Redefining Pilgrimage

New Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Pilgrimages

Antón M. Pazos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317069904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Storia delle religioni

Exploring what does and what does not constitute pilgrimage, Redefining Pilgrimage draws together a wide variety of disciplines including politics, anthropology, history, religion and sociology. Leading contributors offer a broad range of case studies from a wide geographical area, exploring new ways of approaching pilgrimage beyond the classical religious model. Re-thinking the global phenomenon of pilgrimages in the 21st century, this book offers new perspectives to redefine pilgrimage.

Chapter 1
Conventional and Unconventional Pilgrimages: Conceptualizing Sacred Travel in the Twenty-First Century

Ellen Badone

This chapter represents a journey towards a new theoretical framework for understanding sacred travel, both historical and contemporary. At the point of departure is an outline of ideas about directions for that journey. Then follows some ‘back-tracking’ in order to review a number of the key anthropological and sociological works on pilgrimage and tourism published since the 1970s, before returning to my own framework as the destination at the end of the chapter.¹

Human beings are more mobile at the beginning of the twenty-first century than at any other period in human history. Much of this mobility is involuntary, as in the case of the displacement of refugees, forced migrations, or travel arising from economic necessity. Nor does everyone have the luxury of being able to choose mobility. Depending on one’s social class, gender and/or ethnicity, opportunities for travel may be constrained. Nonetheless, travel is characteristic of contemporary society, and much of this travel is undertaken voluntarily. Why then do people travel by choice in the twenty-first century, and why did they do so in the past? There is no single, all-embracing answer to these questions, but a possible approach is to focus on one facet of an answer, by drawing attention to the ways in which social actors seek and construct meaning and value through connections with distant destinations. Here the meticulous scholarship and wide-ranging cross-cultural review of ethno-historical, archaeological and historical sources by Mary Helms shows that a fascination with distant places and the valorization of the things that come from them is not a new phenomenon, nor one restricted to any particular cultural tradition.² In Ulysses’ Sail, Helms documents evidence for the ideological significance of space and geographic distance in non-industrial societies. She shows, for example, that esoteric knowledge was prized and sought out through travel by Australian aboriginal groups, indigenous peoples in South America, and Islamic scholars in West Africa. Likewise, in T’ang Dynasty China, sandalwood, exotic spices and precious stones from distant sources were prized by the imperial court, as were Buddhist scriptural texts and relics brought from holy places in India.³ In these and countless other examples, objects perceived to be of heightened aesthetic value, or ideas perceived to be associated with heightened spiritual truth, were obtained from distant sources and ‘brought home’.

A similar process underlies much voluntary travel, both today and in the past. Social actors, especially those with economic resources, travel to places where perceived ‘goods’ are believed to be located. These ‘goods’ may be tangible: fine food or wine, unique items of material culture, artistic or architectural treasures – or intangible: health, escape from stress, or religious enlightenment. Note the use of the qualifiers ‘perceived’ and ‘believed’. Whether travellers actually obtain the ‘goods’ for which they set out on their journeys is a separate issue from the motivation for their travels.

Following this line of reasoning, both pilgrimage and tourism can be considered related forms of voluntary travel. Some sites of pilgrimage, such as Fatima or Mecca, are associated with established religions. Others, like Gettysburg⁴ or Graceland,⁵ are unconnected to formal religious institutions. The term pilgrimage is used here with reference to travel to both types of sites, ‘conventional pilgrimage’ being proposed for travel to sites connected with religious institutions, and ‘unconventional pilgrimage’ for travel to sites not associated with established religious traditions. Unconventional pilgrimage would, therefore, include many phenomena frequently subsumed under the category of tourism. Hence, not only Pre’s Rock, the roadside memorial in Oregon to long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine, falls into this category⁶ but also places like Ground Zero⁷ and even travel with a less overtly ‘spiritual’ dimension, such as a week spent relaxing and sunbathing at a Caribbean resort. In this chapter, religion is viewed through the lenses of Geertz and Durkheim: as a social and individual endeavour to interpret experience in ways that are perceived to be meaningful, and as an effort to overcome the isolation of the self through connections with persons, values and communities which possess the ability to transcend, elevate and empower the individual. Given this perspective, ‘religion’ is not restricted to the domain of the divine, the supernatural, or to any particular moral code. Moreover, the category ‘religion’ includes what some other researchers and many popular commentators call ‘the spiritual’.

In this formulation, touristic journeys in search of recreation – the re-creation of the self by engaging in activities that are believed to promote health and/or relieve the drudgery of mundane labour – are both ‘religious’ and ‘pilgrimages’. Perhaps the definitions of these terms will be perceived as excessively broad and inclusive. However, rigid distinctions between pilgrimage and tourism derive from an unreflective perception that tourism is a petty and hedonistic activity; that it is ‘mere tourism’ and that tourist destinations are ‘kitschy’ and fake rather than noble, intellectual and spiritually enlightening. We should recognize these critiques as situated in value judgments that define mass or popular pleasures as being less valuable than those of elites. Instead of engaging in such class-based distinctions of taste,⁸ both pilgrimage and tourism are approached as products of ongoing processes of cultural construction that involve a dialectical interplay between the distant and the familiar through which travellers seek perceived meaning and value.

Any genealogy of anthropological approaches to pilgrimage must start with the work of Victor and Edith Turner, who saw pilgrimage as a ‘characteristic type of liminality in cultures ideologically dominated by the “historical” or “salvation” religions’.⁹ The Turners envisaged pilgrimage as comparable in some respects to the tribal rites of initiation they had studied in African contexts. Like rites of passage, the Turners claimed that pilgrimage involved:

release from mundane structure; homogenization of status, simplicity of dress and behavior; communitas; ordeal; reflection on the meaning of basic religious and cultural values; ritualized enactment of correspondences between religious paradigms and shared human experiences … movement from a mundane center toward a sacred periphery which suddenly, transiently, becomes central for the individual, an axis mundi of his faith; movement itself, a symbol of communitas … as against stasis, which represents structure.¹⁰

However, the liminality of pilgrimage, according to the Turners, is assumed voluntarily, unlike the obligatory liminality of rites of passage, and if the pilgrim undergoes a type of initiation, it is ‘to a deeper level of religious participation’, rather than necessarily to an elevated social status.¹¹

The second major landmark along the route of the anthropological study of pilgrimage came in the form of Contesting the Sacred, edited by John Eade and Michael Sallnow.¹² If indeed, prior to this publication of 1991, the anthropological study of pilgrimage was, as Eade and Sallnow have suggested, ‘in its infancy’, then Contesting the Sacred could be seen as inciting the field to adolescent rebellion.¹³ Twenty years later, pilgrimage has emerged as a central, cross-cultural theme in anthropological research, both in terms of its contributions to theory and in numbers of ethnographic studies. Now indeed, we might say that the anth...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Conventional and Unconventional Pilgrimages: Conceptualizing Sacred Travel in the Twenty-First Century
• 2 Old Pilgrimages, New Meanings; New Pilgrimages, Old Forms: From the Ganges to Graceland
• 3 Pilgrimage and the American Myth
• 4 Heaven on Earth: Political Pilgrimages and the Pursuit of Meaning and Self-Transcendence
• 5 Israeli Youth Voyages to Holocaust Poland: Through the Prism of Pilgrimage
• 6 The Pilgrimage to the Hill of Crosses: Devotional Practices and Identities
• 7 The Saint and His Cat: Localization of Religious Charisma in Contemporary Russian Orthodox Pilgrimages
• 8 Walking to Mother Teresa’s Grave
• 9 Reformulations of the Pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela
• Index