352 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
would give him more ritual attention in return for his promise of noninterfer-
ence in the future. This took a long time and involved multiple steps, one of
which was a dance impersonating Confucian officials of the Choson dynasty.
She whirled and danced, waving a fan and wands, and ringing bells. There was
a divination with rice kernels, and the use of archaic terms that no one could
understand as the mansin communicated with the spirits. Later she put on the
robes and prayer beads and staff of a Buddhist monk. The outcome, however,
of all the ritual drama was the resolution of the dissatisfaction of the deceased
uncle who had been meddling in the life of his nephews.
These clients were businessmen, but anthropologist Laurel Kendall, who
has extensively studied these ritual specialists, finds that today they are most
often women. As she observed in Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits:
The mansin (shaman) shares in the ambiguous status of other glamorous
but morally dubious female marginals, the actress, the female entertainer,
and the prostitute. Like the others, she makes a living, often a comfortable
living, by public performance in a society where so-called good women stay
home. But the mansin is neither an actress nor a courtesan. She is the ritual
specialist of housewives. The good women who stay home need her. She
came from their midst, lives like them, and speaks to their anxieties and
hopes. (1985:63)
This is not to say that Korean shamanism has always taken the forms
which it does in contemporary society, or that it works the same everywhere in
Korea today. It should be clear from the above description that individual man-
sin are creative and entrepreneurial. Shamanism was probably the earliest form
of religion in Korea, predating Buddhism and Confucianism, arriving with the
first ancient settlers of the peninsula, but it was surely a different phenomenon
then than now.
Another aspect of Korean shamanism is the well-known and culturally
iconic mask dance (talchum), generally performed in an open town square or a
field, or on a stage that spills into a seated audience. Like so many elements of
Korean culture, the mask dance varies from region to region, with some schol-
ars wanting to dispute whether certain regions perform the “true talchum.” The
differences between the mask dances of various regions are immediately appar-
ent to the audience, based on different music, inclusion of varying amounts of
dialogue or singing, themes of the dramas, interactions of the audience, and
costumes and masks (Dong-il 2005). The regional variations give each form of
the performance a local feel, sometimes a local community’s harvest thanksgiv-
ing, planting celebration, or appeasement of a local deity.
Since the mask dances are also meant as popular entertainment, drama
and complex story lines and characters feature prominently in them. As a folk
art, they often feature an earthy irreverence toward upper classes and authority
figures. When a Buddhist monk appears in mask dances, he is ridiculed for his
lust and avarice; when a Confucian scholar nobleman is depicted, he is comi-
cally petty, obsessed with appearances and reputation, and negligent of his offi-