American wins master's by studying 'musok'
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Barney Battista
By Jhoo Dong-chan
An American student’s dedication to studying Korean shamanism and its rituals has earned him a master’s degree.
Barney Battista, 45, majoring in Korean language and literature at Kyunghee University’s Graduate School, wrote his thesis, “Musok,” “in the Korean as a foreign language (KFL) cultural curriculum through a comparison of ‘gut’ and neoshamanism,” the university said.
“Musok” means Korean traditional shamanism, and “gut” is its exorcism ritual.
In his writing, Battista studies the case for musok in the cultural curriculum of KFL education and to devise methods of instruction in an interesting and effective way.
“I was very impressed by women’s positions and their role in musok culture,” Battista said. “And its legacy still remains in Korean society.”
Battista came to Korea as an English teacher in 2007.
“I just wanted to live in a foreign country. I was going to live here for about a year.”
However, he has now lived in the country for eight years and married a Korean woman in the meantime.
“Korean, which I learned in language school, was very different from Korean in real-life situations,” Battista said.
To learn “real” Korean, Battista lived in Goheung, South Jolla Province, for a while. He worked as an English teacher there during the day, and learned Korean culture and language from the locals after work.
Majoring in music in the U.S., Battista then entered Kyunghee University for a master’s degree in Korean language and literature. He said he did not want to study typical foreigners’ majors like business or English.
Instead, he was more fascinated by the musok, or folklore, class among the many classes he took at the school. He saw gut for the first time during the course.
“Especially, ‘Naerim-gut’ is still vivid in my memory,” Battista said.
Naerim-gut is a ritual to cure “sinbyeong,” also called self-loss, which is the possession from a god that a potential shaman goes through. To believers, it may only be cured through acceptance of, and full communion with, the spirit.
A “mudang,” or shaman-priest, is inducted only after Naerim-gut.
“There aren’t many chances to see Naerim-gut. It only happens once to each mudang,” said Battista.
He believes that teaching musok to foreigners will contribute greatly not only to Korean education but also to understanding its culture.
“Koreans often say ‘sinnanda’ (which means exciting),” Battista said in his thesis. “‘Sin’ means a god in Korean. You can find many other cases of which Korean traditional shamanism still influences Korean language and their everyday life.”
Battista is expected to keep studying Korean traditional shamanism and its culture for a Ph.D.