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Paper short abstract

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.