"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."

Anthropological Quarterly

"[Conversionary Sites] not only addresses important questions concerning aid and religion, neoliberalism, and postcolonialism, but also is a beautifully crafted example of how careful attention to multiple perspectives can uncover new knowledge about the subtle impact of cultural practices on the maintenance of power asymmetries."

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

“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.”

Melissa L. Caldwell, author of Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside

“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.”

Andrea Muehlebach, author of The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy