The Shaman's Wages

Trading in Ritual on Cheju Island

Kyoim Yun, Clark W. Sorensen

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780295745961
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia coreana

Breaking from previous scholarship on Korean shamanism, which focuses on mansin of mainland Korea, The Shaman's Wages offers the first in-depth study of simbang, hereditary shamans on Cheju Island off the peninsula's southwest coast. In this engaging ethnography enriched by extensive historical research, Kyoim Yun explores the prevalent and persistent ambivalence toward practitioners, whose services have long been sought out yet derided as wasteful by anti-shaman commentators and occasionally by their clients. Intrigued by discord between simbang and their clients over fee negotiations, Yun set out to learn the deep-rooted legacy of condemning or trivializing the practitioners' self-interests, from a neo-Confucian governor's purge of shrines during the Chos?n dynasty to the recent transformation of a community ritual into a practice recognized through UNESCO World Heritage status. Drawing on a wealth of firsthand observations, she shows how simbang distinguish ritual exchanges from more mundane instances of bartering, purchasing, bribing, and gift giving and explains why ritual affairs are nonetheless inevitably thorny. This original study illuminates the intertwining of religion and economy in shamanic practice on Cheju Island.

1 A NEO-CONFUCIAN REFORMER’S 1702 PURGE

A painting from Illustrated Records of the T’amna Inspections (T’amna sullyŏkto) (fig. 1.1) depicts burning buildings with Mount Halla and small volcanic craters (orŭm) in the background. The term “shamanic shrine” (sindang) is written under each flaming building (see enlarged image in top left of fig. 1.1), leaving no doubt what the scene depicts: the oft-cited torching of 129 island shrines in 1702, for which Governor Yi Hyŏngsang (1653–1733) is infamous among the locals to this day.

While like-minded Confucian scholars complimented Yi for his deed,1 simbang themselves manifest quite a different take on his act when reciting Cheju’s history during the performance of large-scale rituals: “This is an island where five hundred shrines were burned, and five hundred temples destroyed during the time of Governor Yi from Yŏngch’ŏn [in Kyŏngsang Province]” (Hyŏn Yongjun 1980a, 44). The exaggerated number of shrines and temples destroyed demonstrates how large the incident looms in the memories of the practitioners. Though it is difficult to know how the populace actually reacted to Yi’s measures at the time, his actions quite likely caused much resentment among them, as mirrored in oral narratives that recount how Yi returned to the mainland only to discover that his sons had died, victims of vengeance exacted by the local deities he had offended (Hyŏn Yongjun and Kim Yŏngdon 1983, 100–110, 734–42; P’ungsok muŭm 1994, 2:417–29).2

Based on this story and in light of Confucian principles, most studies have interpreted the purge as the manifestation of a confrontation between a centrally appointed magistrate (suryŏng) armed with Neo-Confucian ideology and the subaltern local people on the periphery who were dependent on the “unorthodox” beliefs.3 While the confrontational nature of the event is undeniable, such a dichotomous interpretation blinds us to Yi’s extremely pragmatic approach to the management of resources involved in the popular religion and to his critical stance on Confucian officialdom’s double standard toward the vernacular religious practice—they condemned shamanic rituals as illegal but benefited from the shamanic tax (muse) purportedly enacted to discourage them.

FIG.1.1. Burning shrines, detail from Kŏnp’o paeŭn (Obeisance to the royal court), Illustrated Records of the T’amna Inspections. Courtesy of the National Museum of Jeju

The dominant interpretations of the incident predicated on an ideological and geopolitical dichotomy are plausible. But Yi’s accounts of the purge demonstrate the way in which state policy on rituals led reformists faithful to Neo-Confucian principles, such as Governor Yi, to appraise ritual consumption. In his disapproving view of the popular religion, sacrificial objects dedicated to rituals were devoid of any symbolic meaning and the laity was being exploited by shamans. He could not conceive of the possibility that people would willingly give up goods in the hope of achieving desired outcomes and that shamans were providing the laity with something valuable in exchange for what they were given. However, unlike other governors appointed to Cheju, he attempted to liberate the laity from the “waste” of resources expended on “wrongful” practice and practitioners from their profession by abolishing shamanic taxes. Moreover, he criticized officialdom and the government for tacitly supporting the very practice they insisted should be abolished in order to reap the economic benefits it generated.

CHEJU, CHOSŎN’S PERIPHERY

In the minds of the metropolitan elites of the Chosŏn dynasty, Cheju was at both the geographical and the cultural periphery. An island “as small as a bullet,” it was “the farthest place from the central government” (Chŏngjo sillok, 17 June 1781). According to Confucian cultural discourse that was prevalent during the dynasty, “any land far from the center,” to say nothing of remote areas like the island, “was deemed to be less civilized than the center itself” (Sun Joo Kim 2010, 10). However, the central elites’ discriminatory view that outlying regions were “culturally defective” (Sun Joo Kim 2008, 161) was particularly pronounced with regard to the island that had once been an independent kingdom. Cheju was at the same time strategically significant for national defense and a valuable source of tax revenue and local tribute (e.g., horses, tangerines, and sea products). The new dynasty made an effort to establish a strong governing presence in the countryside, which the previous Koryŏ dynasty had lacked (Duncan 2000; Pettid 2001, 174; Yi Yŏnggwŏn 2005, 164). For administrative purposes, the central government assigned Cheju to Chŏlla Province, located in the southwestern part of the Korean peninsula, and divided it into three parts: one special county (mok) and two lesser counties (hyŏn). As shown in figure 1.2 (note the inverted compass directions), north of Mount Halla was designated Cheju Mok, the seat of the governor (moksa); the southwest sector was named Taejŏng Hyŏn; and the southeast sector was Chŏngŭi Hyŏn (see the enlarged images in fig. 1.2).

Due to the great distance and the difficulty associated with travel, an appointment to Cheju usually signified a demotion or sinecure for civil servants, regardless of the bureaucratic rank of the position. Reluctant to accept their appointments to Cheju, some officials declined their posts, and others left Cheju without permission before the end of their tenure (Yi Yŏnggwŏn 2005, 160).4 In the eyes of metropolitan administrators, Cheju was a hinterland that lacked Confucian civilization and thus a place where the people and mores were “still in chaos” (158). On this unfamiliar ground, centrally appointed officials desperately needed help from local elites in order to govern a populace that was culturally quite different from that of the mainland, but they found it difficult to obtain such support especially during the early years of the dynasty.

The island’s indigenous power holders (t’oho), mostly from the families of Ko, Yang, and Pu, construed magistrates as metropolitan intruders and initially resisted centralization. Well established in the region, few of these hereditary local strongmen with military, economic, and political power would have wanted to leave home and undertake the risk of traveling to Seoul in order to advance their social position with the central government (Cho and Pak 1998, 200). They maintained a symbiotic relationship with the central government after its subjugation to the Koryŏ in the twelfth century—the latter depended on them in practical matters, such as defending the territories and levying taxes and tribute from the populace; in return, the dynasty granted the local leaders a certain amount of autonomy and protection. Despite the change from Koryŏ to Chosŏn, the native officials (t’ogwan) still participated, in parallel with centrally appointed officials, in the local administration, each having his own official seal and military power (Sejong sillok, 10 June 1427). Moreover, qualified candidates for hyangni, the hereditary “clerks who ran day-to-day operations in the local administrative districts” and whose multifaceted role was indispensable to the Chosŏn government’s efforts at centralization (Kyung Moon Hwang, 2004, 2), were not readily available on Cheju due to the lack of formal education (Kim Dong Jeon 1991, 63–64; T’aejo sillok, 27 March 1394).5

FIG.1.2. Detail from Halla changch’ok (A panorama of Cheju Island), Illustrated Records of the T’amna Inspections. Courtesy of the National Museum of Jeju. Arrows point to enlarged labels: (top left) Chŏngŭi, (top right) Taejŏng, (bottom) Cheju.

However, local authorities eventually had to cooperate with appointed officials in order to maintain and enhance their privileges in the face of the central government’s deepening control of the countryside, which systematized and intensified tax collection. For their part, thrown into a strange place,6 magistrates had to negotiate local allegiances for effective governance and for dealing with practical affairs (Palais [1975] 1991, 13), and they often turned a blind eye to corruption and the illegal activities of their local standing staff. The Confucian ideal of administering the state in a way that relieves the suffering of the people (kyŏngse chemin) was much compromised, and many governors were infamous for abusing their power and exploiting the local people.7 By making this practical compromise, the central government finally brought the power of the island’s hereditary local leaders under control by the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Nevertheless, the mainland elites’ condescending view of Cheju lasted throughout the dynasty. Augmented Survey of the Geography of Korea (Sinjŭng Tongguk yŏji sŭngnam) (hereafter Geography of Korea) characterizes Cheju as a place where “customs are peculiar, the military is fierce, and the people are ignorant.” It cites an excerpt from a letter written by Kwŏn Kŭn (1352–1409), a major figure in Neo-Confucianism, to Yi Wŏnhang, who had just been appointed governor of Cheju: “The foolish islanders are human only when they are happy, but when angry they become beasts” ([1530] 1969, 5:96–97).8 While exiled in Cheju, Kim Chŏng (1486–1521) observed, “Only a few are literate,” “their minds are vulgar,” and “they have no sense of honor or justice” (Cheju Munhwawŏn 2007, 17). Another exile, Kim Chŏnghŭi (1786–1856), a scholar renowned for his original style in calligraphic art, reveals one more humiliating perception of Cheju residents: “Their obtuseness and ignorance are like those of the barbarians in Hokkaido of Japan.”9 In a fashion little different from what cultural historian Taylor E. Atkins refers to as “dyads for articulating difference” between colonizers and the colonized, such as “literate/nonliterate” and “civilized/barbaric,” the elites depicted the islanders as “primitives,” thereby asserting their own superiority (2010, 55).

The Dutchman Hendrick Hamel, a bookkeeper on the Sperwer (Sparrow Hawk), which was shipwrecked in 1653 on Cheju, known to him as Quelpaert, also observed the mainland intellectuals’ opinion of the islanders.10 After being held captive with his fellow shipmates for more than nine months before being transferred to the mainland, he wrote in his journal that the inhabitants were “held in low esteem by people from the mainland” (2011, 12). Although he was perhaps unaware of it, the islanders’ devotion to shamanic practices on a greater scale than elsewhere in Korea added to the metropolitan elites’ perception of Cheju as the least civilized part of Chosŏn Korea.

IMPROPER LOCAL CULT

The volume of the Geography of Korea that deals with Cheju mentions several distinctive local characteristics in the section on customs (p’ungsok), among which an entry on shamanic rituals receives the most extended attention. This entry provides the most detailed information available at the time concerning popular beliefs and rituals: kinds of deities worshipped, seasonal communal rituals (dates and participants, as well as musical instruments used in ritual processions), representa...