ABSTRACT

Reading a translation of one’s first book several decades later enables distance and a critical perspective on one’s early work. This was the case when Laurel Kendall read Kim Seong-nae and Kim Dong-kyu’s Korean translation of her first book, Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life. Kendall reflexively describes how she crafted a gendered research project that reflected the concerns of 1970s anthropology and an emergent anthropology of women. In particular, she offered a critique of the then-current assumption that women’s participation in possession rituals (in Korea and elsewhere) was primarily a reflection of their marginal status, a “redressive strategy” or a “ritual rebellion,” describing instead how relationships between shamans, ordinary women, gods, ghosts, and ancestors were realized in the stories women told about their lives and the rituals they performed with and without the help of female shamans. These observations offered a fresh perspective on both Korean gender relations and popular religion, arguing that these activities constituted a body of belief and practice that reflected the social experiences of women and housewives’ pivotal role in sustaining the health and harmony of village households. In this chapter, Kendall offers a retrospective summation of her work, describing with hindsight what she sees as its primary shortcomings – a naïvely comparative theoretical frame – and what she considers its lasting contribution – an honest portrait of the complexity of women’s ritual sphere in a time and place now gone.