Prof. Kyuhoon Cho, PhD

This research project begins with the hypothesis that the incorporation of East Asia into a globalised modern world conditions ways in which both religion and the nation are constructed in modern Korea. The theoretical suggestion of multiple secularities provides a systematic framework that helps one to investigate in a global comparative perspective not only the historical rise of the category of religion in many parts of the modern world, but also the modern transformations of the religious and other social spheres.

Societies in East Asia have been active contributors to the global engagement with divergent expressions of religion and the secular. Whether through accepting, appropriating and/or resisting secularism as a result of colonial attempts or experiences, or through elaborating and promoting their own versions of secularity, East Asian nations have diversely defined their various traditions as “religion”, “civilisation”, “spirit” or “magic/cult/superstition” in their respective modernizing courses.

During the fellowship, I plan to interrogate the interactions between politics of secularism and changing religious expressions in East Asia, especially how the interactions between forms of secularity and religious discourses and practices have contributed to the rise of nation-states, transformed the religious terrains, and reformulated the modern functional systems such as political, legal, and educational institutions in a globalised Korea. Research up to the present makes me conjecture that unlike in China and Japan, secularism in 20^th century Korea played a crucial role in implanting a somewhat positive understanding of “religion as the modern or national spirit” as well as explosively expanding and invigorating the field of religion. Based on the theoretical studies and empirical researches mentioned above, this research project is composed of three distinctive but related strands:

• The first feature of the project concerns the conception of religion in special reference to the rise of the modern secular nation in Korea. To answer to this question, I will focus on the intersection between religious traditions and secular institutions in Korean societies from a comparative perspective.
• Secondly, I will examine the political activism of Protestantism in globalised South Korea. The conceptual study of religion provides theoretical underpinnings to clarify the divergent loci and roles of Protestant groups in the making and re-making of the Korean nation in a globalised modern world.
• The third research strand is to interrogate the religious system of North Korea as a transnational place. To do this, I will suggest a threefold methodology, which is designed to overcome expected difficulties to study the religiosity of North Korea, one of the most inaccessible societies in the world.