Korean Shamanism
A mudang at work.
In a previous post I mentioned shamanism in South Korea. It will probably come as a surprise to learn that shamanism is alive and well in this country, where it is practised alongside other religions.
So, just what is shamanism? The term is used by anthropologists, rather than any actual believers, and derives from a word in the Tungus language of Siberia, which is where the first anthropological studies were conducted. Shamanism, one can say, is the first of humanity’s spiritual belief systems, and is a form of animism. A person acknowledged by their community to be a shaman is believed to have mastered the world of the ‘spirits.’ The shaman ascends to the sky to commune with the spirits of the human dead and those that inhabit all of nature, or experience possession, the descent of spirits into their own bodies. In the first case, the anthropologists say the shaman becomes the equal of the celestial forces, while in the second they are the means of its incarnation. Shamans are considered experts at channeling and riding the often dangerous energies that pervade the world. In Korea, shamanism is an ancient, deep-rooted and still enduring tradition, though one that is largely unpublicised because it is considered a ‘primitive’ cultural residue that runs contrary to Korea’s modernising project.
Importantly, almost all Korean shaman are women, called mudang, and one ceremony they are especially called upon to perform is called a gut. This is undertaken for different purposes, such as after a death, or for exorcisms. The mudang sets up an altar, and going through multiple costume changes, and using props including, masks, paintings, fruit, and paper flowers, becomes ‘possessed’ by the psyolsang – the spirits. These spirit avatars can be traditional animist gods, which are often animals, or Buddhist bodhisattvas. But nowadays, the spirits can also take the form of Jesus and the angels, or even people like General Douglas MacArthur. He is an important man for Koreans, said Hazel. The costumes represent the various spirits the mudang is channeling, and during the ceremony she will interpret the spirits’ message to her.
Shamanism in Korea is also very secretive. Though many Koreans consult mudang, they are usually embarrassed to admit it, because shamanism smacks of superstition and is deemed culturally backward. But Korean people continued to arrange visits in secret. This was not so much in fear of breaking the law, however, but because of the shame they’d feel if it became known in their own community. They continue to go for many reason: because they are sick or mourning the death of a loved one, because they want something or someone, or want to curse them, or more generally, because they are anxious about what the future holds for them or their loved ones.
Many older Korean people believe they are afflicted by an debilitating emotion called han, a feeling of animosity, bitterness, malignancy, and a profound sense of being ill at ease with what seem to be the obvious injustice of the world. Han has greatly occupied Korean culture, and many ways have been developed for purging souls of the malaise. It seemed that one of the principal roles of the mudang is to satisfy this han, the grudges, of the dead, and to pray for their peace. Through connecting with the spirit world, they cleanse the world of the living of the bitterness of the dead.
Cultural Difference in the Age of Covid-19. Part II
Koreans eating dinner.
In a previous post I introduced some rather broad-brush theory coming from the contemporary French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien concerning differences between Western and East Asian cultures in order to place responses to the current Covid-19 crisis in some kind of wider historical and social context.
In this post, I want to explore the ideas of a couple of Western social psychologists, to see what light they might shed on the issue.
Significant empirical research into psychological behaviour has revealed how even such a basic core concept as the understanding of ‘selfhood’ is determined by the cultural-historical environment and ossifies into recursive patterns of behaviour. The Canadian social psychologist Stephen Heine discusses an East Asian cultural bias towards what he calls the ‘interdependent self’, in which individuals are understood to be connected to each other via a network of relationships. This Heine contrasts to a Western model primarily based on the idea of an ‘autonomous self’, where selfhood is generated in contrast to others.
Echoing Heine, the American social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett has also identified two contrasting cognitive styles - ‘analytic’ (West) and ‘holistic’ (East). ‘Analytic thought’, he writes, “dissects the world into a limited number of discrete objects having particular attributes that can be categorized in clear ways”, and as a result “lends itself to being captured in language”. ‘Holistic thought,’ by contrast, “responds to a much wider array of objects and their relations, and […] makes fewer sharp distinctions among attributes or categories, [and so] is less well suited to linguistic representation.” Consequently, as Nisbett notes, “to the Asian the world is a complex place composed of continuous substances, understood in terms of the whole rather than in terms of the parts, and subject more to collective than to personal control”. In the Western’s case, on the other hand, “the world is a relatively simple place, composed of discrete objects that can be understood without undue attention to context, and highly subject to personal control.”
It isn’t difficult to see how these basically different understandings of the self’s relationship the world might impact on how societies respond to a viral pandemic. For example, it is interesting to consider how it might affect the use of a face mask. I often see Koreans walking around wearing a mask even in the countryside, far from crowds, as if they believe that the virus is in the air, and could be contracted. As a Westerner, I stubbornly hold to a way of understanding contagion that is in line with Nisbett’s analysis of the Western mindset, and therefore believe that the virus can be understood in terms of a person to person infection within a mindset in which “the world is a relatively simple place, composed of discrete objects that can be understood without undue attention to context.”
What if I was considering the virus from within a mindset in which “the world is a complex place composed of continuous substances, understood in terms of the whole rather than in terms of the parts, and subject more to collective than to personal control”? Perhaps I too would be a little more holistic in my understanding of how viral contagion happens.
For more information:
Richard Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and why, Free Press, 2010.
Steven B. Jackson, ‘Chatting Up Culture With Steven Heine: Part I and II’, Psychology Today, Online April 26 and April 30, 2012.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-conscious/201204/chatting-culture-steven-heine-part-i https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-conscious/201204/chatting-culture-steven-heine-part-ii
CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN THE AGE OF COVID-19
I mentioned in an earlier post how the difference in official advice and popular attitude to wearing face masks between Western countries and those of East Asia in the current crisis is striking. South Koreans, like other East Asians, are more used to wearing them than Westerners. Their function is twofold: to protect the wearer (against pollution), and to protect others from the wearer (when, for example, the wearer may spread germs during a cold or flu bout).This second function means that Koreans are wearing their masks now not only to protect themselves but also to protect those with whom they come into contact. And insofar as up to 14 days can be the period when no symptoms are experienced even though one is infected, it does seem reasonable and socially responsible to wear a mask when one is in a public place. I also noted in a previous post how the social value of the face mask is in part symbolic, and that we should not underestimate the power of symbolism as a force of resistance to the virus on the level of collective cohesion.
The fact that even medical experts in the West initially seemed to refer to the role of the face mask primarily or wholly as a form of self-protection says much about the difference between an individualistic and collectivistic society. The former thinks primarily, perhaps excessively, about the interests of the atomized self, while the latter is more aware of how the wellbeing of the self is inextricably bound up with that of their community.
Recently, there has been considerably discussion in the Press about the different ways in which, say, South Korea and the United States have handled the pandemic. Here, for example, are two articles that try to address these difference in relation to South Korea.
Can we predict what social conventions will most effectively combat the spread of the Covid-19 virus? The apparent success of South Korea in rapidly responding to the present crisis and bringing the pandemic under control suggests a culture which, because of underlying cultural traits, is far more used to conformity and obedience than the West’s. The problem for us Westerners is going to be that such ‘Asiatic’ conformity and obedience have such negative connotations for the individualistic Westerners, who are unlikely to respond with the kind of inherent self-abnegation that is expected in Korea and other East Asian societies.
It’s always dangerous to talk in terms of rigid and general ‘cultural differences’, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have some validity, as long as we bear in mind that they are neither unchanging, or binding in the same way to all members of the same society. So, with this caveat in mind, I want to consider some ways in which we can understand why Eastern and Western societies have responded to Covid-19 differently, and not simply as a consequence of specific decisions by politicians.
In the rest of this post, I try to dig deeper into cultural difference, and focus in particular on what the eminent sinologist and François Jullien’s ideas might contribute to the debate.
Jullien argues that on the deepest level, the divergence between what he calls ‘Chinese’ thought (which would include cultures like Korea and Japan influenced by Chinese culture) and that of what he terms ‘Greek’ thought (or “Western’) amounts to two fundamentally different approaches to humanity’s relationship to the world. He describes these two different cultures as being characterised on the one hand by an inclination towards ‘’transcendence’ (West), and on the other to ‘immanence’ (East).
These differences are a consequence os the fact that, traditionally, Chinese thinking was not based on the activity of gathering objective knowledge through the senses, because China was especially sensitive to “the regular, spontaneous fecundity stemming simply from the alternation of the seasons”. In fact, Jullien asserts,“[t]here are two ways in which my existence is continuously connected to something outside. I breathe and I perceive”.
By granting “priority to a conception of reality as an object of knowledge”, the Greeks, by contrast, laid the groundwork for Western thought., writes Jullien. ‘[T]he mind moves upward from visual sensation to the construction of essences, and vision is corrected, structured, and at the same time transcended by reason.” An equation of the eye with the mind was thereby established, and this meant an over-emphasis on the importance of rational argument and analysis, where a whole-as-parts paradigm or bipolarity was applied to thought. “One could say – metaphorically, at least – that Greek thought was marked by the idea, at once tragic and beautiful, of ‘measure’ attempting to impose itself on chaos,” Jullien writes.
As a consequence, Western culture came to value discrete, clear, abstract ‘building blocks’ for cognition. Because it projects order from outside, Western thinking focuses on the causal explanation “according to which an antecedent and a consequence, A and B, are extrinsically related to one another”. Mathematical structures - point, line, plane and ratio - are of the first importance in the history of Western philosophy. Thus, as Jullien notes, Descartes could influentially assert “that the distinct serves as the gauge of truth, ‘that the things we conceive very clearly and distinctly are all true,’ in the oft quoted formula”.
On the one hand, writes Jullien, there is the Western philosophical tradition: “I can privilege the gaze and the activity of perception, the Greek choice, which led them to grant priority to a conception of reality as an object of knowledge: the mind moves upward from visual sensation to the construction of essences, and vision is corrected, structured, and at the same time transcended by reason.” Alternatively, there is the direction taken by Chinese philosophy, which “proceeded from the fact that I am alive, breathing in - breathing out.’ From this premise it was then possible to “deduce the principle of a regulating alternation from which the process of the world flows.” By prioritizing breath over perception the Chinese way was therefore grounded on a conception of the world founded “not on the activity of knowledge but on respiration.’. Jullien suggests that these differences can be summed up in ontological terms by saying that the West is preoccupied with ‘being’, while the East thinks in terms of ‘living.’
But how does this abstract level of understanding culture translate into day-to-day decision making and action? This will be the topic of my next post.
NOTE: I have quoted from Jullien’s The Propensity of Things, and The Great image has no shape, or, on the nonobjective in painting. Here is an Amazon link to these, and others of Jullien’s books:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=francois+jullien&ref=nb_sb_noss_1