A Moral Economy of Difference: Transnational Encounters in Short-Term Religious Humanitarian Relief

Team Members/Contributors

LiErin Probasco Princeton University Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

Over 1.6 million American adults and 1/3 of US congregations participate in international short-term mission trips annually. Existing research on religion and globalization fails to provide a framework for analyzing the transnational relationships these trips engender. This dissertation examines trips in terms of the moral boundaries that enforce or erase difference and status between social actors engaged in cross-national aid-based interactions. Through a case study of short-term religious humanitarian aid travel between the US and Nicaragua, I consider how social relationships form and how social status is established across boundaries of nation and wealth.

The research includes fieldwork and interviews with participants in ten one-week trips facilitated by two US sending agencies working in seven Nicaraguan communities. My analysis examines the construction of relationships and social status in terms of three sites of social difference: national cultures, wealth, and gender. When talking about nationality and poverty in particular, participants engage conflicting models for interaction. A religious or ethical sense of universal values and human worth competes with material inequalities in resources and power. I examine moral boundaries in participants’ narratives of sameness or difference across these three sites of difference. I also examine face-to-face interactions, particularly direct resource exchanges, in terms of social boundary mechanisms that establish relative status. This research illuminates a poorly understood but popular form of global religious outreach; it also suggests best practices to practitioners hoping to craft trips that better embody their goals of aid provision and mission.