‘What do you call the heathen these days?' The policy field and other matters of the heart in the Norwegian Mission Society

The paper will explore policy in a Norwegian Christian church and development NGO, the Norwegian Mission Society (NMS), from a multi-sited perspective. Most importantly, I think, this brings out associations that tell us something about (1) the people under study in NMS, their own continuous ‘site and system awareness’, and their attempts – not dissimilar to mine – to sort out their policy field; (2) me as ethnographer and my attempts to site myself and my discipline in relation to the non-heathen policymakers of NMS; and (3) the nature of development policy itself: from such a multi-sited perspective, policy, clearly, is shown to be important – but not for the reasons one would think.