KOREASCHOLAR

This paper draws on the concept of transculturality, shifting our attention beyond religion as a stable belief system toward religion as a field of transcultural practices. Our conceptualization of religion as a field of transcultural practices is empirically grounded in a hermeneutic analysis of depth interviews with 24 Southeast Asian immigrant consumers living in Auckland, New Zealand. The findings reveal two interrelated sets of transcultural practices through which religion shapes multicultural marketplaces. The first set of practices facilitates entry into multicultural marketplaces, by easing the process of border crossing and enabling social capital development. The second set of practices facilitates mutual entanglement within multicultural marketplaces, by fostering intercultural competency development, sharing of cultural consumption rituals, and enabling the flows of material resources. This paper helps to advance the growing literature on religion and marketing in two ways. First, a transcultural approach moves religion beyond a view of each religious tradition as a bounded system. Instead, religion emerges as an open and dynamic system which is deeply contextualized and whose function morphs to meet the character of the cultural context in which it is embedded. Second, in addition to the present focus on how religion produces differences in marketplace behaviors, this paper also sheds light on the transcultural properties of religion which are held in common across diverse religious traditions. Rather than becoming a dividing force in contemporary multicultural marketplaces, religious fields are also revealed to be hybridized and hybridizing fields of transcultural flows. Overall, in the context of multicultural marketplaces, religion emerges as a key site for the performance of practices which fuel transcultural dynamics.

• Angela Gracia B. Cruz(Monash Univeristy, Australia)
• Yuri Seo(University of Auckland, New Zealand)
• Margo Buchanan-Oliver(University of Auckland, New Zealand)