Title: Religions, nationalismes et célébrations religieuses en Corée du Sud : le bouddhisme et le christianisme face à la coréanité
PhD Supervisor: Jean-François Bayart
PhD CO Supervisor: Samuel Guex (Université de Genève)
Expected completion date: 2026
Adrian's PhD investigates how the relations between Buddhism, Christianity and politics contribute to the process of nation-state formation in South Korea. By looking at the intersection of nationalism and religion, his research aims to overcome two assumptions that are firmly anchored in academic literature and in South Korea's social space. According to the first, Korea and Koreans constitute a racially and culturally homogeneous nation that was founded thousands of years ago, and according to the second, South Korean society has achieved "religious peace" on its soil. However, studies in historical sociology have recently shown that the sense of belonging to the Korean nation is a recent phenomenon, a contingent one and a source of conflict, since the very notion of "Koreanness" is open to debate. Meanwhile, the relationship between the State, Korean Buddhists and certain evangelical movements has been increasingly tense since 2008, giving rise to protests without precedent in the social history of the Korean republic. Faced with the injunction to prove their Koreanness, tensions between religious groups suggest that new modes of belonging and action are at play in the interstices of the national and religious. At the junction between, on the one hand, historical and comparative sociology of politics and religion, and on the other, anthropology of religion, Adrian plans to conduct fieldwork during three widely popular religious celebrations in South Korea, namely Buddha's Birthday, Christmas and Chuseok. This ethnography will allow him to sketch a panorama of the discourses and practices that Buddhists and Christians express in relation to these three celebrations as well as to other religious groups, to the State and to the Korean nation.
Adrian is a doctoral candidate in anthropology and sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva. Of Swiss and Spanish nationality, he is a fluent speaker of several languages. He holds a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Lausanne and a master's degree in international affairs from IHEID, and has developed a keen interest in international history, in the anthropology of religion and, above all, in the historical and comparative sociology of politics. In the course of his intellectual wanderings, he has also taken an interest in East Asian societies, and more particularly in the process of nation-building in South Korea. In 2020, he joined Master-Asia at the University of Geneva, which enabled him to continue learning the Korean language and lay the foundations for his doctoral research. Since Adrian joined the ANSO department in 2022, he has been reflecting on the religious dimensions underlying the South Korean nationalist current. At the present time, he plans to conduct fieldwork in Seoul in order to gain a better understanding of the relationship between Buddhism, Christianity and nationalism in South Korea.