Dancing in the Forest

Why do Koreans search for shamans? Confrontation with jarring reality, magnified in the context of immigration, pulls them to look for cultural roots in moral solidarity with their ancestors. Ancestral spirits travel by carrying culturally engrained remedial power to the 'othered' life of the Korean immigrant community in the country of Protestantism. Korean shamans mediate the present with the past, life with death, the living with the ancestral spirits, and Confucian moral virtue with Protestant belief, and fill the geographical and collective mental gap in a life of transition. This book introduces Korean shamanism within the Protestant context of immigration in the United States, including an ethnography of Korean shamans in order to observe this landscape of not only conflictive but also ambivalent episodes through rituals and narratives of participants.