Laurel Kendall, Ph.D.

Senior Curator in Residence, Asian Ethnology

Professor, Richard Gilder Graduate School

xxx
Email:
[email protected]
Phone:
212-769-5892
Download Curriculum Vitae

Education

  • Columbia University, Ph.D., 1979
  • Columbia University, M.Phil, 1977
  • Columbia University, M.A., 1976
  • University of California, Berkeley, A.B., 1969

Research Interests

A scholar of popular religion and its material manifestations in East and Southeast Asia, Dr. Laurel Kendall’s recent work concerns the production and consumption of sacred objects in contemporary market economies, with fieldwork in South Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Bali.

In Mediums and Magical Things: Statues, Paintings, and Masks in Asian Places (University of California Press, 2021) she describes how material images—like the bodies of shamans and spirit mediums—give material form and presence to otherwise invisible entities, and how 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. It considers how such things are fabricated, marketed, cared for, disposed of, and sometimes transformed into art-market commodities and museum artifacts. Fieldwork in several settings becomes a wide-ranging conversation that yields surprising results when questions posed by experiences in one place are answered in another.  

Book cover image for Laurel Kendall's Mediums and Magical Things.

Kendall began a long acquaintance with South Korean life in 1970 as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer, when a chance encounter with female shamans led her to subsequent anthropological fieldwork. Her Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion (University of Hawaii Press, 2009) offers a 30-year perspective on people described in Shamans, Housewives, and other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life (1985) and The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman (1988).

In 2010, Korean colleagues awarded Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF the first Yim Suk Jay Prize recognizing a work of anthropology about Korea by a non-Korean.  In 2007 the International Society for Shamanic research gave Dr. Kendall a lifetime achievement award. A collaboration with Korean scholars Jongsung Yang and Yul Soo Yoon resulted in God Pictures in Korean Contexts: The Ownership and Meaning of Shaman Paintings (2015).

Book cover for Laurel Kendall's God Pictures in Korean Contexts.

Kendall has also written on gender, tradition, and modernity, most notably in Getting Married in Korea (1996) and as the editor of Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea (2002) and Consuming Korean Tradition in Early and Late Modernity: Commodification, Tourism, and Performance (2011).

At the American Museum of Natural History, Kendall has curated several exhibitions, including Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns, and Mermaids (2007) and Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit (2003), a unique collaboration with the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology that earned Kendall a Friendship Medal from the Government of Vietnam. Kendall is a former President of the Association for Asian Studies (2016-2017), and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Links

Publications

Recent and Important Publications

2021  Mediums and Magical Things: Statues, Paintings and Masks in Asian Places  Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

2024  Laurel Kendall, Nguyễn Văn Huy, and Bùi Thu Hoà. “The Work of Craft in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Lai Xá Photography Village in Vietnam.”  Visual Anthropology 37  (3): 1-25.

2024  “Threads of Connection: Souls and Garments in South Korean Shaman Practice,” (Special Issue on Lives of the Dead in Asia)” Cahiers d’Extrême Orient, Extrême-Occident, 2024.

2024  “Puppets and Souls: Some Encounters in Korean Shaman Ritual.” Puppet and Spirit: Ritual,  Religion, and Performing Objects, Vol. 1.  Eds. Claudia Orenstein and Tim  Cusack, pp. 27-38. London and New York: Routledge.

2023  With Ni Wayan Pasek Ariati, “Animism? Animated? Ensouled? The active lives of  Balinese masks,” Handbook of Material Religion.  Eds, Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Jennifer Scheper Huges, and  S. Brent Rodriguez-Plate, pp. 157-167.  Abington, UK: Routledge.

2023  With Nguyễn Thị Hiền.  “Introduction: Borrowing, Accommodation, Contestation: Ritual Practices and Ritual Creativity in Contemporary Vietnam.” Special Issue: Borrowing, Accommodation, Contestation: Religious Practices and Ritual Creativity in Contemporary Vietnam,” co guest edited by Nguyễn Thị Hiền and Laurel Kendall. Magic, Witchcraft, and Ritual 18 (2): 151-163.

2023  With Wayan Pasek Ariati. “Manifestations of Presence in Korea and Bali: Crossroads,   Intersections, Divergences” Demons and Gods on Display: The Pageantry of Popular Religion in Asia,” special issue,      Katherine Swancutt, guest ed. Asian Ethnology, 82-1: 25-43.

2021  Gods and Things: Is “Animism” an Operable Concept in Korea? Religions 12: 283   297.  https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel12040283

2020  With Ni Wayan Pasek Ariati, “Scary Mask/Local Protector: the curious history of Ida  Ratu Gedé  Gombrang (a.k.a. Jero Amerika).”  Anthropology and Humanism 45(2): 279-308.

2018  2nd author with Erin Hasinoff, “Making Spirits, Making Art: Nat Carving and Contemporary. Painting in Pre-Transition Myanmar,” Material Religion: the journal of objects, art and belief: 285 313.                                                      

2018  “How is a shaman’s altar like a motor?” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft special issue on  Altars and Shrines 13 (2): 267-285.

Teaching Experience

Faculty Appointments

  • Adjunct Professor, Columbia University, since 1990
  • Special Lecturer, Academy of Korean Studies, Seoul, Korea, 2006
  • Visiting Professor, Center for East Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania. 2000
  • Visiting Professor, L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris, 1999
  • Visiting Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Southern California, 1988 Adjunct Assistant Professor, East Asian Studies Program, NYU, 1986-1988
  • Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures, University of Kansas, 1981-1982

Courses Taught

Projects from Columbia University/AMNH Museum Anthropology Program (MUSA)

Additional Courses

  • Exhibition Culture: Politics and Practices of Museum Exhibitions, Anthropology Department, Columbia University. Spring 2011
  • Korean Society, Museum Anthropology, Women, Power, and the State in East Asia, The Korean Shaman Lens, Popular Religion in East Asian Society, Columbia University.