As an anthropologist focusing on Korea, Dr. Kendall trained in a strong ethnographic and area studies tradition - one that required full speaking and reading fluency in the language, extensive knowledge of the particulars of local life, and detailed analysis of the historical, cultural, political, and economic context within which local realities unfold. Given the close historical and cultural ties within Southeast Asia, she also found it necessary and useful to develop a working knowledge of Chinese and Japanese studies and their languages. In recent years, Dr. Kendall has expanded this horizon to include Vietnam. When she trained in the 1970s, Dr. Kendall assumed, along with most of her colleagues, that she was preparing to study a rural society through fairly static models. Instead, she found the challenge of working in Korea over the intervening decades has been to apply close-range and long-term ethnography's depth of insight to a fluid, highly urbanized industrial society. Korea's transformation into the ranks of the newly industrial countries has inspired Dr. Kendall to take a second look at Korean shamans, the subject of her initial 1970s fieldwork. Although shamans are often regarded as "archaic" or "primal" religious practitioners, they are very much a part of the contemporary religious scene. Dr. Kendall's ethnography documents how clients come to shamans for relief from anxieties induced by an unstable and unpredictable market and by precarious credit arrangements.

Her current work concerns the role of material goods in ritual transactions with gods and ancestors. The giving of things to spirits is possibly the most troubling aspect of popular religion for modern rationalists. By interpreting what people do during contemporary shamanic rituals and what clients, shamans, and spirits speaking through shamans have to say about them, she documents how Koreans' use of offerings and ritual props lets them express and dramatize the tangled emotions inherent in a lived history of rapid social transformation and unprecedented material possibility.