Kut as Political Disobedience, Healing, and Resilience

Abstract

A long-standing threat of war on the Korean Peninsula has retarded recognition and reconciliation of military-related atrocities committed in the establishment of this divided territory. Meanwhile, surviving generations utter their grief over the internecine and foreign killing of their ancestors in grassroots memorials and ceremonies. When restless ghosts of mass-murdered individuals appear in shamanic ritual spaces, they summon subversive networks around capsulated moments of the most unrestrained violence and shake onlookers out of their Cold War vigilance. They enact their whispered family traumas to push against nationalist narratives and to provoke a shared experience of injustice while often overlooking consensus on political mobilization. This chapter will consider one such ritual specter: there is a community ritual for the spirits of “comfort women”; a case that may be seen as a form of femicide of sexually enslaved women by the Japanese imperial army. Taking a close look at these atrocity rituals does three things: they highlight the presence of colonial forces in a Cold War-bifurcated region. Secondly, by seeing them as a shamanic liberatory practice, these rituals can demonstrate a type of epistemological disobedience to modern, militarized states. Thirdly, their predominance of female ritualists, clients, patrons, and onlookers speaks to the demand to involve non-patriarchal communities in intergenerational healing, decolonial states of being, and Indigenous cultural resilience.