Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces: Pilgrims, Saints and Scholars in the Caucasus and Beyond

The Caucasus landscape, like those of Europe, Central Asia, or indeed almost any inhabited region of the globe, is dotted with sites and spaces regarded as ‘sacred’ in some sense. Numerous studies have been devoted to the description of the shrines and sacred sites of the Caucasus, as well as the religious systems, rituals and festivals with which they are associated. The focus of this conference, however, is the role played by sacred sites in the construction and maintenance of social networks, and their function as social nodes, where connections are negotiated, forged, enacted and reinforced; but also contested, ruptured and erased.
The aim of the conference is to explore theoretical and empirical developments in the field of anthropological and historical studies of sacred spaces, pilgrimage, material religion and inter-regional religious networks in the post-Soviet Caucasus and beyond. Voluntary or forced migration as well as rural-urban mobility seems to be an important factor in the formation and transformation of sacred spaces in the Caucasus and its iconography. Key questions are: Which objects follow ‘one-way’ trajectories to the sacred site, intended to remain there permanently, and which items return or circulate further? How do we define ‘shrines’ and ‘sacredness’ as some sites seemed to resemble tourist-oriented venues? Who has the power, who benefits from the changing functions of shrines, and the role of migration in this process?
Taking off from the analysis of traditional and emerging hybridities, shared and non-shared sacred spaces in the Caucasus, we hope to better understand the complexity of the region to stimulate a rethinking of the presuppositions underlying the stereotype of a violent Caucasus and the constitution of the Caucasus as an object of knowledge production.