Abstract
The field of Korean Studies is dominated by the diasporic framework, which sees post-soviet Koreans or Koryo Saram as a bounded group with blood-based connections, common culture, and homeland orientation. Constant reapplication of such a perspective results in the replication of existing research findings, which reflect the essentialist understanding of Korean ‘identity’ and ‘ethnic group’. This qualitative study suggests the need to move beyond these self-reifying concepts and encourages constructivist scholars to think of ‘groupness’ as an event while employing ‘identification’ as a unit of social analysis in their studies on ethnicity. Given a growing body of evidence highlighting the importance of protestant churches for the emergence of Koreanness in the United States, this research examines the protestant church as a social space that facilitates the reproduction of post-soviet Korean identification in Kyrgyzstan. Due to a limited amount of Central Asian scholarship on the spatial emergence of ethnicity, this research is exploratory in nature and does not aim to produce conclusive and generalizable results. Nevertheless, this study confirms the major role of the protestant church in producing opportunities for self-identification and defining the content of the ethnic label Koryo Saram, free from stereotype-based categorization. Similarly, this research suggests that further progress in the field of ethnic sociology and Korean Studies requires complete rejection of both primordialist and essentialist ideas in favor of the constructivist paradigm, which should only turn to ‘identification’ as a relevant category of social analysis.
Author Information
Aleksey Pak, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
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