Albularyo Ritual Healing: A Construction of Ethnicity of Filipino Immigrants in South Korea

The transnational movement of people around the globe has challenged migrants’ belief systems and their quest for well-being. The movement of people in itself is a form of ritual performance, a journey towards a dream and the aspiration to acquire a new sense of self and identity. The goal of this research is to illumine how migrants reconstruct their ethnicity through access to the albularyo ritual healing of their homeland. In this paper, migrants are viewed as secular pilgrims who experience the manifold stages of liminality as they continue to seek well-being. Along the journey they suffer from  pneumopsychosomatic illness, which has a certain connection with “home.” They romanticize the memories of their homeland. They access shamanic ritual healing, which brings into the real “here and now” the interplay of memory and the self’s narrative that defines their identity. The research is based on the ethnographic data collected April to June 2013 in South Korea. It  focuses on the story of Filipino immigrants who experienced shamanic healing in their  homeland and continue  wearing  the amulets given to them by shamans to prevent illness and protect them from evil while in a foreign land. The migrants’ definition of their “new selves” is shaped by the core institution of modernity.

   Findings indicate that the root cause of disease from pre-industrial society to the age of globalization is emotion. Negative emotion breaks one’s social ties with the self, significant others, and the divine. Physical illness often stems from one’s spiritual sensibilities in his/her religious worldview. Also, migrants’ state of identity consciousness is “in betwixt and in between” – that is, “neither here nor there” – and they must undergo different stages of liminality in restoring selfhood. Thus, healing is an outcome of rebuilding relationships– practicing one’s spirituality and reconstructing one’s ethnic identity.