Moral Commodities and the Practice of Freedom

Bibliographic Data

ID14760376
AuthorsSara Williams (0000-0003-2213-749X, corresponding author), Sara A Williams
Year2020
Volume48
Issue4
Pages642-663
Publication date2020-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Religious Ethics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0384-9694 • E-ISSN: 1467-9795
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/jore.12333
OpenAlexW3113856292
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited22

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

Aesthetics · Commodification · Environmental ethics · Ethnography · Narrative · Sociology · TRIPS architecture · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Philosophy · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious Tourism and Spaces

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