The voices of Seoul: Sound, body, and Christianity in South Korea

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the human voice in Korean Christian culture with a focus on Evangelical Presbyterians in Seoul. Based on field research in Seoul's large Protestant churches and colleges of music, I examine how the expressive and embodied dimensions of vocalization are linked during communicative interaction to idealizations of Christian personhood and related inhabitable roles (e.g., "disciple" or "evangelist"). I explore this linkage in three ways. Firstly, I show how changing ideologies and practices of the human voice (spoken, sung, or otherwise) belong to a narrative of Korean ethnonational advancement and spiritual enlightenment that is being forged in large, wealthy Presbyterian churches of Seoul. Secondly, I show how sound and body are aligned one to another in terms of this narrative, such that a chronotope of Korean Christianity is "heard" and "felt" in the voice itself. Finally, I show how this alignment and its institutional anchoring serve to create, maintain, and transform Korean Christian social spaces and relations. My analysis centers on students and professionals of European-style classical singing in Seoul, the vast majority of whom are self-identified Presbyterian Christians. I demonstrate how these singers, as recognized specialists of voice among members of an upper-class stratum of Korean Christianity, "tune" the perceived phonic and sonic qualities of the voice to particular genres of communication and thereby inhabit the role of holy Christian persons. Emanating from institutional centers, the European-style classical voice itself becomes an emblem of this identity, transportable to other contexts of social relations. I conclude by offering some generalizing remarks on how the "voice," as a phonosonic nexus, serves as an aspect and instrument of transformable personhood, integral to individuals' semiotic engagement with and inhabitance of socio-cultural worlds.