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Urban Aspirations in Seoul: Guest Editors’ Introduction
Abstract
This special issue invites readers to examine dynamic religious aspirations in the urban contexts of South Korea. Focusing on religious practices, adaptations, and material constructions in the making of Seoul, these articles contribute to the growing scholarly discussion on the relationship between the urban and the religious/sacred in the context of Asian cities and beyond (e.g., van der Veer 2015, Goh and van der Veer 2016). This special issue is the culmination of an interdisciplinary research team-the Seoul Lab-which contributed to the larger comparative urban research project of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity undertaken in Mumbai, Shanghai, and Singapore. In these introductory remarks we share some key concerns of the project in order to invite further scholarly discussion. © 2016 Institute for the Study of Religion, Sogang University, Korea.
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The relationship between the sacred and the urban remains understudied. This special issue studies this relationship by focusing on urban religious aspirations in diverse globalizing Asian cities. The approach builds on the sacred geographies and sociology of secularization literatures. It is argued that religious practitioners respond to urbanization by inventing new conceptions of the urban to make sense of secularizing spaces. In turn, the secularizing spaces free up religious practitioners from the constraints of their traditions to innovate new practices to sacralize the urban spaces, in which the new conceptions of the urban play a crucial role. The direction and content of the innovations are driven by the aspirations of the religious practitioners with regard to the city and this provokes sacred politics challenging the state and capitalist market and aspirational contests to claim and control urban spaces vis-a-vis religious competitors, in which practitioners make use of state-market processes to do so.
According to conventional economic indicators, since late 1997 history has been reversed for South Koreans since late 1997. Their current financial crisis, which would have led to a moratorium without the emergency bail-out packae from teh International Monetary Fund, seems to require not only economic austerity for business firms and citizen but also a total devaluation of their developmental ‘micacle’ in the latter half of the twentieth century. South Koreans' dilemma, if evaluated from a broad historical and theoretical perspective on their compresed modernity, is that the vary mechanisms which made their explosive economic growth possible tend to create various hazardous consequences in social, political, cultural as well as economic life. Patriarchal political authoritarianism chaebol's despotic and monopolistic business practice, abuse and exclusion of labour, neglect of basic welfare rights, ubiquitous physical dangers, and ideological self-nagation are particularly serious examples of such hazards of the uniquely South Korean modernity.
This book highlights the creative and innovative role of urban aspirations in Asian world cities. It does not assume that religion is of the past and that the urban is secular, but instead points out that urban politics and governance often manifest religious boundaries and sensibilities—in short, that public religion is politics. The chapters in this book show how projects of secularism come up against projects and ambitions of a religious nature, a particular form of contestation that takes the city as its public arena. Questioning the limits of cities like Mumbai, Singapore, Seoul, Beijing, Bangkok, and Shanghai, the chapters assert that Asian cities have to be understood not as global models of futuristic city planning but as larger landscapes of spatial imagination that have specific cultural and political trajectories. Religion plays a central role in the politics of heritage that is emerging from the debris of modernist city planning. Megacities are arenas for the assertion of national and transnational aspirations as Asia confronts modernity. Cities are also sites of speculation, not only for those who invest in real estate but also for those who look for housing, employment, and salvation. In its potential and actual mobility, the sacred creates social space in which they all can meet.
Isabella Bird (Mrs Bishop, 1831-1904) was recommended an open-air life from an early age as a cure for her physical and nervous difficulties. Her accounts of travel in America, Hawaii, Japan and Persia were best-sellers. This two-volume work, first published in 1898, was one of the books arising from Bird's visit to Korea and China between 1894 and 1897, the other being The Yangtse Valley and Beyond (1899), also available in this series. Korea was a battleground during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, and subsequently became increasingly dominated by Japan, being annexed fully in 1910. Bird provides vivid descriptions of the Korean people, their way of life and customs at a time when the country had only recently opened up to the West. In Volume 2 she visits the Russian frontier, where many Koreans had settled, and discusses the effectiveness of Christian missionaries.
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