The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman: Of Tales and the Telling of Tales (review)

146BOOK REVIEWS would support generalization. They have some success. Confucianism had a profound but a different influence in the three cultures. Neo-Confucianism was accepted in Korea and Japan as a means to establish a stable government. In Japan it was more often modified because of local pragmatism. In Korea NeoConfucianism encouraged the development of kin descent groups to assert high status. Confucianization did not result in sinification either in Korea or Japan. The reader is reminded that the Confucian model was derived from an idealization of ancient society in Chinese classical literature, not from the Chinese society which the Koreans and the Japanese knew. The authors believe that cultures have a limited range of possible responses to any given stimulus. They suggest that social scientists would do well to explore and define such possibilities as those present when Confucianism came to Korea. The text has 223 pages, including an index and a glossary with romanized terms for Chinese and Korean characters. The Introduction and each chapter has a bibliography and/or bibliographic footnotes. The editing is uneven but generally of high quality. Perhaps the most impressive features of the publication, I believe, are the theses advanced by the authors, the unity of the work despite the fact that thirteen writers are involved, and the wealth of historical and ethnographic data provided. Eugene I. Knez Honolulu, Hawaii The Life andHard Times ofa Korean Shaman: Of Tales and the Telling of Tales, by Laurel Kendall. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987. 157 pp. $23 cloth, $9.95 paper. This superb little book is the engrossing story of a Korean shaman's life, vividly brought to us by Laurel Kendall. Deceptively simple at first, because of its readability , the book nonetheless squarely addresses a central thorny problem involved in telling another person's life—the constant conflict between the desire to let the subject speak in his or her own voice with as little intrusion from the author as possible and the perceived necessity of placing the subject's story in its proper context so that it will attain the meaning and significance for which the subject was chosen in the first place. The dilemma here is the anthropologist's. Kendall's choice for her method seems to have been in response to a state of the art of anthropology as well as her subject. She mentions that some anthropologists have felt dissatisfied with the life history method because it allows little room for the informants' own beliefs and perceptions, that there has been growing interest in getting at the truth of an informant's life, and that there are various methodological and interpretive challenges associated with this task. Kendall says that "only very recently, then, have we begun to ask why it is that people tell their lives, rather than why we should record them, and how it is that people fashion the tales that they tale." (p. 13) This is what she wants to do with her informant/ subject. BOOK REVIEWS147 The subject is a Korean shaman called Yongsu's mother, who provided information and friendship to Kendall when she did the field work for her dissertation and who appeared in Kendall's Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits. It is quite easy to see why Kendall was moved to tell Yongsu' mother's story. To begin with, hers is a life full of drama, beginning with a childhood of Dickensian misery and going on to her unhappy marriage and widowhood and finally to her acceptance of her calling as a shaman. It is, however, more than just drama. Yongsu's mother is a shaman who tells her story for purposes—to legitimize her status as a shaman and to entertain her audience, be it an anthropologist with a tape-recorder or village women who are or might be her clients. Her telling of her story is thus a performance and, like any repeated performance, her story goes through variations at each performance. It is this process of telling her tales —Yongsu's mother's telling and retelling of her story—which provides the main theme for the book. But now the anthropologist's problem intrudes, that of how to...