Statues, paintings, and masks-like the bodies of shamans and spirit mediums-give material form and presence to otherwise invisible entities, and sometimes these objects are understood to be enlivened, agentive on their own terms. This book explores how magical images are expected to work with the shamans and spirit mediums who tend and use them in contemporary South Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, Bali, and elsewhere in Asia. It considers how such things are fabricated, marketed, cared for, disposed of, and sometimes transformed into art-market commodities and museum artifacts.

Laurel Kendall is Curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History and Senior Research Scholar at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
Conventions

1. MacGuffins and Magical Things
2. Ensoulments
3. Materiality, Making, and Magic
4. Agency and Assemblage
5. The Ambiguities of the Unsacred
6. Afterlives
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index