ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the field in which Korean shamans work is ‘the field of misfortune’, which exists separately from the field of health care where medical practitioners work. It also argues that shamanism is not a sort of traditional medicine, and the utilization of shamanic healing is not a phenomenon of medical pluralism. The chapter deals with the definition of shamanism in Korean society. It describes the defining characteristic of shamanism in Korean society. The chapter shows that the speech of the spirits is the critical feature which explains both why Koreans need shamans when they find themselves in the ‘field of misfortune’, and why they have such negative attitudes towards them. Many anthropologists have regarded ‘shamanism’ and similar practices, implicitly or explicitly, as a sort of traditional medicine under the name of ‘medical systems’ or ‘ethnomedicine’.
