Liora Sarfati

This chapter analyses three aspects of spiritual healing in Korea and Israel: the cosmological perspectives on illness, the roles of healers and patients in the treatment, and how spiritual healers and modern doctors view each other. Comparing spiritual folk medicine in a strictly monotheistic society and a multi-religious polytheistic culture reveals that the tensions between modern medicine and spiritual healing relate in both cultures mostly to biopolitics. Institutional concerns and the regulation of bodies and health are more central than religious supernatural concerns. The contradiction between scientific and vernacular medicine does not exist in the worldview of the interviewed healers. They are legitimized at the grassroots level and enjoy the cultural and financial support of many patients in the hypermodern urban centres where they live and work.  pp. 185-205

In Korea and Israel, many people in hypermodern urban areas believe that illness can occur due to supernatural interventions, be it grudging spirits in Korea, or godly punishment for lack of observance in the Jewish tradition. Tsaddik venerating Rabbis in Israel and manshin (possessed shaman) in Korea do not promote spiritual healing as a substitute to biomedicine. They suggest that supernatural interventions expedite the healing process, point to the best medical-care providers and prevent future deterioration. The vernacular nature of these traditions allows the spiritual healers freedom from institutional supervision. The biopolitics of the medical systems in hypermodern societies dictates delegitimization and marginalization of spiritual healing. The contradiction between scientific and vernacular medicine does not exist in the worldview of these contemporary spiritual healers. They are legitimized at the grassroots level and enjoy the cultural and financial support of their many patients.

Korean shamanism (musok) addresses problems of physical, social, and mental health, explaining them as a result of supernatural intervention. The unique position of male practitioners who became healers within a female dominated sphere is especially telling as they are stigmatized for cross-gender and homosexual behaviors -- often labeled in Korea as a “mental illness.” In contrast, musok frames these behaviors as responses to demands from the spirit world, and an individual’s calling. The power of performance is revealed throughout the process of musok healing and can be studied as a cultural apparatus to expand the definitions of sickness and health.

Material expressions of emotion and ideology transformed downtown Seoul from 2014-2019 into an extended commemorative monument dedicated to those who died in the tragic sinking of the ferry Sewŏl on April 16, 2014. This unfortunate event stimulated diverse personal and political responses, in large part because there were 250 high school students on a fieldtrip among the 304 casualties. Analyzing the new shapes that the Sewŏl memorials have introduced into the urban landscape reveals the ways in which the city has maintained its fast flow of life while at the same time allowing city dwellers to poetically express grief, anger, and hope. The aggregated practices of various people with diverse agendas amounted to unique artistic, architectural, and emotion soliciting structures that are delineated in this essay as landscapes of mass cooperation. These landscapes were crafted by thousands of individuals without a firm aesthetic or content related scheme, and they changed as emotions shifted from hope for survivors to grief over the immense death toll and rage toward those responsible for it. On August 15, 2014, two hundred police troops appeared from nowhere and encircled twenty people walking with yellow signs near the Kwanghwamun Square in downtown Seoul. The signs demanded a government initiative to conduct thorough investigations into the recent sinking of the ferry Sewŏl. Some government officials came out of the Sejong Art Center from the Independence Day concert happening that day. The proximity of the performance hall to the protesters' base resulted in an intense moment of face-to-face confrontation.

Asian Studies Review 42 (4): 565-585, October 2018.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Asian Studies Review 42 (4): 565-585, October 2018, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2018.1516732

Urbanities, 8 (Suppl. 1): 70-73, Spring 2018.

When the Sewol Ferry sank in 2014, leaving 304 dead and 9 missing passengers, South Korea was shocked and grieving. The mass mourning soon turned into extensive anti-government protests. First, the activists focused on collecting 10,000,000 signatures on petitions to change the law in order to enable proper investigation, punishment of those found guilty, and redrafting of safety and rescue regulations. Later, in the winter of 2016 the protests extended and called for the impeachment of the former president, Pak Kun-bye (Park Geun-hye). She was eventually impeached in March 2017, in what came to be called the • bittersweet victory for families of Sewol ferry victims' (Griffiths and Han 2017). Mourning the death of so many youths has created a momentum of civic action along enduring debates over governance transparency, morality and policy. Moreover, this protest showed that democratic actions could overcome even the authority of Pak, which stemmed from both tradition-she was the daughter of a legendary (albeit disputed) president-and the law, as a democratically chosen leader. She, however, lacked charisma, a main trait of the authority types categorized by Max Weber (1947). Much of Pak's blame in relation to the Sewol Ferry's sinking can indeed be discussed in terms of lack of charisma. She did not act as the trustworthy leader that Korea wanted to see during such a national crisis. While South Korea has often been described a homogeneous nation, I argue that complex relationships between social classes create urban clashes. In the Sewol movement, multitudes of individuals joined forces to demand justice over government actions that they deemed illegitimate. The prevailing assumption, that ruling and economic elites cooperated to silence the reasons for the tragic sinking, created multiple conspiracy theories about corruption. These rumours empowered the protesters and resulted in the formation of a broad social legitimacy and participation in their struggle. The protest camp allowed strangers to build a sense of mutual understanding and attachment of the kind that Yael Navaro calls serendipitous (2017: 212) even while living in a metropolis like Seoul. The Sewol protesters were aware of the legal system's power and limited their dissent to legal actions with hopes of changing some existing laws in order to bring about the desired societal changes. The Sewol sank in April 16, 2014. It soon became clear that the ferry was not handled, maintained, or supervised properly. The media accused different government ministries for that situation, and many blamed the president personally for not supervising the rescue operation well. The spontaneous demonstrations became a semi-permanent protest camp that since 2014 the mayor of Seoul has allowed to stay in Kwanghwamun Square. Two years later, in 2016, when the alleged corruption of the president were exposed by the media, the demonstrations became massive, and their impact stronger. The public dissent in Seoul reached its height in the winter of 2016-7. At that time, more than one million people attended every Saturday the night's candle vigil protest in Kwanghwamun Square. Many protesters felt 70

Journal of American Folklore, 131 (520): 181-208, Spring 2018.


Vernacular dialectic reasoning reconciles contradictions in people's lives. It involves an amalgam of emotion, belief, and intuition, as well as structures and intentions similar to formal dialectics and scientific thinking. In contemporary Israel, many self-proclaimed secular Jews use vernacular dialectics to avoid confronting stark contradictions between their pilgrimages to the graves of Jewish saints (tsaddikim), their virtual practices of tsaddik veneration, and prevailing rational assumptions in their secular daily lives.

In The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Anthropology, edited by Pardo Italo, and Giuliana B. Prato. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 499-518.

This essay asserts that the diverse and extensive presence of vernacular religion in Seoul makes even controversial practices, such as spirit mediumship, an inseparable part of the experience provided by the city. Persecution by the government in the 1970s and continuous disapproval by the literati elites have not liquidated various forms of divination and possession practices. Moreover, with the aid of new-media promotion the practitioners have gained legitimized places to perform rituals and tell their myths and supernatural revelations. I have explored this religious urban landscape using participant observation and in depth discussions and interviews since 2005. Seoul is often called a 'global city,' but this term has come to be problematized to include also the distinctiveness of each such place. Seoul's unique "personality" is characterized simultaneously by elaborate futuristic architecture and various tokens of Korea's vernacular religions. I specifically explore the relationships between religious beliefs of people living in Seoul and spatial considerations that span well beyond the intention of these individuals. Both the religious and the practical considerations of geographical allotment of land in Seoul are embedded in the vernacular cultural constructions and have been evolving and practiced in typical manners for hundreds of years.

Journal of Korean Studies, 21 (1): 179-212, Spring 2016.

South Korean shamans (mansin) increasingly rely on new media for networking and advertising their services. They exert power and intention through their manipulation of the Internet and other mass communication media, while facilitating the expansion of these spiritual activities in South Korea and internationally, despite the lingering stigma. Historically, Korean shamanism (musok) was an orally transmitted tradition that was mastered mainly by illiterate low-ranking women within the neo-Confucian hierarchy. A growth in literacy has sparked a process of change, which has been accelerated by new media and technology. Since the 1970s, the individual agency of mansin in creating positive publicity and a positive social image for themselves has significantly increased. Evidence of this new agency is based on fieldwork among successful mansin in Seoul. Daily and ritual mansin activities, film representation of mansin, Internet home pages, and online portals of musok associations are analyzed to demonstrate how the visual and textual dimensions of the new media work jointly with other semiotic modalities to construct the image and scope of musok in contemporary South Korea and worldwide.

God Pictures in Korean Contexts: The Ownership and Meaning of Shaman Paintings begins with a provocative question: "what do pictures want?" (see Mitchell 2005). With this initiative, the book views paintings through theories of object agency (Gell 1998) and pictures as emotion provokers (Freedberg 1989) via exerting a "sacred gaze" (Morgan 2005). Indeed, the book affirms how in Korea images of gods embody the spirits that they represent and are worshipped as such. Their handling relates to their supernatural powers and efficacy beyond mere material presence. From the 1980s, and even earlier, these pictures have gained new ways of life as the desired possession of art collectors and museums. They also became national emblems and representations of the "Korean spirit."

Once viewed as an embarrassing superstition, the theatrical religious performances of Korean shamans—who communicate with the dead, divine the future, and become possessed—are going mainstream. Attitudes toward Korean shamanism are changing as shamanic traditions appear in staged rituals, museums, films, and television programs, as well as on the internet.

Contemporary Korean Shamanism explores this vernacular religion and practice, which includes sensory rituals using laden altars, ecstatic dance, and animal sacrifice, within South Korea's hypertechnologized society, where over 200,000 shamans are listed in professional organizations. Liora Sarfati reveals how representations of shamanism in national, commercialized, and screen-mediated settings have transformed opinions of these religious practitioners and their rituals.

Applying ethnography and folklore research, Contemporary Korean Shamanism maps this shift in perception about shamanism—from a sign of a backward, undeveloped Korea to a valuable, indigenous cultural asset.
https://iupress.org/9780253057174/contemporary-korean-shamanism/