In 21st-century Korea, shamanism is not only thriving — but evolving

Artist Jorge Mañes Rubio travels to Seoul, Korea, to learn about the city’s primarily female shamans and their vital role in contemporary urban life.

In cultures all over the world, the figure of the shaman stands out as the one who bridges the mortal and spirit worlds. Often living at the edges of society but functioning at its center, shamans were entrusted with the ability to communicate with nature spirits, ancestors or a culture’s gods and goddesses — and could function variously as oracle, doctor, psychotherapist and beyond.

Such practices have ancient roots, but — as artist and Jorge Mañes Rubio discovered — shamanic traditions are still very much alive and relevant today. Here, Mañes Rubio, a TED Fellow, describes what he experienced when he entered the world of contemporary Korean shamanism during a 2017 residency at Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, and offers his take on how it relates to humanity’s relationship to art and spirituality.

What did you understand shamanism to be before you went to Korea? How did that compare to what you actually found?

My idea of shamanism going into this project was very much a Western perspective: I thought a shaman would live in a remote place, maybe a jungle in Brazil, or in West Africa. I also associated shamans with people who ingest substances to send their souls into other worlds to retrieve knowledge.

Korean shamanism works the opposite way. The spirit of the shaman—known in Korea as manshin—does not travel somewhere else. Instead gods, spirits or ancestors descend into the shaman, so that the shaman becomes a god herself. It’s a very powerful thing to witness: the possessed shaman talks and moves completely differently, she presents completely different personalities — sometimes speaking in regional dialects that the shaman herself does not know how to speak — and assumes a position of authority. People acknowledge the god’s presence with particular hand gestures and a bow — this means you recognize that the shaman’s not a shaman anymore, she’s a god.