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Faculty Bio | |
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Laurel M. Kendall
Adjunct Professor
Columbia University
Anthropology |
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Biography
As an anthropologist of Korea, I have been working with and writing about Korean shamans for nearly thirty years. I first saw them perform in the early 1970s when I lived in Korea as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I was initially interested in the relationship between this largely female tradition and the operation of gender in Korean popular religion. I also looked at the manner in which shaman autobiographies, including portentious dreams and visions, shape shamans’ ongoing relationships with gods and ancestors. In 1989, I collaborated with documentary filmmaker Diana Lee in filming the story of a shaman’s initiation, a visual complement to my books. More recently, I have been examining how changes in the shamans’ world keep pace with the social and economic transformation of South Korean society, a project that includes questions of space and landscape, performance, ritual consumption, national identity, and market anxieties. I am also working with colleagues in Hanoi, Vietnam, on what we call “the sacred life of material goods.” Following the work of Alfred Gell, we are exploring the relationship between people and objects, relationships that have rules, obligations, potential benefits, and dangers. This project weds material culture studies to the anthropology of religion, the practical work of museums to the ethnography of popular religion and magic. Working between Korea and Vietnam, I am cautiously interested in regional comparisons. Vietnamese folklorist Dr. Nguyen Thi Hien and I are exploring points of similarity and contrast between Korean shamans and spirit mediums of Vietnam’s Mother Goddess Religion. My work as a Curator at the American Museum of Natural History has led me in many different directions. I collaborated with Dr. Nguyen Van Huy, Director of the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology, on a joint American/Vietnamese exhibition, Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit (opened 1983), a project that included mutual planning, implementation, and training between the staffs of our two museums. With Dr. Alexia Bloch, I visited museums the Russian Far East (Siberia) in 1998 to share visual documentation of collections made by the Jesup North Pacific Expedition in this region 100 years ago. The journey inspired us to pen a travel narrative about how an area documented in Jesup Expedition ethnographies had been transformed by the Soviet experiment and how it was faring after the Soviet Union’s collapse. In turn, that exercise prompted a co-authored essay on the difference between travel writing and ethnographic narrative.
Representative Publications:
2005. The Museum at the End of the World: Travels in the Post-Soviet Russian Far East. (with Alexia Bloch). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
2004. “Gods, Markets, and the IMF in the Korean Spirit World.” Transparency and Conspiracy, eds. T. Saunders and H. West. Duke University Press. pp. 38-64.
2001. Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class and Consumption in the Republic of Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.(edited volume)
1996. Getting Married in Korea: of Gender, Morality, and Modernity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
1994. Asian Visions of Authority: Religion and the Modern States of East and Southeast Asia. Co-edited with Charles F. Keyes and Helen Hardacre. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
1988. The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman: of Tales and the Telling of Tales. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii.
1985. Shamans, Housewives, and other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. | |
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