The Invention of Sacred Places and Rituals: A Comparative Study of Pilgrimage (original) (raw)

Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World. New Itineraries into the Sacred

The modern pilgrimage—to sites ranging from Graceland to the veterans’ annual ride to to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to Jim Morrison’s Paris grave—is intertwined with man’s existential uncertainties in the face of a rapidly changing world. In a climate that reproduces the religious quest in seemingly secular places, it’s no longer clear exactly what the term pilgrimage infers—and Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World critiques our notions of the secular and the sacred, while commenting on the modern media’s multiplication of images that renders the modern pilgrimage a quest without an object. Using new ethnographical and theoretical approaches, this volume offers a surprising new vision on the non-secularity of the “secular” pilgrimage.

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.

Sacralising the Landscape: Water and the Development of a Pilgrimage Shrine

This chapter will explore the ways in which Roman Catholic institutions seek to control nature in the form of water through the process of sacralisation. I begin with an historical overview of sacralising the landscape through Catholic pilgrimage and then introduce two theoretical approaches within pilgrimage studies (the phenomenological and relational) towards this process in the context of contemporary pilgrimage. This leads to a detailed case study of Lourdes, one of the most popular European pilgrimage shrines, where the landscape has been radically altered through the process of sacralisation where two types of waterthe spring uncovered by St Bernadette during her visions in 1858 and associated with 'miraculous' healing and the river Gaveplay an ever-present and potentially disruptive role.

Local Pilgrimages and Their Shrines in Pre-Modern Europe

Peregrinations, 2007

When people think of medieval pilgrimage, most usually the road to Santiago de Compostela comes into view in the mind's eye, or the even longer and more dangerous voyage to the Holy Land. It is no wonder that these remarkable journeys and the spiritual motivations that sparked them should have attracted so much attention. They have an epic grandeur and a transformational potential that speak directly to impulses that are still felt by pious and adventuresome souls today. Less well known, however, are the more prosaic and far more numerous pilgrimages that took place regionally or locally in medieval and early-modern Europe. Far more so than for the major pilgrimages, these local pilgrimages were rooted in a past that has all but disappeared from the mechanized, urban world of the 21st century and whose concerns no longer spark the popular imagination. Yet, local pilgrimage is a fascinating historical phenomenon, and the fact that it has been relatively ignored offers exciting potential for further study. This special section of this issue of Peregrinations is devoted to local pilgrimage. The idea for this project sprang from a session dedicated to Local Pilgrimage Shrines at the 40th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in May 2005. 1 Besides this introductory essay, the other two articles gathered here originated as papers read in this session, and each of them highlights pertinent aspects of local pilgrimage. These studies do not even begin to exhaust this rich subject. Rather, our intention is more to draw attention to local pilgrimage in the hope of spurring further interest in what may be described as a growing field of study. Each article, thus, focuses on different concerns and perspectives. Local pilgrimage has certainly not been entirely ignored in the past, but it has benefited much less from scholarly attention not only due to its overshadowing by what William Christian, Jr., has called the "more touristic" pilgrimages but, as well, due to the generally less well documented nature of local pilgrimage. The situation is well exemplified by the 1472 will of William Ecopp, rector of the parish church at Heslerton in Yorkshire, in which he left "a string of bequests" for various pilgrimages to be performed throughout England. As Diana Webb has pointed out, these ranged from majorand relatively well documented-sites such as Canterbury and Walsingham "to a number of north-country shrines of the Virgin which are otherwise unknown as objects of

Approaching the Sacred: Pilgrimage in Historical and Intercultural Perspective

2017

The aim of the volume is a comparative study of non-European pilgrimages under different historical conditions and changing power relations. Historic transformations but also continuities in organization, bodily and spiritual experience, as well as individual and collective motives are discussed. Written by an interdisciplinary group of authors, their various disciplinary perspectives offer insight into the differences in methods, theoretical reflections and the use and meanings of objects in ritual performances. The construction of sacred spaces as landscapes of imagination reflects a wide range of meaning in regard of the growing complexity and social dynamism in times of postmodernity. Keywords: Interdisciplinary approach; non-European pilgrimages; transformation and continuity; theories of pilgrimage studies Ziel des Bandes ist eine vergleichende Analyse außereuropäischer Pilgerreisen unter verschiedenen historischen Bedingungen und Machtverhältnissen. Untersucht werden historische Transformationsprozesse, aber auch Kontinuitäten bezüglich der Organisation, der körperlichen und spirituellen Erfahrungen sowie der individuellen und kollektiven Motive der Pilger. Die interdisziplinäre Zusammensetzung der Autoren vermittelt Einblicke in unterschiedliche Methoden, theoretische Reflektionen sowie den Gebrauch und die Bedeutung von Objekten in rituellen Performances. Die Konstruktion von heiligen Orten als Landschaften der Imagination reflektiert eine große Vielfalt an Bedeutungen in Bezug auf die komplexen und dynamischen Prozesse im Zeitalter der Postmoderne.

Religion, Pilgrimage and Tourism: An Introduction

Religion, Pilgrimage and Tourism (4 volume reprint series with Routledge)

Introduction For as long as human beings have existed they have been interested in travel. Particular homelands and cultural norms have always been constructed with reference to, or contrasted with, the lands and habits of ‘the Other’. Implicit in this statement is the notion that some places are more special (perhaps sacred) than others, and this is the core of the intimate relationship between human beings, place and travel, and religion. The field encompassed by this four-volume reprint series ‘Religion, Pilgrimage, and Tourism’ is thus vast. At the least controversial end of the spectrum are those incidences of travel which are sanctified by the so-called ‘world religions’ (Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam), such as the Hajj, the Camino de Santiago, the Shikoku henro, the Kumbh Mela, and the hope expressed at the annual Passover meal, ‘next year in Jerusalem’. However, the field extends far beyond these ‘official’ journeys, and encompasses the nomadic wanderings of Australian Aboriginal peoples through their ancestral lands, travel to participate in Native American potlatch gatherings, the assembly of Ancient Greeks every four years to honour Zeus Olympios at the Olympic Games, and the modern Druids who perform rituals at Stonehenge at the midsummer solstice. Yet beyond the immediately religious lies journeying that is motivated by individual ‘spiritual’ needs, which may involve traditional sacred routes and sites (for example, Westerners going to Indian ashrams), and radically eclectic, non-traditional pathways (for example, Wagner aficionados who travel to experience productions of the Ring Cycle and fans of Elvis Presley who visit his home, Graceland). In the post-religious milieu of the twenty-first century, almost any journey to almost any site may be religious and/or spiritual, a journey ‘redolent with meaning’ (Digance 2006).

Pilgrimages and Tourisms: Differences and similarities between sacred and profane, contemporary and anciet itineraries in limited historical european contexts.

The increase of the urban dwelling and the growth of the cities phenomenon correspond to the similar rise of new forms of land uses characterized by a greater environmental sensitivity and by a wish to belong to the earth, especially to places whose main feature seems to be the apparent genuineness of natural, agricultural and pre-industrial landscapes. Our research establishes a comparison among the models of these new forms of sustainable tourism, the forms of more conventional travel, heritage of the XIXth century jumping and bourgeois tourism, and the ancient pilgrimages, trying to highlight differences and possible overlaps. Even in the advanced secularization of our time, the contemporary forms of environmental tourism seem to be originated by the same inescapable religious roots that moved the footsteps of ancient pilgrims, and nowadays still search for a ontological justification to dwelling "here and now”. It is the similarity between the models of contemporary environmental tourism and the ones of ancient religious pilgrimages that now makes possible to weave "sustainable" trips in the combination of environmental and spiritual interests: routes of silence and rutes of nature, itineraries for physical and metaphysical contemplation, are therefore easily mixable in "sustainable" travel proposals, because they originate by the same root: the universal religious vocation of human being. The pecific case i would like to point out it is the one of the old churches (VI- IX sec) in Romagna country side: a possible itinerary among the most significant poles fundamental to the development of the landscape.

Pilgrimage and Sacred Places in Southeast Europe. M. Katic, T. Klarin & Mike McDonalds (eds). 2014. Zurich, Lit Verlag Gmbh. ISBN 978-364390504-8

Though religious tourism has posed as one of the main attraction in tourism industry worldwide, nowadays a lack of a serious debate respecting to commonalities between tourism and pilgrimage still exists. To fulfill such a gap, this book, which is edited by Katic, Klarin and McDonald, presents the outcome of a previous event: Pilgrimage and Sacred Places in Central and Eastern Europe, place, politics and religious tourism. Understanding pilgrimage as an act of faith, which results in devotion, redemption and penitence, it is interesting to discuss to what extent the term “religious tourism” is acceptable. Of course, we start from the premise this type of tourism has religion as it primary criterion of attraction. Among the strengths of this book, we find a finely-ingrained debate respecting to the role of mobile factor, which is present in pilgrimage and tourism, to offer a homogenized product of consumption that at the bottom it is based on different goals