Abstract

This paper focuses on the manner in which female bodies are described in the Korean shaman myths. This paper aims at exploring how the assumption that human culture is originated from the women’s bodies is shown in the texts. The myths in general covers the stories about supernatural creatures and forces such as a variety of gods. However, their subjects cannot be beyond a human’s imagination, and it is because myth is a story about the origin of human culture, and it is a human that creates the story. This paper assumes that Korean shaman myths are a product of humans’ efforts to expand their understanding of the world through the female bodies. This paper analyzes four female characters in the selected texts: baridegi, chogongbonpuli,segyongbonpuli, samgongbonpuli. There are two ways of representing the imaginary world through female bodies in the texts; one is to embody a human’s life and death by describing women that are confined to their home and even abandoned in the woods, and the other is to explain the origin of farming through the description of sensorial experience of the female characters. Exploring the meaning of the Korean shaman myths and their implications by examining how female bodies are portrayed in the selected texts is a process to substantiate the assumption that the vitality of the female bodies is the primary condition of developing the human culture and to discover the memories of humankind imprinted in the women’s bodies.