Korean Muism did not end with the country's modernization, industrialization or the spread of Christianity and Buddhism as its dominant formal religions, and baksu, like mudang, continue to practice and to be consulted by clients in contemporary South Korea. Anthropological fieldwork on the tradition, including the ethnographic study this entry draws on, documents shamans of both sexes actively working through the late twentieth and into the twenty-first century, serving clients across a wide social range even as Korea's religious landscape has shifted substantially around them, official state attitudes toward shamanic practice have varied considerably across different political periods, at times actively discouraged as superstition and at other times treated with more tolerance or even folkloric pride, without this consistently ending the practice on the ground.
Recording the baksu's practice-status as a living tradition rather than purely historical reflects that continuity directly: this is not solely a role reconstructed from older written sources but one still held by working practitioners today, serving real clients with real concerns, the same basic ritual structure, sinbyeong, initiation, gut, carried forward largely intact from long before Korea's modern religious landscape took its present shape.