Tourism and Religion

Issues and Implications

Richard Butler, Wantanee Suntikul, Richard Butler, Wantanee Suntikul

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781845416478
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book examines both specific issues and more general problems stemming from the interaction of religion, travel and tourism with hospitality and culture, as well as the implications for site management and interpretation. It explores the oldest form of religious tourism – pilgrimage – from its original form to the multiple spiritual and secular variations practised today, along with issues and conflicts arising from the collision of religion, politics and tourism. The volume considers the impact of tourism and tourist numbers on religious features, communities and phenomena, including the deliberate involvement of some religious agencies in tourism. It also addresses the ways in which religious beliefs and philosophies affect the behaviour and perceptions of tourists as well as hosts. The book illustrates how different faiths interact with tourism and the issues of catering for religious tourists of the major faiths, as well as managing the interaction between increasing numbers of secular tourists and pilgrims at religious sites.

1Tourism and Religion: Origins, Interactions and Issues

Wantanee Suntikul and Richard Butler

Introduction

Recent years have seen a rise in the numbers of issues recorded between tourism and religion. These have related to a range of subjects including politics, religious fundamentalism, environmental and social impacts, inter-faith and within-faith disputes and numbers and actions of visitors to religious sites. Many of these issues, disagreements and conflicts have featured in the general media (for example: Beaumont, 2017; Coghlan, 2015; Hider, 2011; Tomlinson, 2015; Trew, 2015), and have not been confined to academic publications. The relationship between tourism and religion has outgrown the original topic of pilgrimage and its links with tourism, religious sites and organisations. Now, the often problematic relationship is far more extensive and complex, reflecting the changes in the scale and nature of tourism, and different beliefs and reactions among the various faiths. It is this nexus or interaction that is the primary focus of this volume, reflecting the fact that in the 21st century the common ground between tourism and religion has moved beyond what has been termed ‘religious tourism’. This term has become confusing and possesses little meaning today, as religious tourism suggests tourism that is motivated by religion or faith, and while this is certainly a still significant segment of tourism, tourism to religious sites now encompasses many more facets of tourism and is subject to more and varied motivations than spiritual obligation or need. Accordingly, this volume is focused on the much wider topic of tourism to what may be viewed as places (locations, sites, artefacts) of religious or faith significance and the implications and consequences of such visitation. In so doing, it moves beyond discussions of the sacred and profane, or of traditional pilgrimage, to throw light on how religious bodies and agencies are dealing with tourism, and how modern travel interacts with what are often ancient sites with generally conservative management. While many of the issues and problems raised are common to tourist visitation to all destinations, religious sites are imbued with additional complications of politics, nationalism, emotion, obligation and belief, as well as traditional roles of welcoming and offering hospitality and sanctuary to travellers.

The increase in overall tourist numbers (UNWTO, 2016) over the past half century has been reflected in the increased numbers of visitors to religious locations, accentuating already existing tensions and difficulties which many such sites have faced in managing their faithful (Sarddar, 2016). These concerns are illustrated in the large number of books and articles that have appeared in the last decade addressing some of these issues. The International Journal for Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, for example, has begun its fifth year of publication and a special issue of the International Journal of Tourism Anthropology (Di Giovine & Garcia-Fuentes, 2016) focused on the links between pilgrimage and heritage, recognising the vastly wider scope of pilgrimage in the present day. A steady number of articles are being published in other established tourism journals (see for example Creighton-Smith et al., 2017) on a variety of aspects of religious tourism, and Leppakari and Griffin (2016) and Raj and Griffin (2017) have recently produced books on management and conflict, respectively, relating to tourism to religious locations. Recent (2016 and 2017) decisions at the international level (UNESCO) on the designation of World Heritage Site status for religious sites in Israel and Palestine reflect the complicated political as well as religious forces that become involved with the tourist implications of such designations. Thus, it is timely to explore both how specific religious faiths have been and are currently involved in tourism, and also how individual countries, destinations and organisations deal with the problems that have emerged from this interaction. The focus in this volume comes from a tourism rather than a religious perspective, which makes it somewhat unique in that regard. Much of the literature that is discussed focuses on religious tourism, particularly pilgrimage, and thus also issues such as beliefs, commitments, obligations and dogmas, rather than on more specific and current problems such as the use of tourism to religious sites for political reasons, the economic benefits and costs of incorporating tourist visitation with religious site management, and issues of marketing tourism to religious sites in troubled destinations, which are discussed in this volume.

As well as the current increased interest in the above topics as expressed in publications, there has also been an increase in the numbers of meetings organised by bodies ranging from the World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), which held its first conference on Tourism and Pilgrimage in 2014 at Santiago de Compostela, Spain, attended almost entirely by people from spiritual organisations to specific academic meetings such as the annual conferences on Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage. In October 2016 in Utrecht, the Netherlands, a conference titled ‘Religious Heritage Tourism: How to increase religious heritage tourism in a changing society’ was jointly organised by UNWTO and the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands. This conference was one of the first to raise questions such as: ‘How can we further develop the social and economic impact of religious heritage tourism?’, ‘How can we further develop religious heritage sites as tourist destinations?’ and ‘From which good practices can we learn to bring religious heritage tourism forwards?’. Much of the emphasis in the above meetings has been on spiritual discussions and what the role of religious organisations should be with respect to tourism, rather than examining the issues from the primary perspective of tourism.

This book is not focused on purely conceptual or spiritual approaches, but examines both general issues and more specific problems stemming from the interactions between religion, travel and tourism with hospitality and culture in general, as well as the implications for site management and interpretation. Thus, while this volume explores aspects of the oldest form of religious tourism, pilgrimage, from its original form to the multiple variations, spiritual and secular, in which it exists today, it goes much further in examining the links between tourism and religion. Tourism to religious sites and features in the modern world is far broader than pilgrimage, and incorporates historical and cultural interests which may be divorced from the spiritual, including aspects of personal homage and faith, religious festivals that attract not only believers but also non-believers, as well as purely hedonistic use of religious features, including sightseeing with no spiritual dimension or motivation at all. This range of motivations of visitors and purposes of visits makes the interaction of tourism and religion extremely volatile and complex. Accordingly, the chapters contained herein address various issues and conflicts arising from the collision of religion, philosophy, psychology, behaviour, geography, culture, politics and tourism, and the impact of tourism and tourists on religious features, communities and phenomena, including those arising from the deliberate involvement of some religious agencies with tourism.

Tourism and Religion

Religion has been a motivation for travel for centuries, if not millennia, and continues to account for a significant, growing and highly developed segment of the tourism market around the world (Digance, 2003; Olsen & Timothy, 2006; Wall & Mathieson, 2006). Improvements in tourism infrastructure and the increasing accessibility of religious sites play roles in spurring this popularity, as well as the strategic marketing and development of these sites as visitor attractions by authorities in the destinations and countries in which they are sited (Vukonic, 2002). Pilgrimage, a journey to a site of special spiritual significance within one’s religious tradition for the purposes of spiritual growth (Glazier, 1992), is one of the oldest forms of religious-motivated tourism, and is still practiced by millions of tourists of various faiths every year. The hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, and the journeys of spiritual visitors to India’s Ganges River are among the best-known and largest of these practices in the modern day.

Not all tourism to sites of religious significance is necessarily inspired, in part or whole, by spiritual motivations, however (Smith, 2009). As many religious sites tend to have heritage structures and artefacts, and host cultural events of different sorts, they also attract tourists who are interested in them for their cultural significance, architectural importance, aesthetic beauty or historic value, independent of their religious value (though religious tourism can be considered as a subset of cultural tourism [Jackson & Hudman, 1995]). Some such sites – for example, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris or the Temple of the Emerald Buddha in Bangkok – are among the iconic sights of those destination cities, included in the itineraries of the most mainstream and generic of mass tourism products. In practice, many sites of religious significance now function as ‘multi-purpose places’ (Shuo et al., 2009; Vukonic, 2006) reflecting the need to cater to the range of tourists that visit them.

Given that there is no clear and agreed-upon distinction between terms such as ‘religious tourism’, ‘faith tourism’, ‘sacred tourism’ and ‘spiritual tourism’ in the literature (Smith, 2009: 74), one aim of this volume is to explore the diverse range of trips encompassing these and other related perspectives and the problems of accommodating the increasing numbers of tourists at religious sites. While religious tourism is defined in terms of having to do with spiritual beliefs rather than hedonistic motivations, or secular or worldly concerns, as a realm of practice in tourism it becomes intertwined with other economies and aspirations. Religious tourism can account for a major part of the economy of countries with important pilgrimage destinations like India (Singh, 2006). Also, because of the hybrid nature of many of the destinations for religious tourism, the development of this niche of tourism can also contribute to the conservation of cultural heritage assets (Raj & Griffin, 2015), while at the same time creating problems of conservation and protection of those sites.

To date, pilgrimage has been the major focus of most of the relevant literature on religion and tourism, and this topic has been addressed by many authors, particularly from anthropology and sociology (e.g. Badone & Roseman, 2004; Eade, 2015; Eade & Sallnow, 1991). Other related texts on this subject include Barber (1993), Maddrell (2014), Reader and Walter (1993) and Turner and Turner (1969, 1978). In terms of a more geographical viewpoint, there are books by Ivakhiv (2001), Margry (2004), Stoddard and Morinis (1997) and Vukonic (1996), and most recently, Timothy and Olsen (2006), the latter focusing specifically on religious journeys, including pilgrimage. Reader (2013), while also writing on pilgrimage, presents a different focus, that of the marketplace, rather than the more general issues resulting from the interaction of religion and tourism. Perhaps the most unique of recent books dealing with aspects of religion and tourism is that of Ross-Bryant (2012) who discusses the relationship between religion and nature in the United States, particularly in the context of national parks. However, a good number of the works on religion and tourism are a decade or more old, so that during the time since their publication great changes have occurred in this challenging relationship. None of the above-cited books takes a comprehensive view of the multiple issues and problems that have emerged in recent years, in particular those caused by the growth in the volume and nature of tourism and the diverging and complex transformations occurring in many of the world’s faiths and their interactions with each other and with other sociocultural factors.

The pressures of tourism on religious communities, sites and features are multiplying exponentially, along with negative reactions in some places to the presence and impacts of tourism and tourists, leading to measures to reduce the touristification of such sites. However, as will be discussed later in this volume, there are also cases in which religious institutions are choosing to become even more involved in tourism and leisure, and actively encouraging visitation by tourists, religiously motivated and otherwise, to their sites. Some churches in the UK, for instance, have introduced new tourism products and activities such as ‘champing’, i.e. camping in churches. Though such initiatives are often undertaken in the interest of finding new revenue channels to fund conservation, they are not without controversy. There has been some debate within various religious establishments as to whether such commercialisation of sacred places is appropriate. There is also often resistance from factions of local communities who believe that such actions denigrate the sacredness of churches or other religious sites. There is clearly a need for a review and to take stock of the overall relationship between tourism and religion and the implications of such relationships.

Structure and Content

This book contains both historical and contemporary perspectives on the relationship between religion and tourism, ensuring that the topic is examined in a way that is historically situated as well as current and applicable in the modern context. It is also broadly international in terms of the examples, issues and perspectives represented. The chapters encompass all major faiths, and the mix of contributing authors is multidisciplinary. This makes for a collection of writings that takes in various paradigms and approaches, and the examples discussed are topical and highly relevant to today’s world. The volume...