L Kendall

Biographic Data

ID1411
NAMEL Kendall
GIVEN NAMESL
FAMILY NAMEKendall
SIGNATUREKENDALL L
AFFILIATIONSAmerican Museum of Natural History
ORCID0000-0002-4665-3264
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS62
TOTAL CITATIONS177
AUTHOR COUNT62
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1974
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2024
H-INDEX8

  • Threads of Connection: Souls and Garments in South Korean Shaman Practice

    Open AccessL KendallARTICLEExtrême-Orient Extrême-Occident2024

    Different from the physical sites of historical hauntings, or the offerings and paraphernalia that are part of family ritual, the garments that are the subject of this paper make a connection to dead souls in ways that are intimate, visual, and tactile. They bridge life and death as the accoutrements of a quotidian social presence that is, in this context, an uncanny non-presence rendering the garments in question as far from neutral matter. Kore…

  • The Work of Craft in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: The Lai Xá Photography Village in Vietnam

    Open AccessL Kendall, N V Huy et al.ARTICLEVisual Anthropology2024References: 18

    In Lai Xá Village, Vietnam, studio photography is the village handicraft. Counter to Walter Benjamin's characterization of the click of a button, privileging eye over hand, but typical of many craft traditions, photographers there describe painstaking apprenticeships through which they learned to master the tools and materials of their craft. They learned to compensate for the shifting properties of light, climate, humidity, and irregular supplie…

  • Mediums and Magical Things: Statues, Paintings, and Masks in Asian Places

    L KendallBOOKMediums and Magical Things2021

    "Paintings, statues, and masks-like the bodies of shamans and spirit mediums-give material form and presence to otherwise invisible entities, and 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 in contemporary South Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, Bali, and elsewhere in Indonesia. It considers how such…

  • Gods and Things: Is "Animism" an Operable Concept in Korea

    Open AccessL KendallARTICLEReligions2021Cited by: 4References: 29

    Shamanship is a thing-ish practice. Early missionary observers in Korea noted that features of the landscape, quotidian objects, and specialized paraphernalia figure in the work of shamans (mansin) and in popular religious practice more generally. Subsequent ethnographers observed similar engagements with numinous things, from mountains to painted images, things vested with the presence of soul stuff (yŏng). Should this be considered "animism" as…

  • Gods, Markets, and the IMF in the Korean Spirit World

    L KendallCHAPTERTransparency and Conspiracy2020

  • Scary Mask/Local Protector: The Curious History of Jero Amerika

    Open AccessL Kendall, Ni Wayan Pasek AriatiARTICLEAnthropology & Humanism2020Cited by: 4References: 25

    Jero Amerika," a mask/tutelary god, protects the people of Ubud, a former kingdom of Bali, Indonesia, and today a tourist mecca. Jero Amerika operates within the logic of empowered Balinese temple masks, but Jero Amerika is also eccentric. Returned to Bali from abroad after uncanny events, the mask makes remarkable appearances during temple festivals and in stories that circulate by word of mouth and via media old and new. Jero Amerika's activiti…

  • Hyung Il Pai

    Open AccessL KendallARTICLEAnthropology News2018

  • Making spirits, making art, Nat carving and contemporary painting in pre-transition Myanmar (Burma)

    Erin L Hasinoff, L KendallARTICLEMaterial Religion2018References: 41

    Embodiment, materiality, and technology intersect in the production of sacred images where tools, media, and intangible studio protocols inform the production of efficacious things. In Myanmar nat spirits appear in the bodies of costumed spirit mediums and in the intimately tended statues that adorn their altars. Prior to the recent democratic transition, nats appeared as the subjects of paintings, sometimes offering sociopolitical commentaries. …

  • Do You Work with Magic

    L KendallARTICLEMaterial Religion2018References: 2

    Elizabeth Graham addresses the problem of the word itself, reminding us that “magic,” like “religion,” came into anthropological use attached to the shadow of its prior and distinctively Eurocentri

  • Introduction

    L KendallCHAPTERUnder Construction2017

  • Things Fall Apart: Material Religion and the Problem of Decay

    Open AccessL KendallARTICLEThe Journal of Asian Studies2017Cited by: 6References: 49

    In popular religious traditions in Korea, Vietnam, and Myanmar, spirits (or gods) become visible through their material realization in the corporeal bodies of shamans and spirit mediums and via ensouled statues and paintings that give the gods or spirits presence on altars. This discussion concerns a basic problem of material religion, that even ensouled, numinous, or otherwise empowered materials are subject to material decay. In the three cases…

  • What is an animated image: Korean shaman paintings as objects of ambiguity

    Open AccessL Kendall, Jongsung YangARTICLEHau Journal of Ethnographic Theory2015Cited by: 7References: 30

    Building on a crossdisciplinary interest in how religion works materially, we examine the triangulated relationship between Korean shamans (mansin), the paintings of gods that hang in their shrines, and the animating presences that empower both mansin and paintings, drawing inspiration from Alfred Gell's notion of "object agency." The gods who inspire a mansin to manifest them in ritual and who animate the paintings in her shrine perform inspirat…

  • Intangible Traces and Material Things: The Performance of Heritage Handicraft

    Open AccessL Kendall, LAUREL KENDALL LAUREL KENDALLARTICLEActa Koreana2014

    The designation of handicrafts as “intangible heritage” under South Korea’s Intangible Cultural Properties Protection Law contains an inherent contradiction: The skills of potters, weavers, paper-makers and other craft producers are akin to the embodied and artful work of dancers and singers in performance genres similarly recognized by the law, and they are likewise realized through disciplined and embodied knowledge made manifest in evanescent …

  • Goddess with a Picasso face: Art markets, collectors and sacred things in the circulation of Korean shaman paintings

    Open AccessL Kendall, Jongsung YangARTICLEJournal of Material Culture2014Cited by: 3References: 26

    In the well-known story of how 'primitive art' came to be recognized as such, things once regarded as sacred or empowered circulate as art collected for reasons far removed from their original intention. In the case of Korean shaman paintings, the authors interpret this process as a kind of 'purification' in Bruno Latour's sense, a translation and transformation of old practices (paintings as the seats of gods) into things that are deployed in ac…

  • Carol Laderman (1932-2010)

    Open AccessMarina Roseman, L Kendall et al.ARTICLEAmerican Anthropologist2011Cited by: 1References: 13

  • South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society by Jesook Song

    Open AccessL KendallARTICLEAmerican Ethnologist2011

  • Beautiful and efficacious statues: Magic, Commodities, Agency and the Production of Sacred Objects in Popular Religion in Vietnam

    L Kendall, Vũ Thị Thanh Tâm et al.ARTICLEMaterial Religion2010Cited by: 12References: 24

    In his provocative rethink of the anthropology of art, Alfred Gell offers the radical suggestion that people commonly abduct agency-acts of thought, will or intention-to things and suggests that the relationship between people and things be studied in the manner that anthropologists analyze other kinds of human relationships. In Gell's terms, the relationship between people and temple images, as sacred objects, follows the "the rules laid down fo…

  • Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion

    L KendallBOOKShamans, nostalgias, and the IMF2009

    Thirty years ago, anthropologist Laurel Kendall did intensive fieldwork among South Korea's (mostly female) shamans and their clients as a reflection of village women's lives. In the intervening decades, South Korea experienced an unprecedented economic, social, political, and material transformation and Korean villages all but disappeared. And the shamans? Kendall attests that they not only persist but are very much a part of South Korean modern…

  • Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion

    L KendallBOOKShamans, nostalgias, and the IMF2009Cited by: 21

    This enlightening study of contemporary Korean shamanism makes the case for the dynamism of popular religious practice, the creativity of those we call shamans, and the necessity of writing about them in the present tense. Shamans thrive in South Korea's high-rise cities, working with clients who are largely middle class and technologically sophisticated. Emphasizing the shaman's work as open and mutable, the book describes how gods and ancestors…

  • Pacific Voices: Keeping our Cultures Alive by Miriam Khan and Erin Younger, eds

    Open AccessL KendallARTICLEMuseum Anthropology2008

  • Of hungry ghosts and other matters of consumption in the Republic of Korea: The commodity becomes a ritual prop

    Open AccessL KendallARTICLEAmerican Ethnologist2008Cited by: 10References: 53

    Contemporary South Korean shaman rituals(kut)incorporate new consumer goods as agentive "props," foci that provoke mime and commentary in dramatic interactions between shamans, clients, gods, and ancestors. In the 1990s, much of this object-centered performance concerned the moral ambiguities of consumption, an appreciation facilitated by an analytic focus on the prop itself. In this study, I argue that the play of props in ritual conveys otherwi…

  • Something Old … Remembering Korean Wedding Hall Photographs from the 1980s

    L KendallARTICLEVisual Anthropology2006

    Walter Benjamin argues that photographs are valued witnesses to events but that, as objects of mechanical reproduction, they are bereft of the aura of authenticity vested in ritual artifacts. This discussion of Korean wedding portraits muddles the dichotomy between “witness” and “artifact” so as to suggest that the witnessing capacity of these photographs was inextricably tied to the ritual “work” of weddings as both elements in and artifacts of …

  • Widening Participation at an Ancient Scottish University

    Open AccessViviene E Cree, Linda Croxford et al.ARTICLEScottish Affairs2006Cited by: 4

    The issue of widening participation is one which has been exercising all universities in the UK in recent years. Initiatives at UK and Scottish government level have forced higher education institutions to acknowledge that something must be done to make admissions fairer, more transparent, and above all, to make higher education more accessible to a wider range of applicants. For instance, as a condition of the Scottish Funding Council core grant…

  • Gods, Markets, and the IMF in the Korean Spirit World

    L KendallCHAPTERTransparency and Conspiracy2003

  • The Flying Tiger: Women Shamans and Storytellers of the Amur. Kira Van Deusen

    L KendallARTICLEJournal of Anthropological Research2003