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Abstract

This paper explores pilgrimage in the Caucasus and Central Eurasia as a multifaceted process that intertwines sacred space, social recognition, and the mediation of symbolic power. While existing scholarship has extensively described major pilgrimage destinations and their ritual topographies, less attention has been paid to the consequences of pilgrimage for individual status and to the role of localized sacred sites in shaping collective memory and social dynamics.

Drawing on ethnographic, historical, and architectural evidence from Azerbaijan and adjacent regions, the study situates pilgrimage practices at multiple spatial scales. Global centers such as Mecca and regional hubs like Karbala generate widely recognized status ascriptions reflected in honorific titles like haji and karbalayi which reconfigure pilgrims’ social identities within their home communities. Simultaneously, local shrines (pirs, ziyārats) and architectural models of universal sacred forms serve as spatial anchors where sacred presence and community-specific expressions of devotion are maintained.

The paper argues that pilgrimage should be understood not only as movement toward recognized centers of sanctity but also as a dynamic process through which authority and belonging are negotiated, reproduced, and localized. In this perspective, architectural replications or evocations of universal sacred forms) such as localized models of the Kaaba (function as strategies of embedding transcendent reference points within regional cultural landscapes. Likewise, the preservation of saintly remains and memorial structures acts as a material locus of continuing spiritual presence, reinforcing collective memory and perpetuating perceptions of spiritual efficacy across generations.

To theorize these interconnections, the study proposes a typology of post-pilgrimage transformation encompassing ritual accomplishment, social status reconfiguration, ethical reorientation, and enduring engagement with localized sacred geographies. By linking sacred space, social repositioning, and forms of symbolic authority, the paper contributes to broader debates on the interplay between religious mobility, collective identity, and power relations in Central Eurasian religious life.

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Abstract

Recent scholarship in the decolonial and critical study of religion, drawing on cases from Japan and India as well as Africa and the Americas, has demonstrated that the category of “religion”, as it emerged in European thought during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was inseparable from colonial expansion and imperial governance projects. Rather than serving as a neutral analytical concept, “religion” has functioned—and continues to function—as a classificatory technology through which imperial and post-imperial powers organise, regulate, and hierarchically rank colonised and marginalised populations, often producing scales of “civility” and “barbarity.”

Despite these advances, Central Asia remains under-examined in this body of scholarship. This paper addresses this gap by applying critical frameworks from the study of religion to scholarly interpretations of religious life among Turkic populations from the early nineteenth century, when the region became a focal point of Russian imperial expansion, to the present. Drawing on academic literature in Russian and English and combining intellectual history with discourse analysis, it examines how successive generations of scholars—not only in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union but also in the Anglophone world—have reinterpreted, rather than simply described, local traditions and practices.

I argue that the study of religion in Central Asia has not merely reflected but actively reproduced shifting imperial, ideological, and epistemological regimes. Nineteenth-century scholarship was embedded in racialised and colonial hierarchies that positioned local populations within evolutionary schemes. During the Soviet and Cold War periods, these frameworks were reconfigured through narratives of class struggle, state atheism, and modernisation, in which “religion” was recast as both an obstacle to and a variable within socialist transformation. This period also saw the emergence of two influential and often competing interpretive traditions—Soviet and Anglophone—each shaped by distinct ideological commitments. In the post-Soviet period, with the decline of Soviet paradigms and the ascendancy of Anglophone scholarship, civilisational frameworks have rearticulated earlier logics, continuing to privilege externally derived categories of religion and belonging.

By tracing these transformations, especially focusing on the works of Vasily (Wilhelm) Barthold, the Bennigsen School, Devin DeWeese, and Adeeb Khalid, this paper demonstrates that the religious landscape of Central Asia has been repeatedly “lost in translation” not as passive distortion, but as an effect of historically specific regimes of knowledge production. It therefore calls for a fundamental rethinking of how “religion” is conceptualised in Central Asian studies and highlights the epistemic consequences of translating local lifeworlds into externally imposed analytical categories.

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The paper examines Buryat lama Galsan Gomboev, the 19th-century Buddhist monk integrated into European scholarship, who bridged Buddhist knowledge and Russian Orientology. Despite lacking formal European education, he became a translator, author, and cultural mediator. Drawing on postcolonial theory, the paper explores his hybrid scholarly identity and contributions to Mongolian studies, emphasizing how Gomboev’s work challenged Eurocentric epistemologies and illuminated alternative modernities within nineteenth-century Russian academic and imperial contexts. I draw parallels with other indigenous intellectuals who received traditional education and, with varying degrees of success, integrated into the Russian academic system, in order to situate Gomboev’s case within a broader context.

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A rich scholarship exists on Buryat Buddhism and its history; however, it mostly provides the reader with socio-historical context, leaving a gap in understanding the role of women within the religious community. This gap is observable in Buryatia, a region with a significant Buddhist population. This research project attempts to fill this gap by studying the agency of laywomen within the Buryat Buddhist sangha by exploring their roles, contributions, and motivations. Studies on female religiosity and opportunities for women in Buddhism, such as nun ordination and Tantric practices, used to overlook the experiences and voices of secular women.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and over 30 interviews with laity, clergy, and experts, this paper examines how female Buryat Buddhist activists locate themselves within the contemporary sangha. Employing theories of desecularization and post-secular hybridity, I argue that their faith-based activism reshapes the boundaries of the sangha in multiple ways, blurring the distinction between religious and secular domains, as well as reconfiguring gendered attitudes. Their projects can be religious or secular, yet remain religiously motivated, as many activists see their efforts as a Buddhist duty or a way to accumulate good karma.

This activism gives rise to a paradoxical form of gendered activism without an explicitly articulated gendered agenda: although activists are aware of their unique position, they demonstrate neither support nor rejection of existing gender hierarchies. A case study method allows for insights into the diverse roles and motivations of lay female religious activists in Buryatia, while at the same time contributing to broader discussions on religion and gender, lived religious tradition, and post-socialist religious transformations in Central Eurasia.