-
4: The Ambiguities of Becoming: Phony Shamans and What Are Mudang After All?
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
102 4 The Ambiguities of Becoming Phony Shamans and What Are Mudang After All? The stakes were high and Chini had failed, failed to gain sufficient inspiration during her kut and failed at the expectations of apprenticeship, losing her nerve and fleeing her teacher. This chapter continues the discussion of inspiration and skilled performance that began with Chini’s kut, asking what it means to become a shaman in the present Korean moment. I am picking up a thread from Yongsu’s Mother’s observation that although there are more shamans now than ever before, they lack the old shamans’ power of inspiration, or as she put it on another occasion, many of them “don’t know front from back.” I am seeking some purchase on the slippery slope between shamanic nostalgia, as thick as viscous mud, and a reconfigured Korea where most things really have changed a great deal. Spirit mothers, spirit daughters, and tales of long ago The experiences of Auntie Cho, Kwan Myôngnyô, and An Hosun and the autobiographical tales of many other shamans suggest that an initiation kut, even a successful one, does not produce a fully realized shaman, and many initiation kut are not successful at all. Apprentices become kija, recognized shamans, through a slow and by no means certain process, and many initiates give it up, as Chini had tried to do, at least for a time.1 Even Kwan Myôngnyô, who had seemed so self-assured at Chini’s kut, left shamanship a few years later and tried to trade on her contacts by marketing fruit, the oversized pears and apples that shamans pile up in such abundance when they prepare for a kut, impressing on their clients the high cost of even a The Ambiguities of Becoming 103 single apple or pear. Kwan’s enterprise was doomed from the start because the gods had chosen her as a shaman, so Kim Pongsun would tell me after the fact, adding that “others” had tried to convince Kwan that her ancestors were not really powerful deities, not sufficient to support a mansin’s career, and had told her that she could leave it all behind with no ill consequence. Instead, the business failed, Kwan’s marriage collapsed into threats for her physical safety, and she returned repentant to Kim Pongsun’s tutelage. The last time I saw Kwan Myôngnyô, she was her jolly old self, going off to a kut with Kim Pongsun as though there had been no break in their working relationship, giggling about the latest gossip in their circle. In shamanic nostalgia talk, the spirit mothers of the past were strict, even abusive task masters. At Chini’s kut the old shaman, An Hosun, recalled her own bitter experiences as a spirit daughter in “the old days”: When the spirits first came to me, I thought I would go out of my mind. . . . Why was I fated to have this happen to me? I was miserable, desolate. I would sob and sob. It was all because I was just a little slip of an apprentice. In the old days, the shamans were very strict. When I was an apprentice, if you made a mistake over a single word, they’d give you a scolding right then and there, no matter who was there to hear it. You had to be careful about so many things. If you made a mistake, well, then they’d beat you, slap bang, with the drumstick or the drum mallet. When you’re a new shaman, what do you know? You don’t know the sequences. You don’t know the rules and procedures. All you’ve got going for you is inspiration. . . . [She pictures her younger self struggling through snowdrifts on her way to a kut.] Those were the most miserable times. You’d sink into snowdrifts up to your knees and your feet would freeze. . . . You had to walk. No matter if it were ten ri, fifteen ri, twenty ri, you had to do your work that day. . . . It was a little bit better when it rained, but when it snowed, when you were pelted with snow—well, even slogging through knee-high drifts was all right, but when you sank in up to your waist, that was misery. You had to carry everything on your head, even the drum and all the gods’ paraphernalia. No one wanted to go. All the carriers would refuse. Who wanted to wade through the...