Korean Shaman Rituals Revisited: The Case of Chindo Ssikkim-kut (Cleansing Rituals)

Abstract

This paper is a restudy of Korean shaman music, focussing on the dramatic social and musical changes occurring in recent decades in the ssikkimkut rituals for the dead. For about a year in 1981, I conducted fieldwork in the island of Chindo, off the tip of the southwestern province of Cholla, South Korea. Ssikkim-kut, the subject of my research, is a cleansing ritual of that province, with elaborate music, traditionally performed by female hereditary shamans, called tanggol, with their accompanists, koin.2 can be seen as a regional variety of the broader category of shaman rituals, kut, still widely performed throughout Korea. After my fieldwork, I concluded that ssikkim-kut was declining, just as folk songs separated from their original context tend to vanish. Echoing the predictions of an earlier report which recommended state efforts to preserve the genre (Ch'un-sang Chi et al. 1979), I wrote pessimistically regarding the survival of ssikkim-kut, Ssikkim-kut is a beautiful reality, but it is regrettably dying out (Park 1996:vi). However, developments in recent years have shown the reality to be more complex. had been performed throughout Cholla province and its vicinity. However, its traditional performers, the tanggols, have gradually disappeared throughout this whole area, despite the strong survival of shamanism in vernacular culture.3 Their decline is evidently due to their low social status, rooted partly in the repression of shamanism by the last two Korean dynasties, which instead promoted Buddhism or Confucianism. While the traditional social hierarchy has been officially replaced by a democratic one, the stigma of shamanism has remained. It took several generations for the descendants of hereditary shamans to find new occupations, but ultimately, when finding such opportunities, they have largely abandoned their traditional family business. However, until recently in Chindo island we could still find a few tanggols actively performing their ritual functions.