Religious mission trips

Dear SAR members,

Experts estimate that 2 million N Americans travel abroad each year on mission trips. These involve (usually church-based) groups that travel together to render some sort of religiously organized service (construction, medical care, relief, education, etc.) within vacation slots (usually for less than 2 weeks). These mission trips involve a circulation of cultural and religious practices, material and symbolic goods, images (photographs) , discourses, and bodies (raced, gendered, etc.). New patterns of youth ministry make the mission trip the preferred annual youth event at many churches, and larger churches increasingly hire mission pastors to organize and supervise such trips. Transnational church-to-church partnerships, or parish twinning, increasingly becomes the context for such trips. A variety of factors contribute to the explosion of this new pattern of religiously organized circulation, and should be examined. Such mission trips create new zones of encounter that frequently cross cultural, ethnic, racial and socio-economic divides. The liminal space of the mission trip encourages consideration of identities and inequalities that are engaged, perhaps reconfigured, and subsequently represented. Anthropologists have notably studied parallel phenomena (tourism, pilgrimage), but few have turned systematic attention to mission trips. Picking up on the AAA annual theme of “circulations” we are looking for anthropologists who have done research (or who will do so in the next months) on mission trips abroad. We (B Howell and R Priest) have both published on this topic, and would like to work towards an edited collection to come out of this session. If you are interested, please write as soon as possible to either Brian Howell (Brian.M.Howell@ Wheaton.edu) or Robert Priest (rpriest@tiu. edu).