Routes to Religions: Circulation of Imaginaries and Reconfigurations of Communities on the Roads of Eurasia
(2023) International Society for the Sociology of Religion 37th Conference. — Location: Taipei (Taiwan) (4.July.2023)
Files
No attached file found for this publication.
Details
- Authors
Fontanari, Thibault 
- Abstract
- Session Abstract: In Eurasia and High Asia in particular—a region encompassing the Pamir, Karakoram, Hindu-Kush and Himalayas mountains—cultural and political history has been shaped by the circulations of farmers and herders, merchants and soldiers, missionaries and saints on and along old and new pathways, roads and highways. Today, while some roads continue to follow ancient caravan trails, new routes through the mountains are opened, offering new trajectories and opportunities for local communities, establishing connections between rural and urban areas. By linking regions and countries, these routes weave threads of global entanglement. They also become areas of increasingly intense cultural and international encounters where diverse cultural groups meet, exchange goods and share ideas. Scholars working in High Asia have recently made roads and paths the sites of their enquiry (Rippa, Murton and Rest 2020; Murton 2017; Saxer 2016; Demenge 2013), examining people’s journeys back and forth as constitutive for social, religious, and economic life (Marsden 2021; Rippa and Rest 2019; Mostowlansky 2017, Boivin and Delage 2016; Foltz 2010). This scholarship builds upon and contributes to a growing interest across the social sciences in how roads actively shape social, cultural, and political landscapes (Harvey and Knox 2015; Heslop and Murton 2021). In conversation with these works, this panel attends to routes and journeys as time-space in which people encounter, appropriate, and transform religious beliefs and practices. In the context of globalisation, religious revival, and cultural resistance, this session welcomes papers that explore the role of roads in the circulation of imaginary and symbolic systems, the transformation of religious practices, and the reconfiguration of social and cultural communities along the roads and paths of Eurasia. How does a study of religion along roads and highways allow us to trace the spatiality and temporality of the development of religious systems, their changes and circulation? Do the routes promote the diffusion of state-legitimised beliefs or are they rather channels of creativity along which people shape new imaginaries and practices? Do they reinforce previous connections or recompose the geography of mobility and thus the circulation of people, goods, and ideas? Do routes help to connect communities and bring them closer together, or do they set them apart? Do they foster similarities in beliefs and practices, or do they rather support processes of distinction between cultural and social groups, or new cultural constructions?
- Affiliations
Citations
Fontanari, T., & Carolin Maertens. (2023). Routes to Religions: Circulation of Imaginaries and Reconfigurations of Communities on the Roads of Eurasia. International Society for the Sociology of Religion 37th Conference., Taipei (Taiwan). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/105700