New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies

Global Perspectives

Dionigi Albera, John Eade

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317267652
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Although there has been a massive increase in the volume of pilgrimage research and publications, traditional Anglophone scholarship has been dominated by research in Western Europe and North America. In their previous edited volume, International Perspectives on Pilgrimage Studies (Routledge, 2015), Albera and Eade sought to expand the theoretical, disciplinary and geographical perspectives of Anglophone pilgrimage studies. This new collection of essays builds on this earlier work by moving away from Eurasia and focusing on areas of the world where non-Christian pilgrimages abound. Individual chapters examine the practice of ziyarat in the Maghreb and South Asia, Hindu pilgrimage in India and different pilgrimage traditions across Malaysia and China before turning towards the Pacific islands, Australia, South Africa and Latin America, where Christian pilgrimages co-exist and sometimes interweave with indigenous traditions. This book also demonstrates the impact of political and economic processes on religious pilgrimages and discusses the important development of secular pilgrimage and tourism where relevant. Highly interdisciplinary, international, and innovative in its approach, New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies: Global Perspectives will be of interest to those working in religious studies, pilgrimage studies, anthropology, cultural geography and folklore studies.

1 Pilgrimage Studies in Global Perspective

John Eade and Dionigi Albera

Why This Book?

Around the world today millions go on journey to and from pilgrimage sites, defined here as sites of deep significance for both individuals and groups. Although what we might describe as ‘place pilgrimage’ to distinguish it from two other traditional journeys—imaginary or virtual pilgrimage and the individual quest for moral perfection over time—has long been associated with institutional religion, visitors to religious sites come for a variety of reasons and some may have no close involvement in religious beliefs and practices (see Reader, 2014; Eade, 2016). Furthermore, pilgrimage has developed to sites that are associated with non-religious beliefs and practices. ‘Secular pilgrimage’ has developed around sites of national or ethnic suffering, such as Auschwitz and the First World War battlefields in northern France, Belgium and Gallipoli. Stonehenge and the routes to Santiago de Compostela attract ‘spiritual pilgrims’ and others influenced by ‘New Age’ and other beliefs, which draw on a variety of religious and non-religious beliefs and practices. This increasing diversity in place pilgrimage is also intimately bound up with the massive expansion of tourism since the Second World War, leading to various hybrid forms such as ‘religious tourism’, ‘dark tourism’ and ‘thanatourism’, for example (see Rinschede, 1992; Reader and Walter, 1993; Seaton, 2002; Slade, 2003; Timothy and Olsen, 2006; Raj and Morpeth, 2007).

The increasing diversity and complexity of pilgrimage is attracting keen interest among researchers from different disciplines globally. However, as we argued in our companion volume, International Perspectives on Pilgrimage Studies: Itineraries, Gaps and Obstacles (Albera and Eade, 2015), the dissemination of this expanding volume of knowledge is hampered by a number of obstacles. While the emergence of English as a global lingua franca has encouraged communication across national borders, Anglophone scholars have tended to ignore research published in other languages. Even among Anglophone scholars there is limited engagement across disciplinary boundaries and between countries. Furthermore, there has been limited success in bridging the gulf between those studying contemporary pilgrimage and scholars involved in historical research.ⁱ These boundaries and gaps in Anglophone pilgrimage studies have been compounded by the dominance of research and publications concerned with Christian (largely Roman Catholic) pilgrimage in Western Europe and North America.

In International Perspectives on Pilgrimage Studies we examined the rich heritage of work undertaken outside the Anglophone world through chapters focusing on Japan, Russia, Poland, Hungary, German-speaking areas, Israel, Italy and France. The volume not only invited Anglophone scholars to learn from the rich variety of research and disciplinary traditions outside the Anglophone world, it also de-centred that world. We sought to put Anglophone pilgrimage studies in its place and open up a space where the contribution by non-Anglophone could be properly appreciated.

We take this project further here through a collaboration which is, in some respects, more challenging than the one encountered in the previous volume. We range more widely around the world and encounter a more diverse world of religious and non-religious pilgrimage. We begin in China and then move across southeast and south Asia to the Middle East, North Africa, Australia and the Pacific, southern Africa, Mexico and Brazil. This is a journey which introduces us not only to a wide variety of religious beliefs and practices (Daoist, Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu as well as Christian) but also to people who are attracted to sites bearing little or no connection with institutional religion. The contributors to the volume reveal the diversity within religious traditions created by the complex relationship between institutional and popular beliefs and practices as well as the syncretic and hybrid forms created by this relationship. Through their surveys of pilgrimage research in these different areas of the world they encourage us to consider the ways in which colonial influences, secular nationalism, tourism and religious reformism, for example, are shaping pilgrimage through the often intricate, shifting and sometimes conflictual intersections of religious and non-religious formations.

The developments in pilgrimage research considered here are not meant to constitute a representative sample on a global scale. Moreover, any attempt to find some sort of middle ground in the processes described in this volume is undermined by the varied and often irreducibly divergent realities. The various chapters show a broad spectrum of situations and processes shaped by different national and regional academic fields. They also demonstrate the impress of the political processes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, reflecting, for example, the legacies of the colonial period and the ‘Cold War.’ Even the degree of openness to the influences of the English-speaking academic world is not uniform.

That said, it is still possible to notice a kind of common breathing despite the disparities and contrasts in the various intellectual itineraries described here. As the chapters variously demonstrate, between the 1950s and 1970s most social scientists were slow to question reductionist assumptions concerning religion and its close associate, pilgrimage. Scholarly relegation of pilgrimage to the realm of ‘superstition’ and a repudiated past was encouraged by political elites in Latin America and China, while in Australia nationalist discourses consciously ignored the issue of religion. In India research was stymied less by political influences than by dominant academic models. Anthropologists, for example, often ignored the millions of Indians travelling to the wide array of shrines across the country because of their preoccupation with the village as a bounded community. Although attitudes in these areas of the world changed at different speeds and in different ways, from the 1970s onwards researchers began to broaden their horizons and draw on a variety of perspectives towards pilgrimage.

This openness reflected to some extent the strengthening of international ties, especially with North American and West European universities. In the countries discussed here, pilgrimage research reveals a continuing involvement with academic debates in these western metropoles. Since the 1980s Anglophone researchers, for example, have drawn on the various ‘turns’ which have stimulated western social scientific debate and analysis through the exploration of cultural production, dwelling, emotionality, identity, materiality, mobility and space. This engagement has enabled pilgrimage studies to move away from reductionist interpretations and a reliance on such canonical tropes as communitas, contestation and hierophany.

Marcus Bingenheimer’s chapter here on China is particularly interesting in this regard. The Chinese equivalent of pilgrimage—visits to particular mountains or temples—has become an officially validated object of study relatively recently among Chinese scholars. While there has been a rapid increase in the volume of research on pilgrimage (mirroring academic productivity in the country more generally), reductionist interpretations remain strong. However, Bingenheimer notes the beginnings of a more nuanced approach. The anthropological study of women pilgrims at Mount Tai by Wang (2009), for example, moves away from reductionist, post-Marxist approaches within Chinese religious studies and ‘takes care to understand [them] as “rational actors” against the condescending ascription that they are merely ignorant followers of “feudal superstition”’ (Wang 2009: 216, quoted in Chapter 2, p. 29).

The canonical tropes and reductionist interpretations are still influential as the chapters demonstrate, but our contributors are all seeking to explore other pathways by drawing on recent theoretical debates in their own ethnographic training and research. They are making their own contribution to the development of pilgrimage studies through their investigations of material religion, landscape, identity, gender, narrative, migration and diaspora, as well as spiritual and secular pilgrimage, contestation, hybridity and the relationship between pilgrimage and tourism.

Exploring New Pathways

It could be argued that our attempt to encourage a freer and more equal global flow of knowledge about pilgrimage is just another hegemonic project. After all, we are publishing in English and drawing on the global networks established by Routledge and the academic publishing empire built up by the Taylor and Francis Corporation. Our project could be criticized as yet another instance of (neo)colonialism by ‘indigenous scholars’, who seek to develop approaches free from the embrace of European imperialism and colonialism (see Smith, 1999).

We are more interested here in exploring pathways that take us through countries, which have been undoubtedly influenced by European colonialism but where local scholars have approached that influence and research undertaken by western scholars through eclectic and independent approaches. They have created pathways that lead us to a more diverse global landscape and take us beyond the Anglophone doxa that often identifies Victor Turner’s seminal work as the only anthropological examination of this topic.

The pathways described by our contributors also lead us back in time towards research undertaken by both local and western scholars. Irawati Karve, for example, was an important pioneer in the study of Hindu pilgrimage. After training in India and Germany during the 1920s, she carried out the first participant observation of a Hindu pilgrimage. Interestingly, her article, published first in Marathi in 1951 and then in English ten years later, was quoted by Victor Turner to support his vision of pilgrimage based on the notion of communitas—a connection which has been largely ignored by scholars. Her work also raises an important but still relatively unexplored issue—the contrast between the predominant presence of females involved in pilgrimage and the plethora of male scholars studying pilgrimage (see Jansen and Notermans, 2012 for a pioneering examination of gender and pilgrimage).

Another Indian pioneer, Surinder Bhardwaj, also began publishing research on Hindu pilgrimage during the early 1970s and established an important bridge between Indian and western academic scholarship (see Bhardwaj, 1973, 1985). In neighbouring China western scholars contributed to pioneering research on pilgrimage. Édouard Chavannes, for example, studied T’ai chan pilgrimage during the early twentieth century, combining an erudite exploration of literary sources with direct observation. Francophone and Anglophone scholars also undertook research in the Maghreb during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the study of religious organization and rituals involving saint cults and their relationship to political authority.

It is not always easy, therefore, to draw a sharp divide between local and western research. Indeed, a creative alliance was sometimes forged, especially where there was a long tradition of cultural ties between intellectual elites. As Alejandra Aguilar Ros shows here in her chapter on Mexico, local pilgrimage scholars engaged in critical dialogue with North American and European approaches, including ‘Italian Marxist analyses of popular culture.’ A nuanced Marxist approach emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, as researchers began to apply Gramscian models of ideological hegemony and resistance in their interpretations of popular involvement in pilgrimage. Yet, although Mexican scholars were inspired by Italian Gramscian pilgrimage studies, they also drew on non-Marxist perspectives through their openness to the work of Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss, Turner and Geertz.

Research on pilgrimage in Brazil reveals a similar complex web of intellectual influences. In his contribution to this volume, Steil considers anthropological research undertaken from the 1980s through a focus on several Brazilian scholars who engaged in the ethnographic study of ‘devotional practices, traditional festivals and pilgrimages’ and encouraged the analysis of ‘rituals as key loci for accessing and interpreting popular culture.’ Among them Pierre Sanchis (who looked for the roots of popular Brazilian Catholicism, by studying pilgrimages and religious festivals in Portugal) was strongly influenced by French structuralism. For his part, Otávio Velho developed a hermeneutics of popular Catholicism inspired by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. For other authors, intellectual inspiration came from publications produced by Mikhail Bakhtin, Victor Turner and Michael Sallnow.

Terminological Diversity

Looking at pilgrimage studies through a wider lens also involves paying due attention to linguistic aspects. This issue was already addressed in the companion volume by contributors who outlined the different terms used to describe pilgrimage in Japan, Russia, Poland and Israel, for instance. In this volume the issue of terminology is explored more deeply. Hence, Marcus Bingenheimer begins his chapter on China by discussing the problem of employing abstract western nouns such as pilgrimage in a radically different cultural context. At the same time he still uses the term pilgrimage and refers to the close equivalence between this term and local categories. In literary Chinese ‘chaoshan’ (to have an audience with a mountain) and ‘jinxiang’ (to offer incense) are the closest equivalents and reflect the central role played by pilgrimages to five mountain ranges which set the limits of the empire and involved both Daoist and Buddhist beliefs and practices. ‘Qiufa’ (searching for the Dharma) was another related term since it referred to the travels by Chinese monks to India, while ‘canxue’ (to visit and study (with a master)) was used for monks travelling to different monasteries. Moreover, in modern Mandarin, ‘chaosheng’ (to have an audience with the sacred) is frequently used to categorize pilgrimage outside China, while a specific term, ‘chaojin’, is reserved for the ‘hajj’, the pilgrimage to Mecca by Chinese Muslims. For Bingenheimer, therefore, ‘pilgrimage’ can still be used in a non-western context but close attention needs to be paid to indigenous terminology and the diverse array of beliefs and practices specific to this cultural context. We can talk about proximity and equivalence but need to avoid reductionism, in other words.

Mathieu Claveyrolas’ study of Hindu pilgrimage in India also discusses this terminological issue. He again refers to ‘pilgrimage’ in noting that ‘the terms used in India reflect the dual character of pilgrimage as both a destination and a journey’. A nice example of this duality is provided by the most common word for a pilgrimage place—‘tirtha’—which refers literally to a ‘ford’ as both a place and a movement. Claveyrolas also indicates that in Hindu traditions the terms related to the pilgrimage may have wider connotations. For instance, ‘mela’ refers to a gathering at a specific location, which can be either religious, such as the Kumbh Mela where every twelve years up to a hundred million devotees gather to bathe in the sacred river, or entirely mundane such as a fair. Moreover, because pilgrimage entails a journey (‘yātrā’), both pilgrims and those travelling on a plane are called ‘yātrī’’.

Hence, in India, China and Japan − as Ian Reader has finely shown in his contribution to the companion volume (2015) − there exists a multiplicity of meanings and nuances to define religious mobility across a variety of cultural and religious contexts. In Muslim tradition the situation is rather different, since the ‘hajj’ or ‘umra’ constitute the only officially approved forms of pilgrimage, thereby obscuring somewhat other forms of religious travelling and visiting. This distinction, strongly supported by rigorist authorities, has also been adopted by most foreign observers. Consequently, in Boivin’s chapter in this volume where he examines western accounts of ‘ziyarat’ (visits to saints tombs) in India and Pakistan from the eighteenth century, he contends that there has been ‘a reluctance until recently to use the word “pilgrimage” with regard to these visits’ (see Boivin, p. 54). Yet, while Katia Boissevain in the following chapter on ‘ziyara’ (saint worship) in North Africa and the Middle East notes the ‘inherent tension’ between ‘hajj’ and saint worship within Islam, she argues that the similarities between the rituals performed during hajj and at saints’ shrines justify describing ‘ziyara’ as a pilgrimage of substitution for ‘hajj’. Drawing on Peter Brown’s classic study (1981/1984), Boissevain claims that the origin of the inherent tension between these two forms of pilgrimage is ‘intrinsic to the ambivalence concerning the relationship between God and human beings in monotheist religions, unmediated and direct or eased along by the intercession of intermediaries.’

Ambivalence is a theme which will appear in other guises later. Here we can conclude that the singular Anglophone term – pilgrimage – clearly operates as a catch-all type term that serves to translate a multiplicity of meanings and nuances in other religious traditions. The fact that this huge variety of forms is rendered in English by only one term may been seen in some respects as a simple coincidence, due to the fact that scholars need a common terminology in order to draw cross-cultural comparisons, that they tend to write in English (because of the asymmetry in the international division of labour) and that there is a lexical poverty of English from this point of view. Yet, what are the implications of this linguistic practice for the use of ‘pilgrimage’ as a universal category? To what extent does its use tacitly disseminate across the globe a concept that comes from western history? Should we identify this process embedded in translation as an instance of hermeneutic circularity? Is the use of a singular English gloss to designate very different forms of religious mobility—forms that often have a profound specificity, even from the lexical point of view, within other cultures—an innocent exercise?

Answering these questions would require an extensive discussion, which is impossible to carry out here, so we will confine ourselves to making some preliminary reflections. The vicissitudes of the term ‘pilgrimage’ seem to be part of what Derrida calls ‘mondialatinization’—a process where Latin became the language of the Church and then of modern science, perpetuating itself through the emergence of English as a global language. Yet, although the term ‘pilgrimage’ reflects the history of Christianity, it does not necessarily mean that it is useless for comparative endeavours; rather, scholars should be more aware of its particular social and intellectual history when they use it in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Pilgrimage Studies in Global Perspective
• 2 Pilgrimage in China
• 3 The Amazement of the Ethnographer: Hindu Pilgrimage beyond Sacred and Profane
• 4 Sufism, Pilgrimage and Saint Worship in South Asia
• 5 Religious Pluralism and Pilgrimage Studies in West (Peninsular) Malaysia
• 6 Studying Religious Mobility: Pilgrimage, Shrine Visits and Religious Tourism from the Maghreb to the Middle East
• 7 Pilgrimage Studies in Oceania: Betwixt and between National Concerns, Academic Trends and Local Ontologies
• 8 South(ern) African Journeys of Reverence
• 9 Transcending Symbols: The Religious Landscape of Pilgrimage Studies in Mexico
• 10 Studies of Catholicism and Pilgrimage in Brazil: Continuities and Ruptures over the Long-term
• 11 Breaking Barriers, Eroding Hegemony: Reflections on the Importance of Multilingual Studies of Pilgrimage beyond the Anglophone World
• Index