Visions and Stones: Spirit Matters and the Charm of Small Things in South Korean Shamanic Rock Divination

Abstract

SummaryThis article considers conceptualizations of the sacred via two of the founding members of The College of Sociology (1937–1939), Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille, as they relate to everyday life. Through this sacred lens everyday life in the city is reflexively intertwined with the stories of a Korean shaman, who through rock divination conjures the spirits of nature for her divinations. Her fantastic and uncanny stories are examined in detail, as well as the intricate relationship between the diviner, patron, and materials used in Korean shamanic in‐house divination. Following Atkinson, Taussig, and others, this piece stresses that power in shamanism is a complicated relation of exchanges and activities, readings and writings, of which the shaman is only one component. Not only is it more and more necessary to consider the perspectives of the patrons and the patients, but the materials, social contexts, and spectral machineries that are brought to the discursive table must also bear equal weight—all of which, in turn, constitute the grounds for what might be considered “shamanic” activity. Through divination, physiognomic traces reveal the interior world of things as a waking dream, which takes part in the mysteries of what another member of The College, Roger Caillois, referred to as the “natural fantastic.” The object of divination—ourselves and our fate—is petrified into thing that can be read and critiqued, and subsequently transformed into a medicine or commodity, which is then consumed as the patron returns to the exterior landscape of the city and awaits its effects.