Short-term mission trips in Asia: intertwining religion, volunteering and tourism

Grace Ann Chua and Harng Luh Sin

Chapter 4 in A Research Agenda for Religious Tourism, 2024, pp 57-70 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Situated within the rise of Christian mission trips from Asia and especially from Singapore, this paper posits important questions regarding our understanding of tourism - how do religious beliefs and spiritual experiences ground and inform tourists’ performative practices of care? Focusing on religion offers us a new understanding for subjective place-based care practices of how tourism becomes oriented towards poverty alleviation. Using fieldwork with a mission trip from a Singaporean church to the Philippines, this chapter untangles why short-term mission trips often focus on aspects of care - such as prayers - that may seem unimportant to others. Short-term mission trips hence serve as a point of entry to critically consider what it might mean for tourism if we were to take seriously the religious points of view of our respondents when they posit that all care is spiritual care.

Keywords: Development Studies; Environment; Geography (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781803928746.00010 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21827_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().