The Missionary and the Pea: An Anthropological Study of the French MEP Economy

This paper discusses how the French missionaries of the Missions Etrangères de Paris (MEP) are linking humans and material objects to support their religious agenda. Revisiting the long history of this organization in Hong Kong and Thailand, but also its distinct recruitment and assignment policies, I highlight how these Catholic missionaries rely on their French cultural background to interconnect people and goods. While theological principles and political pragmatism shape their functioning, I argue that their economy is distinctively rooted in the French notion of terroir –the taste of place— an embodied relation to land that acts as a cultural mechanism to address the socio-cultural diversity of global Catholicism. Their emphasis on soil human relations guides their long-term missionary engagement with specific territories of Asia, their way of circulating people and goods, as well as their strategies to cultivate their bi-cultural belonging.