Shamans in North Korea

You are now going to learn something you didn't know about North Korea, and also something you didn't know about Korean shamanism.

Young-il Kim, Executive
Director of PSCORE

This evening at Columbia University I heard a talk from Mr. Young-il Kim, a North Korean defector and the executive director of PSCORE, a non-profit, non-partisan NGO that works on North Korean human rights, defector education and Korean reunification.

After his talk, I asked him an unusual question: Had he ever met any mudangs (Korean shamans) or anyone who practiced traditional Korean religion in North Korea?

His answer, to my surprise, was a definitive yes. He didn't know mudangs, per se, but he said that fortune tellers were quite common, and that many of them were imbued with shin (신), meaning divinity or god -- not merely people who read astrological charts, but genuine mystics.

But how, I asked, could they survive the communism of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-il, where religion was forbidden?

Mr. Kim explained that the elite have personal problems just like everyone else, so they need fortune tellers too. And because they need them, they protect them.

So there you have it. Like so many of the doors that have opened to me recently, this one is only open a crack, but what little I can see beyond is fascinating.

Shamans and prophets

In his primer Korean Shamanism-Muism, Dr. Kim Tae-kon describes the symptoms of shinbyeong, the illness that afflicts Korean shamans (at least the non-hereditary ones) before they accept the spirit and transition into their spiritual roles. He then goes on to compare these symptoms with those experienced by shamans in other cultures (pp. 49-52).

"The shamans of the Yakut tribe in Siberia experience their limbs and body parts being dismembered ... by an iron pick," he explains, while the ancestor-spirits in the Tungus tribe "pierce the shaman-to-be's body with arrows until he loses consciousness ... Then flesh from his/her body is ripped out and taken away." Again, "Shamans of the Buryat tribe ... are tortured by their ancestor spirits and their body is cut into pieces."

Moving on from Siberia, he reports that "American shamans also experience being killed by ancestor spirits. They also experience having the eyes and teeth ripped apart, while walking through fire ... While the shaman-to-be gets tortured ... his physical body lies still and stiff on the ground (as if it is dead) and is covered by a mat." And so it goes, all dismemberment and torment from the ancestors, in Africa and Indonesia as well. In many accounts, the head is cut off or the skull is opened.

Kim ends this litany by declaring that "the fact that the motif of dismembering limbs and the motif of cutting open a body to put in a 'power of sorcery' are not found in 'civilized' regions such as Korea and Japan, is because the original, primitive and intense experiences (of shamans in primitive ethnic groups) have been filtered out as more 'civilized' concepts are added." I am not so sure.

What comes to mind, as I read these accounts of shamans-to-be, is the story of the Passion of the Christ. Let's look at what happens to Jesus, according to John. First Jesus is flogged, and a crown of thorns is placed on his head (John 19:1-2). Then, "carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the Skull ... There they crucified him" (19:18-19). In both Matthew and Mark, Jesus cries out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Considering that God is his Father, this plaint resembles the shaman-to-be's experience of torment at the hands of the ancestors. Jesus then dies and is entombed, much like the Native American who is covered by a mat. When he reemerges, he is now addressed as "Rabboni," teacher: his status has changed (20:16). He is now able to dispense the Holy Spirit, much as a shaman, after his/her illness passes, is able to heal with the power of the god.

Another story that comes to mind is that of Muhammad's first revelation. Muhammad had been troubled for some time, escaping society for contemplation. According to the Hadith of Sahih Bukhari 1:1:3, the angel Jibreel held Muhammad three times in a tight embrace, similar to the "suffocating feeling" that Kim reports as a symptom of shinbyeong (48). I also think of Jonah, pursued by a revelation that he does not want to give, and of Moses, confronted by fire and forced to take on his vocation.

These Semitic stories are not, of course, exactly the same as shamanism. But they are similar enough to suggest that the boundaries between shamanism and God-centered, revealed religion are not quite so firm as scholars sometimes imagine. There seem to be certain themes to revelation or encounters with the spirit realm, and these have a continuity that is broken more by the cultural context and explanatory machinery than by the nature of the experiences themselves.

Between Mugyo and shamanism

In studying Korean shamanism, you don't get very far before you run into a problem of terminology. What exactly is shamanism? If you define it as a spiritual or religious practice in which a practitioner goes into a trance and communicates with spirits, that's all well and good, but it's not particularly Korean. Shamans do that sort of thing the world over. In some contexts it might be useful to connect the spiritual practices of Koreans, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, Pacific islanders, but at this point you're using a pretty broad brush. It would be like lumping all the Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Zoroastrians and Manichaeans together under a unifying term for religious practices that focus on prophets, revelations, texts and salvation (soterialism?).

The simplest solution is to go narrow. Instead of shamanism, we can say that we're studying Mugyo (무교), the Korean term for the traditional practices that typically get lumped into Korean shamanism. A common English term is Muism, which lacks poetry but more or less works.

Except that now we've drawn too small a circle. Muism, as it happens, looks a lot like the indigenous (or at least non-Buddhist, non-Catholic, non-Confucian, non-Communist, non-anything else) religious practices of Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and probably a few other places in the neighborhood (Shinto comes to mind, though that's a vexed topic). East Asian shamanism? Maybe. But then the focus on the practitioner and the practice, the trance and the channeling, overlooks a larger universe of religious confluences and similarities.

For now, I suppose I'll make due with "Asian shamanism" for the more general, Muism for the strictly Korean. But I wish there were a better term out there for the interwoven traditions of the region.

All the writing in one place

You can now find all of my extraneous writing in one Google Drive folder. With subfolders. Enjoy.

Old wine in new bottles

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I traveled to Korea, Nepal and India for 18 months. During that time, I did what I have come to think of as some of my best writing, in the form of emails home to friends and family.

Those writings have been inaccessible for a while, languishing on a semi-defunct Angelfire page. Well, no longer. You can now read Teaching Korea and Emails East in their entirety, freshly converted to Google Docs format spell-checked but otherwise left pretty much as they were, with all of my ignorance intact. They're also linked over on the left, so you an find them whenever you want to read a bit more. Enjoy!

Unweirding shamanism

My friend Dr. Kyra Gaunt described her field of anthropology to me as "making the strange familiar and the familiar strange." It's a fine definition of what I seek to do: to show people themselves and their cultures in ways that might surprise them, and to give people access to new or unfamiliar cultures by making them comprehensible.

There's also another approach to cultural studies, which one could call "making the strange strange." It's a finger pointing at the exotic. It's the way we look at Honey Boo Boo, not really to understand, but just to tell each other how weird it all is.

In today's New York Times, the Korean novelist Young-ha Kim takes that approach to Korean shamanism, pointing at the exotic weirdness of Korean CEOs turning to fortune tellers and geomancers. She calls it "bizarre" and "an open secret" that senior executives engage in this sort of thing, before sharing her own story of an encounter with a fortune teller. It's a curious attitude.

This is, unfortunately, a typical Korean response to shamanism (and an ironically orientalist approach), and it reminds me of the general atmosphere I encountered when I first traveled to Korea in 2001. Back then, traditional culture was fine for museums and folk villages and special performances, but it was cordoned off. As you walked down the street, you were meant to see nothing but a Westernized, modernized nation full of people doing capitalist business.

It turns out that traditional Korean culture -- music, dance, architecture -- was already undergoing a long rehabilitation. Back in the 1970s, traditional music was simply looked down upon as backward. By 2001 it was already making a comeback, and in the last decade the government has actually promoted more fusion and integration of traditional culture into Korea's modern flash. It's perhaps no accident that Bukchon, one of Seoul's few remaining enclaves of traditional houses, has become a fashionable neighborhood.

But shamanism has yet to be rehabilitated. It's still an embarrassing secret, like eating dog meat or going to a hostess bar. Partly this has to do with Christian and secular attitudes, which look on shamanism as superstition at best, devilry at worst. Some of it goes back further, to Neo-Confucian elite attitudes toward shamanism, and toward women, it's primary practitioners. And some of it is simply inertia.

Korea is good at keeping certain kinds of secrets. For one thing, until pretty recently, the outside world wasn't really prying. And then there's the language: if you can't speak it, you can't join the conversation, so Koreans can keep outsiders from looking at certain things by just not talking about those things in English.

Shamanism is still something that doesn't get talked about all that much to outsiders. Young-ha Kim has chosen to speak of it, but only as a curiosity. I wonder whether Koreans, or Americans, would consider it bizarre for CEOs to consult charismatic Christian ministers, or Catholic priests, or their rabbis, before making big decisions. Why should Korea's indigenous spiritual practices be the odd ones out?

Teaching personal branding to first-generation college students

Today I had the extraordinary opportunity to deliver Google's Introduction to Personal Branding course to a group of first-generation college students and their professional mentors. The event was coordinated by New York Needs You, which helps these students -- most of whom come from low-income families -- overcome the 89% dropout rate for kids like themselves.

At more than a hundred students and mentors, the audience was the largest I've had for a class. The space where I led, in the Goldman Sachs building on West Street, was also the nicest room I've ever led in: I had monitors in front of me to watch my slides, as well as big digital clocks ticking off the time in front of me, and the audience had mics on their tables, UN style. And the people who came to the class were enthusiastic and engaged. They were the sort of people who chose to spend their Saturday in business clothes, hanging around Goldman Sachs to hear what some Googlers had to say about careers, so they were predisposed to pay attention.

I was a little nervous about talking to such a big room, on such a big stage. What I didn't realize was that it would amplify the energy. Punchlines that get some smiles in a conference room with twenty Googlers got big laughs. Exercises created an excited murmur. Questions and answers with the audience played differently too. Early in the class, there are some parts where I ask the audience to call out adjectives that come to mind. In a typical small room, I wait for a while for someone to break the silence, and then a few ideas come trickling in, usually from the same subset of talkers. In the bigger room, everyone started shouting at once. The energy was fantastic, but I had to run things more tightly just so I could hear. Later on, when I called on individuals to contribute, there was a decisive dynamic at work where I was the leader, up on stage and dispensing wisdom, and they were eager participants, like someone David Letterman has picked out to play with.

I rode that energy and delivered the best class of my life. Credit goes to the Google team who developed the class, of course. It's great content, and the students and mentors loved it. Afterward I talked with various students for more than an hour. I gave my usual advice about pre-graduation panic: yes, you'll make lots of mistakes, and that's fine; it's how you learn what you like and what you don't. And it will all work out OK, so relax.

I also helped a few students to find the value proposition in themselves. One young man wasn't sure whether he had anything special to offer. As we talked, he explained that he's getting a 4.0 studying finance at Baruch College, that he came with his family from Azerbaijan at the age of 5, that he speaks Russian and English, that he's been working two jobs to support himself and his mother while he goes to school, and that one of those jobs is actually a tutoring service that he created. For a young woman who's studying economics and urban planning at NYU, I brought it to her attention that there's a unique value proposition in being the only person in her program who can compare America's urban planning challenges with Jakarta's based on personal experience and a knowledge of the local language.

That got me to thinking about my own unique value proposition. I sometimes downplay it -- we all tend to -- but I've had an interesting career, to say the least. I've seen drag queens on roller skates hand out sushi at a dot-com holiday party. I've danced the Hokey Pokey for money and the amusement of Korean kindergarteners. I've written speeches that were read in the United Nations General Assembly and been asked by a senior South Korean diplomat for my solution to the North Korea problem (I didn't have one). I've taken time off to study in a Tibetan monastery in Nepal and watch bodies burn in Varanasi, and I've traveled to India to convince an outsource team to speak their minds in meetings. I've taught classes at Google and written articles about cutting-edge technologies and learned to swing dance and ski and spent three days in the woods learning what color I am (orange). I'm getting a master's degree in Asian studies, which has put me in the classroom with a former CIA analyst and National Security Council member.

Does this make me an expert on careers in general? No, probably not. But does it mean I can tell you something about what it's like out there in the world, and what opportunities there are if you're willing to go on a few tangents? Yes. I've actually managed to accumulate some wisdom and experience that's useful to others, and I'm good at communicating it in a way that people can use. I want to get better at it. I enjoy it. And today, so did my audience.

Breaking Bad and freedom

The summer after my junior year of high school, the father of the previous year's senior class president shot the mother of the previous year's senior class president, and then himself. The senior class president wasn't someone I knew personally, and I never learned the details of what had led to that irrevocable moment, nor do I know what became of the senior class president himself. I was the editor of the high school newspaper, and we prided ourselves on taking on serious stories, but none of us wanted to touch this one. We never mentioned it. No one ever mentioned it really. It happened and was gone.

The trail of bodies in Breaking Bad is longer, the tale more elaborate, but it's moments like these in our actual lives that make Breaking Bad plausible. People are not who they say they are. There have been times in my life when I would have seen much more of myself in Walter White. No, I never did anything remotely as awful as he did, but there were things I kept hidden from those closest to me. I know what it is to be a liar, and I know what it is for lies to unravel. Most of us do.

At this point in my life, though, there's another side of Breaking Bad that resonates. It's the craving for freedom, for the feeling of aliveness, that runs through the show: Jesse emerging from drugs only when he's cooking meth or in love, which might be two sides of the same thing; Marie stealing tchotchkes; Flynn driving a fast car; and of course Walter being good at something. For those of us who live within the rounds of a responsible life -- which, again, is most of us -- there's a thrill in watching people escape from that, even for a little while, even if they fly too close to the sun and get burned.

I've been lucky in my life to have found opportunities to be free. I've slipped off for months at a time to wander in faraway places. I might be further along in my career if I hadn't. I might have more money. Or I might not. The time away forced me to break free from where I had been, to start over again, to try something new. It opened up pathways in my life that I continue to follow. Freedom, if you're lucky enough to be able to pull it off, has its perks, even when it's gone.

Breaking Bad is freedom at a desperate extreme: barrels of cash, endless chaos, constant threat, and a trail of devastation. But it gets at something of the price of breaking away from the steady and predictable. There are risks. There are losses. There is destruction, even if it's just quitting your job or selling your furniture. Freedom is uncertain. But that feeling of being alive that Walter talks about in the last episode -- what is it worth to you? What is it worth to me? And what do we risk when we don't go after it?

A green light

And so the thesis on Korean shamanism in America takes two steps forward, one step back.

This morning I met with Professor Como and shared my idea. He called it promising, let me know about following proper research protocols, and suggested several professors for me to talk to. Then this evening I met with my advisor, Professor Charles Armstrong, and he gave me the green light to move forward on a study of Korean shamanism. I shared with him my passion for modern Korea, and for deepening understanding and appreciation of those parts of the culture that Koreans themselves might overlook, and he told me to pursue what interests me most.

Both professors cautioned me about the challenges of fieldwork, and Armstrong worried that I might have trouble finding people to talk to. That's my biggest concern, actually. What if I go ahead but can't find any practitioners who will share their experiences with me? I left my meeting with Professor Armstrong feeling elated, only to find when I got home that one of my leads had dried up: a Korean friend asked a fortune teller if he'd participate in my research, and he said no.

So I have a green light, and I have ideas, and I have worries. Professor Armstrong suggested that I not worry about research methodologies yet, and instead just immerse myself in the literature on Korean shamanism. That seems like a good place to start.

Korean shamanism in America

So the tricky thing about Korean shamanism in America is that no one seems to know anything about it. At least in the English-language academic literature, there's nothing. Silence. Crickets. (Crickets and not the cicadas [매미] of a Korean summer.)

But that's the interesting thing, too. I'm beginning to think that I should write my thesis about shamanism in America. And possibly Western responses to shamanism at different periods as well. Start with an overview of the first references to it from missionaries and such, then look at the more sympathetic anthropological literature, then pivot to the US. Where there is nothing. Where it would be up to me to do field research.

That scares me. I haven't a clue how one does such a thing. But then, neither do most anthropologists when they start, as far as I can tell. And considering how void the literature is, even my fractured images -- gleaned through translators, bad English, and misunderstood observations -- might add value.

So how do I find shamans, or fortune tellers, or other Koreans in America who work with the spirit world? Will they trust me? Let me do research? Let me record them as they work with others? All of this is unsettling to think about. Unlike archives, which are there when you need them, actual human subjects can be slippery. What if they don't show up? What if they make it impossible for me to do the work I need to do to graduate?

And yet ... This is a subject that grabs me. It's interesting. It's juicy. It's unpredictable and raw and real and maybe a little dangerous. It's an adventure, and it promises a more intimate connection with the culture I'm studying than a journey through the dusty archives of New England churches that sent missionaries a hundred years ago.

I'll talk to my advisor tomorrow and see what we come up with.

Laughter and the infinite

When we talk about religion, we rarely talk about humor. Discussions of Confucian funerary ritual, for example, don't usually spend a lot of time on what's funny about the rituals, either intentionally or unintentionally.

So I am delighted that Laurel Kendall, a leading scholar of Korean shamanism and an excellent writer, actually raises the issue of humor in her writing on shamanistic rituals. It turns out that in Korean shamanism, one jokes with spirits, and spirits certainly joke with us.

And when you look a little below the surface, you find that there's actually a lot of humor in religion. Zen is, of course, a fantastic repository of absurdist humor (cf. shit on a stick). But one finds humor elsewhere, too, if one looks for it: in Abraham's haggling with God over Sodom and Gomorrah, in Taoist writing (especially Zhuangzi), even in the mad genius of Jesus spotting a crowd of people about to stone a woman, and instead of pleading with them to stop, simply suggesting that whoever is without sin go first. (This scene is much funnier and more astounding if you imagine it actually happening.)

This is something I want to look at more deeply. Writing on humor can be depressingly humorless, and I'd like to avoid that. But there may be something to the comedy of the spiritual.