The AAS Oral History Project: Laurel Kendall and Young-a Park - Association for Asian StudiesThe AAS Oral History Project: Laurel Kendall and Young-a Park
08/12/2026 by William Warner
AAS Archives,
85th Anniversary,
Korea,
Northeast Asia,
Oral History
Laurel Kendall as AAS President at the 2017 Annual Conference in Toronto. Photo credit: AAS
The AAS Oral History Project, conceived by past AAS President Christine Yano, explores the history of the field as told by the people who have shaped it. Rather than focusing on publications, these interviews explore the person behind them, with special attention to the moments of contingency, doubt, uncertainty, and paths not taken. The first rounds of interviews have focused on past AAS presidents and were conducted by their students. As we celebrate the 85th anniversary of the AAS in 2026-27, and the growth of the Asian studies field during our organization’s lifetime, we will share oral history interviews throughout the year.
This interview, conducted by Young-a Park (University of Hawai‘i), took place at the AAS 2022 Annual Conference in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Laurel Kendall (American Museum of Natural History) discusses in it her early interest in Asia and anthropology, how being an outsider shaped her interests and career, and exploring the transnational connections of Korean material culture. Kendall served as AAS President in 2026-17.
This interview has been edited for clarity. Unless otherwise noted, all photos are courtesy of Laurel Kendall.
Laurel Kendall (left) conducting fieldwork in South Korea, 1985
Young-a Park
Laurel, thanks so much for speaking with me today. I consider this a great honor because I have admired your work since I was an anthropology grad student at Seoul National University in the mid-1990s. Let me just jump into my first question: How did you get interested in the field of Korean studies?
Laurel Kendall
My interest in Asia preceded my going to Korea. I was at the University of California and I can’t over-emphasize how enriching it is to be on a university campus that has something like an Asian Studies presence: where literature is taught, and history is taught, and there are specialists on China and Thailand and Japan.
When I was a junior in college, I opted to spend my junior year in Hong Kong. That was a tremendous life-changer, absolutely and completely, because it was confidence-building and it hit me between the eyes with the sense of a larger world. It encouraged me to get beyond myself and really contact other lives that were governed by other premises and issues and worries. At that time, the future of Hong Kong as a British colony and what would that mean if it went back to China and could it be something like Singapore … [To] the people I knew those [issues] were, those were very real, these weren’t abstractions in the New York Times for them. It was also the closest one could get to China as an American in those days. This was 1967, 1968. It was in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, and all of this art, movies and performances were spilling into Hong Kong. It was quite transgressive and very exciting. I got to study Chinese, I got to dive into a language that was very different from the French I’d studied in high school. It was completely eye-opening and totally empowering in terms of the life path I wanted.
Young-a Park
I didn’t know that you spent time in Hong Kong.
Laurel Kendall
Yeah, most people don’t. The Korea side came later. Like many people, I would not have gone to Korea or thought about Korea had the Peace Corps not sent me to Korea. I had an uncle who was a clerk in the Korean War. He didn’t kill anybody, but he never talked about it, except to say that it was very cold. He was a Californian like me, it was very cold for him. When I was going to Korea, he mustered from his memory what he thought were two Korean words. And they were taksan and skoshi: what one would say ordering a beer around a military base using such Japanese that had been transported into Korea. Needless to say, Korea had a very, very low profile in my consciousness at the time, and there was not yet a significant population of Korean Americans in the U.S. I knew one Korean American in college, and Korea was not an articulate part of those conversations.
Young-a Park
And you decided on anthropology after going to university and studying in China?
Laurel Kendall
Actually, anthropology happened first. I believe I was in high school when I read one of Margaret Mead’s books, Male and Female. It was in [the] mid-60s, but it was not yet “the 60s.” I lived in a suburb of San Francisco that was not a very interesting place. The gender role situation in an American high school in a suburb was not terribly conducive to women, particularly if they had a reputation for being smart women. I read Margaret Mead, and it was a tremendously liberating insight that gender roles are not inevitable, that they’re culturally variable. That’s the ultimate liberating message that anthropology gave 20th-century America. I learned that anthropologists were people who went far away and observed and wrote and that interested me. It was something I pursued in college.
Young-a Park
Were you encouraged to go to graduate school during your undergraduate years?
Laurel Kendall
I’ll tell you something that I was told before graduate school that was galvanizing. I went to see my assigned counselor when I started undergrad at Berkeley. He looked at my high percentile in history and high percentile in verbal skills and so on and so on and said, “you’d be a perfect high school history or literature or English teacher.” I said, “people have been telling me to do that all my life. And that’s not why I’m here.”
As a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer, 1970-1973
Young-a Park
I’m glad that you didn’t listen to them. It seems like you encountered similar difficulties in the Peace Corps as well.
Laurel Kendall
I’ve written about how Peace Corps really wasn’t ready to deal with women. That piece was something I could only write from a great distance. I didn’t want it to just be about me and horrible things that happened to me. I wanted to deal with it structurally, within a context of American history: how American mores were changing so rapidly and they hadn’t quite touched the Peace Corps administration. There was so much that was just common sense about how you deal with men, but then, “Whoops, women? Women?”
Read More
Laurel Kendall, “Did women have a Peace-Corps-Korea experience?” In
Peace Corps Volunteers and the Making of Korean Studies in the United States, edited by Seung-kyung Kim and Michael Robinson (University of Washington Press, 2020).
Young-a Park
During field work, did you feel being a woman was a disadvantage?
Laurel Kendall
When you’re Korean, so much of what you do is defined by your networks. When you’re an outsider, it’s a true gift. People will speak and open doors for you. I was very lucky through chance encounters in Honolulu that I met Dr. Yi Kwang-kyu (Kwang-kyu Lee), who was a Korean anthropologist. I said, “I’m very interested in Korean mask dances.” He turned to the gentleman beside him and said, “You need to meet Dr. Yi Du-hyun (Du-hyun Lee),” who became my mentor. It was a real door opener, I dedicated my first book to him because he really, he really made me see a Korea that interested me.
When I met Dr. Lee and mentioned my interest in dance, he set me up to teach English to the Pongsan Ta’ch’um Association. They would teach me dance and drumming. I was a terrible dancer and I don’t think I effectively taught much English. But we had a wonderful time. I got to understand this world of the traditional performing arts, the rustic arts.
For example, when a woman who, the receptionist in the Institute at Yonsei, where I was teaching said, “I want to learn, can you make me an arrangement?” and she said her parents said she had to study the piano, that the kind of dance I was learning about just wasn’t respectable. It was a hard struggle to bring forward the arts and traditions that seemed taken for granted now. I was discovering an incredible sense of humor and artistry in what they did. They had deep and impassioned stories, many of which ran counter to the dominant narrative of Korea as Confucian virtues and so on, and so on. They were making fun of it in very interesting ways. In their company, I went to see shamans for the first time and realized, “Hey, these are women.” And other women, ordinary women are at the center of this ritual, engaging the shaman. The men are in the background. And I felt this is a domain of Korea where gender is not a disadvantage.
Young-a Park
I read your piece,
“Retrospectives: What I Got Wrong in My First Book,” and learned a lot about the formation of Laurel Kendall. I read about these frameworks that influenced you greatly in the early 1970s at Columbia, like the anthropology of woman and structuralism, and so on. But I was wondering: what kind of research you were discouraged from doing at the time, and why?
Laurel Kendall
I remember bouncing with great enthusiasm into a meeting with Dr. Myron Cohen, my advisor who did really well by me, saying, “I want to study artists and society, thinking of my mask-dance friends.” He said, “We can’t do that. We don’t know what a Korean clan is yet!” Well, we did find out that they’re not clans, they’re lineages by the structuralist definition. There was a sense of agenda that in some ways was very useful. It was useful to me, for the study of religion, that China studies people had been thinking in very orderly ways about: what is a God? What is an ancestor? And then seeing how that did apply, and where it didn’t apply in Korea, and seeing how gender cross-cut all of that. I don’t regret the discouragement, [but] I would have really regretted it if I’d set up to study extended kinship, because that was a man’s topic.
Dissertation fieldwork with Korean shamans, 1977-1978
I quickly got into the shaman thing because again, another structuralist, I.M. Lewis, had written a book called Ecstatic Religion. He had done a very structuralist, either/or, forgetting that yin and yang blend into each other and [are] in constant oscillation. Lewis wrote that shamans are real and important and central and they’re male. Women are spirit mediums and they are passive puppets. And I knew that wasn’t what I’d seen in Korea. At the same time, it’s very nice to have something to talk against, because it helps you organize your ideas.
Young-a Park
What do you think the impact of your study of Korean shamanism was on Korean academia at the time? At the time, were there already folklorists and anthropologists writing about Korean shamanism?
Laurel Kendall
There were people writing, and I would say they were writing as folklorists. Their passion was to record, to get it down. It was very much like the passions motivating early twentieth-century anthropology: this could disappear. There were serious anti-superstition campaigns at the time. There was also the common-sense teleology: “we’ll get modern, and this goes away.” It was done out of love and passion for something really Korean and that work had been going on since the colonial period. I don’t want to put down that effort: I use that work, it was valuable to me. But what they didn’t do, what the anthropological intervention was, “why are people doing this?”
Paying respects in a shaman’s shrine, South Korea, early new millenium.
One of the criticisms of my work is that as a non-Korean, I couldn’t understand that this is really all about some fundamental premise of harmony. Well, as a non-Korean, I understood that it was about some fundamental premise of harmony, but it was about when harmony gets out of whack, and how you make it right. I didn’t understand this at the time, but there was a feeling that the things I wrote about are not things you talk about, that this is the back room. That became my thesis: this is what women take care of, because women are trying to set things right when things are not right. But they’re doing this in reasonably private ways. To me, as a social scientist, I wanted to find the things that are motivating people to seek a shaman just as structuralists had been concerned with the social tensions in a society that lead to a witchcraft accusation. If I were starting today, I would try to do the same thing. It’s much harder now because when you leave the village, you leave the realm of really active gossip, and it’s much, much harder to do that kind of fieldwork today.
Young-a Park
What were some of the greatest rewards and pleasures in researching Korea?
Laurel Kendall
The greatest rewards and pleasures? Oh, golly. So many! I was trying to understand kinship in relation to women. Ancestors would come back, you know, “Grandma’s here, oh, Grandpa’s here.” I was realizing from the subsidiary stories that I was hearing that some grandmas and grandpas were from the wife’s side, and not from the husband’s side, but they weren’t saying “woehalmŏni,” they’re just saying, “halmŏni,” So, I’d start asking “mother’s? And father’s?” When I went back, one of the shamans who’d been around with me, when the ancestor started talking, she yells out “mother’s [mother] or father’s [mother]!” She was helping me do my work! It was like a gift that I was remembered and my needs were remembered in that way.
A role was created for me when I went around with the shamans and people sometimes mistook me for an apprentice shaman, which was kind of amusing, because I did make it clear, I was the student of my shaman. When I was expected to fall into the kind of kinship terminology that an apprentice would use that has fictive kinship relations attached to it. That was very gratifying.
Young-a Park
What kinds of past changes have you noted and research trends on Korea? And how have these impacted you?
Laurel Kendall
Korean Studies has bloomed and blossomed in so many directions as Korean society has morphed in so many directions. I did
Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF [2009], which was looking back at a much more urbanized, much more economically successful period. At the time that I finished that research Korea was buffeted by the IMF and I wanted to show how contemporaneity impacts on the shaman world. It looks at the problems you bring to the shaman: “Well, I’m at risk of losing my business. Will the IMF let my husband keep his job?” In the shaman world, it’s a constant window on what is going on in Korean life. I think one sees in contemporary writing younger scholars [writing] about Korean shamans, the story of shamans who’ve become intangible heritage bearers and they’re the people who are accessible, and they are the people who are articulate. This problematizing of the tension between something that is an active popular religious practice, and is also a superstar performance space. There’s a lot of interesting writing coming from younger scholars on that.
For me, at this point in my life, I feel my next Korea project is going to be a dive back into the world of the 1970s that I first knew. I think the 1980s is very well covered in terms of cultural developments, but I don’t think there is sufficient appreciation of what preceded it and what a struggle it was to get to that point. People like Yi Du-hyun and people like Ye Yong-hae and their missions and the influence they had in trying to create an awareness and an appreciation of traditional Korean things.
Opening of “Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit” at the American Museum of Natural History, 2003.
I’m a museum anthropologist, and in recent years, I’ve been very interested in material culture, material religion. That study will be focused on a series of different objects and the stories wrapped around the objects. I’ve written one piece on split bamboo combs, ch’ambit. How Ye Yong-hae presents them in a tableau of a beautiful woman combing her black hair, and how people my age or a little younger remembered them as “ahh, they took me to the mogyoktang, they dumped me in the hot water, and then they went through my hair combing for lice,” which is nothing anybody wants to remember. There’s a serious question about whether Korea is to a point where those memories are acceptable memories or are those memories that have to be elided in the creation of lieux de mémoire, that is memories without rememberers, and they can be as pretty as you want them to be. I cited some museum projects, for example, the War Museum did an exhibit called “Ah-Omoni!” about 10 years ago that recreated a squatter community and had mannequins with wind-roughened faces. This was a surprising image, a surprising message for a mannequin in Korea to carry. The Museum of Contemporary History is pretty upfront about what it meant to live in Korea in poorer times and that those were also fairly recent times. I gave one presentation and somebody said, “you said too much about lice!” and I thought, “Alright, I will take the picture of the big blow up with the louse out of my PowerPoint.”
Young-a Park
What’s your next project?
Laurel Kendall
The next one is the tal-hangari, the moon jar which is just sort of the opposite of the bamboo comb: It’s sort of an overdetermined icon. How they’ve been used in museums, how they’ve been used in writing about Korea. Everybody wants to link them to Confucian value, and so on. Where so little is really known about how they were used. They were used and disappeared from use over maybe a hundred-year period at most. Now there are maybe 20, or 30, of the authentic [jars] left in the world. They were not the epitome of porcelainware, but were a utilitarian vessel. But wrapping that around what people choose to say about them, and how that’s in part wrapped up in a larger discourse about what porcelain has meant in the presentation of Korean arts and the story of the connections to Japan and Yanagi [Sōetsu]’s work and through him Bernard Leach and why there is a moon jar in the center of the British Museum Korean gallery which he collected. Through him certain influence on a Korean ceramicist working with this form. The form itself, how appealing it is to moderns, how certain contemporary Korean artists like Kim Hwan-gi and others have used the moon jar form in their work. The color white and all this writing about the color white and what it means to create. The moon jar is such an overdetermined thing. It carries so much and yet we know so little about it.
Young-a Park
Do you rely on your field work from the 1970s to write about ch’ombit and the material culture of that period?
Laurel Kendall
Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. Basically, I never used them for lice, but I did buy some in the market because I thought they were beautiful. At that point they were still being produced for peddlers to carry to markets. And they were still in markets.
With fellow AAS Past Presidents Anne Feldhaus (left) and Katherine Bowie (center) in Delhi, 2018.
Young-a Park
What are some future directions that you consider important for the field of Korean Studies and more broadly Asian Studies?
Laurel Kendall
I think in the world today, a sense of platform where we can talk beyond our specialty, where we can bring our specialties into larger conversations, is incredibly important. In Korean studies, we’ve seen as a very hot topic the study of brides from China, brides from Vietnam. We can imagine team projects where people approach from different sides, but they’re all invested in a common goal. The brides are a striking example that raises questions about flows of goods and imports.
In the field of handicraft, which I’ve been looking at lately, the anxieties about things that are marketed as pure Korean goods, but they’re made in China, sometimes by ethnic Korean hands in China. The beautiful hanji, Korean paper, which makes people proud and the skill that goes into making it, and yet most of the fiber comes from Thailand. There are discourses about how the paper isn’t as strong as it used to be because it doesn’t live through the same harsh winters. It’s sort of like national character transposed onto natural products. These are examples related to my work, but people who deal in politics, people who deal in economics, people who deal in the harder social science questions, it’s incredibly important to keep big pictures going.
Young-a Park
I really like your emphasis on this kind of transnational aspects of these studies. What advice might you give to a graduate student or junior scholar interested in pursuing research in Asian Studies?
Laurel Kendall (center) speaks with attendees at the 2017 AAS-in-Asia conference at Korea University. Photo credit: AAS
Laurel Kendall
I would ask, “are you passionate?” It’s so hard and the opportunities are so limited. If you are not passionate, it’s not worth it. If you are passionate, it’s wonderful. Go for it. Even if you don’t see yourself pursuing an academic career, the background in Asian Studies can be so enriching. If you’re going to be a diplomat, why not take a course in Korean literature? Literature can resonate with things you may be dealing with in your practical work life, or it might carry you through an important dinner conversation. You never know. It may just be enriching in and of itself.
My advice is to drink deeply of Asian Studies and always keep an eye on the bigger picture. For me, that is be a Korean specialist who’s aware of a larger Asian world.
Young-a Park
Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation.
Laurel Kendall
Thank you! You’re a good interviewer, but of course: you’re an anthropologist.
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