‘A Church is a Building, Too’: Multiple Affordances of Religious Structures for (Non)migrant Activities in Seoul, South Korea

The physicality and materiality of churches are largely understudied because of the popular notion that a church is more than a building but a symbolic carrier of faith and community. As this article demonstrates, however, churches and religious buildings are also material phenomena whose architectural, physical, and spatial configurations have a structuring role by providing affordances or multiple possibilities and limitations (dis)allowing for religious and social activities by migrant congregants, non-migrant congregants, and outsiders. Using J. Gibson’s notion of affordances, Glaeser’s activity concept and drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in Hyehwa Catholic Church in Seoul, South Korea, I explore what the physicality of a church could offer to (non)migrants at the individual and community levels with regard to religious and secular activities. Within the context of migration, the church building that includes various spaces and objects within and outside its premise has multiple affordances for one or more activities – religious affordances for sacred activities and quotidian affordances for placemaking activities. By identifying these multiple affordances of church buildings and surrounding vernacular streetscape, I endeavor to present an approach to studying religion’s materiality and physical environment within the sociological discussion of agency and structure.