No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
“Seeking Good Luck” in North Korea
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.
Sinjŏm or spirit fortune-telling is now an intimate part of everyday life among many North Koreans. Extremely popular at the grassroots level, the rise of this traditional religious culture since the late 1990s, if properly understood, can provide an interesting looking glass into North Korea's society and politics in transition. This report is one small step to that end.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Authors 2022
References
Notes
1 See Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung, “North Korea's Partisan Family State,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 28, No. 1, July 9, 2012.
2 Byung-Yeon Kim, Unveiling North Korean Economy: Collapse and Transition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Hazel Smith, North Korea: Markets and Military Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
3 On the idea of the modern state as a magic-performer, see Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
4 See Thank You Father Kim Il Sung: Eyewitness Accounts of Severe Violations of Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion in North Korea, report by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (2005), pp. 4, 39.
5 Eun-young Lee, “Ttalbuk yŏksul'ini dŭlyŏjunŭn bukhanŭi jŏmbogi siltae (The reality of fortune-telling in North Korea told by a defector fortune-teller),” Sindonga, 8 March 2007.
6 Cited from Organized Persecution: Documenting Violations of Religious Freedom in North Korea, special report by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (2021), p. 5.
7 Philip Taylor (ed.), Modernity and Re-enchantment (Singapore: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2007). One reviewer of this article raises objection to the way in which the phenomenon discussed here is described as a return of a traditional culture, asking whether it can be seen rather as a creation of a new folk religion, or even as a manifestation of postmodern culture. It goes without saying that any act of invention, including an invention of tradition, has both traditional-historical and visionary-aspirational aspects to it. In analytical terms, however, these two do not belong to the same register and I believe that it would make more sense to start with the restorative aspects, which then can invite critical approaches that highlight the relatively novel aspects. Besides, many of those whom I interviewed and who had practiced sinjŏm in Pyongyang and elsewhere in North Korea explained their vocation in the terms of a return of a long-lost or suppressed tradition within their family and kinship milieus.
You have
Access