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Dr.

Laurel M. Kendall

American Museum of Natural History
Area
Humanities and Arts
Specialty
Religious Studies
Elected
2025

Anthropologist Laurel M, Kendall is both Chair of the Division of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History and an adjunct professor at Columbia University. She is a scholar of popular religion and its material manifestations in East and Southeast Asia.

Kendall's book Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion (University of Hawaii Press, 2009) offers a 30-year perspective on people described in Shamans, Housewives, and other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life (1985) and The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman (1988). In 2010, Korean colleagues awarded Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF the first Yim Suk Jay Prize recognizing a work of anthropology about Korea by a non-Korean. 

Kendall has also conducted work about the production and consumption of sacred objects in contemporary market economies, with fieldwork in South Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Bali. She 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).

At the American Museum of Natural History, Kendall has curated several exhibitions, including Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns, and Mermaids (2007) and Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit (2003), a unique collaboration with the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology. Her book, God Pictures in Korean Contexts: The Acquisition and Meaning of Shaman Paintings, is the product of an innovative collaboration with a Korean folklorist (Jongsung Yang) and an art historian (Yul Soo Yoon). Kendall is a former President of the Association for Asian Studies (2016–2017).

Most recently, in Mediums and Magical Things: Statues, Paintings, and Masks in Asian Places (University of California Press, 2021), she describes how material images—like the bodies of shamans and spirit mediums—give material form and presence to otherwise invisible entities, and how 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.  

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