The Korean mudang in nineteenth-century travel and ethnographic accounts

Record summary

Nineteenth-century Korean records and foreign travel accounts describe mudang conducting kut rituals involving drumming, invocation, healing and claims of divine or ancestral presence. These sources can support comparison of culturally organized trance, performance, somatic distress and social roles with mediumship elsewhere in Asia. The tradition is not reducible to a single “possession case,” and terminology differs by region and historical period. Researchers should pair outsider accounts with Korean records and modern scholarship on shamanic ritual rather than relying on sensational travel narratives.