Laurel Kendall

Laurel Kendall (PhD Columbia University, 1979) is Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History and is currently Chair of the Division of Anthropology at the Museum. A scholar of popular religion and its material manifestations in East and Southeast Asia, Kendall's journey began with the University of California's Education Abroad Program in Hong Kong (1967-1968). She first encountered South Korea as a US Peace Corps Volunteer (1970-1972) and returned as a graduate student to do fieldwork with female shamans and village women (1976-1978), a relationship maintained through subsequent projects over the next several decades. The author of several books on the subject of female shamans, Kendall's Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF (University of Hawaii Press, 2009) offers a 30-year perspective on this world. The book was awarded the Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology's first Yim Suk Jay Prize recognizing a work of anthropology about Korea by a non-Korean. Kendall has also written on gender, tradition, and modernity, most notably in Getting Married in Korea (1996) and as the editor of Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea (2002) and Consuming Korean Tradition in Early and Late Modernity: Commodification, Tourism, and Performance (2011). Co-curation of the exhibition "Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit" (opened New York 2003, closed Hanoi 2005) led to subsequent field research with Vietnamese colleagues on a study of temple statues and the spirit mediums who used them, a project that engendered a passionate interest in the emerging field of material religion with subsequent work on Korean shaman paintings, statues used by Burmese spirit mediums, and temple masks in Bali. Her recent book, Mediums and Magical Things: Statues, Paintings, and Masks in Asian Places (University of California Press, 2021) weaves these several threads together to describe how material images—like the bodies of shamans and spirit mediums—give material form and presence to otherwise invisible entities, and how these objects are sometimes understood to be enlivened, agentive on their own terms. The book explores how magical images are expected to work with the shamans and spirit mediums who tend and use them. It considers how such things are fabricated, marketed, cared for, disposed of, and sometimes transformed into art-market commodities and museum artifacts . Fieldwork in several settings becomes a wide-ranging conversation that yields surprising results when questions posed by experiences in one place are answered in another. Kendall is a former President of the Association for Asian Studies (2016-2017).