CALL FOR ABSTRACT- PILGRIM ECONOMIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX

Smita Yadav Discussion
Type: 
Call for Papers
Date: 
July 18, 2016
Location: 
United Kingdom
Subject Fields: 
Anthropology

We are pleased to announce a one day workshop on :

 
****** Pilgrimages, Ontologies, and Subjectivities in Neoliberal Economies******
 
to be held at the School of Global Studies, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Sussex, UK on July 18th 2016.
 
Sites of pilgrimage and heritage tourism are often sites of social inequality, volatility, and 
impaired by historical hostilities between historical, ethnic and competing religious discourses 
of morality, personhood, culture, as well as imaginaries of nationalism and citizenship. These 
pilgrim sites are often much older in national and global history than the country as a modern 
sovereign nation-state. Underlying these sites of worship, pilgrimage, religion and piety are also 
pertinent issues to do with finance such as local regimes of taxation, livelihoods, and the wealth 
of regional and national economies where these pilgrimage sites are located.  
 
In this workshop, we discuss the ways pilgrimages are imbricated in local, national and 
transnational economies. We ask questions such as: 
 
1.    What are pilgrimage travel arrangements comprised of, and who has control over the distribution of public resources and facilities such as roads, housing, accommodation, and transportation? 
 
2.    What do such developments reveal about recent changes in these historical places? 
 
3.    How are discourses and practices about money interrelated with those about religion and divinity in pilgrimage sites? 
 
4.    How are neoliberal economies bolstered by these pilgrim sites through heritage tourism? 
 
5.    How are subjectivities transformed in the context of pilgrimage in neoliberal economies?
 
 
The workshop will also focus on the worshippers' own subjectivity especially of holy sites as being situated in their imaginations of historical continuity and discontinuity  and their transformative experiences of worshiping using both modern and traditional forms of infrastructures.  
 
We would like to discuss the infrastructures that facilitate ͚the holy experiences͛  of the pilgrim 
sites while also appropriating local and international demands for modernizing pilgrimage 
experiences for visitors who range from being local, national, international, tourists, and the 
diaspora. We welcome papers that are situated and/or ethnographic.  
 
Please send an abstract upto 300 words,  queries for being discussants,  or propose panels to pilgrimeconomies@sussex.ac.uk by 10 th June, 2016.
 
We are able to offer partial funding for travel/accommodation. 
 
Best wishes
Smita Yadav
Social Anthropology
University of Sussex