Migration and Religion in East Asia: North Korean Migrants’ Evangelical Encounters (Global Diversities) - Hardcover

Jung, Jin-Heon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 113745038X ISBN 13: 9781137450388

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Synopsis

Since the mid-1990s when North Korea was gripped by a devastating famine, increasing numbers of North Korean migrants have been crossing the Sino-North Korean border en route to Seoul, South Korea, in search of a better life. Based on fieldwork conducted in Seoul and Northeast China, Migration and Religion in East Asia sheds light on North Korean migrants' Christian encounters and conversions throughout the process of migration and settlement. Focusing on churches as primary contact zones, it highlights the ways in which the migrants and their evangelical counterparts both draw on and contest each others' envisioning of a reunified Christianized nation-state. Analysing the intersections between religious and political conversion and physical migration, it scrutinises cultural understandings of identity politics, religio-political aspirations, competing discourses on humanitarianism, and freedom in both religious and national terms in the context of late-Cold War Korea.

About this title

Review

"This absorbing study, unparalleled in modern migration studies, is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea and Chinese-North Korean borderlands, and on North Korean migrants' narratives of Christian conversion. Brilliantly described is how, while repression and poverty drive defection, Christianity provides aspirations and the promise of church welfare in South Korea." - David Parkin, University of Oxford, UK

"Migration and Religion in East Asia is a sensitive ethnography of the complex relations between North Korean migrant-refugees and South Korean Protestant Christians. Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork involving missionary churches in northern China and a Pentecostal 'Freedom School' in Seoul, Jin-Heon Jung shows how North Korean migrant-refugees learn to locate themselves within a Cold War, evangelical, ethnonational soteriology by converting to Christianity and equating capitalist freedom with a new doctrine of individual "self-reliance." - Nicholas Harkness, Harvard University, USA

"In this book, Jin-Heon Jung explores interactions between North Korean migrants and South Korean Evangelicals [...]. This is a set of topics that have been woefully understudied; for taking them on, the author deserves our applause." - Timothy S. Lee, Texas Christian University, USA

"Jung has given us a fascinating account of how human life trajectories are constituted by conversion from Communism to Christianity in the dangerous move from North Korea to South Korea. This book brings us close to lived experience within the changing context of North-South relations in Korea. It highlights the politics of Christianity as well as the aftermath of the Korean War and is thus a must read for anyone interested in Asia, religion, and international relations." - Peter van der Veer, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious & Ethnic Diversity, Germany

About the Author

Jin-Heon Jung received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States, and is currently a Research Fellow and the Seoul Project coordinator at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany. His publications include Building Noah's Ark for Refugees, Migrants, and Religious Communities (co-edited, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Multiculturalism in Korea: A Critical Review (co-authored, 2007, in Korean), and My Friends from North Korea (co-authored, 2002, in Korean).

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 113745038X
• ISBN 13: 9781137450388
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 212