Pilgrimage beyond the Officially Sacred

Understanding the Geographies of Religion and Spirituality in Sacred Travel

Michael A. Di Giovine, Jaeyeon Choe, Michael A. Di Giovine, Jaeyeon Choe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032084077
• eBook ISBN: 9781000049060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria dell'ospitalità e del turismo
• Index: Business

Pilgrimage beyond the Officially Sacred: Understanding the Geographies of Religion and Spirituality in Sacred Travel examines the many ways in which pilgrimage engages with sacredness, delving beyond the officially recognized, and often religiously conceived, pilgrimage sites.

As scholarship examining the lived experiences of pilgrims and tourists has demonstrated, pilgrimage need not be religious in nature, nor be officially sanctioned; rather, they can be 'hyper-meaningful' voyages, set apart from the everyday profane life—in a word, they are sacred. Separating the social category of 'religion' from the 'sacred, ' this volume brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars employing perspectives from anthropology, geography, sociology, religious studies, theology, and interdisciplinary tourism studies to theorize sacredness, its variability, and the ways in which it is officially recognized or condemned by power brokers. Rich in case studies from sacred centers throughout the world, the contributions pay close attention to the ways in which pilgrims, central authorities, site managers, 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—presents a compelling look at the interplay of secular powers and the transcendent forces of the sacred at these hyper-meaningful sites.

Providing a blueprint for how work in the anthropology and geography of religion, and the fields of pilgrimage and religious tourism, may move forward, Pilgrimage beyond the Officially Sacred will be of great interest to an interdisciplinary field of scholars. The chapters were originally published as a special issue in Tourism Geographies.

From the liminal to the lateral: urban religion in English cathedrals

Simon Coleman

ABSTRACT
Using data derived from a qualitative and quantitative study of four English cathedrals (Canterbury, Durham, Westminster, and York), I argue that these buildings combine high cultural capital with considerable liturgical flexibility, and that the latter has helped cathedrals become highly popular parts of the church and heritage landscape. In examining the ritual forms made available to visitors, including regular services, informal acts of piety such as the lighting of candles, and varieties of pilgrimage, I argue the need for a more nuanced theoretical vocabulary than is currently in play in order to describe the ways in which informants engage with liturgy. Drawing on both ritual theory and urban sociology, I juxtapose a more conventional depiction of ritual as involving entry into set-apart and liminal frames of action with the observation that many visitors engage in more ‘lateral’ forms of participation, where sacred and secular, official and non-official, blend in complex ways. Such ‘laterality’ emerges not only from contemporary responses to ritual engagement, but also out of characteristic ways in which urban publics engage with variegated city space. My broader argument is that the notion of ritual ‘laterality’ is a highly productive means of characterizing encounters between contemporary visitors and heritage sites of religious significance. Use of this category avoids a clear separation or hierarchy of value between sacred and profane realms of action, or between religious believers and tourists. An investigation of lateral interactions between visitors and such sites also assumes that informal, ambiguously articulated, and less public behaviors may be as sociologically significant as formal and easily visible ones. I conclude that ritual behavior in cathedrals points to wider trends in the encounters between diverse urban publics and ostensibly sacred spaces.

摘要

通过对四个英国大教堂(坎特伯雷、达勒姆、威斯敏斯特和约克)的定性和定量研究得出的数据, 我认为这些建筑将高度的文化资本与相当大的礼仪灵活性相结合, 后者帮助教堂成为教堂和遗产景观中非常受人青睐的部分。通过考察向游客提供的仪式形式,包括常规服务、非正式的虔诚的行为,如点蜡烛,和种类繁多的朝圣之旅,我认为, 为了描述礼仪被调查者参与的方式, 需要一个比目前通行的更细致入微的理论词汇。从仪式理论和城市社会学的角度来看, 我同时保留一种更传统的仪式描述和脱离世俗、进入仪式状态的描述, 并通过观察发现, 许多游客都有侧重地参与了更多仪式形式,在这种形式中, 神圣和世俗、官方和非官方,以复杂的方式融合在一起。这种“侧重性”不仅体现在对仪式参与的现代回应中,也体现在城市公众参与各种城市空间的特殊方式上。我更广泛的论点是, 仪式的“侧重性”的概念是一种高效的手段, 用来描述当代游客和有宗教意义遗产地点之间的接触。使用这一分类可以避免在神圣和世俗的行动领域, 或宗教信仰者和游客之间明确的分离或价值等级。对访问者与此类地点之间的侧重性互动的调查还认为, 非正式的、含糊不清的、更少的公共行为可能与正式的、容易看到的公共行为一样具有社会意义。我的结论是, 教堂仪式行为表明, 在不同的城市公共场所和表面上神圣的空间之间的接触 会有更广泛的趋势。

Introduction

At first sight, cathedrals appear to be ‘icons’ of official religion, even in the semiotic chaos of the post-modern city (Curtis, 2016; Knott, Krech, & Meyer, 2016, p. 1). Extending along both vertical and horizontal planes, typically occupying prime areas of real estate, these buildings conjoin ecclesiastical authority with civic heritage and cultural capital. Invoking another visual image, Judith Muskett (2015, p. 273) refers to English cathedrals as ‘shop windows’ of the national Church and emphasizes their ability to capture the gaze of the passer-by, providing sites/sights upon which Baudelaire’s flâneur can rest ‘his’ eyes (Muskett, 2015, p. 275). Such prominent expressions of privilege show how the cathedral can act as urban cynosure through its elevated position as material embodiment of institutional centrality, apparently melding mutually-reinforcing strands of political, economic, and liturgical authority.

I explore, expand, but also challenge this initial depiction of the cathedral as epitome of stable, official, and hyper-visible expression of (often) urban religion. I draw on survey and ethnographic work within four major English cathedrals, three of them Anglican (Canterbury, York Minster, and Durham), and one Roman Catholic (Westminster). Participant observation (2015–2017) was combined with over 100 interviews with cathedral staff and visitors, and 502 questionnaires spread across the four sites. Research was therefore conducted with clergy, secular administrators, and volunteers as well as those passing through the sites (including local residents). Three members of the team (Coleman, Bowman and Sepp) carried out observational fieldwork lasting from a few days to a few weeks per individual visit in each cathedral throughout the three years of the project, so that all the cathedrals were covered at different points of the annual round of liturgical and other seasonal activities. The research worked to capture data from transient visitors not only via the use of surveys, but also by drawing on survey respondents to obtain in-depth semi-structured interviews, as well as responses to e-mailed questions relating to activities carried out within the cathedrals. Between a third and a half of respondents offered no religious affiliation in our questionnaire surveys, slightly outnumbering those who described themselves as Anglican or Catholic.

At its broadest, and drawing on such data gathered from the largest feasible array of informants, my aim is to oppose older tendencies in urban theory that have represented cities as environments inherently inimical to the credibility of religious practice, threatening its ideological and institutional structures of plausibility (see Bartolini, Chris, MacKian, & Pile, 2016, p. 2). I emphasize the significance of the contemporary city—even in a country as ‘secular’ as England—as a space for animating certain forms of religious vitality, while stressing the need to analyze these cathedrals as distinctively municipal spaces, attracting and accommodating diverse publics, not merely resisting but also deeply situated within urban ecologies of commercialism, governance, chronic mobility, and anonymity.

While I focus on a specifically English landscape of cathedral activities, I acknowledge the comparative possibilities of juxtaposing such work with radically different cultural contexts (e.g. Miles-Watson, 2011), while noting that such a project is beyond the scope of this current paper. At the background to my argument is also an awareness of both England and Europe more generally as destinations where patterns of migration have been transforming pilgrimage shrines and other sites of worship, so that for instance ‘multiculturalism in post-war England has been intimately associated with the growth of non-Christian cults’ (Eade, 2014, p. 38). What was striking about our survey data, however, was the paucity of responses from informants openly professing affiliation with a non-Christian faith (a handful at most for each cathedral). In addition, most respondents came from the United Kingdom, with Westminster having the highest proportion of foreign visitors (29%)—a likely artefact not only of its Catholic identity, but also its location in central London.

The outward stolidity of English cathedrals in both ‘city-’ and ‘church-scapes’ (Jokela, 2014) belies their dynamic internal heterogeneity, their ability to house activities that complement but also seemingly contradict each other’s spatial, ritual, and ideological logics—including parish-based rituals of belonging, varieties of pilgrimage, heritage tourism, flânerie, and occasional provision of refuge for vulnerable groups such as the homeless. On the one hand, cathedrals are places of relative social and ritual incoherence, echoing and not merely shutting out the usually urban world beyond their portals; on the other, not only is such apparent disjointedness reversed on occasions of liturgical focus and intensity, but the very admixture of activities found within cathedral space may catalyze significant forms of articulation—even mutual engagement and creative ‘friction’ (Tsing, 2004)—between disparate activities.

I use a focus on cathedrals to reconsider relations between so-called official and un-official forms of religion, as well as between forms of pilgrimage and tourism (compare Stausberg, 2011), but also suggest the need to consider pilgrimages not only in conventional analytical terms, as set-apart and reliant upon sharp demarcations of time and space in order to create sacralized experience, but also as much more porous and ‘abrasive’ frames of activity, feeding off other activities in the capacious space of the cathedral. Thus, in referring to many pilgrimages as creating ‘lateral’ rather than merely ‘liminal’ social and ritual relations (see also Coleman, 2013), I present an alternative vocabulary to the classic and still influential Turnerian (Turner & Turner, 1978) rite of passage model constituted through oppositions between structure and anti-structure that are based on self-conscious reversals of everyday life. Victor Turner describes liminality as ‘an interstructural position’ (1967, p. 93), where the ritual subject is in a state of ambiguous becoming, temporarily invisible to wider society. The liminal person is assumed to adopt a stance of submission (inequality) in relation to ritual instructors, but one of fellowship (equality) toward others undergoing the rite. A key point is that liminality is prevalent within social and ritual systems constituted by forms of stability, repetitiveness, and communal participation that Turner sees as characteristic of ‘tribal’ as opposed to Western, industrial contexts. This distinction between industrial and non-industrial now seems somewhat anachronistic, but Turner’s essential claim is that liminality emerges out of situations of obligation (1974, p. 42) where even the breaking of rules is regulated and carefully framed, and where the initiate is ultimately pitched back into a society marked by rigid normative structures and shared role expectations.

Victor Turner thus poses the question of what happens to liminality in ‘industrial societies.’ While he accepts that it can continue to exist in certain tightly-knit organizations such as masonic orders, he argues that it tends to move toward the liminoid (what Versteeg [2011, p. 5] calls ‘liminoidity’). While resembling the liminal in its manifestation within spaces set aside from mainstream productive and political events (Turner, 1974, p. 65), the liminoid emerges from contexts marked by cultural pluralism, an extensive division of labor, fragmentation, individualization, contractual relations, commercialization—and, above all, choice. Thus ‘optation pervades the liminoid phenomenon, obligation the liminal’ (Turner, 1974, p. 74), and if liminality pitches anti-structure predictably against structure, the liminoid is concerned more with play and experimentation, realized through such varied media as literature, scholarly exploration, drama, sport, and ritual. Whereas the liminal is ‘eufunctional’ (ultimately contributing in a conservative way to social structure, Turner, 1974, p. 86), the liminoid has the potential to embody social critique. In this vein, while the Turners (1978, pp. 253–254) famously come to see Christian pilgrimage as sharing a number of features with ‘passage rites,’ including ‘release from mundane structure; homogenization of status; simplicity of dress and behavior; communitas…; movement from a mundane center to a sacred periphery,’ they conclude that it is for the most part a liminoid rather than a liminal phenomenon, given its origins in the voluntary decision to leave home to visit a shrine.

One of the striking aspects of this attempt to distinguish the liminal from the liminoid is its relative failure to strike a chord in the scholarly imagination. Whereas liminality has remained in constant use within and beyond studies of ritual—even in contexts of considerable pluralism and diversity—the liminoid is much more rarely invoked. In practice, scholars often use the term ‘liminal’ when Victor Turner would probably have used ‘liminoid.’ Andrew Spiegel (2011, p. 11) suggests that one of the reasons for this reapplication of Turner’s own categories is that his distinction rests on far too crude a division between ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ societal types. A much more profitable deployment of the categories sees them in terms of a more dynamic continuum, reflecting the complex balance of ascription and achievement evident in all social contexts (Spiegel, 2011, p. 15) and indexing different attitudes located between the two poles of conservative (liminal) and transformatory (liminoid).

Spiegel perhaps exaggerates Turner’s own opposition between the liminal and the liminoid, since the two are intended to be overlapping as well as complementary categories, but his redescription of the two is useful and applicable to a wide variety of social situations. Where he tends to agree with Turner is in the depiction of both threshold states as not only set-apart in space and time, but also as unusually intense in the experiences they offer to participants. Implicit in Spiegel’s position is the assumption that the liminoid, like the liminal, is likely to have a focus or a purpose—even if that purpose is the instrumental one of subverting extant structures (Spiegel, 2011, p. 16). Turner regards both the liminal and the liminoid as powerful forms of symbolic engagement, leading to what he describes, following Csikszentmihalyi (1974), as experiences of ‘flow’ where consciousness is narrowed and indeed ‘intensification is the name of the game’ (Turner, 1974, p. 87). In agreeing to engage in liminoid forms of play the person is also subjecting themselves to certain limitations that ‘center’ attention and thereby encourage ‘the flow experience’ (Turner, 1974, p. 88). Drawing on this characterization Turner presents flow as ‘autotelic,’ seeming to require no goals or rewards outside itself (1974, p. 89).

Given that Turner’s depiction of the liminoid is itself multi-faceted, and that authors such as Speigel (2011) (see also Versteeg, 2011) suggest flexible ways of using the term, one might ask why I am choosing to suggest the deployment of a third, related term here, that of ‘laterality.’ For reasons already suggest above by Spiegel, I want to resist a simple and crude temporalization of categories into referring to so-called pre-modern, modern, and post-modern understandings of the workings of ritual and symbol. I want further to suggest that neither the liminal nor the liminoid capture the complexities, tonalities, and sheer ambiguities of engagement experienced by many of those who encounter ritual in almost accidental or serendipitous fashion in the urban contexts described here.

Liminality implies obligation, and ‘liminoidity’ voluntary engagement, but I want to argue that much contemporary experience of ritual is less a matter of conventional engagement or even choice, and more one of often unfocused, unplanned, and not even especially intense encounter. This is not to say that such encounters are trivial, but it is to claim that they are all too easily ignored analytically because of their glancing and inchoate character. In using the term lateral, I suggest that we need to devise ways in which both to recognize and analyze what may be the most common forms of coming across ritual for many people, where they stand literally or metaphorically to one side of the action, not always sure what is happening but not completely disengaged either.

Whereas both the liminal and the liminoid privilege experiences of ‘set apart’ time and space as contexts of marked transformation and creativity, I want to resist the implicit hierarchization of such terms by emphasizing laterality as not only ambiguously secular and sacred, but also as juxtaposing both on an equal moral plane. If the ‘in-betweenness’ expressed by the liminal and the lateral refers in practice to the anti- or non-structural, laterality—while still a spatial metaphor—is much more genuinely ambiguous in its ambivalent, inter-sectional, unpredictable, and sometimes slightly hapless co-habitation of different semiotic and ideological worlds. Furthermore, for some lateral participants in ritual, we need to bear in mind that what Turner describes as anti-structural and liminal, the very center of a publicly framed rite of passage, is likely to seem like the epitome of ‘structure’ in ideological contexts where official religious forms appear to the (literally) uninitiated to embody ecclesiastical authority. In Turnerian analysis, the ideological and emotional power of ‘anti-structure’ relies on participants displaying sufficiently shared knowledge of (and abeisance to) societal and ritual norms for systematic reversals of everyday life to be publicly recognized. For many visitors to cathedrals, however, liturgical life is little understood and certainly not well integrated into common ritual rhythms. Rather, such religious practice is almost by definition viewed as an expression of specialized, institutionalized practice, particularly when surrounded by the high-status trappings of cathedral architecture and liturgy.

In expanding study of sacralized travel away from the Turnerian focus on high intensity experiences at often remote shrines, I explore pilgrimage ‘frames’ that do not exclusively occupy interstices between more mundane forms of behavior, but which co-exist, draw on, and even blend with such forms. My interest is in understanding urban, cathedral-oriented modes of pilgrimage-like behavior that are constructed through situations of adjacency or osmosis with regular forms of ritual, tourism, and mundane, urban living. Thus my argument departs in both spatial and analytical terms from Victor Turner’s (1973) focus on sites explicitly divorced from the temporal and material demands of industrialized existence. A focus on laterality implies looking less at high intensity, centering experiences of effortless ‘flow’ and more at frictional interactions between and across frames of action. Furthermore, I argue that in such interactions the warm embrace of Turnerian communitas may be complemented or replaced by urban forms of solitude and anonymity that are sometimes actually welcomed. Finally, I argue that cathedrals provide striking juxtapositions and even blendings of ‘mundane center’ and ‘sacred periphery.’

My emphasis on articulation and abrasion does not imply, in terms made famous by John Eade and Michael Sallnow (1991), that the multiplicities of discourse and practices contained within cathedrals necessarily involve directly contested forms of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Geographies of religion and spirituality: pilgrimage beyond the ‘officially’ sacred
• 1. From the liminal to the lateral: urban religion in English cathedrals
• 2. Meaning-making in the course of action: affordance theory at the pilgrim/tourist nexus
• 3. Pilgrim routes as contested spaces in Norway
• 4. Tourism and sacred landscape in Sagarmatha (Mt. Everest) National Park, Nepal
• 5. Cultural tourism between local and transnational identities: Jewish heritage in Syracuse, Italy
• 6. Wak’a/shrine making and pilgrimage tourism in Copacabana, Bolivia
• 7. Reframing and Reconceptualising Gambling tourism in Macau as a Chinese Pilgrimage
• 8. Hierarchical value map of religious tourists visiting the Vatican City/Rome
• Index