| What does it take to live the good life? Where are we to find examples of the life well-lived? In which forms does it exist and to whom should we look as our guides? How, then, might we tangibly go about living a life imagined as such? In this dissertation I engage this constellation of questions and locate them in the context of a circle of South Korean shamans who, in their singular yet ordinary existence, opened for me a way of imagining these fundamental concerns anew. Utilizing data culled from eighteen months of fieldwork, I respond ethnographically to the broadly construed question of what, in fact, a good life is by tracking that which is at stake in being an orijinoˇl mansin, or "original shaman.";The term orijinoˇl was used by this family of shamans from time to time to describe what they felt were good faith renderings of shamanic practice, what is known in Korea as musok. That which is "original" should also be heard with an ear to Walter Benjamin's notion of origin [Unsprung], an "eddy in the stream of becoming," which names the potentiality that animates both future and past in crystallized shards of "now-time" [Jetztzeit]. In the chapters of this dissertation I show in various ways how the life of a mansin family offers us deeper insight into the status of origins and originality and how this might speak to the timeless dilemma of what it means to be born with regard to life, while always and also existing, in some sense, with respect to the good life. |
