Short Abstract

This panel explores pilgrimage as a site of cosmopolitical action where humans, deities, technologies, and environments intersect. We invite papers on how power, ecology, media, and infrastructures shape sacred mobility and reveal new politics in a polarised, multipolar world.

Long Abstract

In a rapidly polarised world, the traditional divisions of sacred / secular, human / nonhuman, local / global are increasingly inadequate for understanding the complex processes shaping pilgrimage and mobility. Building on the notion of cosmopolitics (as developed by Isabelle Stengers 2005) — which extends politics beyond humans to include cosmological actors, technologies, and the environment — this panel invites contributions exploring how pilgrimage becomes a site of contested cosmopolitical action. We invite papers that engage at the intersection of pilgrimage and: (1) nonhuman and more-than-human actors (deities, spirits, metapersons, technologies, media), (2) environmental debates and anthropologies of nature (how nature, landscapes, climate, ecology, and the Anthropocene shape pilgrimage), (3) techno-social infrastructures and control regimes (algorithms, big data, digital infrastructures) in pilgrimage practices, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s (1992) concept of the “societies of control”, (4) conflict, controversy, and power in pilgrimage settings (as in the tradition of Eade & Sallnow 1991) now reconceptualised through cosmopolitical, environmental, and technological lenses, (5) global, multi-scalar, and “cosmic” dimensions of pilgrimage politics in a multipolar world (as the EASA 2026 theme emphasises).

We encourage ethnographically grounded and theoretically informed contributions that attend to the entanglements of pilgrimage, power, technology, nature, and the cosmos — and ask: How are pilgrimage practices shaped by human and nonhuman actors, infrastructural regimes, environmental change, and digital technologies? How do pilgrims, religious institutions, states, and nonhumans negotiate and contest cosmopolitical orders? How might anthropology contribute to imagining less polarised possibilities for pilgrimage worlds?

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