Spirit Power: Politics and Religion in Korea’s American Century

Abstract

In Spirit Power: Politics and Religion in Korea’s American Century, Heonik Kwon and Jun Hwan Park recount their “magical” encounter with the spirit of Douglas MacArthur. During a shamanic rite (kut) conducted by a shaman interlocutor in Incheon, one of South Korea’s largest cities and home to a displaced form of shamanism from the Hwanghae region that lies in today’s North Korea, the authors extended their greetings to the American general. What followed left the authors momentarily perplexed. MacArthur “suddenly burst into tears and said that he was happy to meet [Kwon and Park], too” (154). Later, the shaman explained to the authors that the general was “‘happy that at long last, some people came and gave him full recognition [as General MacArthur].’” This evocative anecdote, delivered toward the conclusion of the book, lifts up two questions that the authors use to unlock this book’s capacious and innovative inquiry into religious power, on the one hand, and politics in religion, on the other. First, what is MacArthur—not only an American but a controversial figure in ongoing debates over his wartime legacy—doing in a kut? Second, what can MacArthur’s induction into the spirit world of Incheon’s Hwanghae shamanism tell us about the creative efficacy of Korea’s indigenous religious culture?Spirit Power breaks new ground in the established but growing field of religion and the Cold War. By bringing anthropology of religion, notably Im Sukchae’s body of works on Korean shamanism into critical dialogue with Cold War history, Spirit Power invites readers to explore the “possibility that political ideas are embedded in religious forms, even in such seemingly unlikely places as shamanism” (11). The significance of the book’s intervention lies in its centering of shamanism alongside evangelicalism to interrogate “the manifestation of American power” in twentieth-century Korea’s religious sphere. In doing so, Spirit Power rewardingly expands the analytical category of “religion” that has conventionally been interchangeable with (evangelical) Protestant Christianity in studies of the moral and religious dimensions of American power and turns the field to face “a frontier society Asia’s postcolonial Cold War” (5, 9). The introduction thus presents a sociopolitical portrait of Incheon, the book’s principal ethnographic site where the celebrated memory of General MacArthur as a “mighty puritan crusader” who defended Korea’s Christians against godless communists coexists with the general who has “become an effective helper-spirit among the war-displaced performers of Hwanghae shamanism” (8). What follows is a grounding overview of the historiographical, ethnographic, and theoretical discussions to unfold across the six chapters that make up the body of the book.The first chapter, “Religion and the Cold War,” opens a critical discussion of “religion” and “power” at the intersection of Cold War history and the authors’ home discipline of anthropology. Tracing landmark works on religion and American relations with the world, the authors offer a critical historiography of the field’s contributions to understanding the moral, religious terrain of American power. At the same time, the authors, critiquing the “modernist” logic of a single world stage and rational (nation-state) actors (20), turn to Clifford Geertz’s notion of “power as display” to situate the chapter’s remaining discussion on religion in Cold War Korea in the broader “culture turn” in Cold War history (21–22). In the final two sections, Kwon and Park show that in Korea, where the Cold War turned hot, “religion and religious ideas come to take on a political relevance that is much more radical than how they appear in the existing literature on religion and the Cold War” (23). In telling Korea’s history of religion and Cold War violence, the chapter momentarily takes readers to Cheju island, where the islanders faced the nascent South Korean state’s counterinsurgency terror from 1948 to 1953. This violent episode is inseparable from the history of both Christianity and shamanism in Cold War Korea. As the authors point out, a core group of the state’s agents in this terror campaign came from none other than the Youngnak Presbyterian Church in Seoul, the refugee church founded by the widely revered Reverend Han Kyŏngjik. In closing, Kwon and Park dwell on Cheju shamanism’s aesthetic response to this lived history of political violence to ask “whether a locally confined cultural form such as shamanism can be a meaningful subject for deliberation on religion and the Cold War” (37).In the second chapter, “The American Spirit,” the authors answer the question above in the affirmative through an ethnographic exploration of “the field of contemporary Korean shamanism that has assimilated symbols of American power into the vista of its spirit world” (44). Regarding the “man of the American century” for whom the locality of Incheon is significant in multiple worlds, the authors use this chapter to build toward an argument that the “power of the American General in the ritual world is distinct from the General’s power as a representative historical figure of the American Century and is quite un-American” (68). Critical to the authors’ argument is the ritual knowledge provided by Chŏng Hakpong and Yi Chŏngja (for whom MacArthur is a principal helper-spirit). Through their dialogues, the authors locate an “analogical relationship” (64–65) between MacArthur and the traditionally established helper-spirit of General Im Kyŏngŏp, a seventeenth-century court official who became a locally seated spirit entity along Korea’s western coastline, where Hwanghae is located. With the mass displacement triggered by the Korean War, however, many shamans from this region experienced deracination from not only physical home but their locally rooted spirit world. It is in this social milieu of displacement and search for a new helper-spirit in the more proximate coastal waters of Incheon that the authors understand MacArthur’s spirit as a locally seated “extension (or invention) of a traditional shamanic entity, especially that of General Im” (65). In the closing notes, the authors introduce Im’s theory of parallelism to conclude that “the symbolic presence of American power is possible in Korean shamanism only to the extent that this power coexists with other powers and respects the unique sovereign existence of each of them” (67). Before continuing this dialogue with Im in the book’s latter part, the authors turn the next chapters to shamanism’s confrontation with colonial and Cold War modernity.The third and fourth chapters of Spirit Power critically examine the invention of “superstition” and “heritage,” both of which, the authors argue, have threatened the moral integrity of Korean shamanism. In “Voyage to Knoxville, 1982,” the authors revisit the event of the World’s Fair that brought Kim Kŭmhwa to Tennessee, as well as the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, as an emissary representing Korea’s authentic culture (73). The “deeply contradictory experience” that Kim recollected after her voyage, however, speaks to both the antisuperstition campaigns in Cold War South Korea that intensely targeted shamanism and the inclusive-exclusive politics of global “cultural heritage.” In 1970s South Korea under military dictator Park Chung Hee, the New Village (Saemaŭl) movement gained steam as a state-led and bottom-up mass social movement that sought to “radically transform the mentality and spirituality of rural Korea” (77). The authors learned from their interlocutors that church groups often participated in this war against superstition with zeal, “reciting aloud the part of Matthew on Satan-chasing” (78). Yet, they trace the emergence of a “new cultural policy” that accompanied the post-Park regime in the wake of popular demands for democratization in the 1980s and the changing international Cold War world. While this change has weakened the social stigma around shamanism in South Korean society, the authors critique the “continuation of alienation” enacted by the government’s elevation of shamanism as a living cultural artifact. In these government- (and even UNESCO-) sanctioned spaces, Korean shamanism’s own artistic heritage and creative ritual powers are marginalized (88–89).“Seeking Good Luck,” the fourth chapter, brings Korea’s unique (post)colonial history into the anthropology of religion. Korea’s colonial experience under Japanese rule (1910–45) diverges from the more familiar encounters between white, Christian imperial powers and non-Christian Indigenous societies because the Christian missionary project in Korea did not correlate with either the colonial state power or that state’s particular “civilizing mission.” And when imperial Japan, especially with the start of the Pacific War, imposed a form of “State Shintō,” this triggered a moral crisis among Korea’s Christians. More importantly to the examination of “anti-superstition,” the prominence of Christian identity among the Korean cultural elite during this time meant that the colonized charged the colonizer as idolatrous (103–4). Thus, the authors point out that Korean Christians experienced liberation from Japan’s rule as a national liberation and religious liberation. This chapter also traces another significant divergence in Korea’s colonial case: the collusion between cultural nationalism (Korean) and cultural imperialism (Japanese) in the production of knowledge about shamanism (110). Through generative dialogue with anthropologist Seong-nae Kim (Kim Sŏngnae), the chapter identifies the connecting logic between the nationalist project to retrieve an authentic but “archaic” shamanic past and the colonial project to place indigenous Korean shamanism at the bottom of a social evolutionary hierarchy headed by a transcendental, “high religion” of Shintoism (109). Though I think the authors miss an opportunity to engage in adjacent discussions on the invention of “religion,” “superstition,” and especially “State Shintō” in the field of religious studies, this chapter illuminates the historical conditions that have made it troubling and vexing for shamanism’s place in modern society. How can shamanism be “authentic” and “national” if it incorporates foreign entities? And, why might the “the pursuit of luck by humans and the power of spirits” (111) inspire fear in modern state powers? These questions are further unraveled in the final two chapters.The fifth chapter, “Original Political Society,” opens with a vignette of MacArthur in the spirit world. In a dream, Yi Chŏngja saw the general seated at a round table with other spirits. He exuded his “usual” confidence but “showed some humility, too—out of respect for the old ones” (112). This scene of a spirit MacArthur dressed in his identifiable army uniform and yet fully integrated into the “council of spirits” offers a vivid portrait of the radically egalitarian political model that Im Sŏkchae had located in Korean shamanism. Expanding on the theory of “parallelism” advanced by Im, “one of the most prominent anthropologists in South Korea in the post-Korean War era” (114). At the core of Im’s theory is the notion that “all spirit-persons are sovereign beings on their own and in their unique spheres, and they are stubbornly self-determining” (126). To see this, Im argued, one must “engage with how these spirits are enacted upon in the actual ritual space [kut]” (126), for it would be a mistake to interpret the sequence of stages in a kut as a hierarchical presentation of spirit-persons from high to low. Rather, in each stage (kŏri), the invited spirit-person “becomes the master of that particular kŏri” and only that space/stage, just as spirit-persons maintain their “place-specific sovereign existence” (128) in the domestic world outside of the formal ritual space. Im called this worldview an “egalitarian parallelist order” (131).In the final chapter, “Parallelism,” Kwon and Park draw an analogy between the kut world and the modern international system. Here, they propose that “an arguably archaic religious form may possess within it a political imagination akin to the ideal of modern politics, especially that of international politics” (136). While some of the chapter’s theoretical discussions may prove more gratifying to students of anthropology, the chapter builds on the authors’ earlier discussion of the five-nation flag seen in Chŏng Hakpong’s spirit shrine. To this novel (re)invention of the obanggi (five-directional or five-colors flag) ritual instrument, the authors apply Im’s insight: “the nations depicted in the five-nation flag are bound by the principle of parallel existence” (155). To recount, the nations represented are South Korea (middle position) and the four powers that have waged war on, over, and around Korea in the modern age: China, the United States, Japan, and Russia. Although this instrument represents real nation-states in the secular-political world, the authors argue that, in the moral worldview of Korean shamanism, these nations “meet and work together, as sovereign entities, within the space of common tasks involving the augmentation of human well-being” (155). To put it another way, the moral world of Korean shamanism offers a way to “imagine an ideal modern political system within the given order of an arguably ancient religious system.”In the conclusion to the book, the authors return to the “modern heritage politics” that have resulted in a “bifurcated identity on the part of the ritual performer” (167). For Hwanghae shamans of Incheon who aspire to hold an entitlement as a heritage performer, the helper-spirit of MacArthur is carefully confined to private kut ceremonies. In public ritual spaces, at events organized by official state authorities, the American general is nowhere to be seen and the performer instead calls on the “familiar” (read: authentic) spirits from old Korea. Yet the point that the authors want to make is that it is precisely the creatively imaginative power that captures the “authenticity” of Korean shamanism and its ability to remain meaningful to human life, including present-day North Korea, where good-luck-seeking practices seem to be returning (170).Spirit Power makes a vital contribution to the scholarship on religion and politics at large. The capacious and bold discussions that the authors weave in and out across the chapters invite readers to ruminate on its implications for a long time. Moreover, in the spirit of the Thinking from Elsewhere series in which this book appears, the authors do a marvelous service in introducing Im, whose works have yet to appear in English translation, to English-reading scholars across anthropology and history. While the book promises plentiful rewards to any scholar concerned with power and morality, empire and decolonization, modernity and religion, Spirit Power will find its most eager readers in the fields of religion and the Cold War, anthropology of religion, and East Asian studies. The book will in no time be a required title in graduate seminars and qualifying examinations in anthropology and sociology of religion, modern Korean and East Asian history, and history of the United States and the world.