Statues, paintings, and masks—like the bodies of shamans and spirit mediums—give material form and presence to otherwise invisible entities, and sometimes these objects are understood to be enlivened, agentive on their own terms. This book explores how magical images are expected to work with the shamans and spirit mediums who tend and use them in contemporary South Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, Bali, and elsewhere in Asia. It considers how such things are fabricated, marketed, cared for, disposed of, and sometimes transformed into art-market commodities and museum artifacts.
Laurel Kendall is Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History and Senior Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.
"A very unusual combination of anthropology and art studies, showing how sacred images are born, live, and die. Laurel Kendall uncovers the deeper meaning of the objects admired by collectors and connoisseurs as revealed through the eyes and hands of the people who make, use, and revere them."––Piers Vitebsky, author of Living without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos
"Mediums and Magical Things is a contribution to the study of the materiality of religions in Asia. Not limited to a single field, it is instead a comparative study based on fieldwork of Vietnamese, Burmese, Balinese, and Korean practices and concepts. Kendall has devised a conceptual framework that allows meaningful comparison and brings out both similarities and differences. The process results in new perspectives, derived from the comparison, on individual fields. Through its methodological and conceptual framework, the book may also be an inspiration to researchers of other material objects used in a religious context and other regions."––Boudewijn Walraven, author of Songs of the Shaman: The Ritual Chants of the Korean Mudang
280 pp.6 x 9Illus: 30 color photographs, 30 b/w photographs
9780520298668$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
May 2021