A Practice Under Pressure, and Then in a Museum Case

Korean shamanic practice has spent most of the last two centuries being disapproved of by whoever held authority. Confucian officials of the late Joseon treated it as disorder. The Japanese colonial administration regulated and suppressed it. Protestant missions, and the large Korean churches that followed them, opposed it directly. In the 1970s the anti-superstition drives that accompanied rural modernisation cleared village shrines and destroyed equipment. Practitioners nonetheless continued to work, largely through the clientele that kept coming: households with illness, business failure, a bad death or an unquiet ancestor.

The later twentieth century added a further complication rather than a resolution. Certain rites were designated as intangible cultural properties and certain practitioners as their holders, which brought funding, stages and audiences, and placed a rite that exists to settle a specific household's trouble into a frame where it is performed as national culture. Ethnographers working through the same decades documented practitioners negotiating both worlds at once, and the anthropological literature on Korean shamanic practice is unusually rich because of it. The bells are a small object with all of that attached: working equipment, suppressed superstition and designated heritage, depending on who is looking at them.