Few living rituals have been condemned by so many successive orthodoxies and outlived them all. The Confucian state of the Joseon dynasty classed the gut as licentious rite, taxed and banished its practitioners, and pushed the tradition into the women's sphere, where it rooted: the mudang has been predominantly a woman for centuries, and her clientele likewise, making Muism one of the world's clearest cases of a female-centred ritual economy persisting under a patriarchal establishment. The twentieth century tried harder: colonial administration policed the gut, postwar modernisation campaigns bulldozed village shrines as superstition, and evangelical Christianity, now vast in Korea, preaches against it to this day.
The tradition's answer has been adaptability, documented closely in Laurel Kendall's ethnographies: urban mudang perform in commercial gut halls outside Seoul, clients bring business failures and visa problems alongside sickness and grief, and the kori for a general may share an afternoon with prayers for a daughter's university examination. From the 1980s the state reversed valence, designating master mudang as holders of intangible cultural properties and supporting the great regional gut as performance heritage, with the Jeju island rite for the wind goddess Yeongdeung inscribed by UNESCO in 2009. Heritage status carries its own ironies, staging for audiences a rite whose point is efficacy, and scholars and mudang alike debate the trade; but the commissioned gut, paid for by a client who needs the gods spoken with, continues in Korea and its diaspora, which is the only survival that matters to the tradition itself.