Coping with Conflict, Confronting Resistance: Fieldwork Emotions and Identity Management in a South Korean Evangelical Community

Abstract

Methodological difficulties attendant to ethnographic fieldwork-such as gaining access, maintaining fieldwork relations, objectivity, and fieldwork stresses-are intensified for researchers working with "absolutist" religious group, groups that hold an exclusivist or totalistic definition of truth. Based on my fieldwork in a conservative South Korean evangelical community, I explore in this article two central and related methodological dilemmas pertaining to studying absolutist religious groups: identity negotiation and emotional management during fieldwork. Writing from my complex location as a feminist and a cultural/religious insider/outsider in relation to the South Korean evangelical community, I explore in particular the challenges posed by identity/role management in the field and its emotional dimensions, including the issue of the researcher's power and vulnerability, the quandary of "conformity," and the emotional costs of self-repression arising from the researcher's fundamental value conflicts with the group. I conclude with a reflection on the implications of these experiences for ethnographic methodology, most centrally, how we manage our emotional responses in the field, including "inappropriate" ones, and how we can relate them to the research process.Methodological difficulties attendant to ethnographic fieldwork are well known, but these difficulties are intensified in a number of ways for researchers working with religious groups that can be considered "absolutist," groups that hold to an exclusivist or totalistic

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