The mudang's social history is a long arc from the bottom of the ladder. Joseon Korea, ordering society by Confucian rank, counted shamans among the despised occupations, taxed and regulated them, and pushed their rites to the margins of respectability even as royal women and commoners alike continued to hire them. The twentieth century brought harsher pressure: colonial administration treated the rites as backward superstition, and South Korea's modernization decades ran organized anti-superstition campaigns that demolished shrines and drove practitioners underground, while Christian expansion added its own hostility. The reversal came from an unexpected direction. From the 1970s and 1980s, folklorists, dissident intellectuals and the state's own cultural agencies began treating gut as national heritage, and celebrated ritualists were designated holders of intangible cultural properties, Kim Keum-hwa, master of the west coast fishing-fleet ceremonies, becoming the most internationally visible.
Laurel Kendall's fieldwork, begun in the 1970s and continued through the financial crisis of the late 1990s, documented what the heritage framing can miss: a living clientele bringing the mudang their unquiet ancestors, their illnesses and above all their precarious livelihoods, with ceremonies sought for shops, ventures and debts. Contemporary mudang advertise online and appear on television, and the role remains what it has long been, consulted in trouble and questioned in respectability, a resilient profession that modern Korea has neither absorbed nor abandoned.