Moral Commodities and the Practice of Freedom

This essay explores an increasingly popular genre of organized group travel in white mainline and emerging evangelical US Christianity I call “journeys to the margins”: trips centered on learning from marginalized persons for the traveler’s ethical formation. Drawing on ethnographic research with on...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of religious ethics
Main Author: Williams, Sara A. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Wiley-Blackwell [2020]
In: Journal of religious ethics
Further subjects:B Tourism
B Ethnography
B Israel / Palestine
B Pilgrimage
B anthropology of ethics
Online Access: Volltext (Verlag)
Volltext (doi)
Description
Summary:This essay explores an increasingly popular genre of organized group travel in white mainline and emerging evangelical US Christianity I call “journeys to the margins”: trips centered on learning from marginalized persons for the traveler’s ethical formation. Drawing on ethnographic research with one case study, “Come and See Tours” to Israel/Palestine, I interrogate how the commodified form of these trips shape possibilities for ethical subjectivation. First, I demonstrate ways in which journeys to the margins market ethical transformation to American Christian consumers in the form of packaged moral narratives. Second, I focus on the paradoxical nature of journeys to the margins as simultaneously packaged commodities and ethical encounters. Finally, I use reformulations of freedom emerging from the anthropology of ethics to argue that possibilities for ethical subjectivation occur in moments when tour ideals come into tension with lived realities.
ISSN:1467-9795
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of religious ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1111/jore.12333