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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.