LOCATING RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE: THE INTERACTION OF IMAGES AND ARCHITECTURE, SPACE AND ACTION (REVIEW ARTICLE: Robert Maniura, Pilgrimage to Images in the Fifteenth Century (2004); Janis Elliott and Cordelia Warr (eds.), The Church of Santa Maria Donna Regina (2004) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction: Pilgrimage as Art, Art as Pilgrimage
Imaging Pilgrimage: Art as Embodied Experience, 2021
While place-based pilgrimage is an embodied practice, can it be experienced in its fullness through built environments, assemblages of souvenirs, and music? Imaging Pilgrimage explores contemporary art that is created after a pilgrimage and intended to act as a catalyst for the embodied experience of others. Each chapter focuses on a contemporary artwork that links one landscape to another-from the Spanish Camino to a backyard in the Pacific Northwest, from Lourdes to South Africa, from Jerusalem to England, and from Ecuador to California. The close attention to context and experience allows for popular practices like the making of third-class or "contact" relics to augment conversations about the authenticity or perceived power of a replica or copy; it also challenges the tendency to think of the “original” in hierarchic terms. Imaging Pilgrimage brings various fields into conversation by offering a number of lenses and theoretical approaches (materialist, kinesthetic, haptic, synesthetic) that engage objects as radical sites of encounter, activated through religious and ritual praxis, and negotiated with not just the eyes, but a multiplicity of senses. Table of Contents Acknowledgments List of Plates List of Figures Introduction: Art as Pilgrimage, Pilgrimage as Art I. Vashon Island – Spain: A Backyard Camino II. S. Africa – Lourdes: Souvenirs as Sites III. England – Jerusalem: Rewilding through Pilgrimage Song and Chant IV. Oakland – Ecuador: Haciendo marcas otra vez-Making marks, again V. Los Altos (Labyrinth) – Beyond: "The end is where we start from" Towards a Conclusion: "As Far as the Eye Can Travel" Bibliography
'What is going on here?' Gazing, Knowledge and the Body at a Pilgrimage Shrine
Journeys, 2020
The millions visiting pilgrimage sites across the world attest to the continuing social, political and economic significance of religion. The popularity of pilgrimage is partly driven by the expansion of global communications and the travel and tourism industry (a major contributor to the expansion of the service sector). Many shrines have adapted very successfully to technological change and even in the European region where engagement in Christian beliefs and practices has declined, especially in W. Europe, pilgrimage sites attract widespread interest and new routes are being invented or old ones revived. It is a mistake to see pilgrimage as just a 'traditional' survival or to simply contrast religious pilgrimage with secular tourism. In this article I want to explore the adaptation by pilgrimage shrines to technological change since the mid-19 th century by focussing on a very popular and well publicised Christian shrine-the Roman Catholic sanctuary of Lourdes near the Pyrenees in southwest France. Knowledge about this shrine was disseminated through the growth of mass media associated with the expansion of literacy. During the second half of the nineteenth century newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and postcards found their way across both European rural and urban societies facilitated by an expanding international railway network. Photography played an important role in this dissemination of knowledge, making saints and shrines more visible and the camera played an important role in the portrayal of dramatic events associated with them. Lourdes emerged as a particularly controversial shrine because of people's claims to having been miraculously healed there. The body became a prime focus of the photographic gaze in this context and photographs of the 'sick' body were quickly pressed into service as objective 'evidence' of dramatic healing.
“Seeking the Sacred through Pilgrimage”: A Theological Perspective
Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021
This paper aims to offer a theological taxonomy vis-à-vis the practice of pilgrimage. The taxonomy is constructed around three theological imperatives: that of Revelation, of the Incarnation, and the Sacramental. Acknowledging the polymorphic nature of pilgrimages, as religious, social, and ethno-cultural events which invite multi-layered investigation, this paper proposes an interdisciplinary bridging exercise by translating these theological imperatives into language that can be related to the sociological, anthropological, or ethnographic approach to pilgrimage, in order to highlight some interdisciplinary points of correspondence. The paper also touches on issues of secularization, the negotiation of public space by the religious event, and queries the role of the Church—particularly in the Eastern Orthodox context—in translating or inhibiting the translation of said theological imperatives in the wider social milieu.
Pilgrimage is often seen as a physical journey to a sacred destination fixed by custom, destination-centred and broadly penitential in tone. The work of anthropologists in the last century broadened definitions to consider pilgrimage, across a range of faiths, in terms of a journey of transition and formation of identity. More recent historical scholarship has critiqued the longer development of our idea of pilgrimage, as well as its theological structures and markers. This diachronic approach to pilgrimage has also considered its origins with respect to early Christian conceptions of the life of the Christian in society and found resonances for patterns of lay pilgrimage in early monastic ideas. Such historical-theological dimension of research into pilgrimage provides a useful platform from which we can interrogate the idea of 'faith tourism' or 'pilgrimage tourism'. Many people of faith visit particular churches and holy sites to invoke their historic dimensions as well as to see what is presently on such sites. Visitors seek to re-enact historical narratives in the performance of certain pilgrimages and liturgies associated with them. Historical studies of theology thus may identify narratives that drive choices of action in pilgrimage. An historical reflection on pilgrimage may also be productive in widening definitions of pilgrimage for future development and may offer ideas for development of resources for the traveller.
We begin by invoking possibly the most influential text in the anthropology of pilgrimage, Victor and Edith Turner's Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978). Despite the book's title, it is not, for the most part, about images per se.
Geographies of religion and spirituality: pilgrimage beyond the ‘officially’ sacred
Tourism Geographies
The papers in this special issue, Geographies of Religion and Spirituality: Pilgrimage beyond the 'Officially Sacred,' are placed in the context of a comprehensive theoretical overview of the role that the sacred plays in shaping, conducting, controlling, and contesting pilgrimage. As scholarship examining the lived experiences of travelers has demonstrated, pilgrimages need not necessarily be religious in nature, nor be officially sanctioned. Rather, if pilgrimages are perceived as 'hyper-meaningful' by the practitioner, the authors in this special issue argue that a common denominator of all of these journeys is the perception of sacredness-a quality that is opposed to profane, everyday life. Separating the social category of 'religion' from the 'sacred,' these articles employ an interdisciplinary approach to theorize sacredness, its variability, and the ways in which it is officially recognized or condemned. Thus, the authors pay particular attention to the authorizing processes that religious and temporal power centers employ to either promote, co-opt, or stave off, such popular manifestations of devotion, focusing on three ways: through tradition, text or institutionalized norms. Referencing examples from across the globe, and linking them to the varied contributions in this special issue, this introduction complexifies the ways in which pilgrims, central authorities, locals and other stakeholders on the ground appropriate, negotiate, shape, contest, or circumvent the powerful forces of the sacred. Delving 'beyond the officially sacred,' this collective examination of pilgrimages, both well-established and new; religious and secular; authorized and not; the contributions to this special issue, as well as this Introduction, examines the interplay of a transcendent sacred for pilgrims and tourists so as to provide a blueprint for how work in the geography of religion and the fields of pilgrimage and religious tourism may move forward.
Oxford Handbooks Online
An understanding of medieval pilgrimage can be informed by the application of archaeological approaches to the physical evidence. This chapter outlines the evidence of pilgrimage within the historic landscape, demonstrates the existence of an infrastructure for the support of pilgrims, and applies a functional approach to interpreting the sometimes fugitive remains of shrines. Consideration is also given to the impressive material culture of pilgrimage souvenirs, and the evidence that this provides of pilgrims’ travels at home and abroad. Extraordinary insights can also be gained into the life experiences and personal faith of medieval individuals from the excavation of pilgrim burials.