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Paper short abstract

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.