Laurel Kendall
Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History
Email: lk7@columbia.edu
Educational Background
PhD: Columbia University (’79)
MA: Columbia University (’76)
AB: University of California, Berkeley (’69)
Research Interests
Popular Religions in East Asia, Shamans, Sacred Objects, Contemporary Korea
As an anthropologist of Korea, Dr. Kendall has been working with and writing about Korean shamans for nearly thirty years. Having attended their performances in the early 1970s as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Korea, she became interested in the relationship between this largely female tradition and the operation of gender in Korean popular religion. In 1989, Dr. Kendall collaborated with documentary filmmaker Diana Lee in filming the story of a shaman’s initiation, a visual complement to her books.
More recently, Prof Kendall has been examining how changes in the shamans’ world keep pace with the social and economic transformation of South Korean society. This project includes questions of space and landscape, performance, ritual consumption, national identity, and market anxieties. She is also working with colleagues in Hanoi, Vietnam, studyingl “the sacred life of material goods.” Following the work of Alfred Gell, they are exploring the relationship between people and objects, relationships that have rules, obligations, potential benefits, and dangers.
Working between Korea and Vietnam, Dr. Kendall is cautiously interested in regional comparisons. Vietnamese folklorist Dr. Nguyen Thi Hien and her are exploring points of similarity and contrast between Korean shamans and spirit mediums of Vietnam’s Mother Goddess Religion.
Selected Publications
The Museum at the End of the World: Travels in the Post-Soviet Russian Far East (University of Pennsylvania, 2005).
Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity (University of California, 1996)
The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman: Of Tales and the Telling of Tales (University of Hawaii, 1988)
We are proud to announce that Ariella Napoli, an undergraduate major in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, has received the 2019 Marianna McJimsey Student Paper Award in recognition of her paper “Plurality within Singularity: Choson Korea’s Neo-Confucian Framework.” This award is given to one undergraduate student each year by ASIANetwork, a consortium of over 170 North American colleges that seek to strengthen the role of Asian studies in the liberal arts. Napoli will present her paper at the 2019 ASIANetwork Annual Conference at the University of San Diego in California this April. Her paper will also be published in ASIANetwork Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts. The department extends its heartiest congratulations to Napoli and looks forward to her future contributions to the field of Korean studies as she begins an already promising career.
The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures is grieved to inform the Columbia community that Donald Keene, University Professor Emeritus and Shinchō Professor Emeritus, passed away on February 24, 2019 at the age of ninety-six in Tokyo, Japan. Professor Keene was one of the founding figures of the department and the primary catalyst for the development of Japanese studies at Columbia, translating numerous texts that served as the basis for the undergraduate program and teaching courses on Japanese history and literature for over half a century. His scholarship and service has proved invaluable to the university, and his legacy is commemorated by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture, an institute dedicated to advancing the understanding of Japan and its culture in the United States through university instruction, research, and public education. The department and the Keene Center will host a memorial service in remembrance of the life and work of Donald Keene in the fall of 2019.
