Korean Shamanism : Women's Rites and a Chinese Comparison

Abstract

The series, Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and recalls from distant memory a college board examination question: Which of the items in this series is least appropriate? I would necessarily answer with my own area ofinterest, shamanism. The other three isms are anchored, however loosely, in a corpus of written text and orthodox ritual as they float about in geographic diffusion. is a researcher's category, a heuristic tool for comparing analogous practices in diverse societies (Cf. [PETERs'and PRicE-WiLLiAMs 1980] ), We do find shamans in China, Korea, and Japan, but we also find them in Siberia, Southeast Asia, Oceania, Africa, and the Americas. Outside Europe, we would be hard pressed to find an area of the world that did not have some form of shamanism.2) For some religious historians, implies a single and ancient religious tradition diffused from Siberia (Cf. [EuADE 1964] ). In this tradjtion, scholars do speak of Shamanism as a discrete religion and historical stratum. Yim Sokchae and his students have discussed the limitations of this approach: The term mucinng 2gZ# indicates both the hereditary priestess and the inspirational shaman. As in Okinawa, shaman and priestess perform many of the same ritual functions, a distinction obscured by the blanket use of the term shamanism or the indigenous title, mudong. Shamanism, as an ancient north Asian faith, intimates primitivism and obscures the development and complexity of Korean religious traditions [YiM 1970: 215-217; CH'oi 1978: 12-30]. In this paper, I will use the term shama-