Grafting Missionary Infrastructures: Korean Missions to Cambodia in an IT Age

Abstract

In the late twentieth century, South Korea simultaneously became both one of the world’s foremost Christian missionary-sending countries and a leader in communication technologies. This coincidence has given rise to the notion that South Korea’s emergence as a leader of global Christianity is owing, at least in part, to the technological infrastructures that Korean Christians have developed for missions. But if South Korean Christians are the engineers of new missionary infrastructure, how does this reframe relations between missionary and missionized? This essay draws on field research and interviews with Korean missionaries seeking to design and distribute Christian audio-visual platforms in rural Cambodia, focusing specifically on how these activities reshape inter-Asian mission imaginaries while reinforcing existing inter-Asian infrastructures. Although there have long been Christian missionaries in Cambodia, illiteracy in the countryside has been seen as a major impediment to Christian missionization because it has required missionaries to remain in one place for years. Foreign missionaries had to learn Khmer and also teach Cambodians to read so that they might read and teach the Bible independently. Korean missionaries herald that this has changed with the development and deployment of smart phone applications, which require no reading and, thus, religious messages can be shared without missionaries being physically present. While these missions are seen as transformative from a Korean missionary perspective, these projects operate within terrains of power and access that both enable and direct IT missionary outcomes. Using Tung-Hui Hu’s concept of an infrastructure “graft,” the essay highlights how inter-Asian IT missions are built on pre-existing development and missionary infrastructures, framing both the IT mission interventions and how they are understood by missionaries.