Quest for Well-being: Gazes on the Ritual Healing 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 Filipino migrants living in South Korea reconstruct their ethnicity through access to the albularyo¹ 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 illnesses, which have a certain connection with “home”, their belief systems and practices. They romanticize the memories of their homeland and may seek 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 assertion of their identity is a process of healing their ‘homeless minds’. The research is based on the ethnographic data collected from April to June 2015 to May 2016 in Bucheon, 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 findings indicate that the root cause of ailments of Filipino migrants within South Korea is caused by emotional distress linked to identity conflict and emotional turmoil. 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. In addition, 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 positive relationships with the self, others, and the Divine-practicing one's spirituality and reconstructing one's ethnic identity.