Narrativization of Christian Passage

Abstract

The significance and advantages of incorporating the life histories and personal narratives of individual refugees and migrants are consistently emphasized in anthropological contributions to refugee and migration studies (e.g., Malkki 1996; Black 2001; Rajaram 2002; Powles 2004). The narrative perspective is vital because it can demonstrate the lived experiences of individual refugee-migrants over the course of, to use Michel Agier’s (2008) notion, the destruction of their established life (confinement in camps or life on urban margins) and the actions taken to establish a new life. Individuals express their experiences in socio-culturally shared forms; narratives are forms of expression that are “socially constructed units of meaning,” according to Edward Bruner (1986: 7). In this spirit, this chapter examines the conversion narratives of North Korean migrants—narratives that construe suffering, perilous migration, and the development of a new self in the evangelical language of what I term “Christian passage.”