Built Landscapes and Mobile Gods
Built Landscapes and Mobile Gods
This chapter takes the reader into the mountains, to the shrines and sacred sites that constitute a shamanic landscape. It describes the peregrinations of some venerable old shrines, forced from their original locations by urban development, and the flowering of new commercial shrines on other mountain slopes. If urban development has reduced sacred terrain, cars and good highways have expanded the shamans' access to sacred sites within South Korea. Some shamans have even made pilgrimages to Mount Paektu, on (North) Korea's northern border, traveling through China to the accessible Chinese slope of this most sacred Korean mountain. Circuitous pilgrimages to Mount Paektu underscore the irresolution of a divided Korea, “the country broken at the waist,” and shamans pray on a distant mountain as part of an unfolding Korean story.
Keywords: shamanism, shamans, shrines, sacred sites, urban development, Mount Paektu
Hawaii Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
