Essay 2: Modernity. Readings Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF.

Name
Institutional Affiliation
Course Code/Title
Instructor
Date
Essay 2: Modernity
Introduction
In the 1970s, anthropologist Laurel Kendall made an extensive study about South Korea's shamans and their clients to reflect on the lives of village women and their religious practices. In the decades that followed, South Korea witnessed an unprecedented social, economic, political, and material revolution that resulted in the disappearance of Korean villages (Kendall ix). In a similar case, the emergence of the city of Shenzhen city in China and its growth reflects an overlap of the ways of life in the village it developed from (Bach 423). While shamans continue to exist, Kendall corroborates that they are largely part of the South Korean modernity. For millennia, the definition of time has remained a philosophical and scientific problem since man began to doubt the seven days in the creation account. Since enlightenment until the 21st century, scientific and philosophical meaning of chronology and time have been akin to the use of chronology in historical lexicography. The definition of time and modernity has altered the meaning of shamanism, which early researchers perceived the practitioners and their clients as psychiatric patients. Kendall's book, "Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF" has not only challenged such an assumption but suggested that shamanism has transformative benefits. In Kendall's account of shamans, who for the most part of the last century have been loathed as practitioners of antimodern superstition, are nostalgically celebrated as icons of a vanished rural world, thus challenging the meaning of modernity. This paper reflects on the works of Laurel Kendall and Jonathan Bach to examine what it means for a set of practices, an individual, or a city, among others, to be described as modern and reconcile with aspects that society labels as existing outside modernity.
International standards of modernization make shaman practice take the flip sides of modernity's coin. Modernity is a narrative in which people have been made to understand themselves in comparison to others. In the modernity story of the shaman, the aboriginals have been understood in inconsistent and incongruous ways. In his work, Kendall offers a creative account of how modernization affects women's religious lives in dramatic ways. The aboriginal belief system and rituals of shamans in South Korea are exposed to attacks from the forces of modernity. Talking to shaman Yongsu’s mother about how things have changed, Kendall exposes that the belief system among the shaman has changed dramatically (Kendall xvii). The mountains have lost their power and sense of in...