Spirit Power
Politics and Religion in Korea's American Century

Heonik Kwon (Author), Jun Hwan Park (Author)

9780823299928

Hardback, published 2 August 2022

240 pages, 8 b/w illustrations
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.516 kg

Spirit Power explores the manifestation of the American Century in Korean history with a focus on religious culture. It looks back on the encounter with American missionary power from the late nineteenth century, and the long political struggles against the country's indigenous popular religious heritage during the colonial and postcolonial eras. The book brings an anthropology of religion into the field of Cold War history. In particular, it investigates how Korea's shamanism has assimilated symbolic properties of American power into its realm of ritual efficacy in the form of the spirit of General Douglas MacArthur. The book considers this process in dialog with the work of Yim Suk-jay, a prominent Korean anthropologist who saw that a radically cosmopolitan and democratic world vision is embedded in Korea's enduring shamanism tradition.

Introduction 1
1 Religion and the Cold War 13
2 The American Spirit 39
3 Voyage to Knoxville, 1982 69
4 Seeking Good Luck 90
5 Original Political Society 112
6 Parallelism 136
Conclusion 157
Acknowledgments 171
Notes 173
Bibliography 201
Index 217