Women, mourning, and the ritual for the death of family 1

The Cheju (Jeju) Island Massacre of 1948 prefigured both the Korean War in 1950 and the ideological battle of the Cold War. After the division of the Korean nation, anticommunism in the South effectively silenced the public memory of the Cheju Massacre for over half a century, with the exception of the dead speaking through shamans. During the military dictatorship before the democratization process of the 1990s, shamanic rituals were the only vehicle for expressing these hidden memories of massacre. The tragic deaths of family ancestors were textualized and historicized in a shamanic ritual genre called younggye ullim, or “laments of the dead.” The shamanic ritual of calling the names of ghosts kept intact family memories of the violent event. On the other hand, the recent public commemoration of the victims of the Cheju Massacre reconstitutes public memory of the event, inverting its meaning into the political agenda of democratization. This chapter examines contestations over the meaning of collective death and suffering between the family memory and the public memory of the Cheju Massacre in contemporary Korean history.