AnthropOLogy > Being an Anthropologist: Laurel Kendall

Laurel: When I was in High School, I read a book by Margaret Mead. She was a famous anthropologist who spent her career at AMNH. Reading the book was a revelation. She helped me realize that being a successful girl or boy, woman or man would be different in different cultures. 

I grew up in San Francisco where many people of Asian heritage live and where I could experience Asian art, food, gardens, and architecture. I was fascinated with all of this and wanted to learn more about what life was really like in China, Japan, and Korea.

Laurel: A lot of studying! Besides learning all about different Asian cultures, I took a whole range of courses in all fields of anthropology. That included archaeology , biological anthropology, linguistics, as well as my own interests in religion and women's lives. 

To specialize in Korean culture I had to read a lot about the country's society, history, politics, religion, and folklore. I also had to learn how to read, write, and speak Korean. Plus, I spent two summers studying Japanese, since books about Korea were sometimes written in Japanese. I had studied some Chinese in college and that helped me because Korean writing sometimes includes Chinese characters.

Laurel: I spent almost two years doing research in a small village near Seoul. Seoul is the capital city of South Korea. 

Korea, in general, is a society where men have more privileges than women. I wanted to explore village women's culture through the lens of women themselves. In particular, I was intrigued by female shamans and the rituals and ceremonies they led. A shaman is someone who it is believed can interact with spirits and speak in their voice. They practice healing and predict the future.

During my fieldwork, I lived with a Korean family. Over 35 years later, I am still in touch with them. The village has changed a lot. When I first saw this village, the houses all had thatched roofs. And it took a long time to travel on a bus from the village to the center of Seoul. Now all of the houses have been rebuilt as modern bungalows. I can also get almost all the way to the village by subway from downtown Seoul. And all the grandchildren in the family I lived with have computers and email addresses.

Laurel: Shaman rituals took different amounts of time. The divination, a way to see the future, might only take an hour. But people would sit down and talk before and after, so the whole event might take two or three hours. Sometimes families did special rituals, like around the first moon of the Lunar New Year. 

But the most important rituals, called kut, would last for many hours. Some would be performed for almost the whole night and start again early the next morning. There would be breaks for meals and everyone would eat together. 

At rituals, I would bring my tape recorder, both to record the event and so that the shamans could amuse themselves by singing into it. When the shamans performed kut I wanted to know why the family was holding this ritual. When the shamans spoke in the voice of a god or an ancestor, I wanted to know which one, and what messages the spirit had for the household. I wanted to know what these spirits — and the shaman — had to say about the family's situation.