Fake Churches and False Unification:  The Anthropology of Conversion in the Divided Koreas

Angie Heo of the University of Chicago delivering the Sonja Luehrmann Memorial Lecture.

Tuesday, March 30, 2021 | Co-sponsored by the David Lam Centre, Simon Fraser University

Angie Heo is Assistant Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at the University of Chicago.  After receiving her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley, she taught at Barnard College and held research fellow positions at Emory University and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.  Her first book is The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt (University of California Press 2018).  She is currently working on her next book on Evangelical Protestants and capitalism in the Korean Peninsula. 

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the sums of faith-based aid to North Korea have been so vast as to stir speculations that Protestant Christians are the ones secretly propping up the North Korean regime.  The irony is that Evangelicals in South Korea and the Korean diaspora remain the most strident proponents of anticommunism and the South’s total conquest of the North.  What is the relationship between Christianity, communism, and capitalism in the divided Koreas?  How do South Korean perceptions of religion in North Korea entwine theologies of mission with ideologies of unification?  In this lecture, Angie Heo will explore the contradictions of economic aid and religious freedom in a unique geopolitical zone where the Cold War never ended.  Drawing inspiration from Sonja Luehrmann’s writings on religion, atheism, and communism, she will further specify how Christianity in the divided Koreas presents a challenge to current anthropological scholarship on conversion and sectarianism.

Rinaldo Walcott, University of Toronto

Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. His research is in the area of Black Diaspora Cultural Studies, gender and sexuality.

Abstract:

This paper is an extended mediation on the relationship between Canada and the Caribbean. Drawing on historical evidence and an impressionistic reading of that evidence, the paper theorizes the long relations between white Canada and the Caribbean. The paper makes a case that blackness in Canada is not simply denied because of racism, but rather that Canada as a geopolitical entity does not exist outside of the terrible history of the Caribbean Sea. Linking Canada and the Caribbean firmly through the seas – Caribbean Sea, Atlantic Ocean and other bodies of water like the St. Lawrence River and the commodities that move back and forth across those waters, the paper attempts to join other accounts of Canada’s role in Atlantic slavery as constitutive of how Black people in Canada are presently understood as a national antagonism. The paper is not a work of history but draws on my impressions of history to offer a different way to think about the long history of and the current manifestations of antiblack racism in Canada.