Salvation, Salvage, and the Fashioning of Care in the Haitian Religious Field: A Study of Korean American Protestant Women Missionaries in Haiti

“… another? These questions challenge who gets to be defined as a member of North American church, and ask the role of ethnicity and race in the church. ”

Team Members/Contributors

Minjung Noh Temple University Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

Combining historiography with anthropological, postcolonial, and feminist theories and methodologies, the dissertation explores transnational Christianity in Haiti as manifest in the recent influx of Korean and Korean American Protestant missionaries in the Caribbean nation. While placing them in the context of the history of Protestant missions from North America in Haiti, I focus primarily on Korean American Protestant women missionaries and their practice of various forms of care. Of especial interest is how these women derive religious capital from the very act of caring and how they mobilize this capital in Haiti’s highly competitive religious field, one that has long featured dramatic struggles between the Roman Catholic hierarchy, evangelicals, and Vodouists. I intend to address this intertwined relationship of care and religion as enacted by gendered agents, exploring in particular the ways in which the marketing of care contributes to the shaping and endurance of a specific form of womanhood for Korean Protestant missionaries in Haiti. In doing so, I hope to converse with and perhaps, depending upon my findings, problematize the widespread assumption that evangelical missionary womanhood is constrained to the roles of mother, wife, teacher, and caretaker.