Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on Hindu pilgrims in India who treat nonhuman persons as equals and co-partners in the pilgrimage experience. Its studies how nature talks back to them during pilgrimage; and how pilgrims capture, interpret, and respond to the voice of nature.

Paper long abstract:

In current anthropological debates on the Anthropocene, we face the challenge of how to adjust and possibly avoid the anthropocentrism in our methodology. As the dominant focus in pilgrimage research tends to be on pilgrims and human sociality – for example by analyzing religious mobility through the lens of communitas, discourse, gender, movement, or commerce - contemporary debates on the nature/culture divide urge us to transcend that divide in our pilgrimage research as well by focusing on ‘more-than-human sociality’ (Tsing 2014). This paper aims to explore how pilgrimage research may be useful in adapting and fine-tuning our methodological approaches in such a way that they enable us to change our perspective and our interpretation of ‘the emic point of view’. In fact, pilgrimage often focuses on the human-non-human relationship and reckons with the power and sociality of non-empirical agents. This raises the question: How do we create space for non-human and non-empirical agents in our methodology in order to understand and give voice to other-than-human persons such as trees, stones, mountains and rivers, in the pilgrimage encounter (and beyond)? The proposed paper particularly focuses on Hindu pilgrims in India who treat nonhuman persons as equals and co-partners in the pilgrimage experience. The paper studies how nature talks back to them during pilgrimage; and how pilgrims capture, interpret, and respond to the voice of nature.