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 10th June, 2016.