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 Healing Powers
and Modernity
Traditional Medicine, Shamanism,
and Science in Asian Societies

Edited by Linda H. Connor

and Geoffrey Samuel

BERGIN & GARVEY

Westport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Healing powers and modernity : traditional medicine, shamanism, and science in Asian
societies / edited by Linda H. Connor and Geoffrey Samuel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–89789–715–3 (alk. paper)
1. Healing—Asia. 2. Social medicine—Asia. 3. Traditional medicine—Asia. 4.
Shamanism—Asia. I. Connor, Linda, 1950– II. Samuel, Geoffrey.
RA418.3.A78H43 2001
615.5'095—dc21 00–029256
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright  2001 by Linda H. Connor and Geoffrey Samuel
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without
the express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00–029256
ISBN: 0–89789–715–3
First published in 2001
Bergin & Garvey, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.greenwood.com
Printed in the United States of America
TM

The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
A Note on Tibetan Spelling xi

Introduction 1

1 Healing Powers in Contemporary Asia 3

LINDA H. CONNOR

Part I. Healing in the Modern State: Korea, Malaysia, and India

2 The Cultural Politics of “Superstition” in the Korean Shaman

World: Modernity Constructs Its Other 25
LAUREL KENDALL

3 Tradition and Change in Malay Healing 42

CAROL LADERMAN

4 Modernity and the Midwife: Contestations Over a Subaltern

Figure, South India 64
KALPANA RAM

5 The Political Ecology of Health in India: Indigestion as Sign

and Symptom of Defective Modernization 85
MARK NICHTER
vi Contents

Part II. Healing on the Margins: Malaysia, Indonesia, and China

6 Engaging the Spirits of Modernity: The Temiars 109

MARINA ROSEMAN

7 Presence, Efficacy, and Politics in Healing Among the Iban

of Sarawak 130
AMANDA HARRIS

8 Sorcery and Science as Competing Models of Explanation

in a Sasak Village 152
CYNTHIA L. HUNTER

9 Medicines and Modernities in Socialist China: Medical Pluralism,

the State, and Naxi Identities in the Lijiang Basin 171
SYDNEY D. WHITE

Part III. Healing, Power, and Identity in Tibetan Societies

10 Tibetan Medicine at the Crossroads: Radical Modernity and

the Social Organization of Traditional Medicine in the Tibet
Autonomous Region, China 197
CRAIG R. JANES

11 Particularizing Modernity: Tibetan Medical Theorizing of

Women’s Health in Lhasa, Tibet 222
VINCANNE ADAMS

12 Tibetan Medicine in Contemporary India: Theory and Practice 247

GEOFFREY SAMUEL

Glossary of Tibetan Terms 269

Index 275
About the Editors and Contributors 281
 Illustrations

FIGURES
2.1 A shaman balances on knife blades 34
2.2 Shaman exorcizing a couple outside the rented room of a
public shrine 36
3.1 Pak Long and his minduk 43
3.2 Cik Su 50
4.1 Cover of Mantrajalam Daktarlada Mantrasanulada and sketch
from Na Shariram Nadhi 73
4.2 Sketches of woman’s body by health project staff and women
from Dalit and “tribal” backgrounds 77
5.1 A vaidya consults with patients, as his wife stands by his side 88
6.1 A medium sings as the chorus, playing bamboo-tube
stampers, responds 115
6.2 Shredded plastic bags shimmer, mixed with a few fresh leaves
to form the in Bihaay 125
7.1 An Iban longhouse in Pakan subdistrict 133
7.2 The organization of space in an Iban longhouse 135
7.3 Ruai of an Iban longhouse, daytime 136
8.1 A belian (Sasak indigenous healer) 156
8.2 Sasak women working together preparing food 162
viii Illustrations

9.1 A Lijiang basin family takes in a public poster message on

“hygiene and civilization” 186
9.2 A hospital in the Lijiang area 187
10.1 Lhasa Outpatient Mentsik’ang from Jok’ang Temple 200
10.2 Consultation, Women’s and Children’s Department, Lhasa 205
12.1 Men-Tsee-Khang Clinic, Dalhousie 249
12.2 Dispensary of the Men-Tsee-Khang Clinic 251

MAPS
1 South and Southeast Asia with Study Locations xii
2 Southeast and East Asia with Study Locations xiii
6.1 State Boundaries and Orang Asli Ethnic Divisions in
Peninsular Malaysia 112
7.1 Sarawak 132
10.1 The Tibet Autonomous Region 201

TABLES
10.1 Number of Physicians and Inpatient Beds by Selected Counties,
Central Tibet Autonomous Region Prefectures 202
10.2 Illnesses Most Frequently Cited by Mentsik’ang Patients 210
10.3 Mentsik’ang Patients’ Explanatory Models for Common
Illnesses 212
10.4 Illness Case Studies: Diagnostic Categories of Individuals
Interviewed 213
10.5 Explanatory Models: Illness Case Studies 214
10.6 Patterns of Resort Reported by Case-Study Sample 215
10.7 Decision-Making Patterns Reported by Case-Study Sample 216
12.1 A Sample of Adult Patients at the Dalhousie Clinic,
July–August 1996 254
 Acknowledgments

The chapters in this book, with the exception of the contribution by Sydney
White, are selected and revised from invited papers presented at an International
Research Workshop at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Austra-
lia, in December 1996, entitled Healing Powers and Modernity in Asian Soci-
eties. This meeting brought together a group of anthropologists who have in
recent years been involved in researching issues of medicine, modernity, and
healing in Asia. The workshop provided an opportunity for participants to dis-
cuss their work in a broader comparative framework, stimulated by their diverse
perspectives on healing and modernity. We wish to thank all the participants in
the workshop for their lively discussion of the ideas that have contributed to
the chapters in this volume. We are grateful to Sydney White, who was not
present at the workshop but who later kindly agreed to contribute a chapter in
order to expand the geographical and comparative scope of the volume.
Research by the convenors of the workshop, Linda Connor and Geoffrey
Samuel, was supported by an Australian Research Council Project Grant (“Cre-
ative Synthesis in the Therapeutic Process: An Ethnographic Study of Tibetan
Healing and Biomedicine,” 1994–1997), and it was this research that originally
inspired the idea for the meeting. Funding for the workshop was provided by
the Faculty of Arts and Social Science and the Department of Sociology and
Anthropology, University of Newcastle. We wish to thank Janette Howell for
her administrative assistance in organizing the workshop.
Carol Laderman’s chapter is a revised version of an article titled “The Limits
of Magic,” which was published in American Anthropologist 99(2): 333–341.
We wish to thank K. Lalitha, and Sabala and Kranti, for the illustrations
provided in Kalpana Ram’s chapter from their publications which are, respec-
x Acknowledgments

tively, Mantrajalam Daktarlada Mantrasanulada, 1993, and Na Shariram Nadhi

(My Body Is Mine), 1995.
We would like to thank Stephen Dick, who drafted the maps, for his careful
work and his patience with our all-too-frequent rethinking.
We are also grateful for the assistance of Rozanne Spouse, Karen McLeod,
and especially Patricia Dobinson, who assisted at the many stages of the prep-
aration of the manuscript.
We gratefully acknowledge the suggestions made by the reviewer for Green-
wood Publishing Group, and the work of our editor, Jane Garry. We also thank
our copyeditor, Katie Chase, for her thorough and careful correction of the
manuscript.
 A Note on Tibetan Spelling

In Chapters 10 to 12, Tibetan words are given in an approximate phonetic

transcription (e.g., Gyü Shi for Wylie-system rGyud bZhi). The Glossary of
Tibetan Terms at the end of the book gives correct Wylie-system spellings and
brief definitions. To avoid overloading the Glossary, the disease categories in
Table 10.2 and some terms in the notes to Chapters 10 and 12 are given in
Wylie spellings, indicated by W.
Map 1. South and Southeast Asia with Study Locations

xii
Map 2. Southeast and East Asia with Study Locations

xiii
INTRODUCTION
 1

Healing Powers in
Contemporary Asia
Linda H. Connor

The subject of this book is the state of healing practices in contemporary Asian
societies. In what ways is indigenous healing being reconstituted through pro-
cesses of transnational modernity? How is the praxis of healing being trans-
formed by the politics of health within modern nation-states and by the processes
of commodification of both healers and their therapies? What is the significance
of indigenous healing in the construction of new discourses of cultural identity
and new nationalisms? How do patients in Asian societies engage with the
plurality of healing practices that are themselves shaped by wider relations of
power? How is modernity experienced through the embodied senses and the
suffering body?
These are large and complex questions, especially since South, Southeast, and
East Asian societies present many different facets of the encounter between
“local,” “indigenous,” or “traditional” healing1 and modernity. “Healing” as used
in this volume generally refers to therapeutic practices that are embedded in
local social relations and forms of embodied experience. The term is a counter-
point to “health,” which is generally used to refer to a biomedically defined
state, the absence of disease. Clearly these terms belong to different discursive
frameworks that are of significance for the anthropological research undertaken
by contributors to this volume.
In this book we explore the present state of a range of healing practices in
their Asian locales. The peoples involved include minority and majority popu-
lations. By minority we mean reasonably distinct, small populations living
within the peripheries of larger nation-states such as the Naxi of the Lijiang
Basin in the People’s Republic of China, the Temiar of peninsular Malaysia and
4 Introduction

the Iban of Sarawak in Malaysia, as well as Sasak people on Lombok in In-

donesia. The geographical scope of the book also encompasses rural South In-
dians and Malays, the people of South Korea’s industrial cities, and Tibetans
both in Chinese-controlled Tibet as well as in the refugee settlements of North
India. Among these different peoples we find many types of healing, including
shamanic ritual and herbal medicine, as well as formalized literate traditions
such as Ayurveda, Chinese, and Tibetan medicine. We observe the conflicts as
well as the blurred boundaries between indigenous therapies and biomedicine
(also commonly referred to as allopathic or cosmopolitan medicine),2 which, in
its many manifestations, is the dominant form of medicine supported by national
governments, and is emblematic of the modernity to which they aspire.
The studies presented in this volume draw on the specific strengths of eth-
nographic research into healing. The authors, all of whom are anthropologists
with extensive research experience in Asian societies, acknowledge the multiple
healing resources available to patients in these societies. However, they question
the commonly deployed paradigm of pluralism in medical anthropology, which
privileges the patient and support group as agents freely choosing “options” from
among the available array. The studies in this book emphasize the ways in which
the state legitimizes and transforms certain healing systems, and thus how in-
stitutional power relations shape healing in local contexts, but never totally de-
fine it. Another central theme is the importance of processes of representation
in the struggles over healing power.
Some of the medical traditions discussed, such as the formalized herbal-
humoral systems of Tibetan medicine and Ayurveda, are becoming well known
in the West, through both scholarly study and their increasing popularity with
Western patients interested in their healing potential. The ethnographic approach
of the studies presented here privileges the interaction between healing practice
and textual knowledge, rather than exegesis of the latter. The chapters covering
aspects of Tibetan medicine, in particular, provide an important new dimension
on this subject, which up to now has been heavily oriented to traditional textual
material rather than observations of practice.
Other contributors to this volume have studied less formalized healing prac-
tices, such as shamanism in Malaysia (Laderman 1991) and Korea (Kendall
1985) for many years. They emphasize the value of an anthropological approach
to lived practices in cultures where indigenous healing has long been subjected
to a powerful reifying process through “folklore studies,” a disinterment of
“pure” cultural forms through the use of aging informants and the salvage of
various forms of material culture. Folklore studies of shamanism, as Laurel
Kendall points out in Chapter 2, may retrospectively valorize ancient practices
as expressive of a distinct national spirit, while contemporary practices are con-
structed as debased survivals. Korea’s “folklore revival” in the 1960s and 1970s
can be seen as a nostalgic longing for a premodern world from the vantage point
of an industrialized, urbanized, and Westernized existence. The chapters in this
Healing Powers in Contemporary Asia 5

book focus on the more interesting and fruitful analyses that anthropological
study of contemporary shamanism and other healing practices can provide.
Two earlier works provide benchmarks in the comparative study of “Asian
medical systems.” Asian Medical Systems: A Comparative Study, edited by
Charles Leslie (1976), defined a whole new field of study for the emerging
subdisciplinary area of medical anthropology and demonstrated the dependence
of this field of study on interdisciplinary knowledge from historians, philoso-
phers, practitioners, and others. The volume focused on the “great traditions” of
Hindu, Arabic, and Chinese medicine, their transformations over space and time,
and their relationship to cosmopolitan medicine; but local healing practices and
indigenous healers also received attention.3 Another volume, Paths to Asian
Medical Knowledge, edited by Charles Leslie and Allan Young (1992), contin-
ued the agenda of comparative study of the three formal traditions of Asian
medicine and their interactions with cosmopolitan medicine and local knowl-
edge.
In both volumes, Asian medical systems were studied as cultural systems,
and the framework of inquiry was the logic of knowledge of practitioners and
patients. “Asia” was defined, implicitly, through particular forms of interpene-
tration and syncretism of three great traditions of medicine that had also spread
from and to other parts of the globe. Since Edward Said’s groundbreaking work
Orientalism was published in 1978, unifying constructs such as “Asia” have
been seen to be deeply implicated in the processes of colonial domination by
the West. What can permit us, two decades later, to speak of “Asian societies”
as an intellectually viable boundary for study? In one sense the possible scope
of Asia is so vast that no volume could embrace the diversity, and the present
book does not claim to do so.
In another, pragmatic, sense, the reference to Asia stakes out a broad field of
scholarly interest and intellectual exchange that crosses narrower regional
boundaries, and acknowledges the nexus of geography and history. Character-
istics of precolonial state formations, political ecology, experiences of coloni-
alism and nationalist struggles, the subjugation of ethnic minorities, patterns of
migration, and displacement of populations, all give substance to the notion of
Asia while recognizing its political and historical constructedness and its de-
pendence on certain forms of cultural representation. The linkages, both histor-
ical and contemporary, of Asian societies to many others, including Western
societies, should alert us also to the arbitrariness of boundary making in many
contexts. For example, Sydney White in Chapter 9 details the dominance of
Western medicine in the Republican period (1927–1949) in the People’s Re-
public of China (PRC). Carol Laderman describes in Chapter 3 how Islamic
orthodoxy (ultimately connected to contemporary Middle Eastern political
movements) validates a contemporary Malay shaman’s practice. Geoffrey Sam-
uel unravels some of the relationships between Indian Ayurvedic medicine,
Western idealizations, and traditional Tibetan medicine, in Chapter 12.
6 Introduction

This book is organized, not on the basis of the great medical traditions, but
rather in terms of the articulation of healing, power, and modernity in a selection
of societies of varying type and scale from South, Southeast, and East Asia.
There are three parts to the book, structured thematically around transformations
of traditional healing in modern states (Part I), healing among cultural minorities
(Part II), and the role of healing in contemporary Tibetan societies (Part III). In
the four chapters of Part I, we look at the significance of traditional healing
modalities among populations that are integrated into modern nation states. In
Chapter 2, Korean shamanism, dismissed as “superstition” by the biomedical
establishment, is imbued with other forms of legitimacy in the context of an
urbanized, industrialized state. In Chapter 3, among the majority Malay popu-
lation of Malaysia, a female shaman finds a successful answer to the twin chal-
lenges of modernity and Islamic orthodoxy. Midwives in Tamil Nadu, South
India, threatened with marginalization or incorporation by biomedical institu-
tions, evolve a flexible response through the use of both traditional and modern
cultural resources (Chapter 4). In Karnataka state, South India, Ayurvedic ideas
about diet are used to articulate a critique of modernity and its effects (Chapter
5).
In Part II, we explore indigenous healing traditions among four minority
groups within nation-states, the Temiar and Iban of Malaysia, the Sasak of
Indonesia, and the Naxi in the People’s Republic of China. Temiar shamans of
the Malaysian rainforest use traditional techniques of trance and music to engage
the dramatic changes their society is undergoing (Chapter 6), drawing power
from elements of new social realities that simultaneously oppress them. The
Iban community of Sarawak studied by Amanda Harris draws on indigenous
knowledge and forms of sociality to maintain the vitality of community spirit-
based healing procedures against the biomedical approaches that would under-
mine, not just healing practices, but the worth of Iban identity (Chapter 7). Sasak
villagers of East Lombok similarly maintain local understandings of illness
against biomedical hegemony (Chapter 8). Therapeutic practices have been par-
ticularly significant in the narratives of modernity that have framed the Naxi
minority’s relations with the Chinese state over three political periods (Chapter
9).
The three chapters on Tibetan societies in Part III bring together scholars who
are currently engaged in anthropological research on medicine and healing
among Tibetans, in both the People’s Republic of China, where Tibetans form
a subjugated minority, and in India. As Craig Janes (Chapter 10) and Vincanne
Adams (Chapter 11) discuss, traditional Tibetan medicine in Tibet has become,
among other things, a mode of articulating and dealing with the stresses of life
under Chinese domination, as well as a way of expressing a particularly Tibetan
version of modernity that is not subsumed by PRC state narratives. Among the
refugees in North India (Chapter 12), Tibetan medicine is a resource for dealing
with ailments and troubles for which biomedicine as locally delivered can do
Healing Powers in Contemporary Asia 7

little, as well as a resource in efforts for international recognition of the Tibetan

political struggle against the Chinese.

MEDICINE AND GLOBAL MODERNITIES

Contributors to the volume have characterized modernity in a variety of ways.
They draw on the social science understanding of modernity as an epoch that
began with the emergence of capitalism, industrialism, rational-legal bureauc-
racies, and state control of military power and surveillance (Giddens 1990; King
1995; Therborn 1995). The cultural dimensions of modernity include discourses
of rationality, scientism, and progress through economic development. Contrib-
utors are also concerned to analyze the contours of modernity as a “structure of
feeling” or mode of apprehending the world. Here, the epochal character of
modernity and its implied spatial connectedness with Europe give way to what
Homi Bhabha has called its “ambivalent temporality,” by which he means that
the sense of the “modern” as opposed to the recent past is universal (everyone
can have this experience) while each “enunciation of the sign of modernity” is
culturally and historically specific (cited in King 1995, 113). The experience of
modernity, broadly defined as a consciousness of being part of a changing world
with an open future, is everywhere. Some anthropologists have argued that mo-
dernity has always been a global phenomenon, with the European colonization
of the world being a necessary condition for its emergence (e.g., see Wolf 1982;
Friedman 1995).
There are many experiences of modernity in contemporary Asian societies.
While contributors to this volume have drawn on recent cultural and critical
theory in the humanities and social sciences that engages with emergent realities,
they have been more concerned to understand the transformations and interac-
tions of Asian modernities than to debate about the usefulness of conceptualizing
these processes as “postmodern.” The radical and global character of modernity
demands careful examination in specific contexts before we can go on to en-
visage possible futures. Postcolonial states, postnational movements, and global
economic interdependence need to be understood in relation to modernity, rather
than as usurpations of it. The people of Asia, just as much as people elsewhere,
are active agents in the creation of “global modernities.”4
One of the ways in which modernity has laid a claim on people’s lives is
through biomedicine’s expansion around the globe. In virtually every social
situation considered in this volume, biomedicine has become a metonym for
modernity in the domain of healing. It has been placed there by national gov-
ernments intent on their own modernist projects of “development,” implying
notions of social progress and economic improvement for the nation’s citizens.
While agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and United
Nations International Childrens’ Emergency Fund (UNICEF) have exerted a
unifying influence on international health policy and planning, their agendas
8 Introduction

have always had to come to terms with varying national visions of modernity,
many of which have explicitly anti-Western elements. National visions of mo-
dernity, in turn, articulate in various ways with communities whose aspirations
may point to quite different possibilities, particularly where minorities in au-
thoritarian states perceive themselves as marginalized.
The technologies of biomedical science cannot be deployed in a space devoid
of cultural values and specific forms of social organization; their use is shaped
by the political context in which they occur. As Mark Nichter discusses in
Chapter 5, Mahatma Gandhi was one of the earliest critics of state-sponsored
biomedicine, which he viewed as merely ameliorating the ills engendered by
industrial capitalism, without challenging the unethical, exploitative character-
istics that he held to be intrinsic to this manifestation of modernity. Vincanne
Adams, in Chapter 11, analyzes how biomedical technologies are recommended
by the author of a contemporary Tibetan text on women’s health as a means of
validating the scientific truth of traditional Tibetan medicine—as in the use of
ultrasound machines to diagnose womb disorders caused by blocked “channels,”
or the use of microscopes to see the “bug” that causes a “feverish womb.” Here,
the politics bears on minority struggles against an authoritarian state; in the case
of Gandhi the resistance to biomedicine was part of his resistance to Western
domination at many levels. The political embeddness of biomedicine is not con-
fined to any one kind of politics.
Anthropologists trace these conflicts and displacements from the international
and national arena to their expression in local communities. Sydney White’s
Chapter 9 provides an overview of the way systems of healing knowledge de-
veloped and changed in mainland China, over three historical periods beginning
in the Republican period (1927–1949) and continuing through the Maoist and
post–Mao governments. During the Republican period, “Western medicine” was
promoted as the goal of a progressive state despite limited access to treatment.
In the Maoist period, “Chinese medicine” was officially approved (in a stan-
dardized, simplified, and scientized form), and became a “critical icon of na-
tional identity in the PRC narrative of modernity.” During the 1960s Cultural
Revolution, Chinese medicine became a key element of “integrated medicine,”
which incorporated Western, Chinese, and state-authorized “folk” medicine.
Post–Mao, the vision of a distinctively Chinese socialist version of modernity
has persisted but in keeping with the state’s embrace of global capitalism, Chi-
nese medicine, while still valorized, has become both increasingly commodified
and marginalized in relation to “Western medicine” (see also Smith, 1993, and
Janes, Chapter 10 this volume). White discusses how the Naxi of the Lijiang
Basin, an officially recognized “national minority,” have created their own dis-
tinctive narratives of modernity through their strategic engagement with the
state, enacting a politics of identity through their therapeutic practices as well
as other domains of life. In the contemporary post–Mao era, minority nation-
alities have been reinvented (and have reinvented themselves) through the dis-
course of a more culturally pluralist state. In this context, Lijiang Basin Naxi
Healing Powers in Contemporary Asia 9

have been empowered to valorize cultural difference (vis-à-vis Han Chinese) in

a way that was not possible in the Maoist period. Fortune-telling, gu witchcraft,
and the cultivation and collection of local herbal remedies are the therapeutic
elements of this cultural “revitalization.” However the main Naxi therapeutic
option in the villages and town where White conducted her study remains “in-
tegrated medicine,” which has always been shaped by local practices.
Biomedicine as a set of institutions occupies a dominant position in all na-
tionally supported health systems in Asia. Yet state policy with regard to the
status of traditional therapies shows some marked differences between countries
as governments of varying political hue contend with the degree of formaliza-
tion, political influence and popular utilization in different contexts.5 Even where
the state has formally recognized the therapeutic value of other medical
traditions, such as revived and reinvented Ayurvedic and Yunani traditions in
India (Leslie 1976) and a standardized, simplified and secularized “traditional
Chinese medicine” in the PRC (Crozier 1976; Adams, Chapter 11, Janes, Chap-
ter 10, and White, Chapter 9 this volume), this has not necessarily translated
into a meaningful allocation of the national health budget.6 Healing practices
that are not based on formal literate knowledge applied by high-status (usually
male) members of the politically dominant cultural group are less likely to re-
ceive any state recognition at all. Rather, they are likely to be defined as dan-
gerous relics of the past, clung to by “backward” populations out of ignorance
and superstition. Laurel Kendall’s Chapter 2 well documents the latter stance
with regard to Korean shamans’ healing capacities since the nineteenth century,
while Carol Laderman (Chapter 3) discusses the effect of state-supported Islamic
orthodoxy on rural Malay shamans, many of whom no longer practice. Indige-
nous healing among cultural minorities of Southeast Asia, such as the Iban of
Sarawak (Amanda Harris’s Chapter 7) and Sasak of Lombok (Cynthia Hunter’s
Chapter 8), may not be officially prohibited but has achieved no significant role
in national health policy, and indeed is clearly constructed in antagonistic terms
to modernity in state discourse.
Power relations are intrinsic to the operation of healing modalities in every
society discussed in this volume. The diversity of healing practices may be
constituted as much by class and gender relations as by cultural identities or
other dimensions of difference/inequality. These inequalities have long preceded
the advent of biomedicine as the dominant healing modality supported by post-
colonial Asian states. In Chapter 4, Kalpana Ram points to the “hierarchy of
knowledges in India, where textualized forms of knowledge are given the high-
est prestige and value.” In South India, for example, Ayurvedic and Siddha
medicine based on textual knowledge and transmission through males in
hereditary high-caste lineages have always enjoyed more social power and pres-
tige than forms of spirit possession and midwifery practices among women of
castes placed low in the social hierarchy in agricultural laboring communities.7
As indigenous healing practices come under the purview of policy-makers in
postcolonial states (who are answerable to providers of international develop-
10 Introduction

ment funding), preexisting inequalities are reproduced and intensified as low-

status, less-articulated healing modalities come to be seen as expressions of a
primordialism which is incompatible with the modern state’s vision of itself.
High-status, politically organized practitioners, such as Ayurvedic practitioners
in India, are able to maintain and even enhance their legitimacy and access to
state resources in the discursive construction of “complementary” care, tradi-
tional and biomedical. Nationalist discourse is another sustaining element of
traditional healing in postcolonial states, whose leaders endeavor to counterbal-
ance the negative effects of Westernization with valorization of state-authorized
forms of “indigenous culture.”
There are a variety of ways in which the universalizing knowledge claims of
biomedicine, as a discursive construction, create a “growth of ignorance” (Ho-
bart 1993) whereby local knowledge is of marginal or negative utility. The value
of indigenous healing modalities for local people may not depend on their iden-
tification with highly systematized and discursively elaborated bodies of formal
knowledge. Healing practices that rely for their efficacy on embodied disposi-
tions and orientations, on “habitus” in Bourdieu’s (1992) terms, may be anti-
thetical to the state projects of normalization of citizens through techniques of
hygiene, hospitalization, pharmaceutical treatments, and the like.
The significance of what de Certeau (1988) termed “minor practices” (see
discussion of the concept in Ram’s Chapter 4) is explored by a number of
contributors to this volume. For example, Cynthia Hunter describes the ways in
which Sasak villagers on the island of Lombok, Indonesia, experience the ten-
sions between modernity and the customary practices of their rural community
when Henryati, the young daughter of a local schoolteacher, dies after a long
illness. Relatives seeking treatment through the village clinics and district hos-
pital of the state health system were mystified and alienated by the practices
they encountered and the failure to achieve any meaningful explanation of illness
or treatment from medical staff. The resolution of the moral and epistemological
problem of the girl’s death came through the diagnosis of sorcery, made by all
the indigenous healers (belian) consulted by Henryati’s parents, even while they
persevered with biomedical treatments. This sorcery diagnosis was given force
and strength, particularly for Henryati’s mother and paternal aunt (who did not
share the father’s formal education or modernist ideals), through the locally
embedded discourse of kin and neighbors, articulated through presence and talk
in the cooperative gatherings, especially women’s gatherings, of daily life in the
village. Sasak villagers do not accept the negative valuation of their practical
knowledge by functionaries of the state health system. They attribute meaning
to illness and death within an alternative framework of experience that is sus-
tained by local social relations and embodied practices, despite deployments of
state power and knowledge through the hierarchical organization of hospitals,
health centers, and village health posts.
In postcolonial states, citizens’ affiliation to the state is cultivated through
new forms of social association—in formal institutions such as schools and
Healing Powers in Contemporary Asia 11

clinics, as well as in the public culture of the nation (anniversaries, commem-

orations, and celebrations). Indigenous healing is both sustained by and sustains
forms of social relationship that bring into question the primacy of people’s
identity as citizens. This is another context in which people, and their healing
practices, are likely to be challenged by the state, with mixed results. In Chapter
7 Amanda Harris argues that social relations in Iban longhouse communities in
Sarawak are central to the satisfactory enactment of healing work. Biomedical
hierarchies of knowledge sever the biological from the social, and biomedical
institutions construct the social relations of healing through bureaucratic prac-
tices, thus combining to deny many facets of Iban experience. Harris chooses
case studies that show how contested the meaning of illness and death may be.
In Gana’s case, as in the case of Henryati documented by Cynthia Hunter,
the diagnosis of shaman and longhouse residents had explanatory force that
biomedical diagnoses lacked. Gana was widely understood to have died from a
spirit attack brought on by a breach of customary law that the patient had ig-
nored. Powerful healing ceremonies performed by a shaman (manang) of high
repute failed to save him. The shaman himself had expressed doubt about the
possibility of a cure, but had responded to pressure from Gana’s longhouse
community to perform further ceremonies. Gana was not taken to hospital, al-
though the means to do so was available, because the consensus of opinion
among kin and neighbors was that hospital treatment was useless in this case.
He died in the longhouse where more than a hundred people had gathered to
lend their support. The prevailing opinion among those involved was that Gana
had died of a spirit attack too powerful for any shaman’s ministrations.
By contrast, the schoolgirl Nita’s death was less confidently explained. She
died in the hospital and was brought back to the longhouse where her “spirit”
aspect (semangat) ominously appeared to relatives several weeks after her fu-
neral, which increased people’s disquiet about her death. There was a widely
held opinion that Nita had succumbed to a “new illness” (dengue fever), bio-
medically defined, that resisted any ready translation into Iban illness categories.
The sense of vulnerability and confusion engendered by Nita’s death under-
mined people’s confidence in the indigenous theories and practices that had
failed to cure her. The experience of Iban longhouse residents suggests that
people are compelled to think about modernity through the suffering body. New
illnesses connected with changes to the physical and social environment alter
the foundations of indigenous knowledge, even while this knowledge remains
an important political resource for groups being drawn into the lower levels of
an emerging class structure.
Part of biomedicine’s claim to modernity is the place it occupies in nationalist
discourses of progress and prosperity. But primordialism and cosmopolitanism
are two sides of the nationalist coin. Primordial elements are co-opted into the
construction of distinctive nationalisms that Asian governments counterpose to
Eurocentric “universalist” rhetoric (Kahn 1998, 19–20). Local healing practices
can become implicated in the politics of representation of nation-states. In be-
12 Introduction

coming a signifier of cultural identity, healing may be transformed in funda-

mental ways. Laurel Kendall’s Chapter 2 documents the mutations of modernity
in Korea from the early twentieth century to the present, elucidating the pro-
cesses whereby shamanism has been rehabilitated from the dark place of “su-
perstition” and therapeutic malpractice, onto the more appreciative public stage
of “national culture” and an authentic Korean “religion.” These mutations are
associated with a nostalgia for a preindustrial past among Koreans who expe-
rience the constraints (as well as the delights) of an urban, industrialized, con-
sumerist society.
By the 1980s, Korea’s economic prosperity and international recognition en-
couraged new ways of thinking about the past. Shamanism revived became a
signifier of a modern but distinctively Korean cultural identity. Selected sha-
manic ceremonies since the early 1980s have been officially designated as “In-
tangible National Treasures,” while the carefully chosen shamans who perform
them are “Human Cultural Treasures.” Shamans themselves organize staged
events to showcase the more spectacular aspects of their performances to large
urban audiences who are placed in the role of passive spectators. However,
shamanism’s role in the rites of nationhood has not subsumed other practices
and meanings that it has for shamans and their clients. Kendall finds that sha-
mans are consulted for the same reasons now as twenty years ago when she
first began her ethnographic study. Ceremonies for urban clients are now sched-
uled around the demands of industrial time and are held in rented shrines far
away from apartment-dwelling neighbors who would complain about the noise.
Shamans respond to clients’ perceptions of ongoing misfortune and affliction—
medical, financial, social—that are attributed to disturbed relations of the house-
hold with ancestors and gods. In this sense, then, the narrative of shamanism in
contemporary Korea is an open-ended one.
The ways in which the dialectic of shamanism and the imperatives of mo-
dernity can create new opportunities for practitioners themselves is explored in
Carol Laderman’s Chapter 3, which details the rise of a young woman shaman
on the east coast of Malaysia, whose unorthodox methods of therapy simulta-
neously attracted a new category of affluent, urban clients, while alienating her
village neighbors. Laderman describes the transformation of Cik Su’s practice
over almost a decade, as she selectively shed some of the traditional elements
of Malay seances that were unappealing to her urban clients (including their
lengthiness) while playing up certain theatrical elements. She drew in a new
partner in her performances, a male government official, who reworked tradi-
tional Malay medical theory into a simplified modern idiom and combined it
with elements of Islamic doctrine. Cik Su and her partner combined “antiquity
and modernity, magic and religious orthodoxy” in ways that appealed to both
the Islamic piety of clients as well as their attraction to a reconstructed “au-
thentic” Malay identity. The politics of national identity may foster the revival
of indigenous cultural forms in ways that commodify and decontextualize them,
for purposes of state power, as in the Korean example. But innovations, as
Healing Powers in Contemporary Asia 13

Laderman’s chapter suggests, are not entirely in the control of the state. Shamans
and their patients engage the processes of modernity in ways that maintain their
value and utility for a range of social groups.
The experience of modernity is inevitably gendered, although there is no
necessary relationship between gender and other dimensions of difference. In
postcolonial Asia, while men are frequently seen to formulate and implement
national agendas, and occupy the more favorable niches in the modern economy,
women are more likely to be associated with primordial values, and are often
relegated to the most exploitative forms of labor (Sen and Grown 1987; Mo-
hanty, Russo, and Torres 1991). However, these images must be tempered with
others: powerful women politicians (such as Benazir Bhutto, Indira Gandhi,
Cory Aquino, Imelda Marcos, and Megawati Sukarnoputri) have drawn on class
connections that have facilitated their influence on the nation-state through a
diversity of political ideologies. These women, and educated middle-class
women like the reform-minded Indian doctors discussed in Kalpana Ram’s chap-
ter, are likely to “identify with the workings of modernity and not see themselves
as all that marginal.”8 They may thereby become participants in national and
international policies of development of which poor women are often the targets.
Critical feminist scholarship has impressively documented how development
programs involve particular forms of gender bias with the result that traditional
areas of female autonomy and strength are undermined (for example, see Rogers
1980; Sen and Grown 1987; Kabeer 1994).
The positioning of women in postcolonial Asian states in relation to the val-
ues, policies, and practices of biomedicine, as an icon of modernity, is worthy
of attention. Women as patients, particularly as childbearers, have been sub-
jected to intense forms of biomedical rationality through state-sponsored health
systems. Indices of fertility, morbidity, and mortality rates of infants and mothers
have become deeply invested with political meanings of progress, so that women
become the target of invasive forms of surveillance and control instituted by the
“social welfare” arm of modern Asian states (Yuval-Davis 1997; Ram and Jolly
1998). As healers, women’s expertise is rendered valueless or even dangerous
and should yield to the superior capacities of biomedicine. “Traditional” birth
attendants (TBAs) have been especially subjected to these constructions, and
have been discriminated against in many ways despite the continued patronage
and respect they receive from many women. They have often been designated
untrainable, or have received inappropriate and poor-quality training in programs
sponsored by international agencies such as UNICEF (e.g., see Rozario 1998).
Articulations of gender with other forms of marginality is a subject that merits
close anthropological analysis, as it is in the conduct of everyday life that the
complexity of social domination emerges. Kalpana Ram takes up the struggles
around midwifery in South India as a way of revealing the internal complexities
of modernity as a postcolonial phenomenon and the significance of continuities
with the past. Ram combines historical and ethnographic analysis to show how
reform of childbirth in the Indian colonial context became a cause that endowed
14 Introduction

British colonialist women with racial power, and was tied to broader critiques
of Indian culture. After Independence, the cause of reform was continued by
middle-class Indian women, securing them key positions in the national health
system.
These reformist initiatives persist into the present in discourses around the
dai or indigenous midwife. Indigenous midwives resist their integration into the
biomedical health system in a variety of ways. Their stories of attending child-
births valorize their practical knowledge, despite its low status in the Indian
hierarchy of male-dominated, textualized knowledges. They come to their vo-
cation in response to the needs of women in their communities, and learn
through “immersion” in the birth milieu by watching, talking, and doing. Their
practices may include negotiating relationships with biomedical authorities on
behalf of their patients, despite their frequent rejection by staff in hospitals and
clinics. Ram argues that the midwife is “located at the intersection of diverse
relations of power,” including the relations of the home where most rural births
still take place, as well as the clinic.
The midwife by virtue of her multiple marginalities—of class, gender, post-
coloniality, and often, caste9 —develops a range of “tactics” (in de Certeau’s
terms). These tactics, such as ingenious manipulations of the foetal position to
facilitate birth, or the use of locally available herbal medicines, empower the
midwife in ways that might not be available to her Western counterpart. At the
same time, midwives’ knowledge of the spirit world and use of ritual techniques
render them “irrevocably Other and subaltern to the agents of modernity.”10 Ram
suggests that the situation of the South Indian midwife thus allows us to con-
template a more “complex and comparative” (and, one might add, gendered)
acount of modernity.

ARTICULATIONS OF GLOBAL AND LOCAL

Globalization is usually fairly loosely characterized as the movements, con-
nections, and processes that link people, information, and commodities around
the world. While globalization is often represented as a causal process, it is
more productive to think of it as a descriptive term for many interrelated phe-
nomena that require theoretical analysis. The debates around globalization have
tended to focus on the arguments of those who identify universal processes in
globalization (referred to by Roland Robertson [1995] as the “homogenizers”),
and those (the “heterogenizers”) who emphasize the divergence of processes and
epistemologies that can be described as global. In the sphere of economic theory,
the term has been used to imply the demise of the nation-state or national
economies. However, economic globalization theories of this type have been
disputed by theorists such as Hirst and Thompson (1996), who argue that an
integrated international economy, in which nation-states remain important units,
is a more accurate picture of the current and future global economic order.
Anthropologists are perhaps less concerned with the efforts of sociological
Healing Powers in Contemporary Asia 15

theory to “internationalize” itself through various forms of globalization theory,

as with the articulations of the “global” and the “local” from the perspective of
the local. For anthropologists, the local may refer to the traditional units of
study—small-scale communities in which kinship relations are still an important
ordering principle of social life. But it may also refer to groups which are
“minorities” in nation-states, to displaced persons who are members of “imag-
ined communities,” or to categories of social association, such as that of shamans
and their clients. The local is also a form of representation, in which, for ex-
ample, cultural idioms and commodities are brought into relationship through
institutions such as advertising. All these approaches to the local can be found
in this volume, and permit us to escape from the too simplistic dichotomies of
some overgeneralized and often Eurocentric globalization theory that Goran
Therborn has recently suggested threatens a return to the unifying theory of
“sociological master narratives” (1995, 124).
The chapters in this book explore the articulation of the local and the global
in Asian societies with the purpose of yielding comparative insights into specific
social and cultural processes that are part of modernity. Healing is a site of
transaction and transformation between global and local. Commodification of
medicines and therapies, for example, works in many different directions, not
just as a transfer of “global” biomedicine to “local” societies. In Karnataka,
South India, Mark Nichter (Chapter 5) documents the ambivalence that patients
and healers express about modernity in their “double-voiced” commentaries on
the benefits of progress and the ills of urban-industrial society. Patients seek
solutions to the negative health effects of modern life (including the iatrogenic
effects of biomedicine) in the “ecological” approach of Ayurvedic medicine,
whose theory links a common problem, indigestion, to capitalism’s exploitation
of people and environment. This potentially radical critique of modernity, which
leads some patients, at least, to a cure, has in important respects been co-opted
by the manufacturers of the plethora of commercial Ayurvedic products that
now flood the market. As healers themselves are aware, misuse of Ayurvedic
medicine has become as problematic as misuse of allopathic medicine, and both
point to the larger process of “defective modernization.”
In a study that highlights quite different transformative powers of global and
local Marina Roseman (Chapter 6) has documented how the Temiars of Malay-
sia harness the power of commodities and other icons of transnational modernity
in their healing ceremonies. Temiar forest dwellers are confronted with the dev-
astation of their natural environment by the encroachment of logging companies.
A people who have long interacted with “outforester” others, they are now
challenged by the destruction of the environment that provides them with sus-
tenance. Spirit guides provide shamans with new dream songs: from airplanes
(that have historically brought food drops as well as bombs); dried fish (a new
staple that replaces dwindling forest foods); and a foreign woman from the
marketplace of the downstream town where Temiars now trade on disadvanta-
geous terms with the transnational economy. Strips of plastic bags replace shred-
16 Introduction

ded forest leaves (now in short supply) in the shimmering moments that
“disassemble the visual field” during healing ceremonies. The particular genres
in which each new song is received enable Temiars to map their experiences of
modernity at the site of the sensory and the embodied.
Such innovations bear potent testimony to the engagement of the Temiar with
global processes in ways that are continuous with past experiences of the new
and the strange. Rather than interpreting these improvisations as a capitulation
to the overwhelming forces of change, Roseman argues that they are part of a
local politics of survival that provides the Temiar with “a technology for main-
taining personal and social integrity in the face of nearly overwhelming odds.”
Rather than commodities being an expropriation of power from local knowledge
systems, as the Ayurvedic healers discussed by Nichter understood to be hap-
pening, the Temiar appropriate the power of commodities into local knowledge
systems in order to fortify themselves against their emergence as part of the
underclass in Malaysia’s capitalist economy.
Indigenous healing may be drawn into the global flow of ideas and commod-
ities by linkage with the political struggles of minorities. The situation of Tibetan
medicine in both the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) of the PRC, and among
exiles in North India, illustrates this process. In Chapter 10 Craig Janes studies
the social organization of Tibetan medicine in the TAR, focussing on its trans-
formations since the implementation of “socialist market economy” policies in
the mid-1980s. Throughout the vicissitudes of policy changes, Tibetan medicine
has continued to enjoy a state-endorsed legitimacy as part of the “family of
Chinese medicines” since the integration of Tibet into the PRC in 1959. In this
respect, Tibetan medicine is not different from the other government-sanctioned
“traditional medicines” that were discussed by Sydney White. Janes documents
the explosion in demand for Tibetan medicine, in urban areas as well as rural,
arguing that there are a number of reasons why Tibetan medicine has flourished,
even in the current phase of socialist market-economic policy whereby state
subsidies of the health system have declined, and rural cooperatives (which
funded local clinics in the past) are no longer strongly supported by the state.
Patients do not see biomedicine as providing adequate treatment for chronic
conditions. Moreover, other elements of Tibetans’ formerly highly pluralistic
system, particularly more overtly “religious” elements (such as divination by
lamas), have declined as they did not meet state-defined criteria of health care.
Another reason of particular relevance to the arguments here is that Tibetan
medicine provides a context in which people can express their distress in their
own cultural idioms as a vulnerable and disenfranchised minority in the PRC,
subjected to forms of racism that are also documented by Vincanne Adams
Chapter 11.
The pressure on doctors, clinics, and medicine manufacturers to make profit
out of Tibetan medicine by commodification of services and remedies in the
new market economy means that it is becoming less accessible to poorer, rural
sectors of the population, who now have to compete with more affluent urban
Healing Powers in Contemporary Asia 17

and international consumers. This responsiveness to the market (and to the cul-
tural authority of biomedical science in terms of which Tibetan medicine is
trying to justify itself) is transforming the practice of Tibetan medicine. It com-
promises the quality of local practitioners and medicines (as the priority services
and products go to consumers who can pay the highest prices), and threatens to
transform it into a “superficial herbalism.” The increasingly transnational char-
acter of Tibetan medicine’s appeal, linked as it is to foreign interest in Buddhism
and Tibetan culture more generally, may threaten its accessibility as a resource
for the disempowered Tibetan minority in the PRC.
Vincanne Adams’ chapter explores the dialectic of past and present knowl-
edges in her study of Tibetan medical theorizing about women’s health in Lhasa.
Doctors trained in traditional Tibetan medicine have an ambivalent relationship
to past knowledge, an ambivalence conditioned by the political situation in the
PRC. Elements of the wisdom of the past that can be dissociated from socialist
ideologies of “feudalism” and backwardness are celebrated but need recuperat-
ing and validating in modern scientific terms so that Tibetan medicine will
continue to progress. Adams discusses a modern Tibetan medical text on
women’s health for what it reveals about a particular apprehension of modernity
that is conditioned by its author’s location as a Tibetan minority intellectual in
the Chinese socialist state. The text, conforming to the dictates of liberalization-
era reforms, affirms both the reality of gender discrimination in the Tibetan past
but also the seeds of gender equality that can be found there. These seeds can
now be cultivated by combining the wisdom of traditional sages and healers
with biomedical science, toward the end of improving women’s health.
Modern science can improve the practice of Tibetan medicine, and indeed in
Adams’ ethnographic research in the women’s ward at the main traditional med-
icine hospital in Lhasa, she found that biomedical technologies such as ultra-
sound were frequently incorporated into diagnosis and treatment. However, from
many practitioners’ point of view, these innovations confirm and refine tradi-
tional knowledge, rather than undermining its epistemological foundations. From
the point of view of the patient who consults a traditional Tibetan healer, she
does not necessarily experience herself as medicalized, objectified, and alienated,
even where biomedical techniques are applied, as a Western patient might do,
because these practices are contextualized within a different epistemological
framework. In other words, Adams argues that appropriations of modernity
should not be taken as a capitulation to its terms. Tibetans in Lhasa may draw
on the power of biomedicine to strengthen their traditional knowledge and prac-
tices.
When we turn to the situation of a social group displaced from their home-
land, as in the Tibetans of North India studied by Geoffrey Samuel in Chapter
12, the terms of understanding must take account of their multiple marginalities:
as Tibetans originating from a disenfranchised minority in the PRC, and as
exiles, persons without place or citizenship in their new location. The “percep-
tion of loss,” inherent in the modern experience that is canvassed by Adams in
18 Introduction

relation to Lhasan Tibetans, is acute for the exiles who are physically separated
from their homeland, even if freer to practice their religion and maintain their
culture than their relatives in Tibet. Samuel explores the ways in which the
practice of traditional Tibetan medicine in two North Indian refugee settlements
diverges from both textual accounts and popular Western interpretations.
The theory of humoral imbalance, which is emphasized in books for Western
readers, was rather attenuated in the Tibetan clinics described in the chapter, as
was the reliance on diagnostic techniques such as urine analysis. Pulse reading
was the main diagnostic tool, supplemented frequently by blood pressure read-
ings taken with a sphygmomanometer. Diagnostic categories and procedures
showed some marked variance with categories in the relevant Gyü Shi texts and
their commentaries. An attenuation of more “supernatural” categories, an attrib-
ute also remarked on by Janes for TAR practice, was evident. Samuel locates
the discrepancies between the pragmatically oriented practices of Tibetan doctors
and the representations of their work in two related but separate processes: the
long-standing relationship with biomedicine that is part of the practice of Tibetan
medicine in India as well as the TAR; and the Western romanticization of Ti-
betan religion and culture that has included healing.
If Tibetan medicine in North India is being reconstituted by processes of
modernity, then it is not a one-dimensional or unidirectional process. Like Ti-
betan practitioners in Lhasa, those in control of Tibetan medicine through the
Department of Health in Dharamsala endeavor to legitimate its efficacy in bi-
omedical terms. Patients, already familiar with common concepts and treatments
of biomedicine as it is practiced in North India, exert further pressures toward
a more pragmatic version of practice. As for Tibetans in Lhasa, traditional heal-
ing is a valued cultural resource that is idenitified with struggles over national
identity. For exiles also, Tibetan medicine is an important economic resource as
medicines are a commodity that is increasingly in demand by consumers in
many parts of the world. While Tibetan patients have a fairly pragmatic orien-
tation to traditional medicine, the demand from international patients is created
by what can only be described as the imposition of the more spiritualized in-
terpretation of Tibetan healing that accords with the general interest in Tibetan
Buddhism internationally. The exoticizing of Tibetan culture, a process in which
Tibetans themselves actively participate, has important ramifications for the
practice of healing. Tibetan exiles, while a disempowered minority in many
respects, actively build on the cultural capital at their disposal—their medicine’s
efficacy and its holism—in ways that serve the purposes of cultural identity
struggles as well as health care.

CONCLUSION
It seems imperative for anthropologists to use their particular skills and
knowledge to further our understanding of the ways in which social groups
engage with global forces of change. Transformations are felt just as much in
Healing Powers in Contemporary Asia 19

the arena of healing as in other areas of social life. If we take “healing” to be

a process that is embedded in a spectrum of interconnected social relations,
embodied dispositions, and diverse modes of knowing, then we have to question
whether healing is compatible with modernity, or whether “health,” a biomed-
ically defined and achieved goal, will be the limit of human aspiration in the
future. Much of the recent innovative work by anthropologists working in Asian
societies has focussed on the ways in which healing has become a contested
and deeply politicized area of modern life. Global modernities, from a “health”
perspective, are characterized not only by “wonder drugs” and the proliferation
of new biomedical technology, but also by new epidemics, mass violence, po-
litical repression, population displacements, endemic disease, and environmental
degradation, all of which can be related to global relations of power at many
levels. The anthropological studies in this volume render “healing” visible as a
vital process in any praxis of change that reaches for better global futures.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful for thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter by
Laurel Kendall, Kalpana Ram, Santi Rozario, and Geoffrey Samuel.

NOTES
1. None of these three terms satisfactorily delimits the scope of healing practices in
Asia. All healing, including biomedicine, has “local” specificities; it is difficult to de-
scribe widely used healing systems with a long-documented history of syncretism, such
as Ayurveda or Chinese medicine, as “indigenous”; and “traditional” implies a rigidity
and resistance to change that is not characteristic of healing, whether in Asia or anywhere
else. In this book, contributors have used whichever term seems most appropriate to the
context of discussion.
2. See Leslie (1976, 6–8) for a discussion of these and other usages. The term “cos-
mopolitan” seems particularly dismissive of the complex history of global interconnect-
edness that characterizes the formal, literate traditions of medicine practiced in Asia.
Leslie (1976, 8) favored this term because he thought it best summarized the scientific
and professionalizing processes of biomedicine.
3. See, for example, the chapters by M. A. Jaspan and Alan Beals.
4. This useful term was coined by Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson (1995) as the
title of their recent book.
5. There has been great variability historically as well, as many of the chapters in
this book document.
6. As Janes points out in Chapter 10, Maoist-era China is one exception to this.
7. I am grateful to Kalpana Ram for providing me with this example (personal com-
munication, 7th September 1999).
8. Kalpana Ram, personal communication, 7th September 1999.
9. Ram makes the point that among coastal communities of Tamil Nadu where she
worked, where there are many converts to Catholicism, midwifery is not necessarily
associated with pollution or low status.
20 Introduction

10. Laurel Kendall in Chapter 2 makes the same point with regard to shamans in
Korea.

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Southeast Asian Studies.
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Healing Powers in Contemporary Asia 21

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 PART I

HEALING IN THE MODERN

STATE: KOREA, MALAYSIA,
AND INDIA
 2

The Cultural Politics of

“Superstition” in the Korean
Shaman World: Modernity
Constructs Its Other
Laurel Kendall

What was not transportable, or not yet transported, into the new areas of
progress appeared as “superstition.”
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984.

su.per.sti.tion 1a: a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the

unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation b: an
irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God
resulting from superstition
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, electronic edition, c. 1994–1995.

Superstition: misin, mi ⫽bewitched, deluded, false. sin ⫽belief

Chinese: mixin, Vietnamese: me tin

When we consider “modernity” not as an inevitable and unidirectional process,

but rather, in Baudrillard’s (1987) sense, as something like a viral ideology that
has infected most of the globe but mutated, waxed, and sometimes waned in
local settings (Rofel 1992), then new questions can be asked. “Superstition”
may, with “modernity,” be interrogated as a historically contingent ideological
construct, the potent dark side against which modernities take shape and measure
themselves. For a century or more, Korean intellectuals and reformers have
regarded shamanic practices as the target of a Manichean struggle between “mo-
26 Healing in the Modern State

dernity” and “superstition,” “rationality” and “magic.” From the modernizers’

perspective, this conflict has been about medicine and healing, it has been per-
ceived and experienced as a contestation between rational science on the one
hand, and charlatanry and peasant credulity on the other. These attitudes were
very much alive in Korea when I began my first fieldwork in the late 1970s. In
this chapter, I examine the local history of a potent and well-traveled concept,
considering the stakes with which “superstition” was originally invested in Ko-
rea, for whom, and in what relation to the shamans upon whom its stigma was
cast. Even as the onus of “superstition” is eclipsed by more recent Korean
celebrations of shamanic rituals as “national culture,” these new public dis-
courses are similarly detached from the perceptions and experiences of those
who enact, sponsor, and participate in shamanic rituals and have similarly in-
vested in the ideological baggage of modernity.

THE CONFRONTATION
On a cold, dark night in the early spring of 1977, I attend a kut for a family
that had suffered multiple afflictions. Some months before this kut, the mother
of the family was shot near her heart by a stray bullet as she tended her fields
near a military installation. She did not know what had hit her. Because this
was a sudden and mysterious affliction, her family called in the local shaman
who performed a small exorcism. They also took the mother to a small clinic
in Righteous Town and then to the branch of a major hospital on the outskirts
of Seoul. No one could say what was wrong with her until the family, in des-
peration, took her to St. Mary’s General Hospital in downtown Seoul. There,
she finally did receive effective treatment, but her cure took several months and
was expensive. The family sold their cow and pig—most of their liquid assets—
and spent money that they had been saving for the youngest daughter’s wed-
ding.1 With rightful claims to compensation money, they tried to find the person
who had fired the gun, but it was a futile search. And then the eldest son injured
his leg. After visiting several doctors, he still walks with a limp. The strained
expression on his face suggests constant pain.
The daughter, who relates all of this to me when I ask her, “Why is your
family holding this kut?” adds that even before her mother’s accident, things
had not been going well. Their regular shaman advised them to tend their restless
ancestors with a kut, but because their resources were pinched, they had made
only a minor offering to exorcise ominous ancestral influences (p
udakkôri).
Within months of this insufficient gesture, the mother had been hit by the stray
bullet and the family fortunes continued to plummet.
By 10.30 P.M., the shamans are well into the kut. A policeman from the district
office appears at the gate and shouts his insistence that they cease their drum-
ming and dancing. He complains that this sort of activity is precisely why the
New Village Movement has not advanced in Enduring Pine Village. He de-
nounces the shamans for dancing and shaking their hips to the drum rhythm in
Superstition in the Korean Shaman World 27

front of schoolboys. This greatly amuses the shamans, but the elderly couple
who are sponsoring the kut are irate at the policeman’s intrusion. The old woman
shouts at him with great fervor, “My son is ill. There is no help for it.”
“If your son is ill, you should go to the hospital.”
“We’ve been to hospitals.”
Urged by the crowd to calm down and go away, the policeman threatens to
imprison the shamans for a month if he finds them still drumming and dancing
when he returns. The old man, the master of the house, declares that the kut is
his responsibility and that if the shamans are to be arrested, then the policeman
must arrest him as well. The policeman stalks away and does not return. It is
generally assumed that this defender of local morality and social progress had
been mollified with an envelope of “cigarette money” for his trouble.2 The drum-
ming and dancing resumes and continues well into the next morning.

AN IDEOLOGY OF AFFLICTION
This interrupted kut, and many others that proceeded smoothly to completion,
taught me that far more is at stake in shamanic rituals than a one-shot cure for
an individual illness. This was not a simple exercise in “health-seeking behav-
ior,” a privileging of “sacred medicine” over the “cosmopolitan” variety, a visit
to the shaman in preference to a visit to the hospital. Indeed, the family had
consulted a variety of hospitals and doctors and the mother had received a
satisfactory biomedical cure. The shaman was not a stand-in for the doctor. The
kut addressed not the specific illness, neither the mother’s nor the son’s, but
rather a pervasive climate of family affliction in which accidents and injuries
could occur, where an injury might not heal despite repeated medical treatment,
and where ruinous medical expenses had grave consequences for other members
of the household. Although the mother told the policeman that she was holding
the kut because her son was ill, when she importuned the spirits who spoke
through the shamans, she seemed equally concerned about her youngest daugh-
ter’s marriage prospects, anxious because she had spent her daughter’s marriage
money on her own medical treatment.
Generalizing from many kut like this one, I would describe an “ideology of
affliction” wherein all manner of problems—medical, financial, and social—are
symptomatic of a household’s troubled relations with its ancestors and gods
(Kendall 1985, esp. Ch. 5). In all of these kut, the entire household and the full
sum of the problems and aspirations of all of its inhabitants become the subject
of healing. The idiom of healing is a series of reconciliations between the living
members of the household and their gods and ancestors who appear in sequence
in the person of costumed shamans (Kendall 1977; 1985, esp. Ch. 1).3 The
policeman, of course, saw things differently. People who ought to be visiting
doctors were spending money on “irrational” ritual practices. In my early work
I found it necessary to confound these notions of “either/or,” “medicine or
magic” with a view from within the world of shamans, clients, and kut where
28 Healing in the Modern State

there was no contradiction between visiting a doctor and consulting a shaman.

In my own thinking, I elided any distinction between the policeman’s critique
and commonsensical attitudes encountered closer to home. Ethnography would
triumph over all by illuminating the internal logic of shamanic practice. I failed
to recognize that the policeman also inhabited my ethnographic field even as
slogans advocating “development” (paltal) and “enlightenment” (kyemyônghwa)
were inscribed on the walls of public buildings. Belatedly, I would acknowledge
the policeman as a social actor within the rural Korean world of the 1970s, a
product of both that time and place and nearly a century’s history of Korean
“modernity.”
This particular confrontation between the policeman, the shamans, and the
elderly couple took place during the most enthusiastic years of the New Village
Movement (Saemaûl Undong), initiated by the Park Chung-hee regime in the
early 1970s as a mass mobilization campaign involving local communities in a
variety of public works projects. Under the movement banner and with official
encouragement, local leaders also attacked extravagant rituals and “supersti-
tious” practices that were seen as detrimental to the economies of time and
money necessary for national development. In these years, the Movement to
Overthrow Superstition (Misin T’ap’a Undong) countenanced the destruction of
village shrines and the fining or imprisonment of shamans for holding kut (Ch’oe
1974). “Superstition” (misin) is a term with powerful ideological content in
Korea. Its genealogy is bound up with that of modern Korean history.

KOREA GETS SUPERSTITION

Confucian officials in dynastic times disdained shamans as practitioners of
unclean and improper rituals and as potential charlatans. The Confucian world-
view did not deny the existence of spirits so much as it asserted that there were
better, more proper, less socially deleterious ways to honor them than by em-
ploying shamans. Local magistrates attempted periodically to transform sha-
manic rituals at local shrines into rites performed according to Confucian rules
of ritual propriety. Some officials challenged the efficacy of specific spirits hon-
ored in particular local shrines, but only in rare instances of intellectual specu-
lation was the very existence of spirits called into question (Walraven 1996; Yi
1976).
The labeling of popular religious practices as “superstition” demands a pro-
found cognitive break with the ambiguity and ambivalence of Confucians past.
Rendered in Sino-Korean ideographs as misin, the term literally means “de-
luded” or “false” belief. It proclaims that there are no spirits, that the gods and
ancestors do not and can not affect human fortune. The term came to Korea in
the late nineteenth century via Japan where words had been feverishly coined
to express in ideographs new social, political, and philosophical concepts con-
tained in Western books, the newly minted vocabulary of modernity that was
assaulting East Asia (Ch’oe 1974; Cohen 1993). “Superstition” had already en-
Superstition in the Korean Shaman World 29

joyed a long currency in the West. With subtle shifts in meaning over time and
space, it had originally connoted improper, transgressive, or false beliefs in
contrast to better, more orthodox religious ideas and practices. With the Enlight-
enment, superstition acquired its “modern” meaning as not merely “bad religion”
but “bad science,” “misplaced assumptions about causality stemming from a
faulty understanding of nature” (O’Neil 1987, 165). The Japanese translator
captured this gloss precisely in his choice of ideographs. In East Asia, as in the
post-Enlightenment West, “superstition” would serve forever after as modern-
ity’s dark alter ego, the realm of unacceptable practices, of things irrational,
invalid, and consequently harmful.4
But why—if we no longer accept the inevitability of modernity’s grand nar-
rative—should Korean intellectuals have accepted the terms of this language
and incorporated them into their own view of the world? To pursue the viral
analogy introduced at the beginning of this chapter, late nineteenth and early
twentieth-century Korean nationalists were highly susceptible to infection, hu-
miliated by Korea’s slide into the colonial orbit of the Japanese Empire in 1910
and willing to blame native traditions for the nation’s weakness and humiliation.
Historian Michael Robinson characterizes progressive Korean intellectuals of the
early twentieth century as “quick to point out Korea’s failings, contrasting their
own tradition with their understanding of what was modern, progressive, and
scientific” (Robinson 1988, 35). They criticized Confucianism for fostering op-
pressive gerontocratic mores and empty ritualism (ch. 1). Buddhism would be
reformed along “modern, scientific lines” (Buswell 1992, 26) as in Thailand
(Keyes 1989) and Sri Lanka (Obeyesekere 1991; Swearer 1991, 637–638). Sha-
mans, accused of deluding the people and fostering “irrational” beliefs, were to
be extirpated as in China (Anagnost 1987; Duara 1991; Luo 1991), Siberia
(Balzer 1993, 1996; Vitebsky 1995) and many other places.
Many early progressives marked their rejection of the Korean past by becom-
ing Christian. Indeed, Korea is Protestant Christianity’s unique success story in
Asia, and Christian concepts of religion have had great bearing on how many
Korean intellectuals view indigenous practice. Protestant Christianity sunk deep
roots in Korea in the 1890s, bearing schools for Western education and hospitals,
the institutional accoutrements of enlightenment and science (Clark 1986, Ch.
2). According to Robinson, many prominent intellectuals “linked in their own
minds Western social and political institutions with Christianity” (Robinson
1988, 35).5 In the pages of The Independent (Tongnip Sinmun), an early pro-
gressive newspaper published bilingually with missionary support in the twilight
years of the Chosôn dynasty, concerned nationalists railed against deceptive
shamans and inept practitioners of Chinese medicine. This, in de Certeau’s
terms, is the “cleavage” that “organizes modernity,” the imperative that “sci-
ence” would conquer the “irrational” hinterland of the human imagination, im-
posing its own words and categories upon it (de Certeau 1984, 6).
“Modernity,” as a self-conscious ideology, shaped the identity of the small
group of first-generation professionals and entrepreneurs that appeared in the
30 Healing in the Modern State

cities of the colonial period (1910–1945) (Robinson 1988; Eckert 1991, Ch. 2).
Disdain for shamans and “superstition” became a naturalized attribute of this
new class as it distinguished itself from a seemingly “backward” rural populace.
We have seen this process elsewhere. Keith Thomas describes how in England,
by the seventeenth century, new intellectual developments deepened the gulf
between the educated urban classes and the “superstitious” lower strata of the
rural population who became the objects of “folklore” (Thomas 1971, 666).
A similar split has come to exist in China where, from the end of the last
century, the traditions of vast rural populations have been “derided as backward
and actively suppressed by China’s modern political and intellectual elites,
whose views on other matters range across the political spectrum from extremes
of the Left and the Right” (Cohen 1991, 113). Both Argyrou (1993, 266), writing
of Cyprus, and Kapferer (1983, 18, 29), writing of Sri Lanka, describe the
middle class’s identification with “science” or with more “rational”-seeming
religious practices as a means of asserting and naturalizing class domination. In
urban India, middle-class households adopt new “rationalized” devotional prac-
tices that disassociate them from rural “superstition” (Babb 1990).
In rural Nepal, those whose occupations define them as agents of “develop-
ment” are most likely to reject shamanic practices as a way of asserting their
own claims to “modernity” (Pigg 1996). Stacey Pigg’s observation that “the
idea of the modern generates a sense of difference while at the same time hold-
ing out the promise of inclusion in a global cosmopolitan culture” (165) has a
wide application beyond the site of her Nepalese fieldwork. The point here is
not that the new elites’ posture toward popular religion is an inevitable conse-
quence of “modernity” so much as it represents the self-conscious inhabiting of
new class positions.
In Korea, by the 1930s, the logic of these associations—modernity, middle
class respectability, and disdain for shamans and “superstition”—would be taken
up by ambitious migrants to the colonial city as an affirmation of their new
aspirations and a measure of their disassociation from the countryside. In Pak
Wansô’s (1991) autobiographical novella, Mother’s Stake 1 (Ommaûi Malttuk),
a young widow turns her back on village life to eke out a marginal livelihood
in Seoul in the hope of educating her son and transforming her daughter into a
“new woman.”6 The widow sees her husband’s early death as a tragic conse-
quence of rural backwardness. When the doctor of Chinese medicine could not
cure her husband’s sudden and severe bellyache, she had gone with her mother-
in-law to consult a shaman who set an auspicious date for a healing kut. Her
husband had died even before she returned from the shaman’s house. The neigh-
bors attributed his death to ominous forces stirred up by the construction of a
new house, a common ascription for sudden and often fatal illness. The widow
thought otherwise. Pak writes from the young daughter’s perspective:

Mother didn’t agree with them. She . . . had relatives in cities, and had tasted civilization
before marriage, so she knew that the disease Father had died of could have been cured,
Superstition in the Korean Shaman World 31

as simply and easily as an operation on an infected finger. If only he had seen a doctor
trained in Western medicine!
From that moment on, Mother began to dream of an exodus to the city. (Pak 1991,
178)

This is modernity’s either/or logic (Tambiah 1990, 20–21), the logic of the
rural policemen a few decades later. Acute appendicitis cannot be cured with
Chinese medicine or a visit to a shaman; the patient was doomed. The young
man died of ignorance, an onus cast equally upon the bad science of Chinese
medicine and the irrationality of shamanic practice. A doctor of Western med-
icine could have saved him; tradition killed him. The “modern” widow knew
better and escaped to the colonial city; in de Certeau’s terms, she turned her
back on the “rural hinterland of the imagination.” But this is not the logic of
Korean popular religion whose palimpsest can just barely be discerned in the
story. Ominous spirits, stirred up by moving earth or erecting a new structure
without proper ritual precautions, wreak havoc upon a particularly vulnerable
family member; symptoms of a problematic and ominous spiritual condition are
made manifest in a medical crisis,7 an interpretation that does not preclude the
recognition of medical necessity. The rural family of Pak’s story summoned a
doctor of Chinese medicine for their afflicted son, a parallel of actions taken by
that other rural family in 1977 who, though cognizant of restless ancestors,
brought their afflicted mother and son to clinics and hospitals. The spirits would
be dealt with, but in their fashion.
By modernity’s logic, however, the shaman is a dangerous instrument of
ignorance, an agent of deluded and backward social practices that have tragic
consequences, just as in Enduring Pine Village, several decades later, the po-
liceman blames the shamans for the village’s lackluster participation in the New
Community Movement that will bring progress and prosperity to the village. In
his eyes, the shamans are both a source and a symptom of backwardness. That
Korean shamans have been commonsensically perceived as agents against mo-
dernity has provoked periodic campaigns of active suppression. In 1896, cheered
on by reformist elements, the Seoul police arrested shamans and destroyed
shrines (Walraven 1995, 110–111).8 Between 1919 and 1945, Korea’s Japanese
colonizers were similarly bent upon effacing “superstition,” having already
mounted this campaign at home (Robinson 1988; Hardacre 1989 for Japan). In
Korea, shamanic practices were discouraged by the strong arm of the colonial
police (Ch’oe 1974). In the 1970s, when, in the name of “development” (paltal),
the Park Chung-hee regime initiated “antisuperstition” (misin t’ap’a) campaigns,
folklorists anxious to defend local custom noted the wry parallel between this
movement and earlier Japanese colonial efforts (Ch’oe 1974). In the 1990s, this
history of suppression by the Japanese is evoked to enhance the nationalist luster
of shamanic revivals,9 but aging shamans recall how they were routinely ha-
rassed and sometimes arrested by the police of a newly independent Korean
nation under Syngman Rhee.
32 Healing in the Modern State

“SUPERSTITION” BECOMES “CULTURE”

While this agonistic play of “modernity” versus “superstition” has a near-
global resonance, familiarity should not obscure the historical specificity of each
local realization. “Superstition” and “modernity” are not immutable constructs.
“Modernities” do not inevitably vanquish “superstitions,” although this tenet is
intrinsic to modernity’s worldview, and those who are invested in “modernity”
have every incentive to tell linear narratives about themselves. “The shamans
have all died out.” “Perhaps you might find one or two in the deep country.”
“There aren’t so many kut anymore.” For more than twenty years, these pro-
nouncements have been offered to me by well-intentioned Korean interlocutors
in flat contradiction of ethnographic reality. In the 1990s, commercial shrines
on the periphery of Seoul are filled with kut, and the shrines seem to be a growth
industry. The shamans claim that more new shamans are being initiated now
than ever before (they do not universally consider this to be a good thing)
(Kendall 1996b, c).
Twenty years after the irate policeman disrupted the kut in Enduring Pine
Village and ordered the sponsors to visit a doctor, medicalized perceptions of
Korean shamanship as “superstition” are yielding ground to discussions of sha-
man rituals as “religion” (chonggyo) and “national culture” (minjok munhwa).
These borrowed concepts have their own genealogies in the history of Korean
modernity and are invested with different but still problematic stakes for the
shamans and their clients. Just as well-born collectors of popular folklore in
seventeenth-century England fed a growing sense that the citizens of town and
country inhabited different mental worlds (Thomas 1971, 666), the rise of mod-
ern folklore studies in early twentieth-century Korea was both sign and signi-
fication of the distinction between “modern” Korean urbanites and their
“traditional” past. If the countryside was a place of backwardness and supersti-
tion, by the very act of imposing distance, it became for the new middle class
a homeland of nostalgic longing, as in other places “alternately seductive and
dangerous, unique, lost” (de Certeau 1984, 132), a site of ambiguous imagining
and emotional resonance, simultaneously backward and bucolic (Williams
1973).
As elsewhere, the development of Korean folklore studies was about the pol-
itics of culture as defined by new middle-class intellectuals and mingled with
early nationalist agendas in the belief that the defining essence of a “people”
was to be found in their folk traditions (Bauman 1989, cited in Bauman and
Sawin 1990, 288; Burke 1978, Ch. 1; Linke 1990). But early Korean folklorists
were also fired by the longings of a colonized people (I. H. Choi 1987; Janelli
1986; Robinson 1988). In the manner of Confucian officials who saw themselves
as empowered to distinguish between “good and rich” custom and harmful prac-
tices (Deuchler 1992), the cultural nationalists saw themselves as sifting the pure
stuff of national tradition from the dross of superstition (Janelli 1986, 30–31;
Robinson 1988, 32).10 In crypto-Confucian dress, Korean cultural nationalists
Superstition in the Korean Shaman World 33

performed the culture work of new elites who, in de Certeau’s (1984, esp. Ch.
4) characterization, “normalize” popular practices into modernity’s new intel-
lectual regime by observing, recording, and inscribing them as folklore.
The folklorist, historian, and nationalist Ch’oe Namsôn linked contemporary
shaman practices to myths of the culture hero Tan’gun, as recorded in (highly
ambiguous) ancient texts, and precipitated an intellectual tradition that regards
“shamanism” as a unique spiritual force infusing the Korean people (Janelli
1986; Allen 1990; Walraven 1993).11 These writings moved “shamanism” from
the jaws of “superstition” to the embrace of “religion” and “culture” within
Korean intellectual discourse. Linked to Tan’gun, ancient shamanic practices
were infused, retrospectively, with nationalist spirituality, a theme that has been
taken up again with the revival of interest in Korean folklore since the 1970s
(Janelli 1986; Walraven 1993). This operation necessarily constructs contem-
porary practices as debased “survivals.” Scholars value shamans and their rituals
as evidence of ancient and enduring national traditions, while the observers
maintain their intellectual distance, as learned men and modern progressives,
from the unlettered and superstitious-seeming women who maintain these prac-
tices in the twentieth century. Thus modernity preserves its disdain of “super-
stition” while embracing “tradition” and rendering it safely in the past tense.
The folklore revival of the 1960s and 1970s was prompted by a nostalgic
reaction against rapid industrialization, booming urbanization, and a massive
influx of Western popular culture. With the growth and popularization of folk-
lore studies, many well-read Koreans began to regard shamanship as a pure
Korean tradition alive on the peninsula since before the arrival of Buddhism
and Confucianism. Shamans and their rituals were acceptable where they could
be historicized; the middle class could begin to approach them as the subjects
of folklore, the lingering relics of a dying tradition (See Figure 2.1).
The decade of the 1980s was a critical watermark for Korean thinking about
the past. Memories of national humiliation and economic hardship were now
bracketed by Korea’s entrance into the ranks of the Newly Developed Nations
and by the selection of Seoul as the site of the 1988 Olympics. Viewed from a
distance, attributes of “tradition” could be safely enjoyed. In the early 1980s,
the Ministry of Culture designated three shamanic rituals as “Intangible National
Treasures” (muhyang munhwaje). Carefully selected shamans were appointed to
perform them as “Human Cultural Treasures” (ingan munhwaje), and more
would follow. These staged performances, celebrating ritual activities as folk art
and reconstructed history, deny the persistence of lived belief and practice.
Chungmoo Choi has described some delicious ironies as shamans vie for an
official status that enhances their popularity with clients (C. Choi 1987, Ch. 2;
1991).
The 1980s would see a profound shift in the regard accorded traditional elite
versus popular culture. The 1980s were a decade of debate, argument, and some-
times violent protest, baptized in the blood of the Kwangju Insurrection and
culminating in the torrent of popular dissent, labor strikes, and grass-roots move-
34 Healing in the Modern State

Figure 2.1. A shaman balances on knife blades at a cul-

tural event in downtown Seoul. Photo by Laurel Kendall,
1994.

ments that ushered out the Chun Doo Hwan government in 1987. Things Korean
came to be cast in opposition to things Western (Kendall 1996a, Ch. 3). Nativ-
istic impulses that had fueled Korean folklore scholarship in the 1920s and
1930s and a revival of interest on university campuses in the 1970s (Janelli
1986; Robinson 1988) now blossomed into a broad-based popular culture that
drew its idioms from the traditions of downtrodden peasants and outcast sha-
mans (the minjung or “masses”) (Abelmann 1993; C. Choi 1987, 1991, 1995;
Kim 1994). Intellectual enthusiasm for popular religion mushroomed with per-
formances of kut on university campuses (including Christian universities), the
publication of attractively illustrated books on folk traditions, and television
appearances by a well-known shaman. In the summer of 1991, the first confer-
ence of the International Society for Shamanistic Research was held in Seoul,
and Korean delegates proudly suggested that Korea boasted the most vital living
shamanic tradition in the world. The process had come full circle from denial,
through nostalgic celebration, to recognition as an intangible national resource.
Superstition in the Korean Shaman World 35

GOING PUBLIC
Let me briefly describe a large public kut held in a satellite city of Seoul in
the spring of 1992.12 These kut are organized by the several associations that
now claim to speak for and defend the professional interests of shamans, but
are primarily financed by the shamans themselves who are also expected to
invest tremendous sums in identical costumes for the occasion. Many shamans
consider their participation in these events to be an honor, an opportunity for
recognition in the manner of national treasure shamans. At this particular event,
space and time were organized in the manner of a cultural festival rather than
a shaman ritual; indeed the members of the organizing committee consistently
referred to it as a haengsa, “an event,” rather than a shaman’s kut, or even a
“festival” (che).13 It began with a taped recording of the national anthem, for
which members of the audience stood and placed their hands over their hearts.
A master of ceremonies introduced members of the festival committee (all men
but for one) and distinguished guests (including myself, pinned with a distin-
guished guest’s boutonniere). We sat in a special section where a reviewing
stand, a table covered with a banner, had been improvised for the chairman and
the committee members. The chairman’s remarks echoed the sentiments ex-
pressed in the printed program, that the influence of foreign cultures has harmed
Korea’s own distinct traditions and that this event was being held to keep the
memory of such practices alive. The original local Tano Kut, it was claimed,
had disappeared during the colonial period. Once the introductory formalities
were complete, the committee and members of the local shaman’s association
gathered for a commemorative photograph.
The kut itself was performed on an open-air stage beside a large apartment
complex. As on similar occasions, the stage relegated the spectators to the role
of a passive audience while a small group of women from the association, all
wearing identical Korean dresses, received the gods’ divinations and bowed in
unison. The sense of separation, of watching rather than doing, was enhanced
by the presence of a loud-voiced man with a microphone who announced each
segment, explained its significance, named the participating shamans, and some-
times offered running commentary which, in the climactic moments of a sha-
man’s balancing on knife blades, resembled the frenzied pitch of a football
announcer.
This ambience could not be more different from the intimate atmosphere of
a country kut, like the one that I visited at the start of this chapter, where the
spirits vest with authority and humor things already known among the com-
munity, sentiments and family stories that clients, neighbors, and kin may have
already revealed to the shamans before the start of the ritual (C. Choi 1987;
Kendall 1977). These kut are about life as women live it, with tears and laughter.
In contemporary Korea, the ground has shifted, and clients living in anonymous
apartment blocks hold their kut in the more private settings of isolated rented
shrines where the sound of the drum and cymbals will not disturb the neigh-
36 Healing in the Modern State

Figure 2.2. Shaman exorcizing a couple outside the rented room of a public shrine. The
couple was anxious about the fate of their business. Photo by Laurel Kendall.

borhood (see Figure 2.2). These kut are held far away from neighbors and sup-
portive kinswomen, and they are usually held within the frame of industrial
time, condensed to permit shamans and clients to return home at sunset. With
these adjustments, shamans, clients, and spirits continue to share tales of way-
ward children, drunken spouses, and financial misadventures. If the event is
condensed in time, it has also become more intense as the shamans and spirits
directly engage the client, or the client’s immediate family, for the entire ritual.
When kut are translated into large public performances, they necessarily be-
come something else. They address not a gathering of concerned participants,
family, and neighbors, but a larger and largely anonymous public: the residents
of the sponsoring town or ward, the television-viewing nation, or, on the oc-
casion of the first conference of the International Society for Shamanistic Re-
search, scholars of the world. The personal issues discussed in more intimate
kut are not only less compelling to a broad spectrum of strangers, these poten-
tially embarrassing revelations from the private realm are inappropriate for pub-
lic display. A large public kut thus showcases feats, spectacle, and photo
opportunities while the shamans offer innocuous prognostications for good for-
tune. Personal stories are swallowed up in a larger national story, idealized,
theatrical, an icon of bygone days. By the process of designating national-
treasure teams and “reviving” local rituals with microphone commentary, sha-
Superstition in the Korean Shaman World 37

man rituals have come to be about the history of a people, about Korea, in an
authorizing process whose dominant voices are almost inevitably educated men.

CONCLUSION
A public kut is not a fair measure of what shamanic practices have become
in the 1990s. It does not represent the end point in a process. Shamans continue
to perform kut in their own practices and apart from public displays (although
some shamans might also participate in these). As living practices, shamanic
rituals are also changing practices, adjusting to the spatial constraints of urban
life, the temporal constraints of industrial time, and above all, to the particular
vicissitudes of Korean life in the 1990s (Kendall 1996b). The staged kut does
not find its counterpoint in the country kut described at the start of this chapter,
but rather in the performance of the rural policeman who attempted to disrupt
it. Both would deny the instrumentality of kut as a ritual of affliction: the one
in the name of “superstition,” the other in the construction of a palatable cultural
text. The culturalist response, no less than the denigration of these same practices
as “superstition,” must be understood as a part of the unfolding story of mo-
dernity that Korea tells about itself.
In this chapter, I have drawn on Michel de Certeau’s notion of how “mo-
dernity” discourses inscribe social practice, and have cast sideways glances to
the work of historians and anthropologists who write of other places to suggest
how the study of “superstition”—the inscription and not the thing inscribed—
can enhance a critical understanding of “modernity.” Shamans, so often cast as
the “shock absorbers of history” in Michael Taussig’s (1987, 237) apt phrase,
are an excellent flash point for these discussions. But intertextual resonances
should not suggest inevitable processes. Korean shamans and their rituals will
likely survive romanticization even as they have survived antisuperstition cam-
paigns. I have tried to suggest that the oscillating ascendancy of “superstitious”
and “culturalist” labels for shamanic practices have been linked to specific pol-
iticohistorical developments within Korea. I have also hoped to suggest—al-
though perhaps less explicitly here than in some other writing—that Korean
shamans and their clients, rather than simply being “inscribed” with the dis-
courses of modernity, have engaged and continue to engage these processes.
The kut went on, despite the policeman’s intervention.

NOTES
1. Because weddings were both a major expense and a prime parental responsibility,
mothers in Enduring Pine Village would begin to save toward their daughters’ weddings
by investing in informal credit associations years in advance of the event and usually
long before a prospective groom had been identified. In this period, most village daugh-
ters worked. Where family circumstances permitted, substantial chunks of their earnings
were invested as marriage money (see Kendall 1996a, Ch. 6).
38 Healing in the Modern State

2. A local shaman, not involved in this kut, blandly stated that the way to deal with
the police was to provide them with their cigarette money in advance to thank them for
their trouble in looking out for the household during the forthcoming “big event.” The
team that performed this kut came from the town of Suwôn where they were registered
with a local association that protected them from police harassment. They may have been
innocent of local practices.
3. The kut described above was not described by the shamans as an uhwan (affliction)
kut (usually translated as a “healing kut”) but rather a siyang kut (better known as chinogi
kut) intended to send restless and troublesome ancestors to paradise to address the prob-
lematic condition that was the root cause of affliction. See Kendall (1985, Ch. 1) for a
detailed description of a kut.
4. See Keith Thomas’ (1971) description of a post-Reformation English world at-
tempting to distinguish “religion” from unacceptable folk and papist practices.
5. Because the missionaries were not of the same nation as the colonizers, the Chris-
tian community gave early nationalists a space in which to define themselves against
both a failed tradition and the colonial presence that had supplanted it (Clark 1986, Ch.
2).
6. I am indebted to Kyeong-hee Choi both for introducing me to this work and for
her insightful interpretation of it (Choi 1996).
7. See Kendall (1985, 97–99) and the general discussion of affliction in Chapter 5.
8. Walraven notes that the persecution of shamans was practiced in dynastic times
(Walraven 1995, 109), but this would have been the first of many persecutions carried
out in the name of “modernity” and “enlightenment.”
9. Chungmoo Choi (1995) notes how the salience of the notion of “colonial erasure”
fired the enthusiasm of student groups in the early days of the Popular Culture Movement
and became a key rationale for the military government’s cultural policy.
10. See also Linke (1990).
11. Ch’oe Namsôn was not the first to describe Tan’gun as the progenitor of contem-
porary shamans. Boudewijn Walraven notes that the Mudang Naeryôk (History of the
Mudang), dated to 1885, already makes this link while it disparages then-contemporary
shaman practices (Walraven 1993, 10).
12. For a more complete account and analysis of this particular performance, see
Kendall (1998).
13. The banner draped over the performance area proclaimed the “First Sacrifice to
the Spirit of X Mountain and Tano Festival.”

REFERENCES
Abelmann, Nancy. 1993. Minjung theory and practice. In Cultural nationalism in East
Asia: representation and identity, edited by H. Befu. Berkeley: Institute of East
Asian Studies, University of California.
Allen, Chizuko T. 1990. Northeast Asia centered around Korea: Ch’oe Namsôn’s view
of history. Journal of Asian Studies 49: 787–806.
Anagnost, Ann S. 1987. Politics and magic in contemporary China. Modern China 13
(January): 40–42.
Argyrou, Vassos. 1993. Under a spell: the strategic use of magic in Greek Cypriot so-
ciety. American Ethnologist 20: 256–271.
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revealed unto me that Bahman will sit upon the throne that hath
been denied unto me.”
Alas! having thus spoken, behold, Isfendiyar sighed, and the sun of
his life was set, and great was the lamentation for the brave young
hero lost unto Iran. As for Rustem, sorrowfully he made ready for
Isfendiyar a coffin of gold, causing it to be lined with silken stuffs
and perfumed with amber. Then he laid therein the valiant hero-
prince of the Heft-Khan, and all beholding him wept with bitter
sorrow. Tenderly then the coffin of gold was placed upon the back of
a slow-moving dromedary, forty others following in its wake. And lo!
there followed after them the brave army of the Prince, clad in robes
of mourning, while Bashutan marched at the head of the sorrowful
train, leading Isfendiyar’s horse, whose saddle was reversed and
whose mane and tail were shorn, while from its sides hung the
armor of the vanquished one. Now thus it was that they brought
brave Isfendiyar back unto the palace of his fathers, and behold! all
the world mourned this great loss unto Iran.
But while Iran sorrowed for Isfendiyar, behold, Bahman grew up in
the courts of Rustem, the Pehliva loving him as a son. For in his
heart he grieved bitterly that by his hand brave Isfendiyar had fallen.
Yea, and he gloried not in his last great fight, even though he knew
that now his star would shine on undimmed unto the end, and that
the children of Ormuzd would sing his praises through all the ages
as the one great unconquered hero of the Persians.
 THE DEATH OF RUSTEM

Lo! it is chronicled by Firdusi, who, in his great epic poem, hath

made immortal the heroes and kings of Persia, that Zal in his old age
had born unto him a son of remarkable beauty. But alas! when the
astrologers cast the horoscope of this beautiful babe, they read
therein that few and evil would be the days of Shughad; that he
would be the ruin of the house of his fathers, also bringing
destruction upon the land of Iran.
Now Zal was overwhelmed with dismay when this message of the
stars was communicated unto him, and he prayed continually unto
Ormuzd that he would avert this terrible fate from the head of his
boy. Yea, and he reared him carefully, sparing no pains to inculcate
in the youth the principles of truth, honor, loyalty unto his house and
unto the King.
Then, when Shughad was come unto man’s estate, Zal sent him
unto the King of Kabul, who, when he saw that he was tall and
handsome, and fit in every way to sit upon the throne, showed unto
him great kindness, even giving unto him his daughter in marriage,
and providing for him bountifully.
Now the King of Kabul paid tribute unto Rustem, every year being
required to send unto the Hero of Seistan a bull’s hide as a token of
sovereignty. And alas! this was a great grievance unto his soul, for
he was proud in his spirit and desired to be bondsman unto none. So
it was not alone kindness which prompted him to take Shughad unto
him as his son, for in his heart he hoped thus to have the tribute
remitted.
But behold! when the proper time came, Rustem sent his messenger
as usual to demand the bull’s hide, which made the King very angry.
So, in his disappointment, he hesitated not to express his opinion of
Rustem’s conduct unto Shughad, stirring up his mind against his
brother. Then Shughad, becoming angry and discontented also, said
unto the King:
“Verily, since my elder brother hath behaved unto me thus unkindly,
in my heart he shall be unto me no more than a stranger. Let us
consider, therefore, how we may ensnare him.”
So all night the King and Shughad talked and pondered how they
might rid the world of Rustem, and at last they decided upon a
scheme.
Consequently, it came to pass that presently the King of Kabul gave
a great feast, and when all had become excited with wine, behold,
Shughad, the son of Zal, began to boast of his lineage, saying:
“Verily, Shughad alone of all this great company should be toasted!
Yea, and I except not even the King, our host! For is not the Mighty
Rustem my brother? And do I not come from a long line of heroes,
extending from Husheng the Shah even unto Zal of the white hair?”
Now hearing this, lo, the King sprang up in pretended wrath, saying:
“Upstart! Thinkest thou to lord it over me, the King of Kabul? Verily,
nay! For thou art really no brother unto Rustem, since thy mother
was but a slave in thy father’s household. Therefore, boast not so
loudly.”
Then Shughad, feigning great anger, hastily left the banqueting-
halls, threatening to call forth Rustem to avenge the insulting words
of the King. So, with guile in his heart, the Prince rode forth unto the
palace of his brother. And behold! after they had exchanged
greetings, Rustem said:
“And how fares it with thee at Kabul, O my brother? Art thou still
happy and contented in the King’s palace?”
Then Shughad, rejoicing at the opening thus given him, said:
“I pray thee do not speak unto me of Kabul, for the word is hateful
unto mine ears. For verily this night hath the King insulted me
beyond bearing. Yea, and thee, too, and my father! So I came away
in a rage, and never will I return until the vile words which he spake
of my family are avenged.”
Now when Rustem learned what had been spoken by the King of
Kabul, he said unto Shughad:
“O my brother, trouble not thyself concerning this matter, for verily it
shall bring thee naught but gain. Alas! ever hath the King of Kabul
been vain and arrogant of spirit, but for this he shall be humbled
unto the dust, for no longer shall he reign in Kabul, since his crown
shall henceforth grace thine own fair brow.”
So, at once Rustem set forth to avenge the wrongs of his brother,
but lo! when they were yet far from Kabul, they were met by the
King, who, bowing himself low in the dust, said unto Rustem:
“O Lord of the World! Thou beholdest before thee, with uncovered
head and bare feet, the proud King of Kabul. Pardon, therefore—
thou who art gracious as the River Nile—the foolish words of thy
slave, spoken when his head was troubled with wine. For lo! his
mouth is filled with dust and his soul with sorrow and repentance.”
Now hearing these words of humility, Rustem’s anger was appeased.
Granting unto the King forgiveness, therefore, he graciously
consented to be his guest. So a great banquet was made ready to
celebrate the reconciliation, and as they feasted the King lauded his
wondrous hunting-grounds, wherein the deer and the wild ass
furnished such excellent sport, and he invited Rustem to hunt
therein for a day before returning unto Seistan.
So Rustem, who loved the chase almost as well as the field of battle,
consented to remain the King’s guest for yet another day, for he
suspected not that poison lurked in the honey of the monarch’s
words. But alas! in a certain part of these beautiful hunting-grounds,
the schemers had caused to be dug treacherous pits, lined thickly
with swords and lances and hunting-spears, yet no man would have
suspected their existence, so cleverly were they covered over.
On the following day, therefore, the King directed the hunt unto the
place in the forest where the pits were hidden. And behold! Shughad
ran beside the horse of Rustem to show unto him the path. But
when they were come unto the place of peril, Rakush, smelling the
newly-turned earth, reared high in the air, refusing to advance. Then
Rustem, thinking he was afraid, commanded him to go forward; but
Rakush, backing, refused to give ear unto his master’s voice. Now
this made Rustem angry so that lightly he struck him with his whip,
though never before in all their long wanderings together had he
done so. Then, alas! surprised and maddened by the stroke, Rakush
sprang forward, but only to fall into one of the treacherous pits.
Now sinking into the midst of this cruel bed of pointed weapons,
many a ghastly stab and many a cut in limb and body received
Rustem and his gallant steed. Yet from this awful grave, at one
prodigious spring, Rakush escaped with his master still upon his
back. But alas! what availed that mighty effort? For, down again into
another pit, yet deeper, both fell together. And though again they
rose, and yet again, it was only to be engulfed once more, and yet
again. Yea, seven times down prostrate, seven times bruised and
maimed, did Rakush struggle on, until mounting up the edge of the
seventh pit, all covered with deep wounds, both horse and rider lay
exhausted, Rustem swooning in his agony.
But when once more the mighty Hero opened his horror-stricken
eyes upon the world, lo, he beheld Shughad his brother, smiling in
triumph at his side. Then knew he unto whom he owed this
infamous treachery, and he said:
“Thou Wicked One! Is it possible that thou, the son of Zal, hast
contrived and wrought this evil deed against thy brother? Verily thy
heart is as black as thy shadow, which shall not long darken the
earth.”
Then the treacherous Shughad, trying to justify his cruel deed, said
sternly unto the dying Hero:
“Verily, God hath decreed this awful vengeance to recompense thee
for all the blood that thou hast shed in thy long life as a warrior. Not
I, but He, hath determined thy fate.”
Now at this moment the King of Kabul drew near, feigning great
anger and sorrow when he beheld the dying one. And he wailed:
“Alas the day! That the Mighty Rustem should perish so ignobly, and
as my guest! Quick, bring the matchless balm for Rustem’s cure, for
the great Champion of Iran must not be allowed to die a death so
wretched!”
But Rustem, smiling scornfully, said unto the treacherous King:
“O Man of Wile! Right well thou knowest that Death, that cometh
unto all men in their turn, is the only physician that now can heal
the great Rustem of his wounds. But why should the mighty son of
Zal complain of Fate? For verily, many a mighty King hath died and
left me still triumphant, still in power unconquerable. And behold!
yet there liveth valiant Feramurz, who will be revenged upon thee
for his father’s death.”
And now the Mighty Rustem sighed, saying unto Shughad in a weak
and mournful voice:
“Verily, my spirit will soon be free! But alas! it grieveth me sore that
my faithful body may this night be food unto the wolves and lions.
String, therefore, my bow, and place it in my hands that I may
appear unto the wild beasts that would devour me, even as a live
warrior, ready to defend his life. For our father’s sake, O Shughad,
refuse not thy brother this last request.”
So, suspecting naught, Shughad drew the great bow from its case,
and placed it in Rustem’s hands, smiling with satisfaction to think
that his brother’s end was so nigh. But verily he smiled not but a
moment, for noting the strength with which Rustem gripped his
bow, and the peculiar look of his eye, shuddering with terror, quickly
Shughad dodged behind a plane-tree close at hand. But useless was
the shelter, for though the dimness of death was come over the eyes
of the Hero, he yet spied Shughad where he hid, and whiz! went an
arrow, straight through the tree and the wicked Shughad, transfixing
them together. And Rustem, when he saw the fate of his brother,
was content, knowing that he could do no more harm unto his
house.
But alas! of all that mighty hunting-party not a knightly follower
escaped. For Zuara and all the others perished in the treacherous
pits of the traitor King, save only one, who quickly fled with the dire
news unto Seistan.
Then Zal, in agony, tore his white hair and rent his garments,
lamenting bitterly for Rustem, crying again and again:
“Why was I not present, fighting at his side? Why could I not die for
him? Wherefore, alas, am I left alone to mourn his memory?”
But behold! though bowed to the earth with grief, quickly the white-
haired old warrior sent Feramurz forth with a great army to avenge
the death of his father. And verily the work of the Hero was
complete. For not only did he make of Kabul a desert, but he laid
low the head of the treacherous King and all his race. Then the work
of vengeance finished, lo, he sought out the body of Rustem, and of
Rakush his gallant steed, and bare them back in sorrow unto
Seistan, where they were placed in a noble tomb.
And alas! never was there such wailing in the land of Iran as for
Rustem the Mighty. Nay, not even for the glorious Shahs of Old! And
well might it be so, for never again did Persia rejoice in such an
unbroken line of heroes, and never did she achieve such telling
victories, for with Rustem her glory departed; yea, for many long
years!
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