Bangul, the Shaman's Bell Cluster

A kut is a long event. It runs in numbered sections, each addressed to a different god or group of the dead, and the practitioner changes costume between them so that the room can see which presence is being dealt with. The bells work across the joins. Shaken in the hand, in fast repeated bursts, they open a section, hold the rhythm against the drums and gongs of the accompanying musicians, and mark the point at which the practitioner begins to speak in the voice of the spirit rather than her own. Clients and family present at the rite respond to that shift, because what is said in that voice is the part they came for: a judgement on a household problem, a message from a dead relative, a demand for something to be put right.

The bells are the practitioner's own equipment. Along with the fan, the knives and the costumes, they are acquired at or after initiation, or inherited within a line of practice, and they are kept with the practitioner rather than at the house where a rite is held. That matters for how the object should be described. A particular set of bells is tied to a particular person's practice and to the gods she serves, and treating one person's regalia as a general specification for Korean shamanic equipment misrepresents a tradition in which the personal relationship is the organising fact.

Korean shamanic practice has spent most of the last two centuries being disapproved of by whoever held authority. Confucian officials of the late Joseon treated it as disorder. The Japanese colonial administration regulated and suppressed it. Protestant missions, and the large Korean churches that followed them, opposed it directly. In the 1970s the anti-superstition drives that accompanied rural modernisation cleared village shrines and destroyed equipment. Practitioners nonetheless continued to work, largely through the clientele that kept coming: households with illness, business failure, a bad death or an unquiet ancestor.

The later twentieth century added a further complication rather than a resolution. Certain rites were designated as intangible cultural properties and certain practitioners as their holders, which brought funding, stages and audiences, and placed a rite that exists to settle a specific household's trouble into a frame where it is performed as national culture. Ethnographers working through the same decades documented practitioners negotiating both worlds at once, and the anthropological literature on Korean shamanic practice is unusually rich because of it. The bells are a small object with all of that attached: working equipment, suppressed superstition and designated heritage, depending on who is looking at them.