlshin-kut or P'ungôje performed mostly in the eastern coastal fishing villages of Korea in the spring and fall, for he believes that this communal rite exemplifies "the general tendency of kut to mix prayer with play."(p. 11)

Chapter Two deals with the "kut signs" or ritual symbols. The revelatory signs are what religious historian Mircea Eliade has called "hierophanies," manifestations of the sacred.  These are found in such extraordinary phenomena as the shaman's dance-like gestures performed barefoot on well-honed straw-chopper blades, or speaking in a trance-like state.  In this context Kister brings up the main argument of the book.  He argues that although these extraordinary signs may testify to the presence of divine power at work, they are not necessarily the indispensable elements in the kut performances.  He agrees with Roberte Hamayon that trance "is neither sufficient nor necessary to shamanic ritual action."  The more important elements for him are what he calls "aesthetic signs" that transform the kut into an artistic dramatization of a community's religious symbols.

Kister proposes that a mudang or shaman, more often than not, "creates signs of contact with the gods and spirits with mimetic gestures, music, dance, and visual symbols."  He further suggests that the rite the mudang performs "constitutes an aesthetically satisfying symbolic dramatization of what it aims to achieve, the transformation of disparate individuals into a community centered on contact with the realm of the gods above."(p. 21)  The kut ritual to Kister, therefore, is basically "controlled artistic activity springing from a human urge to transform time, space, and a community's life together into a realm of contact with the gods and ancestral spirits."(p. 24)

A kut's effectiveness to heal, Kister argues, depends not so much on whether a shaman is in a state of trance or performs extraordinary feats, but rather on whether the ritual expresses the sympathy of the shaman and "the prayerful concern of the ill person's family and the concern of the praying community."(p. 29)

Chapter Three shows how Korean shamanist rituals concern themselves basically with "nature, birth, death, and the mudang's life."  It is also argued that these rituals ultimately have three goals:  "harmony with the gods and spirits, release from life's evil, and an awakened self-awareness that opens up one to accept reality."  Chapter Four discusses the mudang's role in helping the community achieve these goals.  Kister contends here that the God of Heaven and the multiplicity of other gods and spirits have more to do with the community's dramatic imagination than with philosophical and theological abstractions.

In the fifth chapter Kister explores the basic characteristics of the kut for the dead.  It is interesting that the shamanist purificatory rite for release from evil is compared with a death rite of the Roman Catholic tradition.

Chapter Six, which begins the second part of the book, is dedicated to the analysis of the dynamics of kut "as a drama."  Kister claims that kut provides "a forum, not only for manifestations of the gods' presence, but also the cathartic purification and growth in objective self-knowledge and in acceptance of destiny."  He contends that kut drama has most of all a "transforming, purifying, and objectifying power."

Chapter Seven explores the laughter and comedic elements that are indispensable in kut ritual.  Kister examines the theories of such authorities as Baudelaire, Freud, Bergson, Nietzsche, Cassier and Northrop Frye, and claims that laughter as found in kut dramas transmutes woe into a surge of zestful triumph over life, brings the gods down to the level of human beings, and dissipates anxiety, fear and grief in the face of crises and death.  Kister gives a number of examples of kôri-kut such as the "Schoolmaster" (hunjang-kôri) and the "Blind Man" (pongsa-kôri), which are quite interesting to read.

Chapter Eight continues to analyze the theatrical language of kut drama.  Kister, using the dramatic theory of Antonin Artaud, the French critic, argues that all kut speak the spatial language of theater, which is characterized by the alchemical fusion of the comic and the sublime.  Here Kister also points out that kut can be studied "in the light of theoretical language of folklore, anthropology, sociology, and the history of religions; but the study of any shamanist rite bears its best fruit when it is rooted in the rite's own theatrical language of symbolic gesture, farce, spatial imagery, and aesthetic form."(p. 150)  Kister in this vein concludes that "kut drama," at its best, "achieves purifying transformation through a deft fusion of anarchical comic farce and sublime spatial poetry."

Kister, however, is aware that kut rituals are not just aesthetic events.  He insists that we should appreciate "the real-life religious drama to which kut give theatrical expression."(p. 151)  This means that we should see kut rituals as "living events" and find the "religious spirit" in them.  This leads to the last chapter, in which Kister discusses kut rituals in the context of the shamanist community and Korean culture at large.  He concludes that kut rituals most clearly reflect the "Korean love of communal play," which "perceives contact with the gods in terms of a community in which worshipers, the ancestors, and the gods become almost equally one through the leveling power of playful laughter and through symbolic participation in life's pain, beauty, and mystery."

Kister's book is outstanding in many respects.  First, his study focuses on the shamanist ritual or kut rather than on the shaman or mudang themselves.  It has been customary until now that most studies on shamanism have dealt mainly with the shaman, rather than their ritual performance.  Of course it is almost impossible to separate the shaman and their ritual in any study of shamanism.  But at least Kister's intention of focusing on shamanist ritual is methodologically refreshing.

Second, the book is also of great interest in that Kister, who has taught drama in the Department of English Literature at Sogang University in Seoul for more than twenty years, tries to see the shamanist ritual as dramatic performance more than anything else.  Kister disagrees with Mircea Eliade, one of the greatest theoreticians on shamanism, who characterizes the shaman as one who "specializes in a trance."  Kister rather goes with Andreas Lommel who defines the shaman as "an artistically productive" person.  This means that for Kister the shaman is above all "a dramatic artist, working often with the simplest of means" to bring about "the transformation of people's lives through the manipulation of their imagination."  His analysis of shamanist ritual primarily as a sophisticated form of drama is at least pedagogically stimulating.

Third, this book is based on extensive research as well as on the author's own field trips and observations in Korea.  It incorporates a number of specific examples drawn from many sources to support the author's arguments.

Furthermore the book is comparative in two ways.  It compares some elements found in Korean shamanist rituals with those found in the other traditions such as Roman Catholicism.  More importantly it also compares the theories of many scholars engaged not only in the area of shamanist research but also in the fields of history of religion and other related academic disciplines.

I understand that this book does not intend to be exhaustive in dealing with Korean shamanist ritual.  I also understand that the book concentrates on the dramatic nature of shamanist ritual.  Although I understand these points, I wondered while reading if focusing on shamanist ritual essentially as drama is the best way to understand shamanism.  Of course Kister does not deny that shamanist ritual can be examined from many other perspectives, and his approach should be taken as an excellent complementary work to such approaches.  Another approach that I personally hope to see in the near future is one that analyzes shamanist experiences in terms of "the spectrum of consciousness" in the transpersonal view of human evolution.

Overall this book is an outstanding addition to the list of references on Korean shamanism.  This can be recommended as a good introductory book on Korean shamanism in general, as well as a book specifically dedicated to the understanding of Korean shamanist ritual as drama for transformation.