Articulations of Mixed Religious Sites

This special issue shows how the terminological aspects and defining characteristics of mixed sites are still relevant, since most of the contributors are struggling to confirm whether they are researching shared or mixed sites, contested and/or competitive, or both. All the case studies show that sacred and pilgrim-age sites cannot be observed as only sites of mixing or sites of contestation and competition.The key contribution made by this special issue lies in its demonstration that we need to observe mixed sites and what goes on there not just in terms of pilgrimage performed at the destination but in all the contexts where mixing and competition are articulated. Pilgrimage sites in general and mixed sites in
particular are a part of wider spatiality and temporality; they are also constituted by everyday life, and they are articulated in people’s everyday lives. In this after-word I can only scratch the surface of the methodological issues that we should address in the study of mixed sites such as the positionality of the researcher, the accessibility of the sites, routes and practices, the articulations of mixed sites and practices, and so on. Further discussion could engage with the issue of laterality recently explored by Simon Coleman (2021) and/or the questions of the archival turn in anthropological research (see, for example, Basu and De Jong 2016). The complexities revealed by the case studies and the diversity of articulations demonstrate that there is much more to say about methodological approaches toward mixed sites and pilgrimages, in general. We are clearly just starting to seriously discuss the methodology of researching mixed sites, but we should do that look-ing at the broader context outside the sub-field of mixed religious sites.