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Paper short abstract

Pilgrimage shrines are not only locations for relics, but also places of infrastructural recording of visitors. I examine how number is deployed by shrine staff and what it says about ambiguous boundaries not only between shrines and visitors, but also between human and datafied forms of presence.

Paper long abstract

Shrines are not only locations for relics, but also places of record, using varieties of infrastructure to both receive and to track visitors. As they engage in a biopolitics of hosting, entailing the visualization and quantification of pilgrims, they are quick to characterize sites in terms of number—enumerating bodies that flow to and through sacred locations, perhaps differentiated demographically or theologically but generally presented in terms of annual and often anxiously anticipated aggregations. In this paper, I examine how number is deployed by shrine staff, what semiotic forms it takes, and what it might say about the necessarily ambiguous boundaries not only between shrines and their visitors, but also between human and datafied forms of presence. In the process, I examine how hosting becomes a technology to convert individuals into dividuals as part of a politics of prompting, tracking and retranslating forms of human mobility into varieties of shrine capital. I explore these themes through comparisons between very different sites: my own work at Walsingham, England; the connections between quantification and the Camino; and infrastructures of counting and control at Mecca.

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The paper investigates how “The Way” manifests as a higher spirit or teacher on the Camino de Santiago, conceptualizing it as a non-human actor guiding pilgrims, while digital technologies redistribute agency, foreground reflexivity, and reconfigure sacred–secular boundaries.

Paper long abstract

The paper investigates how “The Way” manifests as a higher spirit or as a teacher in the pilgrims’ lived experiences during the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage. Building on dozens of interviews with pilgrims, it conceptualizes the Camino not only as a place, but as an active agent, a non-human actor and higher power that guides the journey and imparts teachings through the landscape, as well as through physical and spiritual trials and encounters. Drawing on theories of non-human agency and lived religion (Latour 2005; Stengers 2005; Deleuze 1992) the paper situates pilgrimage as a relational and processual practice in which meaning emerges through interactions between humans, material environments, and transcendental interpretations.

In contrast, modern technologies such as smartphones and social media place pilgrims in a position of conscious choice between the sacred and the profane, transforming encounters traditionally understood as involuntary or divinely initiated into deliberate, curated decisions. The paper argues that while the Camino itself continues to function as an active agent in pilgrims’ meaning-making processes, digital technologies redistribute agency by foregrounding individual reflexivity and intentionality, thereby reconfiguring the boundaries between the sacred and the secular.

Methodologically, the author combines autoethnography with semi-structured interviews and long-term participant observation conducted while volunteering at the Hungarian Pilgrims’ Office. By foregrounding these dynamics, the study contributes to broader discussions on pilgrimage, non-human agency, and the transformation of religious practice in digitally mediated contexts.

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This paper explores divine agency in Taiwan’s Mazu pilgrimages. If cosmopolitics operates not just across species boundaries but also different modes of engaging the world(s) (e.g. landscapes and technologies), where do these different perspectives come together to form a single arena for politics?

Paper long abstract

Starting from my interlocutors’ human-centric view, my exploration begins with the goddess Mazu herself who focuses all human, metahuman, and non-human action during the pilgrimage. Building on Alfred Gell’s (1998) notion of distributed agency, I trace how the goddess orders pilgrimage cosmopolitics. Mazu’s distributed agency shows in technologies of divination, which create inroads for divine intervention and directing the stream of pilgrims, as well as digital tools, like the algorithm of a smartphone app showing her live location. The app’s purpose is less about seizing control of the narrative than capturing the pilgrims’ attention. Taiwanese politicians have long tried to exploit Mazu pilgrimages in their favor but always ended up submitting to Mazu’s distributed agency. The pilgrimage imaginary thus escapes singular control because even the goddess is multiple and one at the same time.

A similar dynamic unfolds with respect to landscape. Many pilgrims walk with the goddess in hopes of gaining an experiential sense of belonging, of “getting to know” Taiwan. Mazu leads her followers through the land, which in the process unfolds and concretizes in front of them: It molds into a solid conception of a Taiwanese homeland. As part of this experienced landscape, Mazu further entices an entire network of other actors, such as volunteers who distribute food and drink free of charge to pilgrims and contribute to a sense of social connectedness via Mazu’s agency. This latter example demonstrates where Mazu’s cosmopolitics exceed the strict boundaries of the pilgrimage circuit, leaving imprints on society at large.

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This paper explores the cosmopolitics of Katsuragi Shugen pilgrimage in central Japan, showing how its digital and ritual infrastructures break down into folds and diagrams—populated by a multiplicity of metapersons who speak and act (enunciate) through pilgrims and visitors.

Paper long abstract

In his posthumous book, Sahlins (2022) used the notion of “metaperson” to indicate sources of agency located beyond the human individual and yet immanent into the world. These entities, which constitute the conditions of possibility of every social activity and cultural production, are often identified with spirits, gods, ancestors, demons, and other more-than-human forces, including institutions, media, and technology. By reframing this notion in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) “collective assemblage of enunciation”, I show how the very idea of metapersonal enunciation (Padoan 2025) constitutes an “immanent infrastructure” of social life, through which cosmopolitical action is enacted (Stengers 2005). I investigate these themes through an analysis of digital and ritual infrastructures connected to the heritagisation of the Katsuragi Shugen pilgrimage in central Japan—whose space is nowadays claimed and contested among competing groups, including religious institutions, governmental agencies, tourists etc. Here metapersons like digital maps, social media, deities, and sutra chapters embedded in pilgrimage routes generate processes of cosmopolitical negotiation, whose articulation could be understood as “diagrams” and “folds of subjectivation” (Deleuze 1988). The immanent infrastructure of pilgrimage, I will argue, can only work by breaking down into these folds and diagrams—populated by a multiplicity of metapersons who speak and act (enunciate) through us. Whether the voices and actions deictically made present are the ancestors, the gods we pray, the institutions we belong to, or the media we follow, they all bring about cosmopolitical action, critically questioning the way we recompose our common worlds.

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This paper examines pilgrimage to doany shrines among the Sihanaka of Madagascar, showing how communal shrine rituals enable the exchange of divine power between humans and metahuman beings within an immanentist cosmopoliteia, where the shrine operates as a gateway between cosmic realms.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores pilgrimage to doany shrines among the Sihanaka of Madagascar as a central feature of an immanentist cosmology in which humans and metahuman beings inhabit a shared world. It examines how communal shrine rituals facilitate encounters, exchanges, and negotiations between humans, ancestors, water beings, forest dwellers, and divinised royalty. Drawing on Marshall Sahlins’ notion of cosmopoliteia, the paper approaches the Sihanaka cosmos as a sociopolitical geography composed of multiple inhabited realms. Lakes, marshes, forests, tombs, and shrines are more than merely symbolic spaces; they are social worlds inhabited by metahuman populations endowed with varying degrees of hasina (divine power). Within this landscape, doany shrines act as privileged sites of exchange, where hasina is more intensely concentrated, transferred, and redistributed between humans and metahuman beings than in any other setting. The paper argues that pilgrimage to doany shrines is a primary means through which hasina is obtained, renewed, and circulated within the cosmopoliteia. Entry upon the shrine locus is carefully regulated through requirements of ritual attire, bodily preparation, and the observance of taboos, which together govern passage across cosmological boundaries. Approached in this way, the shrine operates much like a customs house: a site that manages entry, regulates risk, and mediates the exchange of divine power between realms that are ordinarily distinct yet continuously related. Pilgrimage thus emerges as a form of cosmopolitical borderwork through which relations between human and metahuman realms are coordinated in an immanentist cosmos.

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This paper examines digital pilgrimage among the Naqshbandia Awaisia Sufi order in Pakistan. It traces how the ritual of zikr (remembrance) circulates through digital infrastructures to reconfigure ritual movement, territorial attachment, and political orientation.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines pilgrimage as a site of cosmopolitical action by tracing how the ritual of zikr (remembrance) circulates through digital infrastructures among the Naqshbandia Awaisia Sufi order in Pakistan. Rather than treating pilgrimage as movement toward a fixed sacred destination, it conceptualizes digital pilgrimage as a distributed process in which breath, sound, technical systems, and sacred presences jointly produce mobility, territorial attachment, and distinct political orientations.

The paper follows how zikr, traditionally performed by physically congregating at sacred shrines, is increasingly performed virtually on platforms such as Zoom. Drawing on Islamic ontologies of presence and anthropological work on cosmopolitics and digital religion, I show how this expansion of sacred mobility generates new anxieties about place and presence. While in Sufi thought, divine proximity is affirmed as universally accessible, a claim reinforced by Zoom-mediated zikr that can be performed from anywhere, certain shrines, cities, and national spaces nevertheless come to be experienced as ethically denser and more secure for devotional life because digitally mediated presence renders the sacred addressable and locatable rather than purely atmospheric. I argue that this shift gives Sufi devotional life a distinctly nationalist inflection that classical Sufi thought did not foreground.

By theorizing digital pilgrimage among the Naqshbandia Awaisia Sufi order as a cosmopolitical process shaped by digital infrastructures and nonhuman mediators, the paper shows how pilgrimage is reconfigured in ways that sustain political boundaries and territorial attachments rather than dissolving them in a polarized world.

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Madonna of the Reef in Perast is presented as an enchanted maritime pilgrimage site where humans, divine beings, and materials form one field. Using immanence, ontology and infrastructure theory, the paper shows how reef, sea, boats, and stone produce sacred space via ritual labor amid tourism now.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the pilgrimage complex of Madonna of the Reef (Gospa od Škrpjela) in Perast as an example of what Marshall Sahlins terms an enchanted universe: a social world in which humans, divine beings, materials, and environments form a single interactive field. Rather than approaching pilgrimage as symbolic representation or identity performance, the paper conceptualizes Madonna of the Reef as a cosmopolitical site emerging from ongoing relations between metapersons, maritime environments, and human communities.

Drawing on Sahlins’ anthropology of immanence, theories of coastal liminality and “wet ontology” (Peters and Steinberg), and Brian Larkin’s work on the politics and poetics of infrastructure, the paper argues that the reef, sea, boats, and stone are not passive settings but infrastructural mediators that actively shape religious experience. Local tradition holds that the Virgin Mary appeared on a reef in the Bay of Kotor, establishing it as a divinely chosen site. The subsequent construction of the artificial island through the ritual deposition of stones constitutes an infrastructural response to divine agency, producing sacred space through ongoing material labor.

The annual Fašinada ritual exemplifies pilgrimage as embodied infrastructural work within a liminal seascape where land and sea are inseparable. This framework helps explain the site’s resilience through socialism, secularization, and tourism, showing how cosmopolitical relations persist through material practices that bind humans, nonhumans, and divine beings.