Female Koryak shaman.

In an old photograph from the Museum's archives, a Koryak shaman heats her drum and chants herself into a trance, preparing to confront the spirits that have stolen her patient's soul. Eighteenth-century travelers to Siberia brought hack descriptions of such shamans, who entered into frenzied trance states at will and claimed extraordinary powers through intimate knowledge of the spirits. Europeans in the Age of Enlightenment reacted to these accounts with disgust and fascination. These two contradictory responses are still with us as anthropologists describe the activities of shamans all over the world, in places as diverse as Chinese market towns and the Amazon rain forest.
Governments spanning the political spectrum have condemned shamanic practices as irrational and dangerous, obstacles to progress and enlightenment. Romantics have sought out shamans as guides to a primal religious experience, while nationalists have celebrated them as the bearers of ancient cultural knowledge. In Siberia, where shamans were suppressed during the Soviet period, they are now reemerging as rallying points of ethnic identity.

Shadowy figures in old ethnographies, shamans have become a vivid presence in our own popular culture, even appearing as pivotal characters in romantic fiction and murder mysteries. Workshops in shamanic techniques are part of the contemporary urban scene in North America and Western Europe. Shamans and would-be shamans perform for tourists at cultural festivals from Santiago, Chile, to Seoul, Korea, sometimes incorporating media-inspired theatrics into their own rituals, while local guardians of cultural authenticity fulminate that all of the "real" shamans are dying out.
We anthropologists have shifted our focus from who shamans are - schizophrenics? charlatans? - to what they do. Those who see shamans as primordial relics may be surprised by the social and political contexts that give meaning to their practices today. Indeed, the very fluidity of their visions permits shamans (and their spirits) to comment on such current problems as ecological degradation, ethnic politics, and the uncertainties of the marketplace.
In modern Korean cities, for example, struggling entrepreneurs turn to shamans for assistance - giving new meaning to "the spirit of capitalism." Shamans in China and South Korea, who traditionally called up the spirits of ancient warriors, now also evoke the shades of Mao Zedong and General Douglas MacArthur.

The "spirit mother" with an apprentice.

Although held in low esteem, the work of a shaman may offer the only hope for thirty-two-year-old Chini, who has so far failed at everything she has tried. Raised in poverty and married to an abusive drunk, she fled her marriage and was forced to leave her two small children behind. Drifting from one menial job to another, she began to hear the spirits' voices, urging her to leave her tasks and run outdoors. "But of course, once I got outside, there wasn't anyone there," she says with a faint smile. Her bizarre behavior earned her two visits to a mental hospital. Whenever Chini had her fortune told, the shamans insisted that she was destined to be a shaman, that she must accept her fate and be initiated into the profession. Chini's mother and sister were appalled at first, but eventually they supported Chini's apprenticeship and went deep into debt to pay for her initiation kut.

A kut is a ceremony in which shamans - clothed as gods and ancestors and inspired by dancing to loud, percussive music - become hosts to the spirits. In an initiation kut, the apprentice shaman does this for the first time. Early in her ceremony, Chini must balance on an earthen water jar and deliver an oracle. Speaking through Chini, the god known as the Buddhist Sage announces that an intrusive spirit is blocking the way. Then Chini says no more.

Shaman Kim Kumhwa.

The shamans first cajole the spirits, then coach and finally scold their apprentice, berating her for letting her thoughts wander. In mounting desperation, they tell her that the spirits will not move her tongue for her, that performing inspired speech, "whether or not the spirits have made you into a shaman," is more constructive than her stage fright and stony silence.

As the shamans see it, Chini's gates of inspired speech are blocked by an obstinate spirit, but at another level they recognize that Chini is blocked because she cannot clear her mind, opening herself to feelings and losing herself in performance. She does not heed the impulse to clothe herself in a particular spirit's costume, a vehicle of that spirit's presence and power. She does not weep or shout insults, but resists the emotional release and surrender that would bring on the force of the spirits.

Kim Pongsun, the "spirit mother" in charge of Chini's initiation, tries to identify the troublesome spirit. She divines that the culprit is Chini's dead sister, a pockmarked maiden who took her own life at age nineteen. Kim Pongsun now claims that the dead sister was herself a destined shaman. Once installed in Chini's shrine as Princess Hogu, the sister will assist Chini as a potent guardian spirit.

But even when she is clothed in the robes of this new spirit, Chini can't find inspiration. As a last resort, the shamans dress Chini in the gold satin robe of the Heavenly King, since no intrusive spirit would dare to block the high king's path. Swaying on her feet, eyes vacant, a smile on her lips, Chini proclaims the presence of the Heavenly King, then lapses again into silence.

Kim Pongsun castigates the spirits whose painted images hang above Chini's altar, calling them heartless for insisting on a kut and then failing to uphold their part of the bargain. She threatens to tear them off the wall and burn them up.

At last, the apprentice seems ready to speak for Princess Hogu. Kim Pongsun urges Chini on, using a now-familiar formula: "If there's a costume the spirit wants to wear, then put it on! Jump and keep shouting out the spirit's commands. That's what we mean by the true words of the spirits - shout out what the spirits have to tell us. That's what it's all about." The shamans pound cymbals, drum, and gong as Chini reaches for Princess Hogu's robe. Kim Pongsun shouts, "You must cry your heart out. Then everything will burst out!"

Sobbing convulsively, Chini covers her tear-streaked face with Princess Hogu's fan and - in the person of the dead sister - laments her pitiful situation, forced to become a shaman. The dead girl calls for her mother and pours out wrenching words that could be Chini's own:

Mother! Mother! I wanted so much to be beautiful,
Mother, ... I'll help my little sister as a shaman.
Mother, I want your blessing, but you don't respond.
Mother, how many times I've called you! ... When my mother raised me she wasn't able to give us decent food.
I'm full of pity for Chini. How can it be helped,
Mother? ... That's why I've come.

Tears trickle down the mother's wrinkled face. Chini's sister and sister-in-law are weeping in the corner. The shamans wipe away their own tears. Chini gives a round of divinations, staggers drunkenly through her performance of Princess Hogu's praise song, and collapses in a bow in front of her altar. Although the apprentice has made progress, the outcome of the kut is still uncertain. But for the brief, cathartic encounter with her dead sister, Chini's performance has been limited, her divinations commonplace and unremarkable. The next day - after much coaxing, encouragement, and scolding - Chini undertakes the most difficult ordeal of her kut. She climbs six feet to the top of a makeshift edifice and balances on the blades of a fodder-chopper. There she proclaims the presence of the Knife-Riding General, who is one of the most powerful spirits in her pantheon. But she gives no divinations, and when she descends from the blades, she speaks no more. Chini ends her kut deep in debt and not yet empowered to work as a shaman. She has failed, the shamans acknowledge, because she is too self-conscious and inhibited. Discouraged, Chini breaks off the apprenticeship with her spirit mother and disappears. Her unsuccessful initiation and failed apprenticeship are common in the world of Korean shamans. Although disappointed by Chini's defection, Kim Pongsun is philosophical:

Look at it this way. It isn't as if anyone can become a successful shaman right when they get the calling. They must make a great effort and change completely. If it happened automatically, then wouldn't everyone he making their living as a shaman? Everyone has their moment, and all things happen in their season. If this time the spirits vacillated, then by and by the time can come when they will make her into a successful shaman.