Appel à communications : Panel “Military Pilgrimage: Practices and Discourses”, XXI IAHR World Congress, Erfurt (Allemagne), 2015 — LIMITE : 07/09/2014

Dynamics or Religion: Past and Present

XXI IAHR World Congress, Erfurt, Germany 2015

*Panel Call for Papers*

*Military Pilgrimage: Practices and Discourses*

Panel conveners: John Eade, Universities of Roehampton and Toronto
Mario Katić, University of Zadar

The anthropology of pilgrimage has emerged as a well recognised sub-field
of Anthropology with a significant body of literature that has addressed a
wide range of pilgrimage phenomena. Recent research and publications have
sought to move beyond debates concerning communitas and contestation (see
Turner and Turner 1978; Eade and Sallnow 1991; Morinis 1992) towards
explorations of movement, gender, ethnicity, visualisation, secular and
spiritual pilgrimage, political and economic processes, and the
relationship between pilgrimage and tourism (Walter and Reader 1992;
Coleman and Eade 2004; Badone and Roseman 2004; Hopgood 2005; Margry 2008;
Albera and Couroucli 2012; Bowman 2012; Jansen and Notermans 2012; Reader
2013; Fedele 2103; Eade and Katić 2014; etc).

Nevertheless, some important gaps remain and one of them is military
pilgrimage. Although pilgrimage places have always been connected to
nationalism, politics and military from the Middle Ages (Crusaders) to
contemporary practices (like Australian pilgrimage to Gallipoli or Western
to memorials from the First and Second World War), focus on this form of
pilgrimage has been neglected in pilgrimage research. At Lourdes, one of
Europe’s most visited Christian shrines – military pilgrimage has been a
long established feature and with the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the
advance of globalisation the international military pilgrimage to Lourdes
has grown significantly with delegations from Poland, Slovakia, Croatia,
Ukraine, Canada and the USA as well as from W. Europe. Military pilgrimages
are also happening in these European and N. American countries, viz. the
Polish military pilgrimages to JasnaGora and Lichen, Croatian military
pilgrimage to Marija Bistrica, etc.

Through this panel we want to contribute to research on this still
neglected form of pilgrimage. Our goal is to gather scholars and case
studies from around the world in trying to access practices and discourses
connected to Christian and non-Christian military pilgrimage in local and
global contexts at national and trans-national levels. We want to observe
military pilgrimage in synchronic and diachronic perspective and in
relationship to politics and nationalism, as well as to individual pilgrims
and/or different (secular and religious) agents connected with the
establishment and organisation of different military pilgrimages.

Abstracts (up to 300-words in Word doc.), with contact details and
affiliation, should be sent to John Eade (j.eade@roehampton.ac.uk) and
Mario Katić (makatic@unizd.hr) by *September 7th 2014. *