ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how in July 2008, 18-year-old Rayoung Kim had been pummelled and smothered in her bedroom during what the victim's brother described as a religious ritual. It explains that the ritual was the ancient Korean rite of kut in which a shaman communicates with spirits and described it as a sometimes dangerous practice. Exorcism, the forced or coerced expulsion of negative forces from the alleged victim by ritual means, is a broadly observed and to that degree broadly generalizable ritual practice, a possible translation across many different cultures of religious practice. The chapter presents arguments against the possibility of a Korean shaman's have performed the alleged exorcism death in Virginia and it uses this morbid example as a foil for the explication of significant differences between exorcism in Korean Christian and Korean shamanic practice. It also suggests that a long history of mis translation that has been projected onto the morbid instances of exorcism death evoked above.
