Scholars Forum with Sarina Annis

Sarina Annis is a PhD student at the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, where she studies Christian mission work among Indigenous peoples in Treaty 3 territory. She has an MSc in the Anthropology of Religion from the London School of Economics and will present a paper based on her master’s research: “Early Mennonite Missionaries in Quebec: Thinking Through the Anthropology of Christianity.”This paper briefly tells the story of early Mennonite missionary work in Quebec and connects it to conversations in the anthropology of Christianity more broadly, especially the anthropology of missions. I argue that it is productive to combine the preoccupation with identity in Mennonite studies, with the anthropological focus on the missionary encounter, mainly because these combined insights reveal that evangelism is transformative not only for the “target” population, but for the missionaries themselves.