Imagining religion and modernity in post-colonial Korea: Neo-liberal brand culture and digital space

This dissertation explores the question of how new digital media, and neo-liberal brand culture and the post-colonial imaginary of modernity and the linear world history are entangled with the formation, mediation and circulation of contemporary social imaginaries of Korean Protestantism and Buddhism. Predicated on the post-colonial critique of Eurocentrism in Western theories of modernity and the position that the imaginary is not the opposite of the real but the condition of the production and perception of it, the dissertation appropriates Charles Taylor's idea of social imaginary as conceptual and analytical framework. In conclusion, the dissertation shows that Korean Protestantism is currently imagined as the pre-modern, irrational and inferior other becoming the enemy of, and obstacle in, the full modernization of Korean society, contrary to its being imagined as the symbol of modernity and Western civilization in the early modern Korea. Meanwhile, Korean Buddhism is ambivalently imagined both as authentic Korean tradition purifying the corruption of modern technology/lifestyle and as the forefront, modern religion adapted to neo-liberal times, contrary to its being imagined as the symbol of the pre-modern in the early modern Korea. In the social imaginaries of both Korean Buddhism and Protestantism, the dissertation finds both the working of Protestant semiotic imaginary dichotomizing spirit and matter, the pure(unmixed) and the corrupted(mixed), and that of the post-colonial imaginary of the linear and universal world history in which South Korea is imagined as uncivilized and retarded in the teleological transition of the progress of world history.