Becoming “The Incomplete Faithful”: The Role of Religion in Negotiating the Civic Boundaries of Korean Migrants in Argentina

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 서울대학교 비교문화연구소
· 수록지 정보 : 비교문화연구 / 25권 / 1호 / 323 ~ 363페이지
· 저자명 : 한은혜

초록

Using the framework of transit migration and immigrant religiosity, this article examines the influence of ongoing mobility upon civic life of Korean migrants in Argentina. The focus is on Korean Catholics in Buenos Aires engaged in creating an alternative citizenship to confront their precariousness as a diaspora, with special attention given to the role of religion in negotiating the civic boundaries of transit migrants. In Buenos Aires―a transit location of migration paths―Korean migrants display the ambivalent desire of integrating into the host society from their diasporic position characterized by “the continuity of migration” and the status of “second-class citizens.” Korean Catholics have produced their ethno-religious membership, emphasizing their empirical ethnic difference within the universal Catholic world. However, with increasing requirements to fulfill their civic role as a Catholic community in a Catholic state, their dual strategy of belonging destabilizes the borders of community between a “secular being” and “the faithful.” In this context, this study further explores how Catholicism fulfills moral order of Korean Catholics in favor of operating the border of non-anchored citizens in their transit place. I find the religious subjectification integrated with everyday experiences empowers the Korean Catholics to reconstitute the meaning of citizenship and its religious form of practice based on their indeterminate path of migration. This validates the agency of transit migrants and its potential of producing deterritorialized ways of belonging and civic boundaries in transnational social fields.

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