Description

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Statues, paintings, and masks—like the bodies of shamans and spirit mediums—give material form and presence to otherwise invisible entities, and sometimes these objects are understood to be enlivened, agentive on their own terms. This book explores how magical images are expected to work with the shamans and spirit mediums who tend and use them in contemporary South Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, Bali, and elsewhere in Asia. It considers how such things are fabricated, marketed, cared for, disposed of, and sometimes transformed into art-market commodities and museum artifacts.

About the Author

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Laurel Kendall is Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History and Senior Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.

Praise For…

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"Mediums and Magical Things makes a valuable contribution to the study of material religion, anthropology of religion, and religion in modernity. It is a timely volume that will no doubt fulfill Kendall’s hope that it ‘propel others down similar paths’."
— Nova Religio

"Mediums and Magic Things contributes to the study of material religion and the anthropology of religion in a very readable and easily accessible way."
— Religious Studies Review