Chronicle of violence, ritual of mourning: Cheju Shamanism in Korea.

Abstract

This thesis explains the way in which the memory of historical violence is reconstituted and deconstructed in people's belief in the spirits of the dead and shamanic healing rituals. Rather than focusing on the propositional and symbolic structure of ritual itself, the thesis illuminates the rhetorical and performative aspects of ritual that are expressed in a particular, concrete context of historical relations. By locating ancestral spirits and healing rites in the modern history of Cheju Isl and , the thesis interprets shamanic ritual as a discursive practice that demystifies the cultural knowledge of person and history while recapitulating it through performance. Shamans' divinatory dreams and spirit possession and ritual lamentations of the dead souls (yonggye ullim) bring the violent events of the past, the April Third Communist Uprising in 1948 in particular, into the cure of memory. The April Third Communist Uprising that occurred in 1948 on Cheju Isl and , was a tragic ideological battle of the cold war era. While the cold war ideology continually dominates in the state politics, this event was erased in the historical texts and seemed forgotten in the everyday life of Cheju people. Regarding this violent event as a representative image of the modern history of Cheju Isl and and Korea as a whole, this thesis pursues the following questions: how does this imagery work to bring together history and the magic of the shamanic ritual in which that history is imagined, and how are tragedy and a history of violence converted to life-giving forces of healing? By linking the historical imagery of this tragic event to ideological struggles in the process of Korean nation-building, the thesis suggests that the shamanic practice of reliving the tragedy of the April Third Uprising counterposes a popular alternative to the hegemonic narrative logic of contemporary state violence that has suppressed the memory of this uprising and also other modern forms of popular protests.