Reframing Pilgrimage

Cultures in Motion

Simon Coleman, John Eade, Simon Coleman, John Eade

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134411702
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Reframing Pilgrimage argues that sacred travel is just one of the twenty-first century's many forms of cultural mobility. The contributors consider the meanings of pilgrimage in Christian, Mormon, Hindu, Islamic and Sufi traditions, as well as in secular contexts, and they create a new theory of pilgrimage as a form of voluntary displacement. This voluntary displacement helps to constitute cultural meaning in a world constantly 'en route'. Pilgrimage, which works both on global economic and individual levels, is recognised as a highly creative and politically charged force intimately bound up in economic and cultural systems

Chapter 1

Introduction

Reframing pilgrimage

Simon Colemanand John Eade

Moving images?

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. Nonetheless, at the heart of the text there are a number of photographs depicting sites discussed by the authors, covering Mexico, France, Italy, Ireland and England. A few are immediately arresting: there is one of penitential pilgrims at the Basilica of Guadalupe painstakingly moving forward on their knees; another shows a suitably grim-looking ‘death-dancer’ at a Mexican saint's festival, who displays representations of the nuclear bomb on the side of his skull-like mask. All repay more detailed consideration, however, for what they do and do not reveal about the study of pilgrimage. Most either depict objects (altars, ex-votos, paintings) or—despite the photo from Guadalupe mentioned above—people in largely static poses: kneeling in worship, sitting by statues, observing a benediction. Yet, if we look more closely we realize that there are significant if implicit stories of movement contained in these illustrations of the pilgrimage process: the pilgrims kneeling in front of Our Lord of Chalma, Mexico, are said to have approached the shrine on their knees from a distance of one mile; a plaque at Walsingham, England, tells of the distances traversed by wooden crosses that were carried to the shrine from parts of the United Kingdom; and, although the ‘death-dancer’ leans on his staff, we are given to understand that he customarily leaps about in grotesque fashion, scaring any young people who go near him.

Taken as a whole, these illustrations hint at some of the varieties of physical motion involved in pilgrimage, from walking to crawling to dancing. And yet, most do not show movement itself, and it is here that we see something of the dilemma facing both the photographer and the anthropologist in presenting images of pilgrimage. The act of representation—involving either the literal or the ethnographic snapshot—encourages concentration on images and issues that lend themselves most easily to the gaze of the analyst: in other words, relatively fixed rather than fluid physical and social processes. This is not to say that the Turners are unaware of the mobility inherent in most pilgrimages.¹ Edith Turner herself (1978:xiii) calls pilgrimage ‘a kinetic ritual’, and Image and Pilgrimage aims to deal with ‘the interrelations of symbols and meanings framing and motivating pilgrim behavior in a major world religion’ rather than a circumscribed social field (1978:xxiv). Furthermore, the theme of movement forms part of the Turners' arguments about pilgrimage as embodiment of populist, spontaneously articulated ‘antistructure’. Journeying is said to bring the possibility of creating social and/or psychological transformation, even if only on a temporary basis, and here we see the adaptation of van Gennep's depiction of life as a series of transitions.

The conceptualization of Christian pilgrimage as an often voluntary, sometimes subversive (broadly ‘liminoid’) rite of passage implies a greater degree of flexibility than is evident in tribal societies. There is an initiatory quality to pilgrimage, but the Turners argue (1978:3) that it may be about ‘potentiality’ as well as ‘transition’, providing a testing ground for new ideas, and moreover one that has ‘something inveterately populist, anarchical, even anticlerical’ about it (1978:32). Not only does the pilgrim to a major site escape from the everyday, but he or she ‘cuts across the boundaries of provinces, realms, and even empires’ (1978:6). Furthermore, ‘[i]t is true that the pilgrim returns to his former mundane existence, but it is commonly believed that he has made a spiritual step forward’ (1978:15). Interestingly, the Turners hint (1978:10) at a distinction between ‘the pilgrim's new-found freedom from mundane or profane structures’ during the journey itself, and the increasingly circumscribed experience of the traveller approaching a sacred destination and therefore becoming subject to religious buildings, pictorial imagery, and so on. Yet, their attention is primarily focused on major shrines themselves— usually the mid-points in complex journeys of exit and return.²Indeed, they even admit that ‘the stress has been on the communitas³ of the pilgrimage center, rather than on the individual's penance on the journey’ (1978:39). One can therefore argue that the anti-structural quality of the argument in Image and Pilgrimage is nonetheless conventional in a singular and significant respect: its largely place-centred approach to the culture of sacred travel.

The present volume also examines major pilgrimage shrines but, in addition, it provides perspectives on various forms of motion— embodied, imagined, metaphorical—as constitutive elements of many pilgrimages. We examine both movement to and movement at sites (and sometimes from sites as well), and in certain cases trace the ways in which mobile performances can help to construct —however temporarily—apparently sacredly charged places (cf. Coleman and Crang 2002b). In adopting this approach, we present pilgrimages as ‘kinetic rituals’ but we also have a further purpose. Our shift towards movement is itself intended to move the study of pilgrimage away from certain aspects of conventional anthropological discourse on the subject.⁴ Just as we broaden our ethnographic gaze to take in more than the central shrine, so we attempt to widen the theoretical location of studies of ‘sacred travel’.

The Turnerian notion of pilgrimage as a liminoid phenomenon, which is productive of social encounters without hierarchical constraints, has of course proved immensely resonant. Yamba (1995:9) notes that ‘anthropologists who embark on the study of pilgrimage almost all start out debating with the pronouncements of Victor Turner, whose framework they invariably employ as a point of departure’ (cf. Coleman 2002).⁵ However, the paradigm has also run the risk of taking studies of pilgrimage down a theoretical cul-de-sac, both in its all-encompassing character and in its implication that such travel could somehow (or at least should ideally) be divorced from more everyday social, political and cultural processes.⁶ More broadly, as Tremlett has recently pointed out (2003:24), both Victor Turner and Mircea Eliade can be seen as ‘romanticist’ in their attempt to secure for religion an ‘ineffable inner space or realm’ that can stand as a critique of modernity and its values. Although the Turners argue that pilgrimages have sometimes been associated, for instance, with political uprisings, it is not made clear how the processual, set-apart character of the institution can feed into structural change. Morinis (1992b:2) argues further that the view of pilgrimage as extraordinary has tended to remove it from academic purview: ‘Anthropologists have tended to neglect pilgrimages because they were, by definition, exceptional practices, irregular journeys outside habitual social realms.’

Even when parallels have been perceived between pilgrimage and seemingly secular institutions, such as tourism (Graburn 1977) and popular youth culture (Myerhoff 1975), the comparison has all too frequently been with activities supposedly divorced from daily life. Thus, while Sallnow (1987:9) commends the Turnerian paradigm for taking analysis beyond a sterile functionalism, he argues that its dialectic between structure and process has provided an inflexible analytical tool, according to which the relationship between pairs of dichotomized variables is seen as zero sum—the more of one, the less of the other.⁷ As we shall see later, we need to question whether pilgrimage needs by definition to be seen as ‘exceptional’, and to ask whether a different approach can help the topic emerge from a theoretical ghetto that is still contained largely within the anthropology of religion.

The power of Image and Pilgrimage and related writings by Victor Turner (e.g. 1973, 1974a, 1974b) has been such that they have influenced scholarly discourse even when their central arguments have been rejected (cf. Messerschmidt and Sharma 1981). A theoretical agenda has indeed been constructed precisely out of the shattering of the Turnerian Image. Eade and Sallnow's edited volume Contesting the Sacred (1991a) directly opposes the communitas paradigm, focusing instead on the role of major shrines in hosting—and amplifying—discrepant discourses among varied groups of pilgrims, thus acting as ‘empty vessels’ that can reflect back visitors' objectified assumptions in sacralized form. Despite their disagreements, however, both the Turners and most of the contributors to Contesting the Sacred implicitly focus on place in making their arguments (cf. Morinis 1992b:3). ‘Vessels’ may be empty but they also have borders, boundaries that divide them from the outside, and the ethnographers in Eade and Sallnow's iconoclastic volume usually come to rest on points of arrival and dwelling at specific major shrines: Lourdes, Jerusalem, San Giovanni Rotondo, and so on. The postmodern fragmentation presented by the volume thus retains at least something of a Malinowskian linkage between culture and place.⁸ Of course, as our chapters will reveal, we are not denying the importance of place in ethnography. However, we do note that even when Eade and Sallnow present a more positive agenda for Christian pilgrimage, suggesting that it can perhaps be understood as comprising combinations of ‘person’, ‘text’ and ‘place’ (see Mitchell, Chapter 2 this volume), ‘movement’ is not present in this grouping of elements.

Metaphors of modernity

Recent studies of pilgrimage have noted the contrasts between the topic's relative neglect in past ethnographic writing and its current growth both as an activity and as an object of study (Morinis 1992: 2; Kaelber 2002; Swatos and Tomasi 2002). If pilgrimage formerly eluded researchers who preferred to take small-scale, fixed socio-cultural units as their prime objects of study (Morinis 1992b:2), explanations of pilgrimage's new-found academic popularity can draw on precisely the same problematic. Just as the introduction of historical perspectives has disrupted the notion of the ethnographic present (cf. Fabian 1983), so the realization that mobility is endemic to many current processes of culture formation has begun to have a profound influence on social scientific notions of the field. Urry (2000:132) summarizes the point succinctly (if with some hyperbole) when he argues that contemporary forms of dwelling almost always involve diverse forms of mobility, with clear impacts on relations between notions of belonging and travelling. He therefore opposes the Heideggerian suggestion that the only form of authentic dwelling is a pattern of life rooted in a particular earth and world. At the same time, he argues (2000:50) that travel is no longer a metaphor of progress when it characterizes how ‘households’ are organized more generally. Similarly, Rapport and Dawson (1998c) explore the ways in which movement plays a key role in the ‘modern’ imagination, with even the idea of ‘home’ coming to refer to routine sets of practices, rather than fixed places.

Some analysts have, therefore, come to regard ‘the pilgrim’ (perceived generically) as emblematic of aspects of contemporary life.⁹ Clifford (1997) suggests that pilgrimage is of particular use as a comparative term in contemporary ethnographic writing, since (despite its sacred associations) it includes a broad range of Western and non-Western experiences and is less class-and gender-based than the notion of ‘travel’. His use of the term relates to a broader project of exploring how practices of displacement are not incidental to, but actually constitutive of, cultural meanings in a world that is constantly ‘en route’, made up not of autonomous socio-cultural wholes but complex, interactive conjunctures.¹⁰

Similarly, Bauman's sociological work on ‘liquid modernity’ argues (2000:13–14) that the era of unconditional superiority of sedentarism over nomadism and the domination of the settled over the mobile is grinding to a halt. He invokes the role of the pilgrim to make general points about contemporary identity (presumably largely in ‘the West’), but his use of the term takes it in a slightly different direction to that suggested by Clifford. For Bauman (1996: 19ff.), modernity has given the metaphorical figure of the pilgrim new prominence as it comes to signify a restless seeker for identity.¹¹ Thus, ‘[d]estination, the set purpose of life's pilgrimage, gives form to the formless, makes a whole out of the fragmentary, lends continuity to the episodic’ (1996:22). Bauman's aim is then to trace the move from pilgrim to tourist, from modernity to postmodernity, since if the modern problem of identity has been to construct an identity and to keep it stable, the postmodern challenge is how to avoid fixation and thus keep one's options open (1996:18).

Bauman's model sometimes embodies the slippery fluidity that he describes. For much of the time, he fails to acknowledge the constraints imposed by structural inequalities upon certain categories of people in the contemporary world. Asylum seekers and refugees do not enjoy the same freedom to move and to consume as wealthy tourists and cosmopolitan elites (see Massey 1994), although, as Rosander shows in this volume, we need to avoid patronizing assumptions that migrant workers cannot by definition be involved in the transnational flows of goods, information and image (cf. Appadurai 1993; Gardner 1995; Vertovec and Cohen 1999; Portes 2001).

For present purposes, the relevant aspect of Bauman's argument, in common with that of Clifford, is the assertion that ‘pilgrimage’ provides an analytical and metaphorical means to conceptualize the constant change that is assumed to be (variously) inherent within modernity and postmodernity. To what extent, however, might their writings actually be useful for the comparative study of pilgrimage as a religious institution? We can perhaps start with the arguments against the utility of their perspectives. In a book such as this, constituted by ethnographically based case studies of the type absent in many of Bauman's recent writings, we prefer to avoid assertions as to the nature of ideal-typical (yet rather Western, Christian-looking) ‘pilgrims’.

We do not, therefore, claim that pilgrimage can be brandished as an all-purpose metaphor for ‘our times’. If, as Bowman has argued (1985: 3; cf. Eade 2000:xii), the Turnerian model of pilgrimage separated interpretation from the constraints of history and society, almost the same might be said of the idea of ‘the pilgrim’ as archetypal seeker. We are more interested in the fact that certain forms of travel, labelled pilgrimages (or the rough equivalent) by their participants, appear to be flourishing in many parts of the world. Such journeys undoubtedly benefit from improvements in communications technology that are available to many people, but they also prompt further investigation into the specific cultural, social and economic dimensions of these examples of contemporary travel. For social scientists they raise key questions concerning informants' views and constructions of locality, landscape, mobility, space, place, the national and the transnational. In characterizing our comparative project in this way, we are not attempting to set up rigid analytical definitions. This is not to say, however, that some basic questions cannot be asked of data in order to establish the basic dimensions of the forms of travel being examined. Can they be characterized as broadly voluntary or coerced? As temporary or longer term? As local or more expansive, even transnational? As repeated or one-off? As formally marked by ritual or informal, or perhaps a mixture of both? And how are they labelled by those who undertake them—not lea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Reframing Pilgrimage
• European Association of Social Anthropologists Series facilitator: Sarah Pink
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: reframing pilgrimage
• 2 'Being there': British Mormons and the history trail
• 3 From England's Nazareth to Sweden's Jerusalem: movement, (virtual) landscapes and pilgrimage
• 4 Going and not going to Porokhane: Mourid women and pilgrimage in Senegal and Spain
• 5 Embedded motion: sacred travel among Mevlevi dervishes
• 6 'Heartland of America': memory, motion and the (re)construction of history on a motorcycle pilgrimage
• 7 Coming home to the Motherland: pilgrimage tourism in Ghana
• 8 Route metaphors of 'roots-tourism' in the Scottish Highland diaspora
• Bibliography
• Index