Researching pilgrimage: Continuity and Transformations

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2009.10.016Get rights and content

Abstract

Pilgrimage is one of the oldest and most basic forms of population mobility known to human society, and its political, social, cultural and economic implications have always been, and continue to be, substantial. This study aims to examine key issues, arguments and conceptualizations in the scholarship on pilgrimage in order to better understand how it has changed over the years. The findings indicate a shift to a postmodern approach within the study of pilgrimage, particularly with regard to the increasingly obfuscated boundary between tourism and pilgrimage reflected in the terms secular pilgrimage and religious pilgrimage. Dedifferentiation has penetrated the scholarship in terms of its features and its multidisciplinary treatment by researchers.

Introduction

Pilgrimage, one of the religious and cultural phenomena best known to human society, is an important feature of the world’s major religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. A pilgrimage has been defined as “A journey resulting from religious causes, externally to a holy site, and internally for spiritual purposes and internal understanding” (Barber, 1993, p. 1). Today, pilgrimage is defined differently, as a traditional religious or modern secular journey. The phenomenon is currently experiencing resurgence throughout the world, as longstanding shrines still act as magnets to those in search of spiritual fulfillment (Digance, 2003).

Pilgrimage is one type of “circulation,” which is a form of population mobility. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, mobility has become an evocative keyword and a well-known interdisciplinary field of study with a powerful discourse of its own. The concept of mobility encompasses large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information throughout the world, as well as more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space, and the movement of material things in everyday life. Issues of movement—too little movement, too much movement, the wrong type of movement, or poorly-timed movement—are of great importance to organizations, governments, and the lives of many people (Hannam, Sheller, & Urry, 2006).

Present-day tourism studies employs a “new mobility paradigm” that offers a conceptual framework for understanding the nature of the tourism phenomenon (Bærenholdt, Haldrup, Larsen, & Urry, 2004). According to this framework, “places are seen as dynamic,” as “places of movement”. “Places are like ships,” posits Barrenholdt et al., “moving around and not necessarily staying in one location” (2004, p. 146). A recent survey of mobilities research stresses a number of important aspects of this emerging field of study, including focus on the relationship between human mobilities and immobilities; analysis of the relationship between mobility systems and infrastructural moorings; and the inter-relational dynamics between physical, informational, virtual and imaginative forms of mobility (Hannam et al., 2006).

But while the phenomenon of migration has gained much attention in the literature, different forms of “circulation”, and “religious circulation” in particular, have received much less attention (Eickelman & Piscatori, 1990). Nonetheless, these forms have no less an effect on the environment, and indeed may have an even greater one. This stems from the large numbers of participants, their cyclicity, and the large numbers of people which they affect (Nolan & Nolan, 1989). Pilgrimage also creates other population mobilities such as trade, cultural exchanges, political integration, and the less desirable spread of illnesses and epidemics.

Pilgrimages have powerful political, economic, social and cultural implications, and even affect global trade and health. Pilgrimage inevitably necessitates spatial movement and for this reason stimulates geographers’ concern with distances travelled and the phenomenon’s affect on behavior. Pilgrimage is also an important subject due to its scope and spatial influence: each year, an estimated three to five million Muslims make the Hajj (the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca on a specific date), some five million pilgrims go to Lourdes in France, and approximately 28 million Hindu pilgrims visit the River Ganges in India (Singh, 2006). Researchers are beginning to recognize more fully the powerful and contingent roles of religion and spirituality on a range of scales, from the corporeal to the institutional and the geopolitical (Holloway & Valins, 2002).

This article examines how in recent years research on pilgrimage has shifted toward post-modernism. It also points to discrepancies between the ‘old’ paradigm, predicated on the assumption that religious elements lie at the core of pilgrimage, and the results of more recent studies of secular models of travel, which show that post-modernism furnishes an alternative and complementary approach to explaining the shifting boundaries between the post-modern tourist and the post-modern pilgrim. Studies focusing on these types of journeys are at the forefront of the postmodern debate over movement and centers, global flows, social identities, and the negotiation of meanings (Badone & Roseman, 2004).

Postmodernism is a complicated concept, or set of ideas, that has emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-80s. The term is hard to define because it is used in a wide variety of disciplines and fields of study, including art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology (Klages, 2007). One characteristic of the researchers who employ this approach is the tendency to challenge existing theories and reject the clear-cut divisions within the prevailing scholarship. This article shows how the trends of deconstruction (or of breaking down existing theories), the prevalent tendency to emphasize the subjective over the objective, and the increasing attention paid to individual experiences are all consistent with the new post-modern approach to pilgrimage research.

Section snippets

The main transformations in pilgrimage research

This section characterizes the changes that have taken place in pilgrimage research by reviewing the literature on the subject. It analyzes the concepts, theories and paradigms that have been added or changed within the ongoing pilgrimage research. It also shows how pilgrimage studies have changed direction due to new theories in the field of tourism, which serves as the basis for most of the significant changes and redefinitions that have occurred thus far.

Conclusions

This article analyzes the main transformations that have taken place in pilgrimage scholarship in recent decades. It also reveals that the most significant changes that have taken place and the new direction taken by pilgrimage studies in general have been the result of new research theories in the field of tourism and mobilities. Throughout history, pilgrimage has stimulated much interest and writing, which can be understood in parallel to the practice itself. While the “old” paradigm was

Summary

By reviewing the central themes in pilgrimage research which highlight the importance of new directions in the field, and drawing upon specific influential theoretical developments, I have contextualized recent work in the study of pilgrimage as part of the emerging area of research of “mobilities” and shown how this area of research may be advanced. Indeed, postmodern ideas such as the possibility of co-existence of a multiplicity of truths—rather than the victory of only one privileged

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professors Erik Cohen, Nurit Kliot and Yoel Mansfield for their unswerving and persistent help and support throughout.

Noga Collins-Kreiner is a lecturer (PhD), in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Haifa (Haifa, Israel. Email <[email protected]>). She is also a member of the Center for Tourism, Pilgrimage & Recreation Research at the University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel. Her main research interests are: Tourism Development, Tourism Management, Religious Tourism, Pilgrimage, Social and Cultural Geography and Ecotourism.

References (66)

  • G. Rinschede

    Forms of religious tourism

    Annals of Tourism Research

    (1992)
  • A.V. Seaton

    War and Thanatourism: Waterloo 1815–1914

    Annals of Tourism Research

    (1999)
  • V.L. Smith

    Introduction: The quest in guest

    Annals of Tourism Research

    (1992)
  • P. Stone et al.

    Consuming dark tourism: A thanatological perspective

    Annals of Tourism Research

    (2008)
  • D.H. Alderman

    Writing on the Graceland wall: On the importance of authorship in pilgrimage landscapes

    Tourism Recreation Research

    (2002)
  • S.A. Attix

    New age-oriented special interest travel: An exploratory study

    Tourism Recreation Research

    (2002)
  • R. Barber

    Pilgrimages

    (1993)
  • J.O. Bærenholdt et al.

    Performing tourist places

    (2004)
  • Y. Bilu

    Divine worship and pilgrimage to holy sites as universal phenomena

  • G. Bowman

    Christian ideology and the image of a holy land: The place of Jerusalem in the various Christianities

  • E. Cohen

    A phenomenology of tourist experiences

    Sociology

    (1979)
  • E. Cohen

    Pilgrimage and tourism: Convergence and divergence

  • E. Cohen

    Tourism and religion: A comparative perspective

    Pacific Tourism Review

    (1998)
  • E. Cohen

    The “postmodernization” of a mythical event: Naga fireballs on the Mekong river

    Tourism Culture & Communication

    (2007)
  • Cohen, E. (2008). Personal communication, July...
  • N. Collins-Kreiner et al.

    Pilgrimage tourism in the holy land: The behavioural characteristics of Christian pilgrims

    GeoJournal

    (2000)
  • N. Collins-Kreiner et al.

    Tourism, heritage and pilgrimage: The case of Haifa’s Baha’i gardens

    Journal of Heritage Tourism

    (2006)
  • N. Collins-Kreiner et al.

    Tourism to India: A cultural, educational and religious experience at Dharamsala

    South Asian Popular Culture

    (2010)
  • J. Digance

    Religious and secular pilgrimage

  • Paulla A. Ebron

    Tourists as pilgrims: Commercial fashioning of transatlantic politics

    American Ethnologist

    (1999)
  • D.F. Eickelman et al.

    Muslim travelers—Pilgrimage, migration and the religious imaginatior

    (1990)
  • Cited by (360)

    • Managing visitor experience at religious heritage sites

      2023, Journal of Destination Marketing and Management
    • 'Walking Battlefield Sites': An experience of secular pilgrimage

      2024, Touristic World-Making and Fan Pilgrimage in Popular Culture Destinations
    View all citing articles on Scopus

    Noga Collins-Kreiner is a lecturer (PhD), in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Haifa (Haifa, Israel. Email <[email protected]>). She is also a member of the Center for Tourism, Pilgrimage & Recreation Research at the University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel. Her main research interests are: Tourism Development, Tourism Management, Religious Tourism, Pilgrimage, Social and Cultural Geography and Ecotourism.

    View full text