Conversionary Sites
Transforming Medical Aid and Global Christianity from Madagascar to Minnesota
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: Conversionary Sites in Global Christianities
Chapter 1. Remembering and Forgetting through Medical Aid Work
Chapter 2. Becoming Humanitarians: Bodies Multiple in Communities of Aid
Chapter 3. Redeeming Medical Waste, Making Medical Relief
Chapter 4. Restructuring Value in Antananarivo
Chapter 5. Translating Aid, Brokering Identity: Malagasy Doctors as Precarious Heroes
Chapter 6. Traversing Shadow Spaces of Accountability
Conclusions: Aid’s End Times
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Chapter 1. Remembering and Forgetting through Medical Aid Work
Chapter 2. Becoming Humanitarians: Bodies Multiple in Communities of Aid
Chapter 3. Redeeming Medical Waste, Making Medical Relief
Chapter 4. Restructuring Value in Antananarivo
Chapter 5. Translating Aid, Brokering Identity: Malagasy Doctors as Precarious Heroes
Chapter 6. Traversing Shadow Spaces of Accountability
Conclusions: Aid’s End Times
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Review Quotes
Anthropological Quarterly
"Halvorson offers a fascinating and nuanced analysis of 'conversionary sites' that richly shows how material things congeal bodies, healing, and history in a way that is rarely simple to understand, and always requiring of multiple perspectives arrayed together and against each other."
Melissa L. Caldwell, author of Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside
“Although the fields of humanitarianism, assistance, development, and charity have rapidly expanded over the past ten years, there is still relatively little written on the role of religious organizations. As such, this book is a much-needed contribution to a series of critical conversations about such assistance. Halvorson’s scholarship is exceptional, and her writing is clear, focused, and elegantly presented. Conversionary Sites will speak to multiple audiences, both within anthropology and beyond, to address questions of assistance, religion, and postcolonial politics.”
Andrea Muehlebach, author of The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy
“Focusing on discarded medical supplies that circulate from Minnesota warehouses to hospitals in Madagascar, Conversionary Sites is a beautifully crafted exploration of how transnational Lutheran actors negotiate distinct biospiritual regimes of medical, economic, and moral value. In this fraught process, far-flung Christians engage in value conversions that transform waste into divinely blessed objects, while also managing the contradictions that arise out of a nominally equal but in fact profoundly racialized and classed encounter. A provocative and original study of global medical humanitarianism that offers vivid insight into global Christianity under neoliberal conditions.”
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