South Korea's Young Shamans Revive Ancient Tradition with Social Media
Editor
8 June 2024 20:52 WIB
ECONOMIC ANXIETY
Lee says she has felt physical pain and experienced psychosis since she was a teenager - symptoms that some believe are signs of a deity possessing a budding shaman.
She decided to embrace her calling in 2018 and soon started a YouTube channel that now has over 300,000 subscribers. She posts videos on topics such as the items she carries in her bag and the country's fate in 2024. (She's not optimistic.)
"The current state of South Korean society is a factor that can't be ignored," she said, adding that many of her millennial and Gen Z clients come to her with concerns about affordable housing and the cost of raising children.
In Seoul, where Lee is based, the price of a home was more than 15 times the median salary in 2022, up from 8.8 in 2017, according to a government report. The country has also suffered from high inflation and interest rates.
The younger generation of shamans who live in the city can connect well with younger clients facing economic challenges that they can't find an answer to, said Han Seung-hoon, an assistant professor at the Academy of Korean Studies, a research and education institute that operates under the Ministry of Education.
BATTLING STIGMAS
A culture ministry agency estimated in 2022 that there were between 300,000 and 400,000 shamans and fortune-tellers in South Korea.
Shamanism is an "important and powerful part of the Korean character," the agency wrote on its website.
The roots of shamanism on the Korean peninsula go back at least 2,000 years, said Han.
The Japanese colonial administration of the early 20th century and the military dictatorship of the 1970s attempted to suppress shamanism, which they saw as an obstacle to modernization.
Politically powerful Christians - who make up roughly a quarter of the population - have also criticized shamans and their followers.
Han noted that larger religions such as Christianity and Buddhism - which about 40% of South Koreans say they are followers of - are more influential in society, yet do not draw similar levels of criticism.
Lee said Christians also visit shamans in South Korea. "Even ... churchgoers want to have their bad dreams read," she said.
More recently, some practitioners have found themselves in legal trouble. A 66-year-old shaman in Seoul was sentenced to four years' imprisonment in February after being convicted of defrauding a client of more than $200,000, according to local media reports.
The court ruled that the shaman had been pretending to speak to the client's dead mother.
Lee thinks it's wrong for shamans to make decisions for clients. Instead, she said that shamans served as guides - like friends and family offering advice - rather than decision-makers.
Some of South Korea's elite have links to shamans.
Min Hee-jin, a top entertainment executive embroiled in a business dispute with a major K-pop label, defended herself in an April press conference against allegations that she consulted a shaman for business purposes.
Min said that she had a conversation with a shaman, hoping that talking would make her feel better: "Don’t you guys all do that too?"
A 2022 study in the journal BMC Psychiatry noted a "huge" gap between South Koreans needing mental health treatment and getting it, which it partly attributed to stigma.
"Shamans have been playing the role of counselors," said Kim, the religious professor.
"People have stigmatized shamanism as something dirty, suspicious, and scary," said Han, adding that people were sometimes accused of visiting shamans in attempts to hurt their reputation.
(1 Korean won = $0.0007)
REUTERS
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