This session explores religious encounters with experiences of precarity, scarcity, and survival in Asian cities. Papers include an engagement with an art installation as a representation of the precarity of garland craftspeople of Bangkok, an examination of Mumbai as a case study of religious pluralism as a highly contested, continuous process, and a theological reading of the relationship between finance-dominated capitalism and the built environment in Seoul.
In contemporary Bangkok, flowers are instrumental to religious life. Buddhists daily offer fresh garlands to temples to accrue merit and to ask deities for blessings. But over the past fifty years, the craftspeople who make these garlands have been forcibly removed from the city, deemed an aesthetic “blight” to the modern landscape. What is the future of these workers in a city that at once needs them and discards them? I answer this question by analyzing a fresh flower chandelier installation created by my interlocutor, a queer Thai flower artist, which premiered in 2025 at Singapore’s international art fair. Lowering the chandelier to the ground, the garlands on the bottom break, providing a soft bed for the more expensive garlands; lower-class workers are breaking under the weight of class inequality. The future is not hopeless. Through developing more intimate relationships with flowers, Bangkokians can cultivate greater movements of class solidarity.
This study interrogates the assumption that hyper-diverse global cities naturally achieve religious pluralism. Utilizing a dual methodology of historical analysis and ongoing ethnographic fieldwork among scholars, professionals, and faith leaders, the research argues that the realization of Mumbai's unifying civic ideal is a highly contested, continuous process. Rather than a seamless byproduct of demographic proximity, everyday interreligious engagement is actively complicated by spatial segregation, majoritarian political climates, and the lingering trauma of historical ruptures, requiring calculated, spatialized labor to navigate a deeply layered metropolis.
This paper examines the relationship between finance-dominated capitalism and the built environment in Seoul, South Korea, by analyzing two distinct urban spaces: the city’s slums, known as moon villages (dal-dongnae), and high-rise apartments. During rapid industrialization, war refugees, rural migrants, and evicted residents settled on Seoul’s peripheries, forming what are known as “moon villages (dal-dongnae).” The term dal-dongnae conjures an image of a village built on a hill, as if it might touch the moon in the night sky. Dal-dongnae is not merely illegal housing; they are structural products that emerge when marginalized groups, excluded from housing policies and land markets, have no alternatives. This paper explores how Seoul’s cultural narratives portray class spatialization, progressing from “moon villages” to “apartments” to “penthouses,” highlighting how residential segregation shapes perceptions of class. Ultimately, as moon villages are demolished, a question arises: “How can Christian theology preserve collective memory, community, and housing rights?”