‘the Church Is a Building’: Affordances of Religious Structures and Migrant Placemaking in Seoul, South Korea

Despite a burgeoning interest in the ‘material turn’ in sociology of religion, there is still a scant attention towards the sociological study of religious structures and its physical features primarily because of the popular religious notion that the ‘church is more than just a building’ which implies an emphasis on the metaphorical, symbolic and figurative meaning of the church as people and community. However, a ‘neglect’ of a sociological study of the physical structures of religion and the ‘materiality’ of religion may overlook the role of physical, embodied and emplaced objects in shaping the social interactions, social relationships, and social processes occurring within religious spaces. This paper aims to contribute to this increasing interest in the material perspective by examining the intersection of materiality and migration through the study of religious buildings, and how religious structure as a physical building and object are (re)interpreted and made sense of by migrants and nonmigrants within a religious setting and the surrounding environment. Through these religious affordances of the physical sacred structures, both migrants and nonmigrants (un)intentionally sacralise the surrounding semi-public spaces and objects. Based on an ethnography of St. Benedict Catholic Church in Hyehwa-dong, Seoul, South Korea, I analyse the dynamic relations between affordances, religious structures and migrant objects and its power to both routinise and disrupt the urban rhythm of a ‘global city’ like Seoul. This materialization of religion by Filipino migrants not only emplace an ‘out-of-place migrant body’ into the urban landscape of Seoul but also displace some of the spatial regimes that control and regulate the presence of the migrant body in Korean public spaces. This paper posits that the materiality of Catholic migrant places in South Korea provides avenues for migrants to (in)advertently claim the ‘right to appear’ in relation to urban diversity.