On the Road to Being There
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On the Road to Being There
Religion and the Social Order An Official Publication of the Association for the Sociology of Religion
General Editor
William H. Swatos, Jr.
VOLUME 12
On the Road to Being There Studies in Pilgrimage and Tourism in Late Modernity
Edited by
William H. Swatos, Jr.
BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2006
The series Religion and the Social Order was initiated by the Association for the Sociology of Religion in 1991, under the General Editorship of David G. Bromley. In 2004 an agreement between Brill and the ASR renewed the series with the publication of Volume 11, State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies, edited by Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISSN 1061-5210 ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15183 3 ISBN-10: 90 04 15183 4 © Copyright 2006 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands
CONTENTS Preface: Half and Half .............................................................. William H. Swatos, Jr.
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1. For Charles and For England: Pilgrimage Without Tourism .................................................................................. William H. Swatos, Jr.
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2. Journeys to the Goddess: Pilgrimage and Tourism in the New Age .................................................................... Kathryn Rountree
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3. The View from the Edge: Pilgrimage and Transformation ...................................................................... Elizabeth Weiss Ozorak
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4. Labyrinth as Heterotopia: The Pilgrim’s Creation of Space .................................................................................. Lori Beaman
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5. Spiritual Tourism: Brazilian Faith Healing Goes Global .................................................................................... 105 Cristina Rocha 6. Desert Pilgrimage: Liminality, Transformation, and the Other at the Burning Man Festival .................................... 125 Lee Gilmore 7. The Politics of Pilgrimage: The Social Construction of Ground Zero .......................................................................... 159 Jennifer Selby 8. Religious Tourism in Japan: Kyôto’s Gion Festival .......... 187 Michael K. Roemer
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9. Jubilee 2000: A Computer-Assisted Analysis of the Religion of Jubilant People ................................................ 219 Roberto Cipriani 10. The New Pilgrimage—Return to Tradition or Adaptation to Modernity? The Case of Saint Joseph’s Oratory, Montréal .............................................................. 255 Martin Geoffroy and Jean-Guy Vaillancourt 11. Place and Pilgrimage, Real and Imagined ........................ 277 Lutz Kaelber 12. Pilgrims, Seekers and History Buffs: Identity Creation through Religious Tourism ................................................ 297 Sarah Bill Schott Contributors ................................................................................ 329
PREFACE: HALF AND HALF William H. Swatos, Jr. With the words “a tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist” Victor and Edith Turner (1978: 20) set the course of pilgrimage-and-tourism studies for now well over a quarter of a century. And these words run like a mantra through the chapters of this book. How do we differentiate the attitudes and behaviors of the people who populate these two categories? To what extent are the categories themselves accurate reflections of reality—past, present, and future? I met Victor Turner only posthumously, first through collections of his work by his wife, in connection with my own research on Iceland—a place that had also fascinated him. I was immediately taken with his work because it helped me to understand Icelandic religious practice, which hardly conformed to the ‘secularization’ model then so in vogue in Anglo-American sociology of religion. As it were, I went to teach Icelandic theology students secularization theory and found religion; that is, I began to see ‘religion’ not in a preeminently congregational model but in a pilgrimage model (1984). I also lamented the fact that when the Turners were writing this volume’s mantra he and I were teaching only a couple of hours’ drive from each other. Yet in my graduate training, then only recently completed, I had never heard Victor Turner’s name mentioned. Such was the division of academic departments then—and in some places perhaps still is. Having made that one foray into the usefulness of the pilgrimage concept, I did not return to it in any direct way until the late 1990s, when I began to be invited, through contacts at ASR meetings, to conferences at the University of Trent (Trentino) hosted by Luigi Tomasi. Eventually the topic of pilgrimage and tourism came up, and I discovered that Luigi also had an interest in pursuing this more fully. As a kind of return to those roots, my first publication from those conferences was an assessment of Icelandic neo-Paganism (2000), but then we turned to pilgrimage itself. It was also in the context of those conferences that I learned that Lutz Kaelber, whose
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work I had come to admire in Weber studies, also was interested in pilgrimage and tourism studies. From that, though sadly marred by the fact that Luigi suffered a serious stroke, the volume From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism emerged in 2002. But also in the interim between the 1999 Trento conference (where many of the chapters in that book were presented) and its publication, Luigi and his wife and I spent considerable time visiting a number of pilgrimage centers in Trentino. Although a larger work on these sites never emerged, these trips were extremely helpful in sharpening my own understandings of pilgrimage and tourism. More recently I have realized that a number of colleagues in the ASR, and especially younger colleagues, are working in this area. The time seems right to bring these pieces together in a basically empirical collection. Theory seems to have worked well ahead of data. A relatively limited number of pilgrimage sites on the one hand, along with perhaps a greater interest in the modern/postmodern phenomenon of tourism have, in my view, skewed the field away from the religious elements in travel to pilgrimage sites. Sociology of religion has a contribution to make here, in opening up understandings of religion-as-social-action that can move away from constructions of ‘religion’ that at times seem naïvely purist and quite at variance with ‘lived experience.’ I may, of course, be completely wrong. But at the very least, a collection of a dozen empirical studies from around the world can add something to the intellectual larder of pilgrimage and tourism debates. I am also happy to say that about half the studies have at one point or another been supported by some combination of ASR, RRA, or SSSR funding programs at one stage or another of the research process. I have already shown some of the cards that underlie my own chapter. The empirical data aside, my core claim is that there are hundreds, possibly thousands of ‘under the radar’ pilgrimage events that take place across all religions all the time. These might be called ‘local’ pilgrimages, but in an era of globalization, ‘local’ ain’t what it used to be. Iceland was my first introduction to this, I suppose. But then about fifteen years ago, Ted Reeves book on ‘local’ Muslim shrines in Northern Egypt (1990) got me thinking about it again. Then there were the visits with Luigi and Emanuele to about half a dozen sites within less than an hour’s drive of his home in northeast Italy that generally had local clienteles. Only one (Peteralba) had a retinue of bus tourists. Even that of St. Valentine had only
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a relatively modest crowd on Valentine’s day, and we were left to ourselves when we were there. In the late 1980s, too, as the RRA was setting up what is now the Jacquet Award, we assisted in funding research at the shrine of Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville, Illinois (Giuriati et al. 1989), and in the same issue of the “Geographia Religionum” series in which that research was published, Pilgrimage in the United States, Gisbert Rinschede catalogued and analyzed fully 125 Roman Catholic shrines. And to turn the dominant thrust of current pilgrimage/tourism analysis somewhat on its head, I can now remember in the 1950s that the east-central Pennsylvania modelrailroad tourist attraction “Roadside America” included on its grounds a small, but fully furnished, grotto chapel in the Roman Catholic tradition, where tourists could light candles and pray, and Mass was said at least occasionally. (Priests were more plentiful then.) My conviction is that the tourism literature, which is largely an economically-driven literature (even in its critical modes), has ‘overdetermined’ pilgrimage literature to the point that the religious motivation is unduly minimized. I try to use my own experience in Caroline devotions to show the alternative. Kathryn Rountree takes up the interaction between neo-Pagans— especially feminist neo-Pagans, but I think her insights can be generalized—and traditional sites of ‘pagan’ (or pre-Christian) worship, particularly in Malta and Turkey. It presents several interesting dynamics: Virtually none of these sites has seen explicitly pagan worship for over a thousand years. Neo-pagans have in many cases only the most general ideas of what actually occurred at these sites, and in general tend to shy away from behaviors like animal sacrifice, which is in any case usually illegal. In addition, at least some of these sites were transformed from pagan into Christian and/or Muslim sites. Hence the possibilities for pagan rites at them are dramatically limited. Others are now museum sites, where people don’t ‘worship.’ Tourists are the stock-and-trade of museums. Religious people don’t quite fit the mold and vice versa. Hence there is both the formally secular layer as well as the multireligious layer as well as the relative lack of formality or regulation within the neo-Pagan experience. How all these layers, along with the differentiation between those tourists who are respectful of space (or ‘informed’) and those who are not, work together brings into play a whole variety of social processes and religious meaning structures. Elizabeth Ozorak’s experiences of organized Celtic pilgrimages is
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somewhat different from Kathryn’s, not simply because Elizabeth’s fellow pilgrims were primarily Christian, but because the Celtic pilgrimages she studied were not primarily focused on sites (that is buildings, statues, etc.) but on space. These Celtic pilgrimages were ones where the participants ‘walked the walk’ of Celtic saints, with the participants in at least one case actually carrying a relatively large cross along with them. I remember quite clearly that when a number of these chapters were being presented at the 2005 ASR meeting, Elizabeth needed to break in and explain to us this difference. Most of us were thinking in terms of going to a building or a relatively structured event in a defined space, whereas these Celtic pilgrimages were basically movement pilgrimages. Only occasionally did a specific building for pilgrimage crop up, and going to this building was not in itself the point of the pilgrimage. It is perhaps not entirely surprising that someone who sees herself primarily as a psychologist should focus on this type of a pilgrimage experience, inasmuch as the working-through (by walking on) is the primary element of the event. It might, of course, be countered that those who are going on this type of a pilgrimage are going primarily to see ‘scenery,’ but her results suggest otherwise. Lori Beaman’s contribution also focuses on walking, but in a much more circumscribed way: the labyrinth, an ancient device that made an amazing come-back in the last decade of the twentieth century. Not only were ancient labyrinths, like the one at Chartres, rediscovered and used at least somewhat in concert with their original purposes, but labyrinths were designed and built from coast to coast, at least in North America. Portable labyrinths were created that would be set up at events, like the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, where people could, as it were, ‘walk away’ from the meeting without ever leaving. Is this pilgrimage? Does it add the ‘discipline’ of walking to an experience of self-analysis? Lori uses Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia” as a way of simultaneously describing and analyzing the labyrinth experience and why it may be enjoying such a revival at this time. Cristina Rocha has the advantage of being fluent in both English and Portuguese. She has already displayed this talent in her work on Zen Buddhism in Brazil. In here chapter here, however, she is looking at a Brazilian faith healer and examining how globalization has worked to create a ‘world’ of knowledge about someone who is still unknown among many persons in Brazil. People come to John
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of God ( João de Deus) from Australia, Germany, the United States— indeed, most of the countries of the industrialized West—and he apparently ‘heals’ them by drawing on various techniques born in the spiritist (or spiritualist or psychic) tradition, mixed with a dose of Catholicism inasmuch as his center is named for St. Ignatius Loyola. In this experience a fascinating contrast occurs: Brazil is a country of extreme poverty, with relatively low life expectancy and where relatively simply cured ailments go untreated. At the same time, word of this healer has spread through global channels such that, along with tourist opportunities, persons from outside the country spend significant amounts of money to see this unorthodox healer. These ‘pilgrims’ have changed dramatically the character of the community in which he maintains his clinic, yet the fundamental social problems remain a part of the larger society. This juxtaposition of what seems to be a kind of tourist-pilgrim center and the host society raises questions about how the ‘religious’ dynamic does and does not operate as a social force and the place of clientelistic religiosity in pilgrimage studies. Lee Gilmore’s contribution looks at something that is on the one hand almost the obverse of Cristina’s case. The Burning Man Festival is a pilgrimage event that is constructed by the participants in effect ‘out of nothing.’ People come to the Black Rock desert and create a festival of a week’s duration that is then completely disassembled to the point of leaving no trace that it ever happened. Were you or I to go to the Black Rock desert more than a few weeks after or before this festival we would see ‘nothing.’ That is, the event, the ‘pilgrims,’ and the pilgrimage are all of a piece. In some ways this has affinities with Elizabeth Ozorak’s Celtic pilgrimages in that people are not going to see some ‘thing,’ but whereas Elizabeth’s pilgrims walk, Lee’s settle in. Being there is the pilgrimage—a pilgrimage that some people have now made for twenty years, while others will make only once. Some will stay in touch through the year, especially thanks to the Internet, while others will embrace only the experience itself. It is not formally religious, yet it has values and beliefs. Perhaps it could be said to be a kind of ‘secular faith’—a covenant that is annually renewed. I am reminded of the ancient annual Icelandic Althing, when the representatives of all the people of the country would come to Thingvellur to renew the law, which was in itself a secular event underlain by a taken-for-granted understanding of the forces of the universe.
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If the Burning Man Festival is a constructed pilgrimage site and event, then Jennifer Selby takes us to the opposite: Ground Zero in New York City. Ground Zero is close enough to each of us reading this book that we can all remember the day it was created. That does not need to be explained. What is sociologically interesting is how people have reacted to the event in terms of place, how the site has been ‘sacralized,’ and the routinization of that sacralization in concert with the de-sacralizing processes that are occurring as much of the space is returned to relatively normal commercial use. The United States has never experienced an event like Ground Zero. People can point to Pearl Harbor, but in that case the primary target was military. American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though devastating in magnitude, were likewise war-time events. Even the Holocaust has a context of oppression. On 9/11, by contrast, ordinary people went to work on an ordinary day and got blown to bits. Jennifer suggests that making sense out of this means a renewal of American civil religion. There is no other meaning context that can possibly begin to cope at a societal level with the hows and whys of what happened that day. In this context, a sacred site with sacred symbols that are also at the same time personal symbols has developed, and around it a tourist industry at varying cultural levels has emerged. It will be interesting to ‘revisit’ both the site and her analysis in a decade. Michael Roemer takes us in a very different direction in his study of the Gion Festival in Kyôto, Japan. He also provides sufficient photographs so that we can get some idea of the magnitude of the events involved. His main interest, however, is appropriately theoretical: to explore the question of whether and how one may speak about Japanese participation (including participation as an attendee) in this festival as ‘religious.’ Mike has himself been an active participant in the festival in the past. In the summer of 2005 he returned specifically to conduct on-the-spot interviews among the attendees to raise questions of religion. His results are presented in this study. They are complex. On the one hand, as is relatively well known, the Japanese approach religion quite differently from persons of European origin. On the other hand, however, Mike does find a distinctly religious component within at least a significant number of those whom he interviewed. His data need to be read carefully, but they suggest that the dismissal of the Japanese as ‘not religious’ (even by the Japanese themselves) is too easy. There is a Japanese reli-
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giosity. It is not a European religiosity, but it continues to operate and in part at least explains continued large attendance and participation by the Japanese in festivals such as Gion. It is always a pleasure to collaborate in a project with a sociologist at once as distinguished and cooperative as Roberto Cipriani. I am grateful that he was able to take the time to share some original data with us from a massive research project on the 2000 Jubilee, which was undertaken by a collaborative team of Italian sociologists. In this chapter, Roberto presents the results of an innovative qualitative project that attempted to assess the interpretations of pilgrims to the Jubilee from around the world. Aided by a computer-based analytic protocol, a set of 96 interviews generated according to criteria of language-group, gender, age, country/continent of residence (except for Japanese and Poles, which were restricted to a single locale), and type of residence while in Rome. These interviews provide fascinating accounts of how the pilgrims themselves conceived not only the general Jubilee experience but also things like indulgences, penance and reconciliation, and prayer. The team finds a combination of positive affect especially for the Pope, but also for the Church as a whole and for the opportunity to be in Rome, while at the same time considerable lack of understanding and/or acceptance of relatively basic Catholic teaching on the sacraments and on the Jubilee as a process of repentance and reconciliation. A methodological appendix provides details of the data-collection and evaluation processes. In Chapter 10, Martin Geoffroy and Jean-Guy Vaillancourt explore both historically and through contemporary data the Oratory of Saint Joseph in Montréal, a leading ‘tourist’ site in that city and a counterpoint to most contemporary Roman Catholic ‘pilgrimage’ centers, because it does not focus on Marian apparitions. One of the most interesting aspects of virtually all the major contemporary pilgrimage sites associated with Catholicism is that they are associated with Marian apparitions that occurred in either the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. With the exceptions perhaps of Rome and Jerusalem, few historical Roman Catholic centers of pilgrimage draw significant pilgrims today. (St. James of Compostella being the most likely exception.) What makes the Oratory interesting in the first instance, then, is that it is not Marian, but rather directed toward St. Joseph as its patron. Nevertheless, in many respects it is not its original patron that is of greatest interest but the effect of its founder, Brother
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André—a lay brother through whose agency oil placed before a statue of St. Joseph acquired healing powers. Geoffroy and Vaillancourt’s chapter suggests several things from this: first, the site became associated with healing, rather than with ‘messages’—or quasi-apocalyptic warnings from the ‘other side.’ As a result of this, the moral freight carried both most of the Marian sites—condemnations of sexual behaviors deviant from the strictest Roman Catholic teachings along with woes associated with political systems of the left—are peripheral to the site. As a result of this, in turn, they argue that the site is particularly well poised to ‘minister’ in the broad sense to the spiritual sensibilities of late modernity. While not formally an ‘ecumenical’ site, the Oratory is nevertheless sufficiently free of ecclesiostructural rigidities to minister widely in a variety of styles to a variety of faith traditions, even outside of Christianity. Geoffroy has told me in conversation, for example, that he has interviewed Hindus who have ascended the steps of the site on their knees with no Christian intention whatsoever, but because they are in a ‘holy place.’ And by being a site of only a little over a hundred years’ duration, the Oratory is not saddled with extensive traditions that might inhibit encouraging this multi-faith appreciation of its sanctity (cf. Frey 1998: 160 for an instance of the reverse at Compostella). Lutz Kaelber’s chapter takes a different turn by looking at the intersection between real and virtual pilgrimages, including the somewhat unsettling topic of ‘dark’ pilgrimage (or tourism). Currently the use of the word ‘virtual’ is most likely to be connected with the Internet and related media, but in fact, virtual pilgrimages have a long history connected to the major faith traditions. Lutz points particularly to the Sionpilger of the late-fifteenth-century friar Felix Schmidt (perhaps better known under the Latinized Felix Fabri). The Sionpilger was, in a sense, a ‘virtual pilgrimage’ book to the Holy Land written primarily for nuns, who were not allowed to make a ‘real’ pilgrimage. It is in some ways the predecessor of today’s ‘coffee table’ picture books that take readers to ‘see’ museums, churches, battlefields, and so on. A kind of virtual pilgrimage also has existed for Christians in the devotion known as Stations of the Cross, wherein the Via Dolorosa is ‘walked’ perhaps inside a church, perhaps in an outdoor setting. While the ‘station’ may be marked by no more than a simple cross, in many cases there is at least a pictorial representation of the event being observed, and some full-size-model stations do exist. Here
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one can walk the ‘route’ of Christ to the Cross. And to return to Ted Reeves’s book: A Muslim who can’t afford to go to Mecca can circumambulate the tomb of a local saint with good intent. Nor should we forget Lori’s labyrinths. Computer simulations, of course, can take virtual pilgrimage to new heights—and, as Lutz points out— new depths. On the positive side, as some of the other chapters in the book have indicated, one can use the Web as an informative tool to plan religious travel just as much as any other kind. My own current research on the Chapel of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal in Paris, for example, was greatly facilitated by Web resources, including a virtual tour of the site. On the other hand, Lutz points out that Web ‘tours’ can show people things that real-life tours cannot. And he raises questions, for example with respect to the Holocaust, of the moral dimension to virtual site re-creation. (Lutz was also kind enough to read over and comment on virtually all the chapters in the book, and I wish to express my gratitude to him for this formally here. The book is better for it.) The final chapter, by Sarah Bill Shott, brings us back to the United States and introduces two upper New York State religious tourist destinations related to religious traditions of American foundation: the Miller homestead complex of the Seventh-day Adventists and the Hill Cumorah Pageant site of the Latter-day Saints (Mormons). In her analysis she attempts to tease out the various reasons people come to these sites—in each case not only the ‘observers’ but also the ‘creators’ of the site experience. While the casual observer might simply think of these people as ‘staff,’ in both cases the staffs are almost entirely adherents of the tradition represented by the site. Thus there is an additional function to the site, inasmuch as the site serves to reinforce the convictions of the staff. Unlike the staff described by John Eade in relation to Lourdes (1992), however, the staffs at these facilities have much more of an outreach function. Instead of seeing themselves principally as ‘protectors’ of the site, these staffs also see themselves as communicators of new faith traditions. In this respect, being on the staff of one or another site creates something of at least an ‘internal’ pilgrimage experience for the staff member. Also worth considering in Sarah’s study, in light of Lutz’s chapter, is the ‘virtual’ character of the Hill Cumorah Pageant, which recreates a particular ‘historical’ account within the Book of Mormon, wherein Jesus is said to have visited the Western Hemisphere and
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brought the gospel to Native Americans (who in the play are, of course, non-Native Americans). And so there you have it. To the extent that we have brought new data to bear on the pilgrim/tourist question, we have already been half-way successful. If we stimulate you additionally to think further about the roles of religion in travel and travel in religion to the point that you look around yourself and see a way to research these questions, we will have achieved the other half of our task. References Eade, John. 1992. “Pilgrimage and Tourism at Lourdes, France.” Annals of Tourism Research 19: 18–32. Frey, Nancy Louise. 1998. Pilgrim Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press. Giuriati, Paolo, Phyllis M.G. Myers, and Martin E. Donach. 1990. “Pilgrims to ‘Our Lady of the Snows’ Belleville, Illinois in the Marian Year: 1987–1988.” Pp. 149–192 in Pilgrimage in the United States, edited by G. Rinschede and S.M. Bhardwaj. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. Reeves, Edward B. 1990. The Hidden Government. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Rinschede, Gisbert. 1990. “Catholic Pilgrimage Places in the United States.” Pp. 63–135 in Pilgrimage in the United States, edited by G. Rinschede and S.M. Bhardwaj. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. Swatos, William H., Jr. 1984. “The Relevance of Religion: Iceland and Secularization Theory.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 23: 32–43. Swatos, William H., Jr. and Loftur Reimar Gissurarson. 1999. “Pagus et urbanus in Iceland: Conjunctions and Disjunctions in Neo-pagan Religion,” Pp. 157–73 in Alternative Religions among European Youth, edited by Luigi Tomasi. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Swatos, William H., Jr. and Luigi Tomasi (eds.). 2002. From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism. Westport, CT: Praeger. Turner, Victor and Edith B. Turner. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
CHAPTER ONE
FOR CHARLES AND FOR ENGLAND: PILGRIMAGE WITHOUT TOURISM William H. Swatos, Jr. Holy Charles. Flower of Kings. Anointed of the Lord. Pillar of the Church. Martyr for the Catholic Faith: pray for our country, intercede for the Church, succour us thy servants.1
This quote will, I hope, dispel any thoughts that this chapter is about the present Prince of Wales. The connection is purely nominal, though it creates as convenient a point of departure as might be, since Charles, Prince of Wales, is most certainly a tourist attraction in Great Britain—and probably the world—while Charles I, King and Martyr, today attracts but a faithful few. But it is Charles Stuart, not Charles Windsor, who bears today the title “Blessed Charles, King and Martyr,” and whose ‘birthday into heaven,’ 30 January, is particularly marked by liturgical observances by his most faithful devotees. And yet, in the unique way in which the British are able to absorb past and present into a fictive whole, I could not but note, in an event unplanned when this chapter was conceived, that the two Charles brought history together once more as Windsor crossed the tomb of both Henry Tudor and Charles I Stuart to walk Camilla to the altar of St. George’s Windsor for their nuptial blessing. I felt strangely moved at the moment I saw the same bishop who greets the devotees of Charles I with kindness and good will extend the like qualities to Charles and Camilla. The chapel and personnel were not far away places with strange sounding names, but a site and a retinue with which I was entirely familiar and comfortable. Yet soon I began to wonder how much this media event would serve to turn a pilgrimage site into a tourist venue—and what that might mean.2 1
From a Society of King Charles the Martyr prayer card, Remember. People also come to Windsor Castle as a tourist venue, but that traffic is kept separate from those who come to worship at Evensong and other services. Tourists may certainly stay for religious observances, but hardly any do. Westminster Abbey similarly works to separate these different clienteles, St. Paul’s Cathedral somewhat less so (see Swatos 2002). 2
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Through most of my previously published research I have avoided writing from things that affect me immediately. Seventeenth-century England, eighteenth-century America, and Icelandic spiritualism are all removed from the world of my own experience. This report arises, by contrast, from a personal involvement in Caroline devotion stretching over thirty years, with intense observations since 1999 (the 350th anniversary of the death of Charles I). I do so, however, not to ‘tell my story,’ which I am actually reluctant to do, but because my sociological work in pilgrimage and tourism studies refracted in light of my own experiences in this context leads me to raise questions about pilgrimage-and-tourism as an academic industry. In particular, a limited number of highly visible pilgrimage sites have skewed pilgrimage studies such that the religious dynamic of pilgrimage activities is obscured by the interest in tourism, even when that interest is critical in nature; that is, even those who have an antitouristic bias emphasize tourism as an overdetermining component of pilgrimage studies. Though certainly an important component of the lifestyle of late modernity that can possibly overwhelm religious action at a specific devotional site, tourism should not obscure the reality of pilgrimage as an ongoing religious activity, quite independent of tourism. My own observations, not only but especially, of the events surrounding the annual commemorations of Charles I’s martyrdom, lead me to think that around the world and across religious traditions there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of pilgrimage events and sites primarily, though never solely, occasioned by religious devotion. That these are events are “primarily, though never solely” occasioned by religious devotion, however, is only obliquely related to the phenomenon dubbed ‘tourism.’ More to the point is that human beings almost never act with absolutely single motivation. In Max Weber’s words: In the great majority of cases actual action goes on in a state of inarticulate half-consciousness or actual unconsciousness of its subjective meaning. The actor is more likely to ‘be aware’ of it in a vague sense than he is to ‘know’ what he is doing or be explicitly self-conscious about it. . . . The ideal type of meaningful action where the meaning is fully conscious and explicit is a marginal case (1968: 21–22).
People do pilgrimage, as the rest of life, with a bundle of mixed motivations. What is important is not a deconstruction of their psyches but an appreciation of the fact that they think they are doing
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pilgrimage, hence intend to be doing pilgrimage, and this has value for them. Absent demonstrable prevarication, stated intention must be given its due in the analysis of social action. ‘Latent functions,’ as important as they are in sociological analysis, must not so overwhelm manifest functions as to obliterate them. The purpose of this chapter is to describe an interrelated series of pilgrimage activities whose manifest functions remain primary to the event. I will focus particularly on the activities of three Caroline devotional societies in annual religious observance of the anniversary of 30 January. While there is no doubt that there are nationalistic or ethnic aspects to these observances—it is very unlikely, for example, that Charles’s death would be observed in Norway or Hungary, let alone Japan—and on an international scale, religious observance of this event is almost entirely restricted to those who are ecclesiastically affiliated with the Anglican communion of Christian churches. My point, however, is that these activities remain essentially religious in nature and that the primary clientele of the services come preeminently out of religious sensibilities, albeit that one of these sensibilities is that a particular relationship of religion and politics is most appropriate to a Christian nation. That these observances are largely marginal to tourist calendars underscores my conclusion that the nature of ‘pilgrimage’ research in the late twentieth century was to a great extent ‘overdetermined’ by the appearance of ‘tourism’ as a popular leisure activity dramatically enhanced by the world-opening possibilities of high-speed transport and communication, coupled with shifts in the primary work styles of a large proportion of the citizenry in those nations that appear at the forefront of high-technology multinational capitalism. The events and liturgies of the Caroline devotional societies serve as an example of a host of pilgrimage events across religious traditions that occur beyond the tourist gaze and continue to witness to pilgrimages as religiously meaningful to their participants. Events and Societies Charles I, King of England and Scotland, was juridically murdered 30 January 1649 (modern dating: 1648 old style), by the Parliament of Oliver Cromwell after revolutionary forces had succeeded in defeating those loyal to the monarchy. Charles was deeply religious but
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politically clumsy, and he came, in part, to accept his martyrdom as the result of those times when he failed to hold to fast to his religio-moral principles in compromise efforts to achieve peace—in particular, his signature on the death warrant of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, in effect his prime minister.3 For better or worse politically, Cromwell chose to have Charles tried and publicly beheaded—a decision he had made well in advance of the actual proceedings. The event itself took place on a scaffold built outside the Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace—the only significant portion of the palace that remains today.4 Painted on the ceiling of its Great Room is Rubens’s “Apotheosis of James I,” Charles’s father ascending into heaven, a work Charles had commissioned. He walked under that scene as he went to his own death. Prior to his death, Charles, who had already taken a hand to matters liturgical and devotional while king, composed at least part of a work known as the Eiliké Basilikon, a devotional manual that would become widely circulated by his partisans almost immediately in the wake of his death. Miracles also quickly became associated with, for example, cloths dipped in his blood following his execution. At the time of the Restoration (1660), the date of Charles’s death was added to the Church of England liturgical calendar as a “red letter” observance, shortly thereafter tied to a rite of national fasting and repentance, but also as a day to celebrate the monarchy as an essential feature of British life. During the eighteenth century the day gradually became an opportunity to celebrate the Tory party— or at least Tory principles—and thus came to have a partisan character. The specific liturgies for 30 January were ultimately removed from the Book of Common Prayer by Order in Council, without 3 Like Henry VIII, Charles was a second son, and not initially anticipated to be king, hence had comparably more religious and less political training. 4 Other remaining portions include Henry VIII’s wine cellar and Treasury Green, both off Downing Street, and Queen Mary’s Steps (Mary II) that once led to the Thames. The Downing Street areas remained available to at least occasional public visitation until security concerns in the early 1970s led to restrictions on access to that area. Nevertheless, if one looks from the Banqueting House today toward Downing Street and the Thames, on the one hand, and to Charles’s statue at the foot of Trafalgar Square (Charing Cross), on the other, it is hard not to be overwhelmed by the amount of area that Whitehall Palace occupied, an expanse of buildings and grounds that covered an area approximately half a mile in length, of which the street named Whitehall, running from Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square, remains the most obvious marker. The palace was destroyed by an accidental fire in 1698. A reconstructed model is on display at the Museum of London.
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either ecclesiastical or parliamentary consent, during the reign of Queen Victoria.5 Observance was by no means entirely eliminated, however, and with the rise of the Tractarian movement, emphasizing the Catholicity of the Church of England, the day shifted from one of national mourning to a saint’s feast. An 1869 book, for example, Austin’s Devotions, marks 30 January with the description of Charles as “A true defender of the Faith, a Martyr in the cause of England’s Catholicity” (White King 1999: 6). By the early twentieth century, formal efforts within the Church of England began toward restoration, and a late-1950s report of a committee concluded that Charles had “been properly canonized in a manner approved by the Church, the State, and popular feeling”—hence at that date the only ‘saint’ to have been included in the calendar of the Church of England since the Reformation. The early Prayer Book office explicitly referred to Charles as “our martyred Sovereign” and identified him with the saints. Brian Duppa, Restoration bishop successively of Salisbury and Winchester, who composed the original public offices, in his 1660 Private Forms of Prayer referred to Charles as a “blessed Saint and Martyr” and asked that “we may be made worthy to receive benefit by his prayers, which he, in communion with the Church Catholic, offers up,” thus clearly affirming the traditional teaching of the intercession of the saints as applicable in the case of Charles.6 In addition, four churches in the seventeenth century, after the Restoration, were specifically dedicated to Charles as patron saint. The day was formally reinstated in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer in 1980. It has also been added to the calendars of some other branches of the Anglican Communion though not the United States. Instrumental in enabling this renewed recognition were various devotional societies which formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and whose activities continue into the present: the Society of King Charles the Martyr, formed in 1894; the Royal 5 Further complicated by the fact that while the order of 1859 specifically referred to the services for the day being removed from the Book of Common Prayer, the Queen’s Printers also considered the authority of the Act to extend to the date being removed from the calendar as well, and this was not then effectively challenged. 6 Cf. Liturgical Manual: Society of King Charles the Martyr. It is hence erroneous to claim that at the time these offices were introduced the application of such words as ‘saint’ and ‘saintliness’ with respect to Charles referred merely to his personal holiness or his devotion during his earthly life. Duppa clearly understood Charles in 1660 to be a heavenly intercessor.
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Martyr Church Union, formed in 1906; and the Royal Stuart Society, formed in 1926.7 All three conduct formal corporate observances of Charles’s martyrdom on 30 January in and about the city of Westminster, as do some clergy members in their own congregations, as well as in congregations specifically dedicated to St. Charles, as for example, King Charles the Martyr, Potters Bar, a congregation which the RMCU organizationally, as well as members of the SKCM individually, had a role in founding and whose vicar currently serves as the RMCU chaplain in England.8 Other formal observances are held by each society more particular to its own self-conception, the SKCM, however, focusing most directly on the life-cycle events of the Royal Martyr himself, most notably his birth and the restoration of the monarchy. The SKCM arises most directly out of Tractarianism, but also with specific concern for “intercessory prayer for the defence of the Church of England against the attacks of her enemies,” which largely referred to those among the Nonconformist (Protestant) churches who at that time were agitating for the disestablishment of the Church of England and thereby also invading the endowments that largely allowed the establishment to function. Today a dual emphasis on both traditional liturgy and ecumenical openness to Roman Catholicism tend more to mark the society’s events.9 Msgr Ronald Knox is per7 Unless otherwise noted, details about the SKCM are drawn from White King (1999); information about the RMCU is drawn from its Annuals from 1955 to the present. I am grateful to Dr. Richard Palmer of Lambeth Palace Library for providing access to these. (In the near future this collection will be extended back to 1932.) 8 This suburban London congregation was founded in 1939, with the RMCU paying 60 percent of the costs, the Diocese of London the remainder. The church was dedicated in 1940, but the intervening years of World War II delayed completion of the project well into the 1950s. (The location of the congregation is also referred to in some documents as South Mimms or South Mymms, since the congregation grew out of a parish in that locale.) Across the years, RMCU has tended to act corporately in undertaking projects outside its immediate liturgical activities, whereas the SKCM has more often sought to encourage members to make individual contributions, the leadership setting a personal, rather than corporate, example. 9 One of the great ‘sins’ the puritans laid upon Charles was the fact that Queen Henrietta Maria remained a Roman Catholic throughout their marriage; hence there were Roman Catholic priests constantly in the royal household. The ‘whore of Babylon’ metaphor was widely and wildly applied. After the Restoration Charles II embraced Roman Catholicism on his deathbed, and James II (his brother and successor) refused to conform to the Church of England, ultimately leaving the country, hence creating the succession crisis that resulted in the Glorious Revolution that brought William of Orange and Mary (daughter of James II) to the throne.
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haps the most well-known SKCM member to have moved into the Roman Catholic priesthood from Anglicanism, but both flirtation and ‘going over’ have characterized its history to some extent.10 In particular, the Foundress-President of the Society, Ermengarda GrevilleNugent, was received into the Roman Church and severed her connections with the Society in the early 1930s.11 The RMCU, though having virtually identical purposes to the SKCM, began in part in reaction to what some perceived as the ‘Catholic excesses’ of the SKCM, but also has included a special emphasis on the Scottish aspect of the United Kingdom, with an annual RMCU observance of Charles’s martyrdom not only in London but also, since at least 1962, in St. Mary’s (Episcopal) Cathedral, Edinburgh. The founder was Captain Henry Stuart Wheatly-Crowe, then aged 23, but he became estranged from the Union in the 1930s, although the RMCU continued to pay him a One strain of Stuart partisanship today thus considers working for harmonious relationships between the Church of England and Roman Catholicism to be a specific ‘vocation’ within the Caroline movement. 10 A sermon on the sainthood of King Charles by Knox in 1914 (prior to his submission to the Roman Chuch), “The Thirtieth of January,” was perhaps his greatest contribution to the cause of Charles’s sanctity, not only for what it said in itself, but the more so, since it was subsequently republished with the imprimatur and nihil obstat (respectively a statement of approval of the work and statement that it contains no doctrinal error) of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Westminster. Hence the saintliness of Charles was formally acknowledged by the English Roman Catholic hierarchy (see Knox 1963: 467–72). 11 In addition, Hubert Addeley, Lord Norton, was President of the SCKM for about twenty years from the 1940s to 1960s. Although he largely bore the title in name only and seldom attended meetings, the association of his name with the SKCM clearly put it in the ambit of the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England. Lord Norton was also simultaneously President of the Church Union (not the RMCU) and a Guardian of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, where a separate devotional shrine to St. Charles was also maintained under the auspices of Fr. Hope-Patten, the whole of which respresented a very explicitly defined position within the British Church at that time (on Walsingham, see Coleman 2004). Issues such as the devotional service of Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, which was entirely outside the British Book of Common Prayer tradition, as a part of SKCM activities would rise throughout the early years of difference between the groups. Similarly when the issue of the ordination of women was raised in the Church of England, the SKCM firmly aligned itself with the opposition as a part of the ‘Catholic Societies Council’ in 1989: “We venerate King Charles as a Catholic Martyr—no-one imagines ‘Catholic’ to include priestesses” (White King 1999: 74). Beginning in 2002 the traditionalist Roman Catholic priest Fr. Jean-Marie CharlesRoux was listed on the cover of Church and King as one of the “Patrons” of the SKCM. He also wrote a devotional pamphlet on The Sanctity of King Charles I, which has been reprinted and is sold by the SKCM, and is a Vice President of the Royal Stuart Society.
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small pension almost to the time of his death in 1967. The Scottish rite of 1637—introduced into Scotland by Charles and his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, but popularly rejected—is used at RMCU liturgical observances, regardless of their location.12 The Earl of Strathmore, father of Elizabeth the Queen Mother, was also among RMCU’s founders, and letters of good wishes from her were often read at annual meetings and published in the Union’s annual. The RMCU is particularly attentive to the disabilities placed upon Episcopalians in Scotland, including the martyrdom of clergy who continued to use the Book of Common Prayer, from the Commonwealth period through the eighteenth century.13 The Royal Stuart Society, in whose founding in 1926 Captain Wheatly-Crowe was also a principal, observes St. Charles’s Day principally by a brief outdoor ceremony at Charles’s statue at the south end of Trafalgar Square (Charing Cross, the north end of the street named Whitehall) and later by a wreath-laying at Charles’s tomb during Evensong at St. George’s Windsor.14 The Trafalgar Square event draws the most tourists, in part simply because its location already is a central venue in London, in part because a bagpiper and possibly a bugler or two clearly draw attention to the fact that something is happening. The RSS also sponsors lectureships and honors other members of the Stuart line, most notably Mary Queen of Scots, mother of James I and grandmother of Charles I, cousin
12 This Prayer Book is not to be confused with ‘Scottish rite’ Freemasonry. The 1637 rite is slightly less strictly followed, however, in the Scottish observance of the Feast—particularly in the substitution of Jesus’s ‘Summary of the Law’ for the reading of the entirety of the Ten Commandments, which was always required in the seventeenth-century Eucharistic rites. Both the SKCM and RMCU London celebrations currently include the full Decalogue. 13 The Scottish Commissioners specifically protested against Cromwell’s attempt to ‘try’ Charles in 1649. As late as 1746 a priest was executed in Scotland for use of the Prayer Book liturgy, and another priest banned on pain of death in 1756. Samuel Seabury, the first bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, received his Episcopal orders through the Scottish (‘nonjuring’) succession, though penal laws were still in place (see Swatos 1979; Angus 2005). 14 Charles is interred in a simple slab tomb in the central aisle, approximately midway in the choir, slightly to the right of center. Henry VIII is interred in the same tomb. The parents of the present Queen are also interred in the chapel, but not in this tomb. The ceremony usually consists of the laying of a wreath and a prayer by the chapel’s officiant for Evensong (i.e., not the RSS chaplain, who may assist with the laying of the wreath, but who takes no other liturgical role in the service and does not vest or process). Windsor lies approximately half an hour to the west of London, via public transportation.
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to (and martyr of ) Elizabeth I. A wreath is laid at Mary’s tomb in Westminster Abbey on the anniversary of her execution. Although the chaplain of the RSS is an Anglican priest, the Society particularly reaches out to Roman Catholics, including a Mass following the wreath-laying for Queen Mary.15 The RSS does not conduct a Eucharistic liturgy of its own at the Caroline events, wherein Roman Catholics would be barred by their own obedience from full participation, but its Chaplain was normally deacon of the SKCM Mass and has preached at both SKCM and RMCU observances.16 In some years, all three societies join together in a single liturgical celebration, as they did at the 350th anniversary of Charles’s martyrdom in 1999, the RMCU already having had a first joint celebration with the SKCM earlier in the decade. The SKCM annual Mass of the martyrdom, preceded by a brief memorial service and wreath hanging (a separate ceremony from, but following immediately upon, the wreath-laying by the RSS at the statue in Trafalgar Square), is normally conducted on the 30th itself (unless a Sunday takes precedence), while the RMCU liturgy normally occurs on the Saturday closest to the 30th, a decision first occasioned for the RMCU by fact that a part of its activities was a procession from the church of St. Martin in the Fields across Trafalgar Square to Charles’s statue at the head of Whitehall, which could legally take place only when Parliament was not in session (hence, Saturday). Although this procession has ended, the custom has been kept, in part in recognition of the fact that some persons who might want to attend the SKCM liturgy, may be prevented from doing so by
15 The RSS, especially through its lecture series, has a somewhat more political bent, including in its remit “the true history of the Stuart kings, . . . right principles of monarchy,” and supporting “all existing rightful Monarchy as against the disintegrating influences of republicanism in all its forms.” It also honors White Rose Day, June 10, the birthday of King James III/VIII (the ‘Old Pretender’). WheatlyCrowe was in his own words a “staunch Royalist,” and in his day considered Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria his true lawful sovereign. Wheatly-Crowe’s announcement in 1921 that he was “asked . . . to act provisionally as ‘Lord Regent’,” in effect a “standin for ‘King Rupert’” (who himself tried to discourage such devotion), would have the effect of alienating him from many of his supporters and forcing his resignation from the RMCU. He then became the Governor General of the RSS for 30 years (Innes-Smith 2006: 22–23). The current Governor General is the Duke of St. Albans, descended from Charles II through Nell Gwyn, hence a direct descendent of Charles I, but without legitimate claim to the throne. 16 The chaplain in question died in 2005, and future arrangements remain in flux as this writing.
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Photo 1.1. A lone piper sounds a dirge to begin the Royal Stuart Society’s service at King Charles’s statue at the head of Whitehall. Photo: William H. Swatos, Jr.
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Photo 1.2. A member of the crowd approaches the statue’s base to read the memorial cards attached to the wreaths. Photo: William H. Swatos, Jr.
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weekday commitments and thus are served by this alternative. The SKCM wreath-hanging at the Banqueting House is significant inasmuch as it is done immediately below a bust of Charles, placed by the Society in 1950, which is located in a niche at the spot where a hole was made for Charles to walk through the exterior annex wall of the Banqueting House to the scaffold.17 This bust is one of two placed under SKCM auspices at the tercentenary of Charles’s martyrdom. The other appears above the northeast door of St. Margaret’s Church (on the grounds of Westminster Abbey), facing the statue of Cromwell that is placed across the street before Westminster Hall among the buildings of Parliament. While the placement of these two statues is certainly subject to multiple ‘readings,’ it offsets in some measure the ‘offence’ of the Cromwell statue to Caroline partisans. The SKCM also has a branch of significant size in the United States (and smaller branches in other parts of the world). For over twenty years, the American branch has had a ‘national’ Mass of its own, usually on the Saturday closest to the 30th. The American branch also produces a semi-annual publication of some size and high quality stock, SKCM News, running 20–36 pages, including sermons, book reviews, articles, photographs, illustrations, and news items. The mother organization offers a simpler semi-annual newsletter, Church and King, which for many years was simply a bi-fold single sheet (i.e., four pages in length), but since the mid-1990s has run at double or triple that length.18 The parent and American organizations also each have Websties (www.skcm.org and www.skcm-usa.org). The RMCU publishes an illustrated Annual, of 14–20 pages, usually containing one or two sermons, a substantive article, plus shorter notes, and the association’s annual reports.
17 Another permanent marker on Whitehall of Charles’s martyrdom is to be found on the clock of the Horseguards Building facing the Banqueting House, where the gold-lettered II (i.e., two o’clock, the hour of Charles’s martyrdom) is painted on a square of black. The Changing of the Guard ceremony there, along with the permanently posted Queen’s Life Guard, though not nearly as much of a draw as that at Buckingham Palace, is the event that makes this locale most likely to appear on tourist itineraries. Depending on the day of the week on which 30 January falls, tourists there may have an opportunity also to witness the outdoor portion of the SKCM observance. 18 The number of issues of each of these publications has varied from two to four across the years, sometimes as a result of finances, other times for lack of
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The SKCM and RMCU are in so many ways similar that an outsider might wonder about their separate existences. Aside from personalities in their leadership across time, the historical differences between the two may be summarized along these lines: The SKCM is a religious or devotional society preeminently centered on the holiness of Charles I. Its first obligation is always to defend his ‘true sainthood’ against all opposition. Its alliance with other ‘Catholic Societies’ within the Church of England is thus in part a strategy to affirm the doctrine of the communion of the saints—in other words, that there are persons who have lived on earth who now are in heaven with Jesus and have intercessory power on behalf of those now on earth. Asserting Charles’s sainthood always involves two assertions: one has to do with the work and person of Charles himself as a godly ruler, the other has to do with the intercessory power of saints. The latter, the Catholic doctrine of the intercession of the saints, takes logical priority over the former. Charles is not just a figure of history whose reputation has been falsely presented. Charles is a transhistorical figure who now lives “with Christ in God,” interceding for “the Church militant here on earth.” If ‘the powerful intercession of the saints at the throne of Grace’ is categorically denied, then a religious society in his name would have no logical basis. Hence, the martyrdom of Charles reveals the double danger of Protestantism: not only is it a threat to civil order but to godliness. The RMCU also acknowledges this aspect of the Royal Martyr, but adds a second point to its statement of purpose: “To maintain the principles of Faith, Loyalty and Liberty for which the King died—the Faith of the Church, Loyalty to the Crown, and the ancient Liberties of the people.”19 This ‘political’ component is something from which the SKCM has always shied away as a “purely devotional” society. One can see this in practice partially in the sermons that are delivered at the two groups’ different liturgies, partially in the way historically they have treated various books and articles that
material or personnel. The earliest issues of SKCM News, which I own since its 1970 inception, were published using a ditto machine. 19 One precipitating factor in the formation of the RMCU was that there was considerable debate and discussion in Parliament and its committees c. 1906 about the nature of the Church of England and modifications that might be made in its status. Over against this an argument was made that the Book of Common Prayer was itself a legal source, hence that this discussion and potential action by Parliament was an “infringement of the liberties of the people” (cf. Maclean 2007).
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have been published in secular media. By-and-large, for example, SKCM restricts itself in negative assessments to books or films that present an unfavorable picture of Charles himself and his immediate family. By contrast, the RMCU has been vigilant as well against works that praise Cromwell as, for example, a “champion of liberty” or a “champion of the people.” Liturgically, furthermore, until 1963 the RMCU specifically was committed by its original first statement of purpose to the restoration of “the memorial service [of 1662, abolished by Queen Victoria] to the Prayer Book.”20 Thus whereas the SKCM welcomed “Fr Stafford of the ‘English Missal Society’” as officiant for its 30 January service in 1993, the RMCU has maintained a relatively strict, if historic rather than contemporary, maintenance of Book of Common Prayer worship. In my own experience, furthermore, when I go to lunch with RMCU members, it almost never fails to come up at some point in conversation that someone has either found or is ardently looking for a Church of England parish that continues to conduct worship according to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (which still remains the official book of the Church of England, though it is relatively rarely used, due to authorized “alternative services”).21 Liturgies A significant triumph for the SKCM was obtaining in 1969 the right to celebrate its 30 January Eucharist in the Great Room of the Banqueting House, on the second (British first) floor of what remains of the palace, a public property normally open for fee-paying tourists, though inconsistently so because it is still used both for occasions of state and as a for-hire venue for select other groups’ events. When not in use, the Great Room itself is basically devoid of furnishings except for a large canopied red throne, raised at the far end from the entrance. Above the throne is the royal crest. Except for the throne dais, the floor is bare polished wood. There are large clear
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This language was altered without fanfare in 1963 to “a suitable service in the Prayer Book.” 21 In Anglican circles the liturgical distinction would generally have been expressed to the effect that the SKCM is an ‘Anglo-Catholic’ society, whereas the RMCU is a ‘High Church’ or ‘Prayer Book Catholic’ society.
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glass windows down both sides of the room. The entire ceiling is consumed by Rubens’s paintings—the oval apotheosis proper filling the center with four smaller paintings in the corners, all surrounded by gilt and floral trim. For the liturgy, individual chairs are brought from a storage room at the rear of the hall (which the congregation is later asked to assist in returning to their place). These are arranged in advance to form a central aisle. Seating is normally provided for about 150, though the room could conceivably accommodate twice that number. The poorest attendance I have witnessed numbered in the 60s—80 to 100 is more common. On the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the martyrdom, no extra chairs were set, hence people sat on the floor, on both sides, at some places three-deep. There is some coming and going, not visibly touristic in nature (though it would be one of the finest opportunities to observe the paintings at length, without cost), but the large majority of the attendees form a congregation that remains throughout the service.22 The altar is set at the throne end of the hall, perpendicular to the throne. It is entirely draped in a red and gold frontal (hence, appropriately, a ‘Laudian’ frontal), the top covered with a white linen cloth (the ‘fair linen’ of Prayer Book rubrics). A cross is placed to the center rear, with candles and relics of the Royal Martyr to each side. A lectern is to the front left of the altar (from the congregation’s side). The Society’s banner is carried in procession and displayed to the rear side of the altar. To the right of the altar, slightly at an angle inward is a choir composed of eight to twelve choristers from King’s College London (in approximately equal numbers, male and female) and their director. They do not vest and look a bit out of place and uncomfortable. They perform the same music each year: a Latin Mass setting, including a long sequence written for the occasion, plus Caroline devotional hymns set to familiar tunes, all a capella. The congregation joins in the hymns. The text for the Mass is the 1662 Book of Common Prayer service of Holy Communion with missal additions, plus portions of the 1662 service specific to Charles’s martyrdom and Charles’s own addition to the Prayer for
22
Use of the Banqueting House came in steps: in 1950, to hold outdoor devotions inside the railings around the forecourt of the Banqueting House; in 1969, a Mass could be held, but only if it ended before 10:00 a.m. or began after 5:30 p.m., hence a separate solemn Mass was also held; not until 1984 was the principal Mass held there, during the noon hour.
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the Church in the 1637 Scottish book, honoring the saints. Founders and benefactors of the Society, including Greville-Nugent, are remembered at the prayers. A sermon or address is given by an invited speaker for each year’s observance, who may be clerical or lay. Veneration of the relics follows the Mass. This aspect of the liturgy has been more formalized in the most recent years; previously people seemed to mill around the altar, seeming not to know quite what to do with the reliquaries. In addition to the customary monetary offering taken in the course of the Mass, wherein the cost of the event is given explicit reference, publications of the Society and small devotional items are on sale at the end of the liturgy from tables at the opposite end of the hall from the altar.23 Historically the President of the Society, when a priest, or else its chaplain has been the principal celebrant of the Mass. In the most recent years, however, both of the current two priest “co-presidents” being of relatively advanced age, one somewhat infirm and the other living at considerable distance from London, a younger priest from a suburban London locale has been the principal celebrant. At his initial celebration it was clear that he was not used to celebrating by the 1662 rite, but subsequently he has adjusted to the text, and as a whole the liturgical events have been comparably more well ordered. In 2005 this included the use of historic choir habit for the preliminary prayers and wreath-hanging at the entrance to the Banqueting House, thence a change to the eucharistic vestments of antique character for the Mass proper.24 There are some ironies to the celebration. Most notably, intentionally or not, the throne dais towers over the altar. Since the Mass is celebrated in the eastern position (the clergy with their backs to
23 One such devotional item is a plasticized ‘holy card’ that includes within it a piece of “cloth touched to the relics of St Charles K & M January 2003.” The front of the card bears the words “St Charles, King & Martyr Pray for Us.” This form of reliquary card serves particularly well to demonstrate that this liturgy and the SKCM’s intention is not merely one of ‘historical’ commemoration, but seeks to establish a spiritual link between earthly participants and an ‘active’ transcendent realm. 24 The same vestments, consisting of chasuble, dalmatic, and tunicle, with maching stoles, all in a red and red-gold fabric have been used at all celebrations I have attended. The attendants are vested in cassock and cotta. The preacher normally wears choir habit if ordained, academic regalia if not. The vestments were made in 1955/56, partially of seventeenth-century fabric. The SKCM loaned these vestments and its banner to the RMCU for its London centennial celebration in 2006.
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Photo 1.3. The Rt Revd and Rt Hon Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, preaching at the SKCM Mass on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the martyrdom of King Charles I. Note the reliquaries on the altar, the Society’s banner to his right, and the throne behind. Photo: William H. Swatos, Jr.
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Photo 1.4. Attendees come forward after the conclusion of the Mass to view the relics of King Charles. Photo: William H. Swatos, Jr.
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the congregation) and the altar is on the same level as the congregation, this results in the elevations during the consecration clearly appearing to be to the throne and royal coat of arms, the crucifix and other specifically religious symbols being entirely blocked by the vested clergy’s bodies. Hence, when one sits in the congregation, the visual focus is the (empty) throne. In one sense, the Royal Martyr’s absence from the throne creates a moment of potential religious recollection; in another, the raised throne potentially emphasizes the power of the state over the church: how much the Church of England really is the Church of England—a creature of royal prerogative and state power. At a much more prosaic level, incense is also not used at the liturgy because of the possibility of its damaging of the ceiling; ironically the administrators of the building agreed to candles on the basis that they were already allowed for dinners held there. Hence a clearly secular rationale trumps any priorities of worship (although the candles are also claimed to be ‘smokeless,’ something which incense most obviously is not). In comparison with Church of England congregations generally, one also notices both a surprisingly high percentage of men present (always well over half the congregation) and, within that, a comparably high percentage of younger men (about 20 percent of the whole). This apparent youthfulness may, however, be an artifact of the structural limitation that there is no elevator or lift chair to the hall, additionally complicated by winter weather, possibly reducing the numbers of older persons for want of ease of access. In addition, the Banqueting House is relatively close to King’s College and a number of other affiliated institutions of the University of London. Likewise, the ‘maleness’ of it may be partially an artifact that the Banqueting House is in the central government-business area of the London, with the liturgy held on a weekday during the lunch hour; however the gender composition of the congregation has not markedly altered when the service was held on a Saturday. A half-dozen or more clergymen (as testified by their clerical collars) are also in the congregation. I have never seen a woman present wearing a clerical collar, though a nun in habit has sometimes been present. There is no formal luncheon (or any form of refreshment activity) following the liturgy, and the SKCM annual general meeting is held at in connection with another celebration close to the date of
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the Restoration of the monarchy (29 May), rather than at this time.25 Hence, when “the Mass is ended,” so is the event—or almost so. Clusters of attendees then scatter to local pubs, where a measure of Turner’s communitas does occur, largely in respect to finding seating. That is, visual recognition of other persons, whether or not one has ever met them before, legitimates a request to share table space in a way different from ordinary pub manners: An entré such as, “Mind if we sit here? You were at the service weren’t you? [followed by a self-introduction, possibly with handshake].” In such an encounter, the conversation is likely to turn to matters ecclesiastical, beginning with the liturgy itself, but quickly moving on to the broader state of the Church of England. Business cards may be exchanged, along with invitations to visit some related event, possibly specifically related to Caroline devotion, though more likely to the specific interests of the two parties. If it happens that the people already have encountered each other at some other venue, perhaps only observationally, that may particularly set a context for both conversation and plans to see each other again in the future. Thus, in my case, for example, a “Haven’t I seen you at Bourne Street?” will introduce the parish church of St. Mary’s Bourne Street and another potential cast of characters as well as set of topics for discussion. How much these are actually followed up no one knows, but they are characteristic of both pilgrimage events and touristic encounters—for example, people in the same tour group upon finding themselves in juxtaposition with others from the same group, even if they have not previously had any conversation, may take the common identifier of a group jacket, hat, or t-shirt as a legitimate basis for opening conversation, asking for seating privileges, and so on. The RMCU London Mass has been held at the Church of St. Mary-le-Strand since 1992. This was also the venue for the SKCM from the 1940s until the time the SKCM gained use of the Banqueting House and is still the usual venue for the Restoration Day Mass
25 A third annual Mass is held to celebrate Charles I’s earthly birthday. From the 1960s to the 1980s the SKCM also often held “summer outings.” These were sometimes in the nature of pilgrimages, either to explicitly religious sites like Walsingham or one of the churches dedicated to St. Charles or else to estates or homes where significant Caroline ‘relics’ were held. Later they became more purely social events and were abandoned in 1992. In earlier days a formal luncheon sometimes followed the 30 January Mass.
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prior to the SKCM’s annual general meeting and luncheon.26 There is no unique connection between St. Mary-le-Strand and Charles I. The parish dates from late Saxon times, and its greatest claim to historic fame is that among its former rectors is St. Thomas Becket, a man who achieved his martyr’s crown in virtually diametrical opposition to the circumstances surrounding Charles’s death: that is, Becket on behalf of the church opposed the designs of Henry II and was for all intents and purposes murdered on Henry’s orders.27 The present church, however, dates from 1724, hence is basically a new building in London terms (actually referred to as “the New Church in the Strand” in writings of the day). Designed by James Gibbs, it is generally considered the greatest surviving example of English baroque architecture in London.28 It is listed in the larger tourist guidebooks, and in fact, I have never been in St. Mary-le-Strand (where I have spent far more time than the Banqueting House) when tourists did not come in (or try to come in) to see the building. On the other hand, I have never seen the church visited by organized tourist groups. People come as individuals, perhaps particularly interested in art and architecture, as the Courtauld Galleries are basically across the street, hence a visit to the Courtauld can be complemented by St. Mary’s in an aesthetic quest.29 The primary reason the RMCU uses St. Mary-le-Strand now is a combination of custom, centrality, and relatively reasonable cost.30 At present the 26
Prior to World War II, SKCM events were held at the church of St Andrewsby-the-Wardrobe, which was damaged during the War. Now restored, it serves on occasion for SKCM and other Caroline events, as does the church of St. Katherine Cree (both in the City of London itself ), where for a time the SKCM maintained a chapel. 27 Henry, however, had the good political sense to do penance for Becket’s murder, something Cromwell could never have conceived. 28 There is also some evidence, from no less a figure than David Hume, to suggest that Prince Charles Edward Stuart, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie,’ may have visited and worshipped at St. Mary’s in a secret visit to London in 1750 (see Grant 1975/6). The church is now also the official chapel for the WRNS—Women’s Royal Naval Service, in effect women who served in the British Navy, principally wartime service. 29 The church actually sits on an island of land in the middle of the Strand, hence strictly speaking there is nothing ‘across’ the street from it, though buildings sit to the side of it: embassies and consulates to the north (with the LSE only another street away), the Courtauld and King’s College to the South. The Church of St. Clement Danes is on another island to its rear. The Strand intersects with the north end of Whitehall at Charing Cross, approximately a half-mile from the Church. 30 The RMCU previously held most of its commemorations at St. Martin in the Fields, Trafalgar Square. The principal issue in leaving St. Martin’s was expense,
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secretary and treasurer of the RMCU, a layman, also happens to be a communicant of the parish, as is the “London Secretary” of the SKCM (a different person); these interlocking associations are purely coincidental, though certainly convenient. The decision of the societies to go to the parish was originally influenced by the service of a rector there, who was also a member (and is now one of the two co-presidents) of SKCM. His successor, however, was initially unaware of the association and told me that though he came to host and participate in the events as appropriate, “I really didn’t give a fig about King Charles until I came here. And don’t care a whole lot about it now.” Nevertheless, he remained chaplain to the RMCU until his retirement. The present incumbent has participated in the liturgy in one way or another since his assumption of the charge in 2002. The RMCU liturgy adheres closely to the 1637 rite textually, but in an ironic twist upon its origins, has somewhat more elaborate ceremonial, inasmuch as incense is used. There is also an attractive raised pulpit from which the address is given by an invited cleric or layperson. The address will be subsequently published in the Union’s annual. A diptych of King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria, probably from the late seventeenth century, belonging to the parish, is prominently displayed.31 The chaplain and the incumbent play the central liturgical roles among the clergy. In recent years women have been included as servers or readers. A vested, four-to-six person semiprofessional choir sings the Mass setting, choral offertory, and hymns to (electronic) organ accompaniment. “God Save the Queen” is always sung at the end of the Mass, prior to the final hymn. The congregation numbers between 25 and 35, largely on the basis of whether or not a contingent from the parish of King Charles the Martyr, Potter’s Bar does or does not appear.32 This contingent will also as costs rose across the years. The specifically precipitating event, however, was a change in clergy at the Potters Bar congregation, which had supplied organist, choir, and servers for the Mass. The new priest initially asked for additional money for transportation, but even when that was offered, simply cut off discussion. The procession across Trafalgar Square had also become difficult with increasing traffic and undependable police support from year to year, hence ceased (now replaced by the Royal Stuart Society service, without procession). 31 This work was acquired on behalf of the parish by the aforementioned rector who had connections to these societies. 32 At the centenary the count reached almost fifty. Numbers at the Scottish service are smaller than the London observance. The Scottish service is always held in the Episcopal cathedral in Edinburgh, inasmuch as Charles founded that See
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affect the sex ratio of the congregation. Without them, the congregation is overwhelmingly male; with them, it is closer to equal. The age range is also different from the SKCM event. There is virtually no one under 40 present in the congregation; the mean age would be to all appearances in the late 60s. Tourists do wander in during the Mass. Some will stay and even sit for a bit. Others leave immediately. Events in conjunction with the Mass have altered across the past decade to some degree. Three constants are the annual general meeting of the Union, which is basically a business meeting, attended by about fifteen to twenty people; a luncheon, for those who desire, with similar attendance; and the drinking of the “loyal toast,” that is, a toast to the Queen.33 The shift in practice has been to move the business meeting and toast from coming after the luncheon to coming before, being held at the church rather than the luncheon venue. The stated reason for this was that some persons felt excluded from the meeting by the cost of the lunch. At the same time, however, the venue for the lunch was changed, from a private room in a first class hotel to the center of a restaurant that had a low lunchtime draw on Saturdays. The result has been that attendance has stayed about the same, though the implicit expectation of paying for lunch to attend the meeting has been removed. Like attendance at the Mass itself, actual numbers are influenced by the presence or absence of a contingent from the Potters Bar congregation. The luncheon, largely by being prearranged and using long, banquet-style seating, while certainly intended to build up conviviality, actually has a mixed effect when compared to the SKCM, since the communitas of struggling for seating at a pub in the middle of the central London lunchtime rush is replaced by a more formally designed event. On the one hand, no one will be left out, but on the other, the prearranged (although at that time the Cathedral was medieval St. Giles’s Church, now in Presbyterian Church of Scotland hands, whereas the present Cathedral, St. Mary’s, dates only from the nineteenth century, when Scottish legal inhibitions against Prayer Book worship were removed). The current Bishop of Edinburgh is the President of the RMCU, but election to that See does not carry the RMCU presidency in tow. There are separate Scottish and English chaplains. 33 Due to the RMCU’s centenary observances in 2006, the business meeting was moved to 30 May, the day following Restoration Day, when arrangements were made for the Union to meet at Lambeth Palace, the official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, where relics and documents pertaining to the era of Charles’s reign—including Charles’s gloves given to Archbishop Juxon by Charles on the scaffold of his martyrdom. The RMCU had a financial hand in securing these for the Palace, as did some officers and members of the SKCM.
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character of a formal meal continues a measure of unliminality. There is really no threshold to be crossed among middle and upper-middle class people who know how to play proper roles at a formal dinner. By the same token, this element of structure serves better to include the less assertive attendee, who in its absence, might simply leave.34 The American observance of the SKCM represents yet another alternative that deserves consideration. Virtually all of the annual ‘national’ Masses have occurred at Anglo-Catholic parishes on the East Coast, usually with a guest preacher. The American branch also has had a bishop who serves in a quasi-official role as Episcopal Patron and who may be present either as celebrant or preacher or simply pontificating from the ‘throne.’ The current Episcopal Patron is the diocesan bishop of what may well be the most conservative diocese in the Episcopal Church. The American Masses, which normally also include a meal following and a business meeting, tend to be more elaborate in ceremonial and especially in music and in floral display. The American chairman, a layperson, often takes the liturgical role of subdeacon in the Mass. Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the American Masses, however, is the fact that they have been for years videotaped, and these videotapes are sold. Hence, both those who have attended the Mass and those who have not can have a sound and visual record of the event. Across time these can become potentially valuable data for anthropological research. The videotapes also have the function of creating a ‘virtual’ pilgrimage experience for those who are unable to attend. There is no similar option with respect to the British events. Whether or not the American events qualify as ‘pilgrimages’ will be influenced by definitional issues—that is, whether a pilgrimage must include a geographic specific or whether travel to a social specific is in itself adequate to qualify the experience. The latter case raises the question of the distance traveled: If the event, rather than the
34 At those times when the RMCU, SKCM, and RSS have joined together for the Mass, the RMCU continues to have its own luncheon, business meeting, and loyal toast. SKCM members are invited to attend, and a few do so. By the same token, when the organizations have separate observances, a number of those who will attend the RMCU observance also attend the SKCM service. (This, in fact, would number about half those who participate in the RMCU service, once the Potters Bar contingent is removed from the whole.)
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site, constitutes the basis of the pilgrimage, then how far does one have to travel to turn it into a ‘pilgrimage’? Can people in Rome, for example, have claimed to have made a pilgrimage to St. Peter’s Basilica? Would a specific event—for example, the opening of the great doors at the millennium—at St. Peter’s qualify as a pilgrimage even for a Roman? With respect to Santiago de Campostela, for example, the Camino itself takes on great, if not entirely uncontested, significance; hence in at least some cases, the specifics of getting there may become as important as being there (cf. Frey 1998: chs. 2–4). Pilgrimage Without Tourism The United States of America rests on a Pilgrim myth. Various alternative settlement groups in North America notwithstanding, it is the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock who are foundational for a significant piece of the United States’ ‘presentation of self.’ Those Pilgrims were largely fleeing England to get away from the Stuart monarchy— beginning with James I, but continuing through and accelerating during the reign of Charles I as well. Yet there are also curiosities: the liturgical practice of the Church of England as embodied in the Prayer Book Christianity that Charles defended to his death was observed through the interregnum only in Virginia and some settlements of the West Indies. The Anglican loyalty of colonial Virginia is one of the many pieces of North America’s history that slips through the cracks of the Pilgrim myth. Were the Anglicans in Virginia or the Icelanders who to went to the northern coast long before the British dissenters just ‘tourists’? And how ‘native’ and how ‘American’ are Native Americans anyway? The words ‘pilgrim’ and ‘pilgrimage’ have a clearly religious connotation in current use, and especially so in a society and culture that builds Pilgrim Fathers into its founding myth. Persons who go on pilgrimage, hence, are expected to have an underlying religious motivation for their action. Yet we also know, as more complete studies are produced of pilgrimages in earlier times, that all pilgrimages were events of mixed motivation. Not only is it rare to find that ideal-typical case of “meaningful action where the meaning is fully conscious and explicit,” but it is equally correspondingly rare to find that singularity of motive that would drive such action. Mixed motivation is the norm; singularity of motive is the “marginal case.”
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Basic social psychology would teach us that people undertake actions, especially actions which require the arrangements that attend a pilgrimage, with a complex set of possible outcomes or goals. Hence, it would be appropriate to expect that someone on a pilgrimage would have a series of motivations for and results expected from his or her journey, only some of which might be explicitly religious, and there might additionally be unexpected outcomes, religious or otherwise, that would arise through the trip itself that would shift the inner-perceptual dynamic slightly or greatly. We can say with some confidence, thus, that pilgrimage has something to do with putatively religious motivation and something to do with travel, but motivation is seldom singular and religion is multidimensional. Tourism also has to do with travel, but by no means is all travel touristic. For example, someone traveling from Paris to New York to attend a business meeting is not normally referred to as a tourist. The word ‘tour’ implies a particular relationship between the person and the object(s) of travel, which is peculiarly detached from the manifest purposes of the objects of travel. To continue the prior example, a tourist from Paris to New York might go on a tour that included Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange. That would not be a business trip. The idea is to see, but not really engage. The tourist goes to Africa to see animals in nature; when she starts shooting them, that’s a hunting trip.35 A pilgrimage, by this logic, is a religious trip. The complication that overrides the simplicity of what I’m saying here is that human beings are not nearly as singular as this distinction would imply. Pilgrims to St. Peter’s in Rome may still go clothes shopping and tour the ruins of antiquity. The businessman from Paris may schedule a tour of Chinatown. It’s also possible for the reverse to occur: a ‘secular’ tourist at Chartres or Ely can be ‘moved’: [T]hose who enter a cathedral [or other historical religious site] as tourists are sometimes beguiled by place, mood and size into a mode of wonder. They can acknowledge a desire to understand, to question, even to confront the God whose inspiration has made possible both 35 In this respect I find use of the term ‘sex tourism’ wrong. As far as I can tell, no one on a claimed ‘sex tour’ goes to observe sex. To be linguistically consistent, such events should be termed ‘sex trips,’ just as there are business trips, skiing trips, hunting trips, camping trips, and so on. In general usage, people go on a tour to look, a trip to do.
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the building and the moment. In this way, the tourist may indeed be transformed into a pilgrim. (Archbishops’ Commission 1994: 36)
And of course, the person going to St. Peter’s can be so overtaken by the shops that she forgets the Pope. Nevertheless, anyone who has spent any length of time in any putatively sacred space knows that tourism is an industry that can undermine the quality of sacrality—the “mood.” And this plays into the “mixed motivations” of religious sites (cf. O’Dea 1961). That is, religious sites for a variety of reasons want to draw people to them, but when the religious site becomes too well known, then the religious virtues that motivated the original devotees to communicate the message of the holy place may become undermined or debased. This is especially the case in a site that has many layers of meaning, such as Westminster Abbey. It is my observation that it is virtually impossible to do pilgrimage in the classic sense to Westminster Abbey, except perhaps on one or two days a year, and then only by special arrangement. By “the classic sense,” however, I mean something very specific—viz., praying at the tomb of St. Edward the Confessor or perhaps of that of Mary Queen of Scots for a certain genre of Roman Catholics. But there are also other senses of ‘visits’ to Westminster Abbey that are less clear. People may come, for example, because it was the site of Princess Diana’s funeral. And even before The Da Vinci Code, about which more below, I have been quite surprised by the number of people who come to the Abbey to ‘see’ the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton. Yet others come and walk around in a daze that would lead the observer, though perhaps unfairly, to wonder if they have any idea why they’re there at all. Finally there are those whose reason might be said to be a literal self-religion: they come to have their own picture taken at Westminster Abbey. For me, between St. Edward, Princess Diana, and Sir Isaac Newton, on the one hand, and the dazed and photographed, on the other, we have a fairly clear distinction between the pilgrim or protopilgrim on the one hand, and the tourist on the other. I am not at all sure that in the midst of the business of tourism the religious or protoreligious needs of the former group are not trumped by the latter. In this respect, I have been fascinated by the effects of the tourist industry spawned by Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code. Sir Isaac’s tomb of course plays a role in that book, but Westminster Abbey
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was a significant tourist venue before The Da Vinci Code, and it will still be long after that book has been forgotten. The same is true of the Louvre. Not so clear is the fate of two other sites, both of which were also quite familiar to me years before The Da Vinci Code was ever published because of aspects of their religious significance: St. Sulpice in Paris and the Temple Church in London. Both have become at least temporarily ‘tourist’ sites—that is, people come to them primarily to ‘see’ something mentioned in The Da Vinci Code and not out of any interest based in a putatively religious context. Each site has had to find ways to cope with its new found ‘fame.’ St. Sulpice is a large structure with a weekly round of public worship, hence the presence of tourists is not in itself an inconvenience. The difficulties of tourism primarily center around talking, interruption of worship, and the fact that the beam of light of the gnomon that plays such an important role in Brown’s story goes right across the high altar, leading some people to go right up to the high altar. Perhaps for St. Sulpice it is more the ‘surprise’ of tourism than anything else. Neither St. Sulpice nor the Temple Church (especially) is particularly easy to find or on the standard tourist route; hence each has simply performed its assigned religious functions in a context of relative normalcy. St. Sulpice draws a certain number of outsiders (non-Catholics, non-Christians) for its organ concerts, but these are scheduled events that do not interfere with the more specifically religious aspects of the parish’s life—although the option of staying for Mass in conjunction with the brief Sunday morning concerts may in some cases encourage persons from outside the parish to stay for the liturgy. For the Temple Church the surprise is greater, since it is not a regular parish church, hence has only a specialized clientele, plus a few visitors interested enough to find it, largely for religio-historical purposes, as the church of the preeminent Elizabethan theologian Richard Hooker, or the occasional student of architecture. As a specialized cure relating to the law, the church was almost totally unprepared for the tourist onslaught. Staffing has had to be increased to protect the building, but the church has also responded by scheduling a weekly public talk specifically to discuss items relating to The Da Vinci Code.36 Thus the Temple Church has tried to turn the tourist trek into a teaching opportunity. 36 The problem with The Da Vinci Code for the religious sites that it mentions is that it is a so well-written and descriptively accurate that readers may forget that it is a novel—in particular that Brown is not at all obligated to be religiously or
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I turn back now to the commemoration of Charles I. So far, Charles I remains largely unromanticized in the popular mind and receives mixed, though mostly negative, evaluations from secular historians. Thus, the events surrounding the annual commemoration of his martyrdom remain pilgrimage without tourism. Pilgrims come to sites rich with history to ‘touch’ the holiness of a man whose death purportedly worked miracles and whose martyrdom may well have ‘saved’ the Church of England as an admittedly odd branch of Catholic Christianity. The case of Charles, hence, might offer an instructive insight into the pilgrimage and tourism field—viz., that pilgrimage is an ongoing, multi-faith activity that occurs in what well may be thousands of sites, from relatively local to international. It is the decision, often by third parties, that moves a pilgrim site/event into the pilgrimage-and-tourism field (cf. Borchert 2005; Roseman 2004; Tate 2004; Yang and Wei 2005). The ‘tourist dollar’ has several potential origin points—e.g., popular culture, the decline of traditional sources of locally generated income, national or regional political-economic interests—but it is seldom the direct origin of a pilgrimage venture (however, cf., Lang et al. 2005, on the construction of modern temples in China). The causes of this are not difficult to articulate—not merely the commodification commonly associated with postmodernity, but also the increase of leisure time, urbanization, greater discretionary income, smaller family size, longer lifespan, speed and ease of travel, to name but a few. Hence, existing venues offering both a ‘significant’ physical/aesthetic site and a potential for observable activity and interaction become attractive to the tourist industry. Venues that touch the imagination either by their historical associations or their role in contemporary global society are one category of sociocultural settings that can be developed into a tourist itinerary and ‘experience.’ The most likely prediction one could make about pilgrimage on the occasion of the martyrdom of Charles I—or even to the Banqueting House generally—will probably remain of highly limited interest well under the radar of the construct of ‘pilgrimage-and-tourism studies.’ What this event and space and those like it around the world can theologically correct or even informed, hence may take any flight of meaning-fancy he chooses. Brown elides from site descriptions to religious ‘facts’ with the greatest of ease. Providing a very explicit statement at the outset of the book of what in the book is true, as a writer of fiction Brown is under no obligation to keep saying “the rest of this is just made up by me.”
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do for us, however, is call into relief the lacunae that are created by the shaping of ‘pilgrimage studies’ by tourism and tourism studies. That is, ‘pilgrimage’ as an object of social scientific investigation has been constructed in relation to postmodern tourism. This is not to say for a moment that pilgrimage has ever been ‘purely’ religious. It is well known that pilgrimage routes and centers facilitated both economic and political interactions, as well as more microsocial interchange across thousands of years in some cases. Those global pilgrimage centers, however, also point to the preeminence of religion as a significant force for sociocultural organization and development. The current pilgrimage-and-tourism context, by contrast, sidetracks religion itself as a category of consequence within the pilgrimage experience; that is, the religious significance of the pilgrimage center becomes sidelined in the socioeconomics and sociability of tourism. By examining events like the annual observances of the martyrdom of Charles I as well as observances at scores of local shrines that have not become a part of the tourist circuit, we can begin to assess the meanings of pilgrimage activities and events apart from the economics of tourism. Questions like ‘Why bother?’ and ‘Who cares?’ take uppermost significance as there is no obviously touristic context to explain—which is to say, ‘explain away’—the observance and activity. ‘Why bother?’ opens the significance of the event, while ‘Who cares?’ reveals the participants. While it is utterly naïve to think in terms of ‘pure’ pilgrimage—that is, pilgrimage entirely abstracted from any surrounding environment—one can find pilgrimage events that are not a part of packaged tourist activities and take up the actors, sites, and activities as sources of social anthropological data on pilgrimage as a form of religious life. This approach can begin to tease out the character and ‘meaning’ of pilgrimage in what might be argued to be a comparably purer form than obtained through activities and sites which are more visibly contested among locals, pilgrims, and tourists. Peregrinatio in piccolo may well give the largest insight into the phenomenon as a religious experience.37 37 I am especially grateful and indebted to E. David Roberts, the present Secretary and Treasurer of the RMCU, for an exceptionally careful reading of a prior draft of this chapter and offering many helpful suggestions. Peter Smaill, current editor of The Royal Martyr Annual, also helped to pull together a number of last minute details. Joanne L. Swatos has accompanied me in these activities since 2002 and shared insights and opened doors through which this work has been enriched. Responsibility for such defects as remain is, of course, entirely my own.
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References Angus, Robin. 2005. “A Royal Saint for Scotland.” The Royal Martyr Annual 2005: 5–9. Archbishops’ Commission on Cathedrals. 1994. Heritage and Renewal. London: Church House. Borchert, Thomas. 2005. “Of Temples and Tourists: The Effects of the Tourist Political Economy on a Minority Buddhist Community in Southwest China.” Pp. 87–112 in State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies, edited by Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney. Leiden: Brill. Cavendish, Richard. 1992. “Charles I Societies.” History Today 42: 62–63. Brown, Dan. 2003. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday. Coleman, Simon. 2004. “Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth’: Landscapes of Myth and Memory at Walsingham.” Pp. 52–67 in Intersecting Journeys, edited by Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Frey, Nancy Louise. 1968. Pilgrim Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grant, Antony. 1975/6. “Prince Charles Edward Stuart a Member of the Church of England in 1750?” Church and King 27(2): 3–4. Innes-Smith, Robert. 2006[1970]. “The Last Cavalier.” The Royal Martyr Centenary Annual: 19–25. Knox, Ronald A. 1963.University and Anglican Sermons. London: Burns and Oates. Lang, Graeme, Selina Chan, and Lars Ragvald. 2005. “Temples and the Religious Economy.” Pp. 149–180 in State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies, edited by Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney. Leiden: Brill. Maclean, Allan. 2007. Sermon Preached at the London Centenary Eucharist Commemorating King Charles the First. The Royal Martyr Annual: forthcoming. O’Dea, Thomas F. 1961. “Five Dilemmas in the Institutionalization of Religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 1: 32–39. Roseman, Sharon R. 2004. “Santiago de Compostela in the Year 2000: From Religious Center to European City of Culture.” Pp. 68–88 in Intersecting Journeys, edited by Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Swatos, William H., Jr. 1979. Into Denominationalism. Storrs, CT: Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. ———. 2002. “New Canterbury Trails: Pilgrimage and Tourism in Anglican London.” Pp. 91–114 in From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism, edited by William H. Swatos, Jr. and Luigi Tomasi. Westport, CT: Praeger. Tate, Mark. 2004. “Tourism and Holy Week in Léon, Spain.” Pp. 110–124 in Intersecting Journeys, edited by Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. White King. 1999. The White King—The Society’s History 1894–1993. [London?]: Society of King Charles the Martyr. Yang, Fenggang and Dedong Wei. 2005. “The Bailin Buddhist Temple: Thriving under Communism.” Pp. 63–86 in State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies, edited by Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney. Leiden: Brill.
CHAPTER TWO
JOURNEYS TO THE GODDESS: PILGRIMAGE AND TOURISM IN THE NEW AGE Kathryn Rountree Some time ago I received a letter written by a friend during her travels in Turkey.1 The first paragraph read: I feel so privileged to be traveling around, and especially being here in Turkey. What an amazing country! It is so big and has so many treasures. The visit to the Anatolian Civilisations Museum yesterday was wonderful. I had such an ache to hold some of the old goddesses in my hands, to feel their magic and love them gently. Their round bodies—big breasts, bellies and buttocks—speak of the journey of women’s lives. I was enraptured and wished that you were here with me. You really must plan a visit here, and to Egypt too.
I begin by quoting this letter because it was written by the kind of pilgrim-tourist who is the focus of this chapter and it poignantly reveals something of the emotional intensity and religious meaning of this experience for her. It further provides an opening to a discussion about sacred travel in relation to religious and feminist identity and embodiment. Specifically, I wish to suggest that this and similar accounts illustrate that such journeys contribute to a radical re-inscription of the female body by exposing women pilgrims to alternative representations of the feminine and by providing contexts in which the feminine can be re-imagined and re-experienced through symbolic activity and ritual. The body as a site for analysis has recently received a great deal of attention from feminist and other scholars within the social sciences, however a discourse centered on the body has yet to develop within the literature on pilgrimage.2 As
1 This woman was originally a participant in my doctoral research on feminist witchcraft and the Goddess movement in New Zealand (1990–1993; cf. Rountree 2004). She gave permission for the letter to be quoted. 2 There has been a limited amount of discussion about the suffering body in pilgrimage discourse (Sallnow 1987; Skultans 1987a and 1987b; Dahlberg 1991; Eade and Sallnow 1991; Dubisch 1995).
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Morinis (1992: 17) says, “we are yet to investigate the broad range of psychosomatic sensations that accompany sacred journeys and are often the most significant aspects of pilgrimage in the view of participants themselves.” This chapter aims to make a contribution to such a discussion. The friend I quoted above is one of several hundred thousand women in the Western world who belong to the Goddess movement, and one of a growing number of these women who, along with other modern Pagans, are visiting a huge range of sites in Europe and elsewhere connected, they say, with ancient Goddess worship.3 Stonehenge, Avebury, Glastonbury, Delphi, Knossos, Agrigento, Ephesus, Çatalhöyük, Luxor, Karnak and Malta are just a few of the favorite destinations. Visits to ancient temple sites and monuments, stone circles, groves, churches, tombs, sacred wells, caves, mountains and other natural features are combined with lecture presentations, visits to museums, and rituals.4 Contemporary local culture and the pleasures of local landscapes are also relished: elements of ethnic tourism, environmental tourism and historical tourism are integral to these pilgrimages (cf. Graburn 1989: 31–32). They are undertaken by individuals or small groups of friends who organize their own travel itineraries as well as by groups who elect to join a Goddess package tour organized by a tour leader (or leaders) who is usually deeply involved in the Goddess movement.5 The phenomenon of the modern Pagan pilgrimage, of which journeys to ‘Goddess sites’ form one component, brings the Western tradition of pilgrimage full circle. In classical times pilgrimages to consult the oracle at Delphi, to celebrate the Great Panathenaea festival at the Parthenon, to pay
3 Griffin (2000: 14) quotes sources that suggest that in the United States the Goddess community numbers up to 500,000, while the community in the United Kingdom numbers 110,000 to 120,000. Undoubtedly numbers have grown in the last six years. 4 Early Christian churches were often built on the sites of earlier pagan temples: thus the sacred essence of a site and the local population’s devotion to the site were appropriated at the same time as the visible signs of the previous religion were covered over, incorporated, or obliterated. 5 Only occasionally are Goddess tour leaders male. In July 2005 I joined part of a Goddess pilgrimage in Turkey organized by two American women, Lydia Ruyle and Katie Hoffner, and a Turkish man, Resit Ergener, who has written about the Anatolian Mother Goddess. This pilgrimage was organized in conjunction with a Goddess conference held at Selçuk Museum near Ephesus, 20–23 July. A followup conference/pilgrimage tour was held in Turkey in July 2006. Cf. http://www.goddessconversations.com/turkey.htm
Photo 2.1. The Celcus Library, Ephesus, Turkey, where tourists and religious pilgrims (Christian and Pagan) mix. Goddess pilgrims form only a tiny minority of visitors. Photo: Judy Roberts.
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homage to Artemis, Zeus and Aphrodite respectively at Ephesus, Olympia and Aphrodisias were famous, and they are becoming important again for many modern Pagans. Contemporary Pagan engagements with sacred sites have begun to be explored by scholars (e.g. York 2002; Bowman 1993), most extensively by Jenny Blain and Robert Wallis in their Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights project.6 My interest in this area grew out of several seasons of fieldwork in Malta which have examined the ways in which Maltese Neolithic temple sites have been variously interpreted, contested and appropriated by a range of local and foreign interest groups—archaeologists, the tourist industry, Maltese nationalists, local hunters, artists and Goddess pilgrims—as well as Maltese people more generally (Rountree 1999b, 2001, 2002). As well as exploring various attitudes and agendas in relation to the temples, I was interested in Maltese attitudes toward the foreign (mostly American) Goddess pilgrims. In this chapter I am concerned primarily with the meanings of pilgrimages to Goddess sites—in particular to Crete, Malta and Turkey— for the women who make these journeys. My fieldwork included a number of visits to Malta, Greece and Turkey between 1998 and 2005.7 I also draw on the Internet, which is a rich source of Goddess pilgrims’ travel accounts, and on my email correspondence with women pilgrims. The Overlap of Goddess Pilgrimage and Tourism It is now just over a quarter of a century since Victor and Edith Turner wrote what has become an adage in the scholarly study both of tourism and of pilgrimage: “[A] tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist” (1978: 20). Numerous authors have explored the relationship between tourists and pilgrims, especially the ways in which the pilgrim’s journey can be seen as a metaphor for the 6
Cf. http://www.sacredsites.org.uk In Malta I met five Goddess tour leaders, three of whom were American women visiting Malta; one was an American who was resident in Malta (but has now returned to the US); the last was a half-American, half-Maltese woman who had moved from the United States to live permanently in Malta. I stayed with this woman, Clotilde Mifsud, for four weeks on one fieldtrip, and I am indebted to her for invaluable help with my research. I also spoke with many Maltese people about their attitudes toward Goddess pilgrims: students at the University of Malta (where I taught two anthropology courses), archaeologists, artists, and a wide range of people I met informally. 7
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tourist’s vacation in contemporary secular society.8 In particular, Dean MacCannell (1999) has claimed that tourism functions as a surrogate religion in connection with modern mass leisure, and Nelson Graburn (1989), also in the Durkheimian tradition, has demonstrated how the vacation acts as a symbolic time marker of ordinary (profane) time and non-ordinary (sacred) time, thus structuring the passage of modern lives. While wanting to distinguish between the different motives of pilgrims’ and tourists’ journeys, Erik Cohen notes that “in modern mass-pilgrimage, paralleling mass-tourism, the actual behavior of pilgrims often becomes indistinguishable from that of tourists” (1992: 53). Campo agrees that “the two are seldom easily distinguishable. Pilgrimage often invites tourism, while tourism entertains the possibility of pilgrimage experiences” (1998: 53). In this chapter I argue that the contemporary Goddess pilgrim epitomizes the traveler who straddles the tourist/pilgrim divide, possessing important elements of both as well as some distinctive characteristics. Unlike the traditional religious pilgrim who typically journeyed to a single sacred center (“out there,” according to Turner 1973), the Goddess pilgrim’s itinerary, like the tourist’s, frequently incorporates a number of sacred ‘attractions’ in a given area (for example, Britain and Ireland or the Eastern Mediterranean), often in a short space of time. The sacred centers which attract Goddess visitors are geographically widespread and pertain to many different cultures and religions—ancient Greek, Celtic, Egyptian, Hindu, native American, European Neolithic, and so on—the specific details of whose religious traditions, past and present, are often very different from one another (or not well known, as in the case of Neolithic and Paleolithic societies).9 The friend whose letter from Turkey I 8 Cf. Cohen 1979, 1992; Moore 1980; Graburn 1983, 1989; Horne 1984; Allcock 1988; Urry 1990; Eade 1992; Morinis 1992; Coleman and Elsner 1995; Nash 1996; MacCannell 1999; Swatos and Tomasi 2002; Badone and Rosen 2004. A special issue of Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 19, no. 1 (1992) is devoted to articles on pilgrimage. 9 Narratives about prehistoric religions based on the available archaeological evidence may be quite different depending on who is constructing them. For example, when I was working at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük (Turkey) in 2003, it was clear that the archaeologists currently excavating the site told a different story from that of the Goddess pilgrims who visited the site, and they did not even agree with earlier archaeologists that the female figurines found on the site represent a Goddess. The director of the dig, Professor Ian Hodder, acknowledges this plethora of interpretive voices from different interest groups and is trying to give them interpretive space in the site’s Visitor Centre.
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quoted at the outset, for example, has also spent a great deal of time searching out sacred sites in Egypt and has visited holy places in many parts of India. Two other women active in the Goddess movement in New Zealand undertook a pilgrimage in 1998 that incorporated sites in Israel, Jordan, Italy (including Sicily), and England. On other occasions they have made pilgrimages to Malta and Egypt, and in 2005 they visited sacred sites in Ireland. If, as MacCannell says, the tourist is “really an early postmodern figure, alienated but seeking fulfillment in his own alienation— nomadic, placeless, a kind of subjectivity without spirit” who “collects experiences of difference” (1999: xvi, xxi), I would suggest that the Goddess pilgrim is similarly a postmodern figure, alienated from many of modern society’s values; collecting a plethora of female deities, myths, rituals and sacred sites from the world’s religious traditions; a kind of subjectivity with an abundance (rather than absence) of spirit. One New Zealand participant in the Goddess movement I interviewed said quite explicitly that she sees the movement “as very much part of the postmodern age.” I have previously described the Goddess movement as a “designer religion” because of the tendency of participants to collect, adapt and creatively reassemble an eclectic mix of religious elements from many different living and ancient traditions (Rountree 2004: 121). Sharing the middle-class tourist’s attraction to ‘heritage,’ Goddess pilgrims are part of what Edgar (1987, cited in Urry 1990: 93–103) terms “the era of pastiche and nostalgia.” However, I do not think that Goddess pilgrims can be described accurately as “post-tourists”—those who acknowledge the “staged authenticity” (MacCannell 1999: 91–107) of many ‘traditional’ tourist attractions but delight in them nonetheless, knowing that “there is no authentic tourist experience” (Urry 1995: 140). The devotees of Goddess spirituality may readily admit that their modern Paganism involves much borrowing and pastiche, but they are deeply serious about their belief in the sacred energy connected with and emanating from ancient Pagan temple sites, and equally serious about their experiences of this energy. The contemporary tourist and the Goddess pilgrim both inherit an increasingly globalized world where, David Lowenthal argues (1997: 228), cultural resources are considered part of the universal human heritage: “Remains of ancient Egypt and China, relics of Greece and Rome, echoes of Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment, and the rich diversities of a thousand tribal traditions embellish and
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animate the whole world.” Participants in the Goddess movement heartily agree. I have discussed with some of them Tanya Luhrmann’s charge that the movement “poach[es] from the past in the interests of the present and plunder[s] the world’s mythology for [its] symbolic goods” (1989: 244). They have replied that they recognize a universal wisdom and value in a great diversity of spiritual traditions that offer insights and benefits desperately needed by today’s world beyond the confines of their cultures of origin. In these women’s view, religions are bigger than cultures and are not the property of specific cultures. Answering the accusation that they could be seen as appropriating other cultures’ religious traditions and sacred sites, even as perpetuating a colonialist or imperialist impulse (cf. Nash 1989), women have stressed that they treat sacred sites with reverence and indigenous societies with respect, and are deeply concerned about the sites’ preservation, indeed sometimes more concerned than the host communities themselves.10 They would see themselves as learning respectfully, rather than poaching, from other cultures. Starhawk, an author well known in the Goddess movement and among contemporary Witches and Pagans internationally, has stressed the responsibilities that accompany such learning from indigenous cultures: [A]ny real spiritual power we gain from any tradition carries with it responsibility. If we learn from African drum rhythms or the Lakota sweat lodge, we have incurred an obligation to not romanticize the people we have learned from but to participate in the very real struggles being waged for liberation, land and cultural survival (1989: 214).
It should be noted, however, that Starhawk and her collective in the San Francisco Bay area are more politically active in a range of
10 An American woman who has been leading Goddess tours to Malta for a number of years set up a Foundation in 1995 to promote education about Malta’s Neolithic heritage and to assist in the temples’ urgently needed preservation. Among its activities, the Foundation has funded a new archaeological laboratory at the University of Malta, lobbied internationally for funds to conserve the temples, organized conferences and tried to mobilize widespread Maltese concern about conserving their Neolithic heritage. Yet a section of the Maltese population has little regard for the temples, and they have been severely vandalized more than once (including the dislodging and smashing of many megaliths in 2001). Such acts have outraged the majority of the population and stirred a campaign to protect and conserve all the temples. Plans for erecting fiberglass tents over Mnajdra and Hagar Qim temples are well underway with completion expected in 2006.
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local and global arenas than are most participants in the Goddess movement.11 Like Graburn’s “ethnic tourists” (1989: 31), Goddess pilgrims are often eager to meet the local people and taste local culture in the places they visit. And like the modern tourist who returns home with an eclectic hoard of souvenirs, the Goddess pilgrim returns with relics of the journey, many of which resemble those in other tourists’ luggage—a camera loaded with photographs, maps and museum tickets, hotel cards and credit card receipts, ethnic arts and crafts. It is not only Goddess pilgrims who purchase a miniature Artemis from a stall outside Ephesus, a plaster ‘Mother Goddess’ in Malta, or an Isis figurine in Luxor.12 While some of these replicas of ancient figurines end up on altars in women’s homes and are used in personal or group rituals, some of them are also displayed decoratively on sideboards and mantelpieces in women’s homes or given away as gifts as they are by other returned tourists. These relics and souvenirs are felt to carry, perhaps even contagiously transmit, some of the charisma or sacred essence of the place visited, and assist tourists or pilgrims to reconstruct their journey in the imagination. Similarly, in a kind of exchange, pilgrims or tourists frequently leave something at the site, symbolically conveying the message ‘I was here.’ They may inscribe their presence on the site by having their picture taken there, writing their name in the visitors’ book or carving it on a rock, leaving an offering of flowers or creating a small cairn or shrine.13 Some sites become the recipients of eclectic offerings made by Christian pilgrims, Goddess pilgrims, and by tourists alert to the ‘historically significant’. After visiting a holy well in northwest
11 Cf. Rountree (2001) for further discussion about appropriation in relation to the Goddess movement; cf. Starhawk (1988) for a discussion of how modern Witches, Pagans and women in the Goddess movement may become involved in assisting the political struggles of contemporary indigenous cultures whose religious traditions have been “learned from.” 12 Interestingly, replica statues of Artemis at Ephesus were diffused throughout the Graeco-Roman world, enabling her devotees to relate to the original statue at Ephesus (Coleman and Elsner 1995: 33). My tour guide at Ephesus told me that during the Roman period these ‘souvenirs’ could be purchased from shops lining the street leading to the site in the same manner as shops leading to the site today sell plaster or marble-dust replicas (cf. the New Testament book of Acts 19: 24–28). 13 In a discussion I had with a class of anthropology students in New Zealand, several felt that imprinting one’s identity on a landscape in these ways could be construed as a form of appropriation. To imprint it permanently, for example by carving it in stone or on a tree, is obviously vandalism.
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Ireland, the birthplace of St Columba and a site sacred in preChristian times, one tourist-Goddess pilgrim wrote of her surprise upon entering the ruined chapel beside the well: I walked through the crumbling doorway, and saw the old stone altar. My first feeling was puzzlement, for the altar was covered with objects. I walked closer. There were myriads of things: biros [pens], withered flowers, fresh flowers, plastic rosaries, felt-tip pens, spectacles, medallions, a small tin of “vaseline for chapped lips.” I was moved to the depths. These things were mostly the contents of people’s pockets, left there spontaneously in a desire to leave something of themselves in a holy place. I felt in my pocket and found a special limpet shell, picked up a few days before in the centre of an Iron Age fort on the Arran Islands. The shell joined the other objects on the altar.14
While this ‘holy well’ evokes quite different associations for different types of visitors (a Christian saint’s birthplace or “a sign of the Goddess emerging from the ground to bless and sustain”),15 visitors share a desire, and are probably motivated by one another’s offerings, to leave something of themselves in the place.16 Cohen has said that the tourist can be distinguished from the pilgrim in that the pilgrim traditionally hopes to experience religious “rapture,” whereas the tourist seeks “mere pleasure and enjoyment” (1992: 53). The modern Goddess pilgrim avidly seeks both spiritual rapture and bodily pleasure. Asceticism and austerity are not ideals that have a place in neo-Pagan religious philosophy where the spirit/body split is meaningless and earthly pleasures are heartily celebrated.17 Here, for example, is what the advertising material on the Internet promises those who join a pilgrimage to Crete with Carol P. Christ, a feminist thealogian (from thea, ‘Goddess’) and prolific inspirational author: Feel Her power in holy mountains sense Her mysteries in the darkness of caves, pour out libations of milk and honey on Minoan altars.
14 See Women’s Spirituality Newsletter, Autumn Equinox 2001 (no. 64), p. 11. This newsletter is the national newsletter for women in the Goddess movement in New Zealand. It frequently contains women’s accounts of sacred travel. 15 Ibid. 16 Eco-tourists position themselves as morally superior to other tourists through their motto: “Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but foot-prints.” 17 Not all traditional pilgrimages called for self-denial and hardship, however. Turner and Turner say that the great medieval pilgrimages in Islam and in Christianity were usually associated with great fairs and fiestas, as they are in Shinto Japan (1978: 36).
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Photo 2.2. Wayside shrine of Black Madonna with offerings of flowers, stones and other objects on pathway beside beach at Positano, Amalfi Coast, Italy. Black Madonnas are currently very popular with both Christian feminist pilgrims and Goddess pilgrims, and whole tours are devoted to visiting Black Madonna shrines. Photo: Kathryn Rountree.
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Contact a sacred energy that will transform the way you feel about women, yourself. Walk on the stones of the ancient sites of Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, Kato Zakros, Archanes, Mochlos, Myrtos, and Kato Symi. Discover the matrifocal subtext of Christianity at Paliani with its sacred myrtle tree, Kera Kardiotissa, and Kritsa. Nourish your soul in the museums of Heraklion, Agios Nicholaos, and Siteia. Descend into the caves of Skoteino, Amnissos, Psychro, and Ida. Hike in the mountains at Zaros, Zakros, Archanes, Psychro, and Ida. Stay in small villages, meet local people, dance to Cretan music, feast on freshly cooked fish, tsatsiki, taramosalata, feta cheese, tiny olives, fried potatoes, local wine . . .18
These pilgrims stay in hotels and travel in an air-conditioned bus between sites (as indeed do many other religious pilgrims these days).19 As well as visits to archaeological sites and museums, the Cretan tour takes in delightful seaside villages, pottery studios, and a good deal of wonderful eating, swimming and local music. The emphasis is on fully experiencing the pleasures of the Cretan environment, on connecting physically with the places sacred to the ancient Minoans and on learning more about their culture. These goals are probably the same for many tourists visiting Crete—at least those interested in culture and history. The Goddess movement is largely a middle-class phenomenon, and Goddess pilgrims, like many middleclass tourists at present, are attracted by the ‘real,’ the ‘natural,’ the ‘traditional,’ and the ‘ancient’—all of which are fixed with a romantic gaze, but one which is also aware that the ‘real,’ the ‘natural,’ and so on are culturally constructed or produced categories (cf. Urry 1990: 93–103). Like middle-class intellectual tourists generally, Goddess pilgrims are inclined to see themselves as educated travelers rather than as mass-tourists. So what is the difference, or is there a difference, between Goddess pilgrims and other tourists? What, fundamentally, is a pilgrimage? One of the women in the Goddess movement whom I asked succinctly defined pilgrimage as “a sacred journey to a sacred place
18 “Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete with Carol Christ,” http://www.goddessariadne.org/goddesspilgrimage.htm (accessed 10 January 2005). 19 I am reminded of my welcome on board the Goddess pilgrimage bus at Ephesus, 21 July 2005, facilitated by Lydia Ruyle. Lydia referred to the bus as “the traveling womb of the Goddess,” and whenever a new woman joined, her name was inserted into a welcome chant sung by all others on the bus.
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with a sacred purpose.” She was thinking of sacred journeys which are explicitly and fundamentally connected with a particular religious tradition, but many sacred journeys are not religious in this strict sense. Morinis has proposed a useful definition broad enough to encompass religious, semi-religious, and secular journeys and to cater for terrestrial, virtual and metaphorical pilgrimages: “the pilgrimage is a journey undertaken by a person in quest of a place or a state that he or she believes to embody a valued ideal” (1992: 4).20 The valued ideal enshrined at the pilgrimage site may be associated with a deity, saint or prophet (as at Mecca, Lourdes, Jerusalem, or Banaras), or the site may embody national, cultural or some other form of collective ideals (for example, Lenin’s tomb, Mao’s Mausoleum, Elvis’s shrine at Graceland, Mt Rushmore, war memorials and important historic sites), or the valued ideal of the quest may be unique to a single individual.21 Of course when within a definition of pilgrimage we include travel to sites that embody cultural and individual ideals, it becomes more difficult to distinguish pilgrimage from tourism, at least for the outside observer. Not every visitor to Lenin’s tomb or Graceland, or even to Lourdes or Mecca, is a pilgrim despite these places’ connection with deeply valued ideals. Some visitors, for example, are sightseers, perhaps interested in witnessing the phenomenon of a site’s magnetism for pilgrims, but not personally vesting sacred value in the site in the way that pilgrims do. I would agree with Morinis that the self-determined identity and motivations of the individual traveler are more important than the destination of the travel. 20 By ‘virtual’ pilgrimage I mean sacred sites that can be visited by accessing Web sites, cf. Chapter 11 in this volume. 21 Campo’s (1998) typology for classifying American domestic pilgrimage landscapes also usefully divides pilgrimages connected with organized religion from pilgrimages connected with cultural and national values and ideals. However I find his employment of the terms “civil religion” and “cultural religion” problematic with respect to the types of pilgrimages he discusses under each of these terms. Campo’s third category, which includes sites connected with “cultural religion” and “implicit religion,” becomes particularly problematic when applied to global pilgrimage sites. Within this category he brackets together visits to international theme parks and celebrity sites; journeys by African, European and Asian Americans to important places in their ancestral homelands; and baby-boomer Americans’ pilgrimages to seek gurus in India or to “gather at ancient monuments like Stonehenge.” In my view these are three quite different kinds of pilgrimage. (I know Goddess pilgrims who would be highly affronted, not to mention astonished, to have their journeys grouped with visits to Disneyland.) It may be that in a discussion of pilgrimage it is unhelpful to distinguish so sharply between organized religion and implicit religion.
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As the woman I quoted at the beginning of this paragraph put it, the pilgrim’s journey is distinguished by its sacred purpose. The valued ideals embodied in ancient pagan temple sites are religious (or spiritual) for the Goddess pilgrims who visit such sites (but not necessarily for other tourists) in the sense that these sites were once designated shrines of deities—deities who are being revived and reinvested with sacred meaning and power by contemporary neoPagans. Thus, making a journey to Delphi or a Maltese Neolithic temple is potentially as much a religious pilgrimage as traveling to Jerusalem, Rome or Mecca. The valued ideals vested in Goddess pilgrimage sites are also cultural, because they pertain to a subgroup within contemporary Western feminism and have symbolic value within that subculture. These same sites may embody other valued cultural ideals for travelers normally classed as ‘tourists’—the Parthenon and Ephesus, for example, may be valued as magnificent achievements in the early history of Western civilization and evoke in some Western tourists awe, admiration and pride. Such visitors to these places could thus be seen as secular pilgrims. The difficult, often impossible (and perhaps pointless), line to draw is between secular pilgrims and ‘mere’ tourists. How does one identify the ‘sacred purpose’ of the secular pilgrim, or the line between passionate curiosity and devotion? It should also be noted that a traveler may shift between different modes of travel in the course of a particular journey, for example, from pilgrim to tourist or holiday maker to business person. Embodying the Sacred According to Morinis (1992: 5), in cases where the “valued ideals” embodied in the pilgrimage site are religious, the sacred site is “where the divine issues forth into the human realm. The shrine is a rupture in the ordinary domain,” through which the divine penetrates. For Goddess pilgrims this rupture is twofold: there is a breach, or bleeding, between the sacred and profane realms, and between past and present worlds.22 Visiting an ancient pagan temple or stone circle 22
After reading a draft of this chapter, Wendy Griffin astutely pointed out that “rupture,” “issues forth,” “penetrates,” and “breach” could be construed as invoking masculinist imagery, and that “bleeding” might be a more appropriate term to use in this instance.
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involves, in some sense, not only a journey to a distant place, but also, in the wishful imagination, a journey to a distant time, albeit for a short period. The site provides the constant, material link between the past and present worlds. Nostalgia for a society which is different from the one in which they habitually live infuses Goddess pilgrims’ accounts of visiting the ancient sites. This is not to say that women yearn to turn back the clock several millennia permanently, advocate de-evolutionary cultural change, or idealize everything about ancient societies. They would not, for instance, wish to embrace Stone Age technology, carry out animal sacrifices, or endure high infant mortality rates; nor do they imagine that Goddess-worshipping societies were free of injustice or cruelty. They do believe, however, that the past offers different models for more balanced gender relations and for a more sustainable relationship between humanity and the earth (Eisler 1988).23 Scholarly definitions of pilgrimage have emphasized the importance of the imagination and of ritualization in conjunction with the journey to the sacred place (Campo 1998: 41–42). Some of the rituals the women do at Goddess sites—like pouring libations of milk and honey on ancient altars, meditating, praying, chanting and dancing—are creative and determined attempts to forge or invoke a connection with the original Pagan communities, to claim a longed for heritage, to emphasize and embody a shared Pagan identity.24 Through their bodily presence and ritual enactment in the place women assert the ancestral roots of their modern Paganism. In his discussion of contemporary Pagan pilgrimages, Michael York (2002: 151) also emphasizes the modern Pagan’s quest for identity and inspiration. The journey to a shrine or sacred place in the hope of obtaining healing is found in all religious traditions, although it is not necessarily
23
There are many who would disagree that these were characteristics of ancient ‘pagan’ societies, arguing that women in the Goddess movement are quite wrong to reconstruct these societies in utopian terms. Cynthia Eller (2000), for example, takes this view. Her book sparked a new round of stormy debate between scholars from various disciplines and Pagans (including Pagan scholars) on so-called ‘Golden Age’ theories about the past. I do not wish to enter the fray of this complex question here (although I have elsewhere, see Rountree 1999a, 2001, 2004), as I am concerned in this chapter with Goddess pilgrims’ realities as they experience them, and with the implications of these realities in women’s lives, rather than with the ‘truth’, legitimacy or otherwise of their beliefs. 24 Similarly, “ancient pilgrimage not only celebrated identity, but did so by linking it with a special place” (Coleman and Elsner 1995: 15).
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Photo 2.3. Goddess pilgrim praying at main altar in Mnajdra Neolithic temple, Malta. Photo: Julia West.
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a feature, or the most important feature, of all pilgrims’ journeys (Morinis 1992: 11). Victor Turner says that a pilgrimage center, for the believing actor, represents a “threshold,” a liminal place and moment “in and out of time,” where the pilgrim directly experiences the sacred through miraculous healing or transformation (1973: 214).25 Such healing and transformation, along with a renewed feminist political consciousness, are frequently the ‘valued ideals’ embodied in the sites Goddess pilgrims visit. A feminist project involving healing emerges strongly in Carol Christ’s explanation of the purpose of her Cretan tour: In traveling to Crete, we seek to connect to ancient women, to a time and place where women were at home in their bodies, honored and revered, subordinate to none. We seek knowledge of a time when women and men came together freely without specters of domination and control, self-loathing and shame, that have marred the relation of the sexes for thousands of years. We have found that the ancient stones speak. Descending into caves we feel grounded in Mother Earth and in the sure knowledge of the power of our female bodies. We seek to heal the wounds of patriarchy, violence and war. We hope to participate in the creation of ecologically balanced, peaceful cultures in which every woman and man, every creature and every living thing is respected and revered for its unique contribution to the web of life.26
A skeptic might ask how making a pilgrimage to ancient sites in the Mediterranean is going to revolutionize gender relations ‘back home’ in the United States. Part of the answer must include the fact that when these women are not making pilgrimages to Goddess sites, they are little different from other middle-class feminist women insofar as in their regular work and living they have the achievement of an equitable society and a sustainable world among their life goals. Christ herself has long been a politically outspoken thealogian and a passionate activist both for the women’s movement and for ecological causes. (It should also be noted that not all Goddess pilgrims travel on package tours or in relative luxury. The New Zealand friend whose letter I quoted at the beginning of this chapter travels very modestly using local transport and on foot, sometimes well off the beaten tourist track.) 25 Turner and Turner (1978: 253–54) use the term “liminoid” to distinguish the pilgrim’s voluntary journey from the neophyte’s involuntary liminality experienced during a rite of passage. 26 See Carol Christ’s writing about the Goddess, Greece and her life at http:// www.goddessariadne.org/carolwords.htm (accessed 10 January 2005).
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The answer Goddess pilgrims would give to the question about how traveling to sacred sites helps “heal the wounds of patriarchy” seems implicit in the above quotation from Christ. Women seem to feel that they experience “the wounds of patriarchy” personally and physically: “domination and control, self-loathing and shame” are felt in a strongly embodied sense. Self-healing of these wounds needs to precede, or be a basic component of, the healing of society. Visiting sacred Goddess sites also charges pilgrims with fresh energy, insight and commitment. The quotation contains a series of elisions: of time and place, of ancient and modern women, of women’s bodies and the earth’s body, of nostalgia and healing. These elisions hold the key to how healing is believed to occur. The sacred place gives access to a sacred time, which is also a timeless time apart, a place where time stands still, an otherworld. The gap between past and present is collapsed; the intervening period disappears. Within Cretan caves (for example), the woman’s body is enveloped by the earth’s body; while there, women imaginatively align their identity with those whom they believe inhabited a time before patriarchy. In this liminal space, the womb of Mother Earth pregnant with potentiality, nostalgia and healing powerfully merge. Here nostalgia is not passive sentimentality; rather, it becomes the agent of healing. ‘Remembering’ becomes a re-membering; healing is a rebirth. Goddess pilgrims believe in the earth’s power to heal body, mind and spirit to create an uninterrupted and whole self. By making the journey to the sacred place and by consciously engaging bodily with it, women enact self-healing. This is achieved more powerfully by their performance of symbolic acts and by conducting healing and celebratory rituals in the place. Here we can identify the process Turner described when drawing a parallel between pilgrimage and rites of passage: “an actor-pilgrim is confronted by sequences of sacred objects and participates in symbolic activities which [she] believes are efficacious in changing [her] inner and, sometimes, hopefully, outer condition from sin to grace, or sickness to health” (1973: 214). Further, “the health and integrality of the individual is indissoluble from the peace and harmony of the community” (Turner 1973: 218): thus the connection is made between the Goddess pilgrimage and the feminist goal of transforming patriarchal society. Having experienced personal healing and transformation, the woman feels she can work more effectively with renewed inspiration and vigor for various feminist goals.
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In some respects, Goddess pilgrims’ ideas about embodiment and healing may be compared with Catholics’ beliefs about and practices during Holy Week. In this instance, a sacred time (the annual commemoration of Christ’s passion) rather than a sacred place becomes the crucial hinge connecting past and present, Christ and his followers, penance and redemption. During Holy Week devout Catholics try to experience imaginatively the wounds of Christ, keeping alive an image of the crucifixion by meditation and symbolic activity, believing this will have personal spiritual benefits, as well as contribute to the healing and redemption of society in general. The wounds of Christ are felt in a personal and strongly embodied sense, especially by those who self-impose pain and hardship in order to share Christ’s suffering more fully.27 The point of comparing Goddess pilgrimages with Holy Week ritual activity is that in both cases the ritual actors are seeking to make a connection with a pivotal moment in the history of their respective religious traditions through a powerful embodied experience. They perform symbolic acts that they believe will heal them spiritually, and make a connection between personal healing and the healing of society in general. In both cases the key to the logic and effectiveness of ritual behavior is faith in a series of imagined connections. Let us look at some further examples of how the religious meaning and significance of visiting sacred sites is felt and expressed as a transformative bodily experience by Goddess pilgrims. A woman who leads Goddess tours to Malta described to me in an email her experience of being in the Hypogeum, a remarkable subterranean Neolithic temple at Hal Saflieni in Malta (where I met her), in the following way: I felt moved beyond words and I felt immense gratitude for having the opportunity to be there. The power of the Hypogeum to heal and transform felt very alive even in these modern times. I experienced the energy there as a profound kindness that opened my heart and flooded me with a sense of being held, loved, forgiven, empowered. I left with a joyful heart and a feeling of deep longing for what I know we have lost in this modern culture.
Like the Cretan caves described by Carol Christ, this underground Maltese temple induces in my correspondent a sense of being in a 27 A particularly dramatic and extreme example of this is found in the Philippines where some individuals have themselves nailed to crosses on Good Friday.
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liminal otherworld connected to another time; the “energy” in the place is still “very alive,” its potency undiminished. The embodied experience of being healed includes physical sensations (for example, an energy opening the heart) and strongly felt emotions (love, joy, longing). While the healing received is spiritual, it is felt strongly in the body. The Internet advertising for one of this woman’s Goddess tours to Malta refers to the ecstasy women experience when their bodies come into intimate contact with ancient temple sites that are “charged with sacred energies”: Experience the sacred healing energy of the world’s oldest Goddess temples through chant, song, dance, ritual and archaeological study . . . The peaceful, artistic and matrifocal people of ancient Malta left us their temples and symbolic language and still today they feel charged with the sacred energies of regeneration, transformation and healing. Journeying to Malta with other women provides an opportunity to encounter these sacred mysteries and reconnect with our matrifocal roots. We will circle together as women have for millennia to experience ecstasy and strengthen our visions for personal transformation and planetary harmony and healing.28
Another Goddess pilgrim to Malta wrote thus about visiting the National Museum of Archaeology and seeing the full-bodied Goddess statues, and then visiting the temple of Hagar Qim from which the statues were removed: I tried to imagine what meaning they might have carried in their own time, but faced with these extraordinary fat figures I found myself unable to be objective at all. They simply delighted me. Their size moved me. They filled me with a joy in the beauty of my own body that I have never felt before. I am not a very large woman, nevertheless, the issue of fat has negatively affected my image of myself. Most of my American sisters have suffered from the same anxiety. What I experienced in front of the glass case in that dusky museum was an epiphany: the Goddess revealed to me in my own body. Visiting Hagar Qim, I needed nothing more than the present. I did not see the temples as remnants or ruins from the past but as contemporary sacred space. I lay down against the curved wall, fitted my body within their warm contours, and felt utterly connected to the past, present and future in the great cycle of being.29 28
See http://edgeofwonder.com/malta.html (accessed 22 April 2002). Published in The Beltane Papers: A Journal of Women’s Mysteries, 13, 1997, pp. 11–12. 29
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The second paragraph of this account again demonstrates how Goddess pilgrims collapse past and present (and future) time while at the pilgrimage site. As well as releasing them from the strictures of chronological time, the sacred site, whether a museum, temple or cave, provides the pilgrims with a context in which the feminine, particularly the female body, can be re-imagined (as sacred and worthy of reverence whatever its dimensions) and re-experienced through ritual and symbolic activity. The woman quoted above experienced feelings in Malta’s Museum of Archaeology similar to those my friend felt in the Anatolian Civilization Museum in Turkey when confronted with the “round bodies—big breasts, bellies and buttocks” of the Anatolian figurines. Exposure to representations of the divine female body as a large, solid, fat form—contrasting radically with the thin female body worshipped in their own societies—enabled both women to re-evaluate the feminine and re-value themselves. In the quotation above the woman’s objective gaze gave way to a series of emotions felt in her body: she was “delighted,” “moved,” “filled with joy.” She experienced an epiphany, seeing/feeling her own body as divine, herself as Goddess. Following this epiphany, she visited a temple site and performed a symbolic act whose effect was to inscribe on her body the revelation she had experienced in the museum. This action enables us to observe the intersubjective relations between pilgrim and sacred site. The contours of Hagar Qim temple, and indeed of all the Neolithic temples in Malta, echo the rounded contours of the Neolithic Goddess statues. Entering the temple one symbolically enters the body of the Goddess. By lying down and curving her body into the curved limestone walls of the temple in which the “fat” statues had once stood, the woman maps the Goddess’s body onto her own and further embodies her self-recognition as Goddess. She turns her body into a living souvenir of the place and her experience of it. Having intellectually embraced the awareness of “the Goddess revealed to me in my own body,” she positions her body in the temple wall’s embrace and symbolically embraces herself. In this position her body also imitates the embryonic state, metaphorically expressing the liminality of the moment. Such bodily re-inscription might be seen as healing the “wounds of patriarchy” inflicted by the imperative that an acceptable woman is a thin (and preferably youthful) woman. In Butlerian terms, this pilgrim is daring to perform gender differently,
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at least at the symbolic level.30 Through encountering the materiality of the site the woman encounters her own materiality in a new way and with renewed intensity.31 By curving her body against the temple wall, she seems to express her desire to share the site’s materiality, or at least get as close as possible to it. The material surfaces of human and site touch intimately; the borders of the human body and the sacred site are perfectly aligned. A woman in the Goddess movement with whom I discussed this symbolic act explained that ritual activity is like a language; it gives concrete form to ideas, intentions and desires, and enables what is apprehended intellectually to be fully integrated into one’s whole (embodied) self. However, the body is not purely the instrument of the mind; sometimes through the process of enacting a ritual a cognitive understanding follows rather than precedes the act. When she ‘intuitively’ chooses symbols and carries out a symbolic act ‘without knowing why,’ the woman is ‘tapping into her unconscious’; rational insight or enlightenment comes as a result of the bodily act. Communitas and ‘Authenticity’ We have seen that nostalgia and a desire for personal and planetary healing are repeated themes in Goddess pilgrims’ accounts of their journeys. Also commonly emphasized is the connection women experience with their fellow pilgrims through traveling, singing, dancing and performing rituals together at sacred sites. Here is what one American woman, Anita Louise, who visited Çatalhöyük (Turkey) in 1998 with a Goddess tour, wrote about her pleasure at experiencing a pilgrimage site with a group of like-minded women:
30
A thorough exploration of Judith Butler’s ideas in relation to the body as socially created rather than biological, particularly her ideas about gender as performance, is beyond the scope of this chapter. Butler argues that the production of sexual identity occurs through “the reiteration of norms” (1993: 10) and that “normality” is produced and reproduced—as a practice—by repeated ‘appropriate’ performance (1993: 10; cf. 1999). In these terms, it could be argued that Goddess pilgrims are transgressing and rejecting patriarchal norms through their ‘inappropriate’ bodily performances at sacred sites. 31 My thinking here has been influenced by Simone Fullagar (2000). Much of what she writes about the relation of the traveler to nature is also relevant to the relation of traveler to sacred site.
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kathryn rountree The day has finally arrived. Too excited to sleep, I wake before the sun rises on Turkey’s central plateau. We have spent the night in Konya, high in the Taurus mountains, only about an hour’s drive from our destination, Çatalhöyük, site of the largest Neolithic city archaeologists have yet discovered. I’ve looked forward to this day since I first came across Marija Gimbutas’ illustrations of this site in her beautiful book, The Civilization of the Goddess. The wall paintings, the horned skulls, and the clay figure of the Mother Goddess, enthroned between two felines, captured my intense interest and became dominant themes in my art. Today, the pilgrimage I’ve dreamed of for ten years becomes a reality. I will stand before the unearthed dwellings that were home to the artists whose works still speak magic, even after seven thousand years. On the way to the site, we park and walk down a path between two fields—cut grain on our left, tall sunflowers on our right. Joining hands in a circle, we give thanks to the Mother for the bounty of the Earth and the beauty of this day.32
The performance of circle or spiral dancing, group meditation and other rituals in sacred places are frequently a part of Goddess tours. Turner would describe the feelings generated by such rituals as the communitas which pilgrims, as liminoid beings similar to neophytes in rites of passage, experience. Released from the mundane structure of everyday life and traveling “from a mundane center to a sacred periphery which suddenly, transiently, becomes central” for them, Goddess pilgrims experience intense bonding similar to those who undergo initiation rituals together (Turner and Turner 1978: 34). They also journey toward “a sacred source of communitas, which is seen as a source of healing and renewal . . . [where] the health and integrality of the individual is indissoluble from the peace and harmony of the community” (Turner 1973: 217–18). As we have seen, however, the communitas women seek is not only with others on their tour. They also pursue a spiritual bond with women of bygone ages, seen in such statements (quoted above) as: “We will circle together as women [in Malta] have for millennia to experience ecstasy,” and “In traveling to Crete, we seek to connect to ancient women.” For the Goddess pilgrim, the experience of communitas feeds and enhances her spiritual and feminist political iden-
32 “Journey into the Past: Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic city in Anatolia (Western Turkey),” http://ww.wordweb.org/sacredjo/index.html (accessed it 31 July 2001). (This site is no longer functioning.)
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tity and her sense of oneness with women across temporal and cultural boundaries. While the social aspect of the pilgrimage process is very important for Goddess pilgrims, probably more important is a woman’s own intimate encounter with the sacred and her personal spiritual needs and insights in relation to the site. This is more obviously so for women who travel on their own to these places, rather than on a package tour. Upon their return, as we have seen, Goddess pilgrims recount deeply emotional experiences in temples once dedicated to ancient Goddesses. Their desire to make such pilgrimages seems to be motivated by a huge nostalgia for what they believe they have lost in modern industrialized society: the ‘primitive,’ the ‘natural’, and a high social value placed on women. Visiting ancient holy places is an attempt to satisfy a nostalgic desire for solidity, simplicity, connection with the earth, an ancient spiritual heritage, all of which are felt to have been lost within contemporary Western societies. If the tourist can be seen “as a contemporary pilgrim fleeing the superficiality, instability, and inauthenticity of modern society in quest of ‘authenticity’” (Boissevain 1996: 2, summarizing MacCannell 1976), this is much more true of tourists who are part of the Goddess movement. Similarly more true is Greenwood’s claim that for middle-class tourists, the “thirst for cultural authenticity” is “a recognition of the supposed cultural impoverishment that has accompanied economic success and world domination” (1989: 184). The reasons Lowenthal gives for the burgeoning growth of the heritage crusade also apply to the Goddess pilgrims: a sense of isolation and dislocation along with dismay at the pace of technological change and the loss and neglect of natural landscapes (1997: 6). Geertz (1972: 26) and Turner and Turner (1978: 38) have respectively described modern pilgrimage as a “ ‘metasocial commentary’ on the troubles of this epoch” and as a “search for the roots of ancient, almost vanishing virtues.” This is a fitting description of Goddess pilgrimages, which in this regard constitute both a pre-modern and a postmodern phenomenon. The Overlap of Goddess Pilgrimage and Orthodox Religious Pilgrimages My analysis of the Goddess pilgrimage clearly fits very much within the formulation of pilgrimage proposed by Turner: it is a liminal
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phenomenon and anti-structural insofar as it provides contexts which represent for pilgrims places apart from the dominant patriarchal structures of their societies where they experience communitas with sister pilgrims and, imaginatively, with those whom they regard as their spiritual forebears. I would argue that the Goddess pilgrimage is even more radically anti-structural than Turner envisaged, in that pilgrims do not seek merely a short-term release from the constraints of the normative social order and mundane daily routine. Ultimately their political goal is the permanent transformation of the dominant patriarchal social order. Like all religious pilgrimages, the Goddess pilgrimage is made for the purpose of devotion, but it is also at some level a feminist liberatory project and protest. I would certainly not want to suggest, however, that all pilgrimages fit Turner’s formulation. His model has been shown not to work in a number of settings (Morinis 1984; Pfaffenberger 1979; Sallnow 1981, 1987). A common theme among those critiquing Turner is that pilgrimage is not anti-structural, but rather serves to reinforce social boundaries and distinctions. In his research on the role of lay helpers at Lourdes, for example, Eade (1992) found that the helpers were required to implement official discourse and practices and to encourage “correct” behavior at all times: structure won out over communitas. I would agree with Eade and Sallnow (1991: 5) that what Turner has to say about pilgrimage “could be seen as representative of a particular discourse about pilgrimage rather than as an empirical description of it, one which might well co-exist or compete with alternative discourses.” Quests for places or states which embody valued ideals encompass many diverse types of pilgrimage, religious and secular; it would be naive to expect a single theoretical model to account for them all. We have seen that Goddess pilgrims share important characteristics particularly with tourists interested in culture and history. Their journeys also have features in common, as well as some that contrast, with other religious and semi-religious pilgrimages. For Goddess pilgrims, as for other religious pilgrims, making a sacred journey to a place regarded as a spiritual ‘home’ and conducting devotional rituals in that place is a way of performing their religious identity. In the case of Goddess pilgrims, this journey is a way of enacting their membership of a religious community which existed in antiquity
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rather than in the present. Like some other religious pilgrimages ( Jewish, Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, for example), Goddess pilgrimages may be tied to certain ‘holy days,’ annual calendrical celebrations, or rites of passage in an individual’s life: Goddess tours are often planned to coincide with Equinox or Solstice dates. However, Goddess pilgrimages are never undertaken out of a sense of duty or obligation as a number of orthodox religious pilgrimages are (most famously the Hajj for Muslims), and modern Pagans accumulate no social or religious merit by making pilgrimages in the way that Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim pilgrims may. The explicit quest for healing at a sacred site has already been discussed. For Goddess pilgrims, as for orthodox religious pilgrims, the sacred place is a place of power that can work upon the pilgrims at various levels of their being. According to Eade and Sallnow (1991: 24), the dominant motive for going on a pilgrimage is usually “to request some favor of God or the shrine divinity in return for simply having made the journey or for engaging in ancillary devotional exercises.” This kind of ‘market ideology’, whereby physical suffering and penance are exchanged for material or spiritual favors, where devotion is exchanged for the removal of sin, has no counterpart in contemporary Pagan thinking. Any healing or transformation sought by a Goddess pilgrim is not thought of as being part of a deal with a divinity. Sometimes women pray for healing at the site but often when Goddess pilgrims speak of communing with the sacred they use terms which emphasize bodily experience: “connect with,” “contact,” “feel,” “sense,” “experience.” Healing and transformation flow directly from the sacred energy intrinsic to the site; the earth’s body is the Goddess’s healing body. Orthodox religious pilgrims also seek a direct experience of the sacred at the pilgrimage site, a spiritual experience that is felt strongly in the body. But Goddess pilgrims see bodily experience as an end in itself and unashamedly celebrate bodily pleasure; thus they differ fundamentally from orthodox religious pilgrims. This difference grows out of a central difference between traditional religions and Goddess religion. The latter, with its turn away from traditional beliefs and emphasis on the autonomous, expressive self, fits within Heelas’s category of “detraditionalized spiritualities of life” (Woodhead and Heelas 2000: 368). In spiritualities of life authority is taken to lie within
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rather than without, the divine is immanent, and healing and transformation occur through individuals working with ritual and meditation. Conclusion In many respects, women belonging to the Goddess movement who journey to sacred sites are both pilgrims and tourists, particularly sharing many characteristics with other middle-class tourists. Like the museum-visiting tourist, Goddess pilgrims “play an active part in recreating the story [of a sacred site] as they proceed through its topography” (Coleman and Elsner 1995: 217). A sacred site is always in the process of being written and re-written in the light of contemporary insights, beliefs and agendas, but its sacred essence remains unchanged. The Goddess pilgrim’s story about a site is often a consciously selective and romanticized account emphasizing female divinities and the matrifocal nature of an ancient culture. Goddess pilgrims are not blind to the realities (as far as they can be known) of past cultures, however, and their nostalgia is not backward-looking for its own sake, but is part of a contemporary political consciousness which desires to continue transforming their patriarchal societies. As well as experiencing a strong connection and communitas with other women sharing their journey, Goddess pilgrims feel, or try very hard to feel, a strongly embodied connection with the sacred landscape and with the ancient communities who once inhabited it. The sacred site is not simply an object of aesthetic appreciation: Goddess pilgrims are not mere sightseers. They experience a site at a multi-sensory level, intimately encountering the site’s materiality with their own bodies. Just as ancient pilgrims celebrated their identity and linked it with a special place, seeing the pilgrimage as “a potent symbol for the inner spiritual journey to one’s authentic home” (Coleman and Elsner 1995: 15), modern Goddess pilgrims frequently describe their journeys to exotic, distant locations as “coming home to matrifocal roots.” The pilgrimage journey is the umbilical cord that connects them with a sacred place, and making the journey is a means of bodily enacting their spiritual identity. Through performing rituals at sacred sites, rituals that are sometimes imagined to resemble those performed in antiquity, Goddess pilgrims do their best to perform their Pagan identity. Through these rituals they also experience their female bodies as sacred, themselves as divine. In
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these ways, and because of the explicitly stated spiritual purpose of their journeys, Goddess pilgrims are obviously different from other tourists. In these ways also they share much with pilgrims from a great many other religious traditions.33 References Allcock, John B. 1988. “Tourism as a Sacred Journey.” Society and Leisure 11: 33–48. Badone, Ellen and Sharon R. Roseman, eds. 2004. Intersecting Journeys. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Boissevain, Jeremy. 1996. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–26 in Coping with Tourists, edited by Jeremy Boissevain. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Bowman, Marion. 1993. “Drawn to Glastonbury.” Pp. 29–62 in Pilgrimage in Popular Culture, edited by Ian Reader and Tony Walter. London: Macmillan. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge. ———. 1999. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. Campo, Juan Eduardo. 1998. “American Pilgrimage Landscapes.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 558: 40–56. Cohen, Erik. 1979. “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences.” Sociology 13: 179–201. ———. 1992. “Pilgrimage and Tourism: Convergence and Divergence.” Pp. 47–62 in Sacred Journeys, edited by Alan Morinis. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Coleman, Simon and John Elsner. 1995. Pilgrimage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dahlberg, Andrea. 1991. “The Body as a Principle of Holism: Three Pilgrimages to Lourdes.” Pp. 30–50 in Contesting the Sacred, edited by John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow. London: Routledge. Dubisch, Jill. 1995. In a Different Place. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eade, John. 1992. “Pilgrimage and Tourism at Lourdes, France.” Annals of Tourism Research 19: 18–32. Eade, John and Michael J. Sallnow. 1991. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–29 in Contesting the Sacred, edited by John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow. London: Routledge. Edgar, David. 1987. “The New Nostalgia.” Marxism Today March: 30–35. Eisler, Rianne 1988. The Chalice and the Blade. San Francisco: Harper. Eller, Cynthia 2000. The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory. Boston: Beacon Press. Fullagar, Susan 2000. “Desiring Nature: Identity and Becoming in Narratives of Travel.” Cultural Values 4: 58–76. Geertz, Clifford. 1972. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Daedalus 101: 1–37. Graburn, Nelson H.H. 1983. “The Anthropology of Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 10: 9–34. ———. 1989 [1977]. “Tourism: The Sacred Journey.” Pp. 21–36 in Hosts and Guests, edited by Valene L. Smith. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 33 This chapter is an updated version my article “Goddess Pilgrims as Tourists: Inscribing the Body through Sacred Travel” published in Sociology of Religion 63: 475–96 (2002). The ASR also provided a Ralph A. Gallagher Grant that assisted my travel to its 2001 meeting, where I was first able to present these findings. My colleagues Joe Grixti and Graeme Macrae provided insightful comments on my paper as it developed.
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Greenwood, Davydd J. 1989. “Culture by the Pound: An Anthropological Perspective on Tourism as Cultural Commoditization.” Pp. 171–85 in Hosts and Guests, edited by Valene L. Smith. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Griffin, Wendy. 2000. Daughters of the Goddess. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Horne, Donald. 1984. The Great Museum. London: Pluto Press. Lowenthal, David. 1997. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. London: Viking. Luhrmann, Tanya M. 1989. Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. MacCannell, Dean. 1999 [1976]. The Tourist. Berkeley: University of California Press. Moore, Alexander. 1980. “Walt Disney World: Bounded Ritual Space and the Playful Pilgrimage Center.” Anthropological Quarterly 53: 207–17. Morinis, Alan. 1984. Pilgrimage in the Hindu Tradition. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1992. “Introduction: The Territory of the Anthropology of Pilgrimage.” Pp. 1–28 in Sacred Journeys, edited by Alan Morinis. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Nash, Dennison. 1989 [1977]. “Tourism as a Form of Imperialism.” Pp. 37–52 in Hosts and Guests, edited by V.L. Smith. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1996. Anthropology of Tourism. Oxford: Elsevier Science. Pfaffenberger, Bryan. 1979. “The Kataragama Pilgrimage: Hindu-Buddhist Interaction and its Significance in Sri Lanka’s Polyethic Social System.” Journal of Asian Studies 38: 253–70. Rountree, Kathryn. 1999a. “The Politics of the Goddess: Feminist Spirituality and the Essentialism Debate.” Social Analysis 43: 142–68. ———. 1999b. “Goddesses and Monsters: Contesting Approaches to Malta’s Neolithic Past.” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 9: 204–31. ———. 2001. “The Past is a Foreigners’ Country: Goddess Feminists, Archaeologists, and the Appropriation of Prehistory.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 16: 5–27. ———. 2002. “Re-inventing Malta’s Neolithic Temples: Contemporary Interpretations and Agendas.” History and Anthropology 13: 31–51. ———. 2004. Embracing the Witch and the Goddess. London: Routledge. Sallnow, Michael J. 1981. “Communitas Revisited: The Sociology of Andean Pilgrimage.” Man 16: 163–82. ———. 1987. Pilgrims of the Andes. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Skultans, Vieda, 1987a. “Trance and the Management of Mental Illness among Maharashtrian Families.” Anthropology Today 3: 2–4. ———. 1987b. “The Management of Mental Illness among Maharashtrian Families: A Case-study of a Mahanubhav Healing Temple.” Man 22: 661–79. Starhawk. 1988 [1982]. Dreaming the Dark. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 1989 [1979]. The Spiral Dance. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Swatos, William H., Jr. and Luigi Tomasi, eds. 2002. From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism. Westport, CT: Praeger. Turner, Victor 1973. “The Center Out There: Pilgrim’s Goal.” History of Religions 12: 191–230. Turner, Victor and Edith Turner. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Urry, James 1990. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage. ———. 1995. Consuming Places. London: Routledge. Woodhead, Linda and Paul Heelas. 2000. Religion in Modern Times. Oxford: Blackwell. York, Michael. 2002. “Contemporary Pagan Pilgrimages.” Pp. 136–58 in From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism, edited by William H. Swatos Jr. and Luigi Tomasi. Westport, CT: Praeger.
CHAPTER THREE
THE VIEW FROM THE EDGE: PILGRIMAGE AND TRANSFORMATION Elizabeth Weiss Ozorak To undertake a pilgrimage is to put yourself at risk . . . the risk that you might not return as the same person who set out. The risk that all that you had thought you knew, understood, perhaps carefully constructed in your mind, might be blown apart (Palmer 1997: 8).
Historically, pilgrimage has been used for a variety of purposes, ranging from penance, thanksgiving, and the quest for healing, to the desire for travel and adventure. At least some of these purposes speak to issues of self-transformation—healing, for example—and pilgrimage has become a powerful metaphor for the interior journey of the soul toward God (for example, in Bunyan’s classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress). Pilgrimage is symbolic, in Paul Tillich’s (1958) sense: it participates in the reality toward which it points. The act of physically moving from the mundane world to a holy place, often with some suffering and risk, both embodies and represents spiritual change and growth. It is not surprising that the twentieth century, with its unprecedented emphasis on psychological self-enhancement, has seen a resurgence of pilgrimage. In a similar vein, Lauren Artress (1995: 36) identifies psychological healing as “one of the most pressing issues of our time.” In the last 40 years, existing pilgrimage routes have witnessed a boom in popularity (Elizondo 1996), in some cases with tenfold increases in the numbers of pilgrims who travel them: the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain, for example, has gone from hosting a few thousand pilgrims a year to over 100,000 a year (American Association of Friends of the Road to Santiago). In the same time period, old routes have been rediscovered, and new routes to traditional sites created. These new pilgrim journeys are most often ecumenical in nature and consciously seek to attract a broad range of people with a variety of motives, ranging from spiritual challenge and transformation to making new friends and enjoying the scenery
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(see, for example, the Web pages of Pilgrim Adventure 2005 and Scottish Cross 2005). There are various possible reasons for the general resurgence of pilgrimage at this point in history, in addition to the emphasis on psychological self-enhancement. One is a kind of nostalgia resulting from a disenchantment with the fruits of the current culture (Neitz 2005). Another is the hunger for a sense of efficacy, especially collective efficacy (Bandura 2001). A third could be that mainstream religion increasingly fails to resonate people’s lived experience. Niles Goldstein (2000: 154) writes, “One of the problems with religion today is that our faiths, as well as our clergy, are too protective of us. They try to tame the transcendent . . . And because they have failed to provide us with the sustenance that so many of us now crave, we have been forced to look elsewhere.” But what drives a particular individual to undertake a particular pilgrimage at just this point in time? The pilgrims on these journeys seem to bring a wide range of experiences and motives with them. Although most articulate some reasons that would sound familiar to their predecessors—healing, for example—there are many who undertake the journey in an openended spirit of exploration, often in response to some personal turning point, such as retirement, divorce, ordination, serious illness, or bereavement. These pilgrims, with no family tradition or faith-based requisite, find themselves impelled to go out to some holy place, often for reasons they cannot articulate. It simply feels like the thing to do. “I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but I’ll know when I find it” is a sentiment common to many of these new pilgrims. My observations suggest, and other writers (e.g. Jones 2002) affirm, that many people choose to go on pilgrimage at a time of transition in their lives—they expect to change, or are in the middle of a major change. In the throes of transition or pulled toward them, it is perhaps not surprising that many pilgrims experience noticeable transformations of information processing and, consequently, of selfschema and decision-making. Indeed, many pilgrims intend the experience to change them, albeit in unsuspected ways (Elizondo 1996). Phil Cousineau (1998: 8) writes, “We travel as seekers after answers that we cannot find at home.” Recognizing that, as Alan Morinis (1992) laments, too little attention has been paid to the personal side of pilgrimage, I propose here
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a social-cognitive model for transformation through pilgrimage that fits within the multi-level interdisciplinary paradigm described by Robert Emmons and Raymond Paloutzian (2003), in that it draws extensively not only on my own discipline of psychology but also from other disciplines (notably sociology and anthropology) and offers a variety of possible connections between levels of psychological inquiry. Data collected during four pilgrimages in which I was a participant observer offer support for this model. Cognitive Processes and Transformation The experience [of pilgrimage] sets one’s life in a fresh perspective, of those on the edge, rather than the center. From the edge the world looks different—there is awareness that what is important at the center may appear to be empty at the edge (TW, pilgrim).
This comment is taken from a book of feedback kept by a professional organizer of pilgrimages. In fact, many pilgrims return saying the same thing: I am different. Life seems different. I am making different choices as a result of this experience. Many current books on pilgrimage identify transformation as a natural consequence of the journey (e.g., Cousineau 1998; Jones 2002; Palmer and Palmer 1997; Westwood 1997). The central question is: How does pilgrimage lead to transformation—and, secondarily, do men and women transform differently in the experience of pilgrimage, or are their experiences largely overlapping? As a cognitive psychologist, I understand these questions from the etic perspective of a scholarly discipline. As a pilgrim and practicing Christian, I also understand them from an emic, experiential perspective. To get a flavor of both, it is helpful to set one’s own experiential framework. Even those who have never been on pilgrimage have likely had some experiences with similar qualities—a loss of the familiar, a new and intense social environment, perhaps some physical challenges and perhaps an explicit framing of religious or spiritual values. The experiences of spending a significant amount of time in another culture, especially one with fewer amenities and choices than this one, of back-packing in the wilderness for a couple of weeks, of being ill or injured enough to be confined for a month or more with little contact with the outside world, and of going on
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a lengthy religious retreat—all of these have qualities in common with a pilgrimage journey, though the combination of them in the pilgrimage experience is unique. The cognitive paradigm approaches such experiences from the perspective of information processing, asking what it is about these experiences in terms of perception, memory and meaning that renders them striking and in some way efficacious. Such a paradigm allows us to recognize which qualities of pilgrimage might be found in the other experiences listed above and which are distinctive, as well as the mechanisms through which thinking and related emotion likely change. According to the cognitive paradigm, we are constantly engaged in an active construal of the world, which we call top-down processing. That is to say, we do not absorb ‘what’s out there’ like sponges or record it—albeit inaccurately—like slightly defective video cameras. Instead, driven by a need to make sense of the world, we draw on our own prior experiences, experiences shared by others, and rules of thumb that we have derived or been taught to create models that allow us to interpret that portion of our current environment to which we are able to pay attention. Information is taken in, selectively, through the senses and very briefly occupies sensory memory, which is highly accurate. From there, information moves into short term or working memory, which is less accurate and also has a very limited capacity. To increase efficiency, we use cognitive structures—schemas, scripts, categories and prototypes—to organize information for storage in long-term memory. Partly because the capacity of long-term memory is huge, we rely heavily on structure to store and retrieve information; and while in storage, information continues to be affected by the structures themselves—for example, a remembered conversation will increasingly come to resemble our prototypical script. That is to say, most of the time, our existing meaning systems will determine the interpretation of new information. It takes effortful processing, usually initiated by a series of perceptions that fail to fit the schemas we already have, to reconfigure a meaning system, especially a central one such as religion. How much and how accurately we process information is affected by a wide range of variables, including our age, our level of experience with respect to a given context, our level of arousal and stress, and the consequences of inaccuracy. We process familiar information much less thoroughly than new or unexpected information, and we process everything less thoroughly when we are
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tired or under stress.1 Central meaning systems typically are bolstered by positive affect, and there is emotional as well as cognitive resistance to processing information that is contrary to them, although the cognitive dissonance of ill-fitting perceptions is a great motivator for change. All of these aspects of processing are pertinent to the study of pilgrimage. Crystal Park (2005) and Israela Silberman (2005) argue that religion must be understood first and foremost in terms of its meaningrelated functions. Meaning systems provide motivation, rules for making choices, descriptive beliefs about the world and oneself, and propositions relating all of these. For example, a religious person may desire to be helpful to others and may evaluate opportunities for prosocial behavior with an eye toward being helpful; however, if that person is male and perceives the task at hand as ‘women’s work,’ he may not see it as an opportunity to help, whereas a woman with similar beliefs would (Ozorak 2003). It takes a powerful set of experiences to alter a meaning system. Raymond Paloutzian (2005) identifies three stages of such change: external input that strains current appraisals, followed by an internal change in the meaning system, which then is expressed by altered behavioral outcomes. When the meaning system no longer fits one’s experience, after a period of dissonance and disorientation, schematic accommodation is likely (Ozorak 1997)—that is, not only the content of beliefs changes, but the knowledge structures used to organize them change too. As a result, one’s values and motives might also shift, as the pilgrim quoted earlier suggested. This can involve adopting different values or simply giving existing values a more prominent role in decision-making (Paloutzian 2005). The most radical shift would be a conversion to a new focus of ultimate concern, but that would be rare, and unlikely to occur on a Christian pilgrimage with people who are already at least nominally Christian. A shifting of priorities, however, seems to be a common feature of meaning-system changes, whether religious or not (Miller and C’de Baca 2001). Pilgrimage, insofar as it diverges from the sensory and cognitive environment of daily life, redirects and expands attention and thus influences subsequent perception and memory. In addition, the 1 For a more extensive discussion of cognitive processes as they relate to religion, see Ozorak 2005.
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pilgrimage narrative becomes itself a powerful metaphor both for the group and the individuals in it, leading them to reconstruct their personal narratives in ways that have observable consequences. Of course, substantial shifts in cognition can take place outside of religious or spiritual contexts. It is worth asking whether or not these changes are different within a religious context from those in other contexts. The Pilgrimage Study This study evolved as what Lincoln and Guba (1985) term a “naturalistic inquiry.” I made my first pilgrimage in the summer of 2000, along St. Cuthbert’s Way in southern Scotland and northern England, ending at Lindesfarne or Holy Island, just off the Northumbrian coast. As luck would have it, I kept an extremely detailed journal of my experiences and insights, and also interviewed three fellow pilgrims with whom I found myself traveling; that became a kind of pilot database for this study. Intrigued by the fact that all of us seemed to be in the midst of a major life transition, and that each of us, despite any previous experience or cultural heritage with respect to pilgrimage, had gravitated to this journey seeking some kind of unspecifiable help, I decided to make a more systematic study of contemporary ecumenical pilgrimage. This study has continued to be a combination of what Brown (1999: 396) calls “fieldwork on my own psyche” and participant observation, in the tradition of heuristic research (Moustakas 1994). I chose to focus on ecumenical pilgrimages within the British Isles due to time and language limitations. What is particularly interesting about Britain is that nearly all of the pilgrimage routes and holy sites had fallen into disuse by the twentieth century and that an amazing number of them—dozens at least—have been rediscovered in the past thirty years and are once again popular and lively destinations for religiously motivated travelers ( Jones 2002; Palmer and Palmer 1997)—this, in a culture that is, on the surface at least, almost completely secular (but see, for example, the work of David Hay, e.g., 2001). While there are aspects of this study that reflect the distinctive times and places in which it was carried out, it seems likely that there is a good deal of common ground between the pilgrimages described here and by others, in terms of the transformative
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factors (Barber 1991). Most likely, pilgrimage comprises a ‘fuzzy category’ with members sharing different attributes and with a family resemblance overall (Coleman and Elsner 1995). Between spring of 2003 and summer of 2004 I made three pilgrimages in Britain, one with a mostly English group and two with American groups, and one in Ireland with an English group. I found all four groups via the Internet, and essentially took what was available during the time period of my sabbatical leave. Thus, although I would not argue that these groups represent a random sample, there was no selection bias on my part save that imposed by the time available and the geographical focus of the study. All of these pilgrimages were in rural areas of Britain and Ireland. This is important in two ways. As Rhys Williams (2005: 239) notes in his call for attention to geographical location, “Social life . . . happens somewhere, and the somewhere should seem to matter.” One of my informants, a priest who has made pilgrimages all over the world and authored a book about pilgrimage in Britain ( Jones 2002), affirmed this in his remarks: “Rural Wales is physically beautiful, isolated, poor. Rome is triumphal, patriarchal, urban. Going one place vs. another has a very different impact.” For Americans, as Mary Jo Neitz (2005) suggests, closeness to nature is associated with closeness to God. This strand also runs through British culture, dating back at least to Celtic Christianity (Low 1997) and probably earlier. And, as Neitz also points out, we do not simply respond to a location, we construct it in part based on our cultural myths. One of the American groups consisted of members of a church youth group (five girls and two boys) and their adult chaperones (two men and two women), completing a curriculum called “Journey to Adulthood.” In some ways this group was obviously distinctive. The other three groups were comprised of adults ranging in age from 20 to 85; one of the three groups had a much higher percentage of women than men (18 women, 4 men), and two were fairly evenly divided (13 women and 10 men; 4 women and 5 men). Members of all four groups knew that I was working on a book about pilgrimage and that I was also a practicing Christian making a real pilgrimage. There were times when the two roles came into conflict, and in each of those cases I chose to err on the side of participation in order to be faithful to my self-description—for example, once missing a group meeting where participants shared their motives
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because I had volunteered to look after a late-arriving member of the group. I kept in touch with members and leaders of all four groups and to date have had follow-up conversations with 28 of my fellow pilgrims.2 I kept my own detailed journal for each pilgrimage and also took notes on the observations and insights of other pilgrims, both at the time and during the follow-up conversations. Beyond the public reflections that pilgrims sometimes shared with the group, I honored individual choices to share personal thoughts and feelings with me, or not. In all four groups, the majority did choose to share reflections, but the extent of that sharing varied considerably. These reflections were augmented with the comment book kept by one of the pilgrimage organizers and with published autobiographical accounts of pilgrimage (e.g., Bouldrey 1999; Du Boulay 1995; Goldstein 2000; Lash 1999; Munro 1987). I then looked for patterns of response suggesting a shift of vision or some other cognitive-emotional change. While the pilgrimages varied substantially in how much terrain was covered, how much was done on foot, and the extent of participation in maintenance chores required, all four had certain things in common. These included an emphasis on physicality, relative material simplicity, a slower pace of information, a lack of familiar cues and competing demands, a loss of usual roles and the substitution of a new, intense social network, and an explicitly Christian framework. Each of these pilgrimages involved a physical progression through space. It is my observation that the more direct and physical the progression—for example, moving closer each day to the sacred endpoint and progressing slowly, on foot or in a small boat—the more profound its effects. For many pilgrims, the physical discomfort of strenuous walking and relatively primitive accommodations and the immediate need to address pain—emotional as well as physical— rather than try to ignore it were new experiences. The extent of material simplicity varied substantially between pilgrimages, but even the most posh (hotel accommodations and all 2 I refer to these as follow-up conversations rather than interviews because the latter term suggests a level of formality that turned out not to be practical. I discovered on the first pilgrimage, and again on each of the others, that the role of co-participant creates different expectations than that of researcher, and since I presented myself as a fellow pilgrim who was coincidentally working on a book about pilgrimage, when the two roles came into conflict, I opted to act as a fellow pilgrim.
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meals provided by others) required some doing without—at the least, living out of a suitcase and having many fewer options and luxuries at every point of the day. These relative deprivations were, however, paired with settings of great physical beauty (see Riley 2003). Television, radio and newspapers were largely unavailable; nobody had access to e-mail and cell phones rarely functioned in the remote locations in which we were traveling. All information, therefore, came through the old-fashioned channels of personal observation or by word of mouth, one person at a time. As a result, there was much less competition for cognitive resources; attention could be much less selective than usual. There was less competition for cognitive resources in other ways as well. For many of the pilgrims, home life involved juggling demands of work, family, home upkeep, church and the like. By contrast, even on the most demanding pilgrimage, chores were modest and shared with others. It was never necessary to do more than one thing at a time, and sometimes it was not necessary to do anything at all—a rare commodity at home for most of the pilgrims. At the same time, most pilgrims were challenged to absorb and adapt to new ways of functioning. At least half of the adult participants had never been to the pilgrimage location and knew nobody else, or perhaps just one other person, in the group. The church group all knew each other well, but the locations and expectations were new. Most of the teens had never traveled abroad before. This was both disequilibrating and liberating. In the adult groups, people were often slow to reveal details of their lives ‘back home.’ Some fellow pilgrims were surprised to learn, toward the end of the pilgrimage, that I was a college professor. Leadership in these groups was based on practical considerations and did not reflect any of the usual status markers of occupation, age or gender. Most pilgrims came with the expectation of developing a sense of community. There was little or no getting away from the group, and while most interactions were supportive, it was impossible to avoid those that were not. Experiences such as helping to carry water or wash dishes for the group and sleeping together on the floors of village halls reinforced the sense of ‘being in this together.’ All of this was explicitly framed, on each of the pilgrimages, as an example of the Christian imperative to love one’s neighbor. A pilgrim differs from a tourist in that the former has an inner journey as well as an outer one—a search for the sacred as well as
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for a place (Barber 1991; Jones 2002). All four of these groups conceived their mission in Christian terms. Each group prayed together at least twice a day, and Christian ways of interpreting the journey were consistently offered by leaders and fellow pilgrims alike. For most pilgrims, constant reminders of one’s faith are a departure from everyday life and bring a different set of expectations and values to the fore. These qualities create a kind of setting that is uncommon in daily life but common to retreats of all kinds. That is, sensory experience is uncluttered and action is slowed down. Theologically, Christians view this as ‘emptying the self ’ in order to ‘make room for God’ (Artress 1995; Gallagher 1999). If the setting is unfamiliar, so much the better: there is less likelihood of being misled or blocked by prior expectations. Instead, one remains receptive to new insight. Powerful myth and evocative ritual—in this case, Christian myth and ritual— are used to guide that insight. Sometimes fatigue and physical strain intensify the emotional dimensions of the insight (Miller and C’de Baca 2001). According to Bridges (1980), these characteristics of what he calls “neutral zone experiences” form an ideal environment for personal transformation, and this explains why so many cultures have required such experiences as rites of passage. As previously noted, the early stages of information processing constitute a kind of bottleneck: we simply cannot absorb the amount of information there is, so we attend and remember selectively. Although this is still true on pilgrimage, it was very much less so for most pilgrims than in their lives at home. As a result, processing seemed more thorough and less reliant on habit, displaying what Paul Post (1996: 3) describes as “an emphasis on the elements of surprise which contrast with the daily routines of home.” This resulted in a sense of the freshness of life—of even simple things being observed more keenly than usual. “I am much more aware of the character and movement of the sky, the shades of blue,” one man wrote. “[Also] the texture of the earth, not just if it is harder or easier for walking but its ‘quality.’” The heightened perception may account for the sense many pilgrims report of being out of time as normally experienced—neither rushed nor bored. In most instances the day was structured around traveling from one place to another rather than by a time schedule; one pilgrim deliberately removed his watch in order to create a different sense of time, or what Jaime Vidal (1996) calls a different
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way of measuring distance in relation to time. This different sense of time and distance was most pronounced in the group that walked the most, probably because the pace of walking limits incoming information more than the pace of a motor vehicle. (One pilgrim commented on “the shock of returning from Iona at such speed, with the world flying by too fast to notice”). With less pressure on perception, more should be encoded to memory. In particular, these relaxed sequences of personal experience should generate vivid, lasting episodic memories. Research suggests that we tend to structure our episodic memories in narratives. Our culture provides some guidelines as to the acceptable forms of narrative and we proceed to, in essence, write our own stories as we go along, and rewrite them after the fact to make them more coherent than reality generally is. In particular, we rehearse most those memories that fit with the version of the story as we currently have it and minimize those aspects that fit poorly. If we are operating under a specific framework, that will prime us selectively to attend to and rehearse what fits with that framework. In this instance, the framework was religious, and it was also a story about transformation. Story, H. Richard Niebuhr (1941: 43–81) has argued, is essential to religion. On Christian pilgrimage there are two stories, in a sense—the Christian “master story” (Goldberg, 1991) and the story of pilgrimage and its effects in general. Both are intended to be understood as deeply transformative, both collectively and individually. One of the four pilgrimages occurred during Christian Holy Week, and the liturgies were used to guide pilgrims’ focus to the narrative of crucifixion and resurrection—and, by extension, death of the old self and birth of the new self. The liturgical leaders in all four groups used corporate worship and, in some cases, shared reflection time, to reinforce the sense that we were moving into a deeper relationship with the sacred as we progressed through the journey. Of course, individuals construct their own religious narratives as well. These stories, while intensely personal, still reflect the scripts provided by the faith and by the culture generally (Ganzevoort 1998). There seems to be something valuable about the process of ordering one’s experiences in a coherent order that can be placed in the context of the wider religious narrative. It is not surprising then that the pilgrims’ new perspectives reflected that emphasis. The priest in charge of services for one of the pilgrim
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groups over several years commented that each year, as the pilgrimage week progresses, he is increasingly sought out for rites of reconciliation—not just for ‘sins committed’ but also for people confronting what they now interpret as the meaningless quality of their current life at home. While this might reflect in part people’s need to get their courage up to speak with an unknown priest, he also noted that people spend more time as the week goes on simply sitting in silence with the large wooden cross carried by the group. This is also supported by comments from several pilgrims in each group that they felt the journey helped them get closer to God. Jennifer Westwood (1997) suggests that this increase in companionable aloneness as the focus becomes more tightly pinned on the sacred is typical of pilgrim groups. In the two of the three adult groups about whom I had the most complete information, roughly two-thirds were already in or just about to begin a transitional phase (defined as having a change of marital status, job or other major life commitment during the past year or the following six months, or a major bereavement during the previous year), and the remaining third includes those for whom the information was not available, so it is probably a conservative estimate. Change was thus on the personal as well as the religious agenda, which often takes the form of creating a new personal narrative or re-working an old one (Miller and C’de Baca 2001). “For me this pilgrimage is an ending and a beginning,” one pilgrim wrote, “an ending of so many strands that needed tying together and a beginning of a new pilgrimage following the simplicity of the saints of old.” James Day (1993) and Peter Stromberg (1993) suggest that narratives of change are always performative rather than simply descriptive. Insofar as narratives are performative, they offer consequential opportunities for transformation. Just as the individual who says “I do” in the course of a marriage ceremony emerges as, in some sense, a different person, a religious individual can be changed by assenting to a new narrative. In fact, this seems to occur often in Christian conversions, and the conscious construction of the narrative seems to enhance the result (Liu 1991). Religious knowing that derives from personal experience seems able to transform lives in a way that no amount of doctrine or teaching can do (Watts and Williams 1988), in part because each re-telling of the story is itself a new performance that continues to be shaped.
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Religious communities sometimes support their members in such reconstructive efforts (Mankowski and Thomas 2000). In this case, the pilgrimage group acts as a temporary community—and in some cases, pilgrims do remain in touch after the pilgrimage—so they are able to perform that function. In fact, to the extent that pilgrimage is arduous or creates difficulties for the participants, they are likely to be invested in seeing it as a transformative experience for others as well as themselves; it becomes part of the group’s collective identity. An argument for real transformation, however, needs to rest on data that demonstrate continued difference well after the journey itself is over. One of the few studies on pilgrimage in this respect (Pieper and Van Uden 1994) found that pilgrims’ attributions of cause for events became more religious during and immediately following a pilgrimage to Lourdes, but reverted back to everyday thinking after a period of months. My sense is that attributions of cause are less important indicators than actually making different choices, such as switching jobs or scaling down personal possessions. As one pilgrim wrote, “The pilgrimage . . . is just a start for me in my search for life’s direction . . . I hope to be able to find all the things I found here in my daily life.” A moving testament to change was offered by a man who came back from pilgrimage to deal with his father’s ultimately fatal illness and the aftermath of his death: “Before the glass was always half empty, and now it’s half full . . . Life is such a gift, and I almost missed it. There were all kinds of things that I could never face, and now I can. Standing up there in front of all the family [at the funeral] and telling my daddy’s story—I could not have done that before.” Themes of Change Several themes emerged consistently from the narratives of transformation offered by pilgrims, immediately and months after the pilgrimage. Each of the themes described below was voiced by at least three pilgrims representing at least two different groups, and each is also represented in at least one published autobiographical account of pilgrimage. Because of the nature of the data, it is not possible to compare the relative commonness of the themes, but all appear to be representative beyond the context of any particular group with whom I traveled.
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The juxtaposition of raw natural beauty and unaccustomed physical demands evoked strong emotional responses from many pilgrims (Post, 1996; Riley, 2003). A number of people identified the physical aspects of the experience as distinctively transformative. A man in his sixties who was participating in a cross pilgrimage for the second time remarked that slogging through the mud for a week in the service of something spiritually larger was “the most powerful thing I’d ever done in my life,” and he added, “it gives a whole new meaning to ‘taking up the Cross.’” And whereas many people in their home lives admitted to ignoring pain or fatigue in order to meet existing obligations, on pilgrimage there was often an explicit obligation to attend to difficulties as they arose: bandaging incipient blisters, drinking water to avoid dehydration or having a stronger pilgrim carry another person’s backpack to ensure that both would be able to walk the distance. This resulted in an interesting blend of empowerment and recognition of one’s own vulnerability. Partly as a result of this, many pilgrims experienced personal efficacy issues. People worried about their ability to ‘keep up’ with the group or contribute what was expected. As time went on, however, they gradually became aware of the collective efficacy of the group and experienced that as a relief. In my own journal I wrote: I was extremely anxious about even helping to carry that big heavy wooden cross. It is big and heavy. But I don’t have to carry it all by myself and I don’t have to carry it all the time. This has some obvious implications for daily life, where I certainly have burdens to bear, but often I work myself up to thinking I have to carry them all, all the time, and I don’t.
Collective efficacy is an aspect of community, and the importance of community (as highlighted in the work of Turner and Turner 1978) surfaced over and over. Beyond efficacy issues, this took both the positive form of feeling supported and affirmed by the group ‘for who I really am’ and the negative form of worrying that the group would somehow reject that ‘real’ self. Both sides of the coin are an integral part of the pilgrimage experience, as noted by an experienced pilgrimage leader: “Other people are an important element of [Christian] pilgrimage because we are called to love others as Christ loves us. When you travel together, you bump up against each other, and it can be a challenge to love them” (Sr. Cintra Pemberton, personal communication). Vidal (1996: 45) notes that this
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separation from the normal social environment and immersion in a contrasting one produces a very different way of relating to strangers, a quality Vidal calls “liminal solidarity.” Also, for pilgrims of both sexes, but more commonly for women, community often came to include those not present—either those they were ‘carrying with them in prayer’ or those who had gone before them, especially on that pilgrim route. As one woman put it, “Over the days you come together with fellow pilgrims more easily, like old friends. Whether or not you see them again, they become a part of the communion of saints.” Just as the pilgrims’ social sense shifted, their values seemed to change. People who spend time voluntarily doing without material luxuries in an otherwise pleasant setting (e.g., Lindbergh 1955) often comment on how little they miss their ‘stuff ’ and how it changes their relationship to material goods overall. In the case of Christian pilgrimage, gospel values reinforce this shift in values (e.g., Matthew 6:24–26; Mark 10:23–25). One of the teens commented with surprise that when she came home, she “didn’t care much about [her] stuff ” any more. One woman said flatly, “I came home and got rid of a third of my stuff, and I’ve been much happier ever since.” At the same time, pilgrims commented that they came to realize that there was a spiritual source of joy that had little or nothing to do with the external circumstances of their lives. One described it as a river running through her life, with the challenge being “to keep finding my way back to the riverbank so I can keep sticking my hand in the river.” But finding the way back to the river can be difficult when the seeker is plunged again into busy daily life. Many pilgrims were acutely aware of the disconnection between the pilgrimage and their daily lives, and some worried that they would go back to ‘normal’ too easily: “I’m distressed at how quickly I slip back into the status quo,” one man said. Often they expressed an urge to continue the inner journey long after the outer journey had finished: “I don’t want this to be just two weeks of my life. I want it to go on shaping who I am and how I live;” or, “The pilgrimage is not an end in itself—it is the start of things to come.” As Westwood writes: “It is when you get home, when you come full circle, that you perceive the ‘truth’ of your journey. Though the sacred place is the source of spiritual power, it is at home that the effects of this power on
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you become visible. Your re-entry into everyday life is the test of your pilgrimage” (1997: 182). Westwood delineates three components of pilgrimage experience as it “comes full circle.” First, there has been an awakening, an enlarging of perspective that may be joyous, painful or both. Second, there has been recognition of one’s smallness and weakness in the great scheme of things, a change Westwood refers to as humanizing. At the same time, pilgrimage offers a heroic dimension to life, a sense that there is something one can do, after all. Some pilgrimages are undertaken with this as an explicit goal, such as Fr. Gerard Hughes’s peace pilgrimage from Scotland to Jerusalem (Hughes 1991). As we have seen, Westwood’s dimensions are supported by the reflections of the pilgrims in this study: they experience changes in perception, they wrestle with both their strengths and their limitations, and they return home with renewed vigor and often some changed intentions about their lives. Just as the journey allows the pilgrims to experience on a personal level the mythic-historic basis of their faith that pilgrimage sites are said to embody (Coleman and Elsner 1995), the homecoming allows them to incorporate that mythhistory into their ongoing personal narrative. In this way pilgrims are, in Jason Ramsay’s words, continually “losing [their] role as observer and becoming part of the landscape, part of the story” (Palmer and Palmer 1997: 90)—a story that extends beyond the pilgrimage itself. As with any personal change, the challenge is to maintain the new self in the face of the old cues, including the responses of family, friends or co-workers who may not want the change to occur (Bridges 1980). Does Gender Matter? The themes of change, without exception, arose for both male and female pilgrims. However, for three of these themes—community, efficacy and ongoing transformation—men and women experienced and spoke about them differently. Both men and women recognized the importance of relationships within the group, but it was a source of greater anxiety, on the whole, for women. Men were more apt to comment that they felt somehow more “authentic,” more truly themselves, on pilgrimage,
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and that when they returned home they found that they wanted to hold onto this more honest sense of self. Women were more likely to worry, sometimes intensely, about not fitting in with the group and feeling like “oddballs.” Those who did feel they fit in, however, expressed how much the support of the group meant to them. Personal efficacy concerns also typically took different forms for men and women. When the pilgrimage included strenuous hiking, men were more likely to worry about (and resist) needing help; when it didn’t, they sometimes added in strenuous elements for themselves, including sleeping out on the ground or carrying alone a heavy cross meant to be carried by three people. By contrast, women were often surprised and pleased to discover that they were able to cope with strenuous physical elements better than they expected. On the other hand, women were more likely to take over kitchen duties and refuse men’s help when offered. These match traditional personal efficacy concerns for each gender (e.g., De Vault 1991) and may also reflect men’s need to experience the pilgrimage as a heroic journey (Rohr 1999). If the temptation to take refuge in familiar work operates out on the journey, it is likely to be even stronger at home—along with a host of other time-consuming temptations. As Richard Rohr (1991: 15) says, “Having more options is not necessarily freedom.” While both women and men recognized the uphill battle of reconfiguring their choices in lives that are often over-full, women were more likely than men to identify it as a problem. For many pilgrims, but especially for women in ‘dual shift’ lives, time without competing demands was hard to come by at home, and yet writers on spiritual wholeness agree that time—time that is truly free—is essential (e.g., Chittister, 1991; Muller, 2000). Barber (1991: 155) writes, “Precisely this may be why men and women have felt the need to go on pilgrimage: surrounded by the petty cares of everyday life, it is impossible to hope for miracles or to find spiritual release.” Returning from pilgrimage, I reflected in my journal about the difficulty of living as a free spirit in what now struck me as an unfree life: It’s sort of like walking out of a bar and suddenly realizing that your clothes and hair smell of smoke and you’ve been breathing it in without noticing. Because the troubling aspects of my life are so subtle— I’m clearly a person of enormous privilege as the world goes—they’ve crept in and tied me down without my being aware of it.
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elizabeth weiss ozorak Conclusions
The Christian master story contains an episode in which Jesus, newly baptized, is led (or driven) by the Spirit into the wilderness, where he is tempted by the devil—that is to say, confronted by that which is most personally difficult for him.3 His return from the wilderness marks the beginning of his ministry. It could be said, therefore, that Christian myth-history incorporates a model of pilgrimage as the catalyst for transformation: in the wilderness, away from his usual social roles and habits, Jesus is challenged in ways that authenticate his commitment. His behavior is correspondingly different upon his return. Many of the pilgrims in this study, drawing consciously or not on the script of their master story, would say that the Spirit led them into the wilderness in order to change them, and there is some evidence to support the claim of change, although such changes tend to unfold over time. As one pilgrim said, “I believe it will be years before I can fully process the impact of this time of pilgrimage.” The model of transformation in the wilderness is far from unique to Christianity, however. Jean and Wallace Clift (1996) identify the pilgrimage motif as an archetype, a universal pattern of human experience. Bridges (1980) asserts that some kind of time in what he terms the “neutral zone,” a place away from anything reminiscent of usual daily life, is necessary for transitions to be completed in a healthy way. It is therefore no coincidence that pilgrimage plays a key role in so many wisdom traditions (Coleman and Elsner 1995) or that the literature on pilgrimage asserts its efficacy so widely. Many of the pilgrims in this study affirmed its role in personal change, while recognizing that mainstream American society, with its frantic pace, overload of information and emphasis on what the Christian tradition calls ‘worldly things’ as opposed to ‘things of the Spirit’ makes it challenging indeed to retain those changes. The world does look different from the edge than it does from the center. Many return home hoping to make their center a little more like the edge, believing that, as Westwood (1997: 184) puts it, “The transformation of the world around us will be the result of personal transformation.”4
3
This story is found in all three of the synoptic gospels: Matthew 4:1–11, Mark 1:12–13, and Luke 4:1–13. 4 An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion (ASR), Philadelphia, August 2005. The
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References American Association of Friends of the Road to Santiago. [No date]. http://www.geocities.com/friends_usa_santiago/Information/information.html. Artress, Lauren. 1995. Walking a Sacred Path. New York: Riverhead Books. Bandura, Albert. 2001. “Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective.” Annual Review of Psychology, 52:1–26. Barber, Richard W. 1991. Pilgrimages. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press. Bouldrey, Brian. 1999. Traveling Souls. San Francisco: Whereabouts Press. Bridges, William. 1980. Transitions. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Brown, Karen McCarthy. (1999). “Papa Ogou, Do You Take This Woman?” Pp. 395–401 in Searching For Your Soul, edited by Katherine Kurs. New York: Random House. Bunyan, John. 2000 [1684]. The Pilgrim’s Progress. Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour Publishing. Chittister, Joan. 1991. Wisdom Distilled from the Daily. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Clift, Jean Dalby and Wallace B. Clift. 1996. The Archetype of Pilgrimage. New York: Paulist Press. Coleman, Simon and John Elsner. 1995. Pilgrimage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cousineau, Phil. 1998. The Art of Pilgrimage. Berkeley, CA: Conari Press. Day, James M. 1993. “Speaking of Belief: Language, Performance, and Narrative in the Psychology of Religion.” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 3: 213–29. De Vault, Marjorie. 1991. Feeding the Family. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Du Boulay, Shirley. 1995. The Road to Canterbury. Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishers. Elizondo, Virgil. 1996. “Introduction.” Pp. i–xi in Pilgrimage, edited by Virgil Elizondo and Sean Freyne. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Emmons, Robert A., and Raymond F. Paloutzian. 2003. “The Psychology of Religion.” Annual Review of Psychology 54: 377–402. Gallagher, Winifred. 1999. Working on God. New York: Random House. Ganzevoort, R. Ruard. (1998). “Religious Coping Reconsidered, Part Two: A Narrative Reformulation.” Journal of Psychology and Theology 26: 276–86. Goldberg, Michael. 1991. Jews and Christians. Philadephia: Trinity Press International. Goldstein, Niles. E. 2000. God at the Edge. New York: Random House. Hay, David. 2001. “The Cultural Context of Stage Models of Religious Experience.” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 11: 241–46. Hughes, Gerrard W. 1991. Walk to Jerusalem. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Jones, Andrew. 2002. Every Pilgrim’s Guide to Celtic Britain and Ireland. Liguori, MO: Liguori Press. Lash, Jennifer. 1999. On Pilgrimage. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lincoln, Yvonne S., and Egon G. Guba. 1985. Naturalistic Inquiry. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Lindbergh, Anne Morrow. 1955. Gift from the Sea. New York: Random House. Liu, Christine. 1991. “Becoming a Christian Consciously versus Nonconsciously.” Journal of Psychology and Theology, 19: 364–375. Low, Mary. 1997. Celtic Christianity and Nature. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. author would like to acknowledge the support of this research through a Joseph H. Fichter grant from ASR as well as a research grant from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR), and also the help of Chris Jenkins, S.C.J., in collecting and organizing the data.
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Mankowski, Eric S., and Elizabeth Thomas. 2000. “The Relationship between Personal and Collective Identity: A Narrative Analysis of a Campus Ministry Community.” Journal of Community Psychology 28: 517–28. Miller, William R., and Janet C’de Baca. 2001. Quantum Change. New York: Guilford Press. Morinis, Alan. 1992. “Introduction: The Territory of the Anthropology of Pilgrimage. Pp. 1–28 in Sacred Journeys, edited by Alan Morinis. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Moustakas, Clark. 1994. Phenomenological Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Muller, Wayne. 2000. Sabbath. New York: Bantam. Munro, Eleanor. 1987. On Glory Roads. New York: Thames & Hudson. The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Revised Standard Version). New York: Oxford University Press. Neitz, Mary Jo. 2005. “Reflections on Religion and Place: Rural Churches and American Religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44: 243–47. Niebuhr, H. Richard. 1941. The Meaning of Revelation. New York: Macmillan. Ozorak, Elizabeth Weiss. 1997. “In the Eye of the Beholder: A Social Cognitive Model of Religious Belief. Pp. 194–203 in The Psychology of Religion, edited by Bernard Spilka & Daniel N. McIntosh. Boulder, CO: Westview. ———. 2003. “Love of God and Neighbor: Religion and Volunteer Service among College Students.” Review of Religious Research 44: 285–99. ———. 2005. “Cognitive Approaches to Religion.” Pp. 216–234 in Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, edited by Raymond F. Paloutzian and Crystal L. Park. New York: Guilford Press. Palmer, Martin. (1997). “Foreward.” Pp. 8–9 in Sacred Journeys, edited by Jennifer Westwood. New York: Henry Holt. Palmer, Martin, and Nigel Palmer. 1997. Sacred Britain. London: Piatkus. Paloutzian, Raymond F. 2005. “Religious Conversion and Spiritual Transformation.” Pp. 331–47 in Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, edited by Raymond F. Paloutzian and Crystal L. Park. New York: Guilford Press. Park, Crystal L. 2005. Religion and Meaning. Pp. 295–314 in Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, edited by Raymond F. Paloutzian and Crystal L. Park. New York: Guilford Press. Pieper, Joseph Z.T., and Marinus H.F. Van Uden. 1994. “Lourdes: A Place of Religious Transformations?” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 4: 91–104. Pilgrim Adventure. 2005. http://freespace.virgin.net/pilgrim.adventure. Post, Paul. 1996. “The Modern Pilgrim: A Christian Ritual between Tradition and Post-modernity.” Pp. 2–34 in Pilgrimage, edited by Virgil Elizondo and Sean Freyne. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Riley, Alan. 2003. It Ain’t Heavy. Available at http://www.scottishcross.org.uk/aintheavy.php. Rohr, Richard. 1991. Simplicity. New York: Crossroad Publishing. ———. 1999. Men and Women: The Journey of Spiritual Transformation (sound recording). Cincinnati, OH: St. Anthony Messenger Press. Scottish Cross. 2005. http://www.scottishcross.org.uk/whatis.php. Silberman, Israela. 2005. “Religion as a Meaning System: Implications for the New Millennium.” Journal of Social Issues 61: 641–63. Stromberg, Peter G. 1993. Language and Self-transformation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tillich, Paul. 1957. Dynamics of Faith. New York: HarperCollins. Turner, Victor W., and Edith L.B. Turner. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Vidal, Jaime R. 1996. “Pilgrimage in the Christian tradition.” Pp. 35–45 in Pilgrimage, edited by Virgil Elizondo and Sean Freyne. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Watts, Fraser, and Mark Williams. 1988. The Psychology of Religious Knowing. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Westwood, Jennifer. 1997. Sacred Journeys. New York: Henry Holt. Williams, Rhys H. 2005. “Introduction to a Forum on Religion and Place.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44: 239–42.
CHAPTER FOUR
LABYRINTH AS HETEROTOPIA: THE PILGRIM’S CREATION OF SPACE Lori G. Beaman Although the construction of labyrinths can be traced through at least two millennia prior to the Christian era, their use in spiritual practice had largely disappeared until a dramatic revival in the last quarter of the twentieth century. After an encounter with the labyrinths of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco myself a few years ago, I decided that studying the labyrinth ‘experience’ would add an interesting element to my intellectual life, which was mostly mired in the compelling but sometimes rather dry world of church-and-state issues. I started to talk to people, in tentative terms, about this piece of my program of research. I discovered that some of my close friends had been ‘walking’ in some formal settings in the United Church of Canada; others had discovered labyrinths outside of a faith community and had walked by chance. Sometimes people conflated ‘maze’ and labyrinth, and I found myself buying into the language distinction, correcting them: “No, no, they aren’t the same. Mazes are puzzles, designed to trick, labyrinths are. . . .” Hmm. . . . that part was more difficult. What are labyrinths? I decided to start where I had begun, at Grace Cathedral with Lauren Artress, the head of Veriditas, an international labyrinth organization. The deeper I went into the research, the more I realized that making sense of labyrinths and their participants was going to be a more complicated process than I had first imagined. In June 2004, I traveled to Chartres to attend the labyrinth workshop being led by Lauren Artress. I chose her workshop from the list of possibilities because she is a feminist and has made labyrinths the center of her ministry. Along with about 30 other people I walked the labyrinth in two private sessions, attended small group discussions, and the large group lectures by Artress. When we all said our goodbyes there were some participants with whom I had only limited opportunities to talk. When I said to one couple “I’m so sorry we didn’t get a
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chance to know each other better,” she replied “Oh, we know each other.” Like it or not, I was a pilgrim and/or religious tourist with this group of spiritual seekers. Labyrinths What is a labyrinth? I have frequently heard it described as a walking meditation or a spiritual path. Simply described, it is a circle (most frequently, although ancient designs certainly include squares) that has a single opening through which the walker both exits and enters. Its paths wind their way toward a central space, in which the walker often pauses for reflection/meditation and then exits via the same path on which she entered. The basic designs are most frequently associated with ‘sacred geometry’ that is said to be central to the labyrinth experience. The ‘classic’ design is also known as the Cretan labyrinth or the pagan labyrinth. This design predates Christianity and reportedly has been discovered throughout the Roman empire (and in various variations globally). Made of stone, turf, or paint, for many people this design symbolizes the transcendence of the labyrinth as a spiritual tool, removing its association with any one faith community or spiritual truth. The second design is commonly referred to as the ‘Chartres’ design, so-called because its most famous representation is laid in stone in the floor of the nave of the Roman Catholic cathedral in Chartres, France. While other designs from the same period existed, and in some cases still exist, it is the Chartres labyrinth that is best known. The Chartres site is reportedly an ancient sacred site. As Kathryn Rountree notes “Early Christian churches were often built on the sites of earlier pagan temples, thus the sacred essence of a site and the local population’s devotion to the site were appropriated at the same time as the visible signs of the previous religion were covered over, incorporated or obliterated” (2002: 476). The Chartres labyrinth differs from the classic design primarily in its number of circuits— it has eleven, while the classic has seven. Debates around the designs range from which design better facilitates a connection with the sacred to which contains the sacred geometry necessary for that connection. For more than a decade there has been a bustling material culture around labyrinths—from their installation, to ‘how to’ (and how not to!) books, scarves, pendants, mugs, even portable finger
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labyrinths. (Finger labyrinths are not new, by the way, as there are some that date to the middle ages still in existence.) It is possible to ‘walk’ a labyrinth on line publicly, or to purchase one’s own portable labyrinth stamped on canvas. The definitive work on labyrinths remains a 1922 book by W.H. Matthews. On the first page he addresses the question of the difference between mazes and labyrinths. He notes that there is little or no difference between the two, “some writers seem to prefer to apply the word ‘maze’ to hedge mazes only, using the word ‘labyrinth’ to denote the structures described by the writers of antiquity, or as a general term for any confusing arrangement of paths” (1970: 1). This latter use has predominated, and Matthews himself distinguishes between paths which confound and paths which lead. The Chartres labyrinth is mentioned, as are numerous other church labyrinths. For example, Matthews mentions the Rheims Cathedral labyrinth which was laid in 1240 and made of blue stones or marbles. Apparently it “was destroyed in 1779 by order of a certain Canon Jacquemart, who objected to the noise made by children and others in tracing its course during the progress of divine service” (1970: 61). It has been taken as received wisdom in much of the current writing about labyrinths that they were somehow linked to pilgrimage, but Matthews leaves this somewhat open: Some authorities have thought that they were merely introduced as a symbol of the perplexities and intricacies which beset the Christian path. Others considered them to typify the entangling nature of sin or of any deviation from the rectilinear path of Christian duty. It has often been asserted, although on what evidence is not clear, that the larger examples were used for the performance of miniature pilgrimages in substitution for the long and tedious journeys formerly laid upon penitents . . . In the case of wall labyrinths, of course, the journey would be less arduous still, being performed by the index finger (1970: 67).
Matthews dates the earliest use of the word labyrinth to approximately 2000 BC in reference to the Labyrinth of Egypt, written about by Heroditus. It was located above Lake Moeris and reportedly was an elaborate building of 3000 rooms containing in its lower level the tombs of kings and sacred crocodiles. Matthews concludes “it is plain, from the fragments of various gods and goddesses found on the site, that it was a centre of worship of a great variety of deities” (1970: 15). Later, labyrinths resembling what we now described
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as the ‘classical’ design are found on the coins of Knossos. Of this design he states: “Obviously there is no ‘puzzle’ about this kind of labyrinth, one has simply to follow the one path, either to penetrate to the inner goal or to escape thence to the exterior” (1970: 45). While the entire book is really about the design, history, and location of labyrinths and mazes, it is interesting that Matthews pays little attention to what has become the central feature of labyrinths today—their use as a spiritual tool. Here I want to pause for a moment and reflect on the broader significance of the labyrinth movement and labyrinth sites, which transcends the local, specific experience of the individual religious believer, although the local reproduces and constructs the labyrinth genealogy. McGuire helps to deconstruct this notion in her argument for a broader definition of religion and the sacred. She posits a bracketing of contemporary cultural assumptions about religion as a method for seeing religion anew. Drawing on the notion of the “past as another country,” McGuire notes the absence of “tidy boundaries between the sacred and profane” in pre-modern times (2006: forth.). It is exactly this blurry boundary between the sacred and the profane that the postmodern sociologist needs to recognize. The labyrinth as tourism, pilgrimage, experience is an intriguing case study of the exciting messiness of lived religion. Thus we have the tension between ‘going to’ the sacred site—i.e., Chartres (France), Durham (England), Trinity Square (Toronto), or Grace Cathedral (San Francisco)—and the ‘going through, or going around’ the labyrinth. Either (or both) the place or the labyrinth walk can be interpreted as sacred, and the interpretation not only shifts among individuals but within an individual from time to time. McGuire’s point assists in a sociological transformation that is desperately needed, moving us from smug assumptions about ‘real’ religion, both in our own time and in the past, based on a narrow definition of what counts to a more nuanced interpretation that places the believer at the center of definitional bases while simultaneously acknowledging a sedimentation that shapes the believer’s interpretations. Such an approach enables us to map religious life (recognizing the fluidity of that life and the map as a guide, not a static statement) as it is happening, rather than as we might wish it were happening or as it has occurred in the past. I see it as important to situate this study of labyrinths here because of the tendency to see them as peripheral to ‘real’ religious experience.
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They are, on the contrary, as ‘real’ as church attendance and as important in assessing religiosity. There is also a sense in which participation in this sort of ritual is outside of ‘normal’ religion even by the participants themselves. As one workshop participant noted “my congregation would be shocked to know that I was here.” And yet, participation in the labyrinth walk was described by this person as key to spiritual centeredness and religious being. To designate church attendance and participation as ‘the’ measure of religiosity misses the core element of this person’s religious experience. And yet sociologists persist in assessing religious behavior on these terms. It is also for this reason that the designation of such behavior as religious tourism is problematic, for that implies that there is a holiday, in a sense, from one’s ‘real’ religious life, or that the religious tourist is somehow less than the religious pilgrim. The gendered aspect of labyrinth participation is a topic for another essay, but it is noteworthy that women have embraced this practice/ritual more fully than men. The Chartres workshop was made up predominantly of women—only about one fifth of the participants were men. Women seem to comprise the majority of labyrinth walkers. I recently attended the opening of the Trinity Square Labyrinth in downtown Toronto, and the walkers/participants again included about twenty percent men. I have never seen a man at the labyrinth walk I occasionally attend in Montréal (except the minister of the congregation). It is worth exploring the links between women’s spiritual practices and the process of defining what counts as ‘real’ religion. To date I have formally interviewed seven of the participants in the Chartres workshop, and it is those interviews that form the core data for the discussion in this chapter. They range in age from 44–54, and all are women. They are single, divorced, separated, and married. They include clergy, and five of them have built their own labyrinths. Some are regular churchgoers, other are not. Most sort through their spiritual experiences in at least some vaguely Christian framework, although they tend to include spiritual practices from multiple traditions, and recognize those practices as such. The broader group from which these participants come was diverse, but was predominantly white, female, and middle aged. For some participants the Chartres trip was a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage—for others, a return trip or one among many sites of their spiritual explorations. As I have talked to participants about the labyrinth experience,
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their religious histories, and thinking about Chartres, I have been trying to think about how to make sense of the experience of Chartres. As a place to which one goes, it could be thought of as a site of religious tourism. But much of what I read didn’t quite capture what seems to be happening in regard to the labyrinth. The problematic bit for me was the fact that the labyrinth, and Chartres, could not be lopped off as a ‘tourism’ site. To be sure, there was a sense of going to the labyrinth, but there was also a sense in which there was not only a ‘going to’ the labyrinth, but also a ‘going through’ the labyrinth. While Chartres is indeed a real place, it seemed that the labyrinth existed both there and everywhere through the process of ‘going through.’ I will pursue this notion of the geography of the labyrinth in greater detail below. First, however, it is important to reflect a bit more fully on the tourism/pilgrimage dichotomy. Luigi Tomasi notes that, “there is no antithesis between the pilgrim and the tourist; there is no contradiction between piety and relaxation. However, the extent of this intermingling of the traditional with the modern is difficult to quantify in empirical terms: it is hard to distinguish the ‘curious traveler’ from the ‘religious traveler’ and to comprehend his or her identity (2002: 19).” This intermingling captures the problem of the tourism/pilgrimage dichotomy. It is also possible that the ‘curious traveler’ has a ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ experience. Does the fact that someone does not set out as a pilgrim make a difference in how we should interpret his or her experience? As Tomasi points out, what used to be a pilgrimage was defined by the journey, but is now more likely to be framed by the destination. This may in part be as a result of our romanticization of the pilgrimage process—the slow, steady and difficult journey to the holy site. It is difficult to see airline delays, hours spent in airports, hostile fellow travelers and bad food as constituting a similar sort of journey. Tomasi’s conclusion points to a path away from the pilgrimage/tourism distinction. He notes: “One may therefore conclude that, while the form of pilgrimage has changed, its meaning is still the same as it was in the past: the typically human desire to seek out the sacred, though what symbolizes or articulates ‘the sacred’ today may be different from the past, even at the same site, and may be multivalenced among many visitors” (2002: 20). Of course, how and to what degree ‘the sacred’ is something that is located ‘over there’ is a matter for debate. The labyrinth may challenge both
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the pilgrim/tourist dichotomy as well as the idea that the sacred is somehow cordoned off from the rest of life. Heterotopias In his poetic “Of Other Spaces,” Michel Foucault talks about in between spaces as “heterotopias.” He describes these as real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias (1986: 24).
One of the participants in this research has perhaps put it a bit more succinctly: “It [the labyrinth] captured my imagination and geometrically speaking.” Chartres is a real place, and its labyrinth is real—embedded in the stone floor, an uneven stone path which dates to the 1400s. Its embeddedness is perhaps the reason it has not been destroyed, as so many labyrinths dating from the same time have been. The original purpose, it is speculated, was to provide an accessible pilgrimage in times when it was considered to be too dangerous to travel for a ‘real’ pilgrimage. This ‘pilgrimage in place’ brought together the going to and going through aspects of the labyrinth. However, following McGuire, I am a bit wary about ascribing meaning or purpose to the labyrinth. There are no historical accounts of walkers’ experiences. For years, even centuries, the labyrinth was covered by chairs, ignored by church officials—and remains to this day a source of contention. The cathedral labyrinth is available for public walking only on Fridays, and even those are not entirely to be counted on. There is indeed contestation, inversion, and a recollection of other labyrinths—ancient, Christian and classic. And even those designations are contested, perhaps best illustrated by the story of a person walking on the labyrinth a few years ago on one of the prescribed days. An elderly, probably local, French woman walked by and hissed “sacrilege! ” at the walker as she went past.
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James Beckford positions his theoretical examination of religion as “moderate constructionism,” described as being in between radical and structural constructionism. He writes: Without denying the existence of anything other than text and discourse—and building on well-established insights into the constructive and destructive possibilities of social interaction—I seek to analyse the process whereby the meaning of the category of religion is, in various situations, intuited, asserted, doubted, challenged, rejected, substituted, re-cast, and so on” (2003: 3).
The socially constructed meaning of the labyrinth walk as ritual is illustrated by the fact that on more than one occasion I observed people on the path trying to complete a labyrinth walk when groups of tourists would stand in the middle of the path, gawking at the stained glass windows or other parts of the grand architecture of the Cathedral, seemingly oblivious to those around them trying to carry out a sacred journey—or a quiet meditation. The somber mood of some walks I have observed has, frankly, left me wondering whether it was inappropriate to experience joy on the labyrinth. Was one supposed to be overwrought and angst-ridden? The swarm of leaping, yelling Boy Scouts who invaded the brick labyrinth I was walking in Montréal one day in part resolved that issue for me, as did the dancing walkers on the second walk at Chartres and the opening in Trinity Square. I have taken people to labyrinths and asked them not to read the ‘instructions’ before they walk, in hopes of figuring out whether there is something inherently ‘in’ the labyrinth to be experienced. Like other ritual, the creation of meaning seems to be a dialectic process that is both structurally and individually constructed. Beckford counsels social scientists to be comfortable with the messy nature of religion and its definition. If there is anything that might challenge the patience of a sociologist who is not comfortable with blurry edges it is the labyrinth, which is perhaps even more chameleon-like than other ‘religious’ places and experiences— being potentially both and neither. Foucault identifies five aspects of heterotopias: they exist in every culture; they shift in terms of function; they are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (1986: 25); they are linked from but break with traditional time; they “presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (1986: 26).
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The labyrinth is heterotopia of the finest order, although Foucault claims the ultimate heterotopia is the boat. Existing in physical space and in so-called real time, labyrinths are a place to go for the spiritual journey. The physical space is ‘visited,’ but it is taken with the pilgrim, evoked in memory on the next walk, and shaping the next experience. Labyrinths are experienced individually, and in community, often simultaneously: Sometimes I really love walking the labyrinth alone, and I’m much more likely when I’m walking the labyrinth alone to, hmmm . . . maybe dance it a little more or walk it in a different style, than I do when I’m walking it with other people. But there’s a wonderful richness of community and all of the metaphors for life on the labyrinth when you’re walking it with other people as well, so I think that they’re very distinct experiences and they’re both wonderful.
The social scientific study of religion has tended to valorize only the ‘in community’ aspect of religious experience/expression/belief, assessing (with some disdain) individual behaviors such as “Sheilaism” that undermine the fundamentally collective nature of the religious experience (see Swatos 2002: 195 for a broader discussion of this in relation to the public/private divide; also James 1999). To distill this into sociology’s heritage I suppose we might conclude that there is too much Durkheim and not enough Weber informing the ways in which religion is defined and studied. Linda Woodhead (2007: forth.) summarizes the problem beautifully: Both religion and magic, if we follow Durkheim’s language, have to do with the sacred, but only the former counts as religion. Religions looks remarkably like what Christians think of as religion, in Durkheim’s words: ‘a unified set of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things . . . which unite into a single moral community called a ‘church’ all those who adhere to them’ . . . Only religion has social significance and only religion is worthy of sociology’s attention and analysis. Thus religion becomes the norm, against which other forms of engagement with the sacred appear vague, woolly, fuzzy, insubstantial, fleeting, lacking in seriousness and salience—if not individualistic, selfish, narcissistic and threatening to religion and society. Notice how the nature of the judgement about spirituality slides easily from the apparently objective to more obviously evaluative.
Labyrinth walking falls into this ‘spiritual’ terrain that renders it a bit too fuzzy to count as religion. This may also partially explain
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the somewhat marginalized position of the ‘religious tourism/pilgrimage’ literature within the subdiscipline. Where exactly do these people belong and how do we count them? Human agency as multisited and multifaceted is problematic at another level as well. What is missing from Foucault’s discussion is any articulation of the creation of these features of heterotopias, and it is in part what this chapter seeks to address. Heterotopias are constituted through the enactment of human subjectivity, and through power relations. They depend on human interaction, and while they exist in “real” space, they are made through human agency. Foucault has often been criticized for his lack of a theory of human agency, although his defenders argue that Foucault’s theoretical position does not require a position on human agency (see Rose 1996, for example). I would argue that Foucault assumed agency, and it is this that is important in the explication of the labyrinth as site of pilgrimage, religious tourism, and religious experience. Integral to this notion of agency is the relationship of body to religious experience, for the movement of the body is a core part of the labyrinth experience. Meredith McGuire has called for a more sophisticated acknowledgment of the importance of body beyond mere acknowledgement of cognitive functions of the mind. She says, “let us appreciate that a person’s subjective sense of self is intimately linked with body/mind. We experience things done to our bodies as done to our selves.” (2003: 102). Although McGuire’s work in this instance is focused on the notion of religion and healing, her comments are equally applicable to the experience of the labyrinth walk, which must be viewed holistically. Participants often focus on bodily reaction when describing the spiritual impact of the walk, recalling floating through the labyrinth, or the feel of the stones on the bare feet and that connection to other feet and other lives. One woman described the practice of a man she knew whose daughter was physically challenged. Before visiting her he would walk the labyrinth to enable his body to match the pace of hers. It is important to keep the notion of body at the forefront of analysis that seeks to explicate religious experience, a focus that, as McGuire points out, has been largely lacking in the sociology of religion. With these agency and body considerations in mind, I will explore the features of the heterotopia and their intersections with labyrinths.
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All Cultures Heterotopias generally exist in all cultures, argued Foucault. Although we cannot claim that labyrinths have existed as heterotopias in all cultures, they have certainly existed for thousands of years in a relatively wide range of geographic locations. One interviewee notes: The labyrinth is really pre-Christian, and found in almost every religion. So there are some churches that have trouble with it, because they see it as pagan, which I suppose it is. But I don’t necessarily consider it . . . pagan is not a word I use . . . I still see it as being religious or spiritual, but because it is found in every religion and is pre-Christian, I think it is one of the many things that the Christian church has borrowed from other sources and adapted to its own use.
The various claims around labyrinths have largely resulted in a recognized division between the ‘classic’ labyrinth and the ‘Chartres’ labyrinth, the former being broadly characterized as pagan, the latter as Christian. Newer labyrinth designs have emerged, although some people express skepticism that they do not contain the sacred geometry necessary to invoke a spiritual response. Artress states: “Labyrinths are mysteries because we do not know the origin of their design, or exactly how they provide a space that allows clarity” (1995: 45). This mystery, combined with both their persuasiveness and timelessness contribute to the sense that one is connecting to the sacred. Shifting Function The idea that heterotopias shift in function is useful when thinking about labyrinths and their use. This is so at both the individual and community level, and from place to place. Different sets of instructions appear at different labyrinths—the brick path in front of a Montréal church invites the walker to pause and pray before entering. Recently in Durham, England, I encountered a temporary labyrinth made of sand, in classic design, that specifically encouraged the walker to invoke Jesus and other biblical “players” in the process of the labyrinth walk. While the labyrinth was outdoors in the cloister of the monastery of Durham Cathedral, I wondered if the builders were aware of their use of the ‘pagan’ design of their creation. The invitation to walk ranges in its form from mere spatial
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presence of the labyrinth—this is the case in Toronto—to elaborate instruction invoking specific imagery, for example: I give about a 15 or 20 minute talk and just very roughly talk about the history of labyrinths. And how I see them being used in terms of earth energy religion, rather than Christian traditions because many people have associated labyrinths with a strictly Christian tradition and I think that could put people off. And so I want to make it available to as many types of people as possible. And I talked about some of the different ways that the labyrinth could be used.
Functional shifts from an historical vantage point are more challenging to map. Historical records of the details of the building of the Chartres labyrinth have long since disappeared. Educated speculation situates them in pilgrimage—taking a trip and never leaving the church, so to speak. In this way the labyrinth resembles the ultimate heterotopia, the boat, although the shift in space is imagined rather than a course that can be identified cartographically. But labyrinths have also served as the site of myth (the labyrinth and the minotaur is the best known example, although the labyrinth in that story is arguably a maze and not a labyrinth) and a ritual place for a walk for good weather, as is the case for labyrinths on the islands off the coast of Sweden. There is always a journey involved, but its destination shifts. This is so for the socially constructed range of possibilities of meaning for the labyrinth as well as for the continuity and individual constructions. Each of these levels is shifting and contested. Community meaning-making and function experience subtle shifts as well: the two evening walks in Chartres were quite different in character. During the first, the mood was somber, many walkers appeared to be distressed and/or upset, some were crying or had tears in their eyes, and most seemed to be immersed in themselves. The second walk was much different—there was a collective sense of good will, many walkers stopped to hug or touch or simply smile at their fellow walkers. One danced. The mood of the first was grieving and pain, the second celebration and lightness. The space was communally created and functioned differently on the two different walks. Slater points out “personally significant places can both inform, and be informed by, an individual’s need for everything from solitude and contemplation to gathering and celebration” (2004: 245). The first Chartres walk reflected the former, the second the latter.
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Participants themselves identify the functional variations in the labyrinth as space. One states: It can fit for anybody where they are. You see it done in pretty rigid churches, you see it done in less rigid churches . . . um . . . the labyrinth walk. You see it in prisons, you see it in hospitals, and as you put it out there for people it’s done in all these places it feels safer for people to be able to use.
Another: You can use labyrinth walking on a number of different levels, you can have huge cathartic experiences or you can just simply get a solution to a problem that’s been bugging you. And however people benefit from it, that’s great. And some people benefit on certain levels, and others benefit more profoundly. And I’m never prescriptive what somebody’s going to get out of it.
A third, as she enters the first labyrinth walk at Chartres: I went, oh, that’s what I’m doing here, I’m a pilgrim. You know? And that got me thinking about how I’ve done that with other sacred sites, I’ve gone to them because I’m just interested in them but really what I’ve been doing is making pilgrimages all these times. But I didn’t really know that.
Regretably, we do not know the ways in which labyrinths were used in the cathedrals. Cathedrals were often built on sites that had preChristian sacred meaning. Who accessed those sites, whether there were pagan labyrinths or meditative paths and how they were transformed, remain obscured from our view. It may be that the labyrinth was an accessible piece of everyday religious practice. We do not know, and we must exercise caution about projecting present-day meaning-making to past religious life. Contemporary labyrinth making and walking is not monolithic, and so it may be safe to assume the dynamic nature of human religious experience in the past as well. Strange Bedfellows The juxtaposition of the seemingly irreconcilable is another aspect of the heterotopia, and the labyrinth does not disappoint in this regard. Again, at Durham we have the pagan labyrinth design, the invocation of Jesus, and alongside religious tourism, film tourism— since, as it turns out, much of Harry Potter was filmed there as well.
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(Durham is one of several sites listed in a recent feature in the Globe and Mail on Harry Potter and film tourism in England). The juxtaposition of the spiritual and the magical may not actually be incompatible, although sociologists have certainly worked hard to create them as being so. What I think Foucault is talking about when he describes the juxtaposition of spaces in the real is what the walker brings to the space. I attended a labyrinth walk in a modern church in Montréal last fall, having been to Chartres in the spring. The classic and Chartres designs are available in separate rooms of the church, and walkers can choose either or both. The labyrinths are paper, and crinkle at bit when they are in use. My feet felt not paper, but the stone of Chartres when I walked them last fall. Of course, the stones aren’t there, but memory places them there, making the impossible possible: the large stone labyrinth of the Cathedral stuffed in the small low-ceiling room of the modern church in Montréal. A number of participants noted that they bring together their labyrinth experiences, juxtaposing by memory impossible spaces: “I walk labyrinths in basements, and I walk labyrinths in churches, and I walk labyrinths in schools and all kinds of places . . . But it’s almost a reminder of, or a symbol for, the larger, more—older labyrinths I have walked.” This convergence of spaces is also a coming together of memories of various experiences that inform the present and reflect back on the past. The juxtaposing of the irreconcilable is not restricted to the individual walker, but takes on larger ‘irreconcilable spaces’ as well. One recurring theme in the interviews was the potential for labyrinths to be used in the healing process. Participants didn’t see labyrinths used in the healing process as being separate from the medical community or hospitals, but rather proposed that they be located in the midst of medical institutions. Some had worked to install labyrinths in their local hospitals, others had worked on training sessions for medical professionals. In this way, the often irreconcilable worlds of science and spirituality were brought together in the heterotopia of the labyrinth. One observes: “I do truly think it has the potential to be used in, like drawing the medical community back into the mystery of healing, instead of the science of healing, or the science of curing.” Another adds, “Because there are so many uses for the labyrinth. Um . . . I’ll put it under a broad head-
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ing of healing because I believe in healing and I am a healer and do healing work, so there’s healing, there’s spiritual healing that can be done in the labyrinth, there’s emotional healing that can be done in the labyrinth, there’s physical healing.” The seemingly irreconcilable nature of the scientific and the spiritual is made more complicated by the idea that labyrinths contain a sacred geometry that places the walker at the edges of science and spirit. The study participants report the juxtaposition of incompatible spaces, the emergence of solutions to problems and surprises in their labyrinth experiences. Strange juxtapositions are sometimes deliberate, sometimes unexpected. A Place in Time That labyrinths exist in a space that is both linked to but breaks from traditional time is another way in which they are heterotopias. Labyrinths offer a space in the present, but also in the past and the future. Within the space of the labyrinth, walkers are free to move about in time. This is not to say that such movement is not possible outside of the labyrinth, but that the labyrinth is uniquely positioned to facilitate time transcendence: I need to reenergize and recharge, and going away and spending time in such an ancient site where there’s that, for me it was such a profound sense, the first time I walked the labyrinth in Chartres and the stones, the way the stones are so worn. That very profound sense of centuries, of pilgrims who had walked this before me. And that really impacts my life in a very special way. I just love the sense, in fact I just found myself very soon, and I’m not a teary person, but I just found myself very soon crying, because I just had that wonderful sense of faithful people of history who had walked that path before me, and how that impacted their life, and now it was my turn to do the walk. And we don’t have that sense of history in the United States as much, there certainly is the First Nations and the Native Americans that have much more of a sense of history than us white folks, that have come to this country. But we don’t have those centuries and centuries like they do, in Europe. I found it very profound to walk those stones and also so bizarre to have all of the tourists standing around, as I walked the stones.
Others echo this view. One responds: “It’s just giving people a chance to drop out of their everyday life, go into a different place, access whatever they need to access.” Another,
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So, I timed myself going in and out, and um, walked barefoot because I wanted to connect with the builders, I wanted to connect with the men that laid the stones and feel grounded in that. And also the women that supported them. I’m sure there weren’t women carrying stones around, but the women that were baking the bread and bearing the children and doing all that sort of stuff.
Imagined people and activities in other time offers as sense of timelessness for the walker who becomes a unique moment in that particular labyrinth’s history, as well as part of a long history of walkers. But, the time factor is not simply about other walkers, but about linking life outside of the boundaries of the labyrinth to the walker’s own space and place in time. An Invitation In Aside from the obvious entrance to and exit from the labyrinth, there are other aspects of the labyrinth that exhibit the fourth characteristic of the heteotopia, the “system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (1986: 26). It is interesting that even when the tourists I described earlier were standing in the midst of the labyrinth they were not in the labyrinth. There is a certain mindfulness that is part of the system of opening and closing. This is not to say that one must have religious purpose, but part of the opening and closing is at least an intention to be in and then outside of the labyrinth. The meaning of labyrinth as ‘thing’ is not uncontested, however: while one participant stated “It has an energy all its own,” another objected to the characterization of the labyrinth in this way: “it doesn’t have a power all its own, but it presents the opportunity. A place where we can come together.” Earlier in the interview she stated: “I didn’t really understand people that were doing things like bowing to it, and giving it all sorts of power, that, and honor that I didn’t. To me it was just stones. So, the idea that is had extra energy, or was a sacred I don’t know, vibrations or whatever. I didn’t quite get that part, still, I didn’t understand that.” The idea that there is an opening and a closing that acts, in a sense, as a boundary as well as an invitation is reflected in this participant’s statement: “It’s giving people a chance to drop out of their everyday life.” But, of course, the walker can’t stay in the labyrinth indefinitely. The journey has an ending at some point.
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For some people the opening is about the opportunity to create community, to be a part of a religious experience. One participant commented: “that’s why Jesus said wherever two or more are gathered, I am there. It’s the community that brings the energy.” The system of opening and closing is sometimes explicitly laid out in the ‘instructions’ for entering. Participants engage with these in various ways, some carefully following them, others ignoring them. At the center of one of the first labyrinths I walked was a bowl of polished stones, which had a small hand printed sign saying ‘please take one’ inside it. I did, but I wondered what it signified and what I was supposed to do with it. One of the participants discussed a similar experience: I was very excited that it was there and this would be my first chance to walk it. But there were no instructions, it was very interesting. I mean, the labyrinth was in a well-lit room, and you know, it was just the labyrinth. And there was no instructions, no music, there were no candles. It was not—it doesn’t have all the stuff I think that enhances that walk, so I walked the labyrinth and it was . . . um . . . and it was very interesting, but then I got to the center and I didn’t now what to do. Because there were no instructions, so I thought, am I done now? So I walked back out, and you know, I didn’t walk the path I just walked straight out, and went over and asked him I said what do I do now I’m in the center? And he said well you walk back out the path. Oh, okay. So I went back and walked back out on the path. So it was kind of a funny walk.
My recent experience at Durham castle was a strange mix of invitation in and boundary to keep out. There is a certain boldness that perhaps comes with trudging through a few labyrinths. One comes to see them as no person’s land, communal property by their very presence—labyrinths are not intended to belong to some one person. The act of their creation is an invitation in. I heard this way of thinking in comments made by participants about the accessibility of the Chartres labyrinth, and in their talk about how and where labyrinths are situated. The central theme is the maximization of availability. The enclosure of the labyrinth at Durham had no obvious entrance, but was surrounded by a low stone wall. There was a sign on the east side that said the hours for public access were posted on the south side. The sign on the south side, beside a locked wooden gate, gave no indication of when I might be permitted access. I took this to mean any time—after all, labyrinths are meant to be walked. With my friend as look out, I clambered over the wooden
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gate and walked the labyrinth. Once inside the labyrinth, I could not imagine that someone would interrupt my sacred journey. And no one did. Conclusions McGuire’s work encourages a fresh perspective which leads to a reconstitution of the meaning of religion as a social scientific concept. Removing modernist blinders permits the labyrinth (as one example) to be seen as a vital part of religious experience, one that ‘counts’ as much as church attendance or knowledge of biblical content. I worry that the use of terms like ‘religious tourism’ and ‘pilgrimage’ work to place experiences like the labyrinth walk outside of what should count, in addition to creating a bifurcated categorization of religious experience, or sacred experience, which establishes a hierarchical notion of ‘real’ religion and ‘seeking.’ The combination of using the past as a foreign country as well as employing Foucault’s heterotopia may work to subvert those categories and facilitate the creation of a better framework from which to think about labyrinths as place and experience. On a recent walk along the beachfront of Lake Ontario in the Toronto neighborhood of ‘the Beaches’ I saw the windblown remains of a labyrinth in the classic design, fashioned of hills of sand and the odd rock marker. On further inquiry I was told that the week before there had been a labyrinth of the Chartres design. I wondered about who had built the labyrinths and who had walked them. Were they churched? Did they consider their walk to be ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’? Did they know what the labyrinth is? Were they aware of its history? I wondered how pre-modern religion, with its permeable sacred/profane boundaries could help to inform my interpretation of the ‘holy site’ on the beach. Luigi Tomasi writes: “The desire to travel in order to satisfy the need to know both mundane reality and celestial mystery is an impulse that has constantly driven humankind” (2002: 1). What role does the labyrinth play in this search for place? There exists a strong sense among those who walk the labyrinth that its potential extends well beyond an individual experience. This is not to say that these participants do not use the labyrinth as a space for themselves, a heterotopic escape, but that, in the sense that
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Orsi (2003) argues that prayer is public, the labyrinth walker is situated not only within the complex folds of the meditative path, but also in the midst of a network of human relations, even when they walk the path alone. Participants see the labyrinth as a space that has implications beyond a one-time, or local, experience. One remarks: So I’m not quite sure how it can bring people together, but if we can get to a place where we can, honor, let’s see, unravel and figure out how paths are used in everybody’s tradition and honor that within those traditions, then I think we’re somewhere. Because the paths at least in my experience are transformative, the use of the path is transformative, but we can say the same thing about any spiritual practice. It’s a matter of honoring spiritual practice and encouraging people to have one, in order to create a sense of well-being.
Is there something unique about the Chartres experience that differentiates it from walking the labyrinth in one’s home church, or community center or beach? Is there a distinctly ‘pilgrim’ experience about going to Chartres? Is there something about the labyrinth that shifts the experience from that of ‘tourist’ to that of ‘pilgrim’? Are those who stand in the middle of the labyrinth ignorant about its very existence, staring at the cathedral’s marvelous stained glass windows, any less pilgrims than those who wait anxiously for the labyrinth to be uncovered on Fridays? Are there ‘accidental pilgrims’? Adrian Ivakhiv writes “In a relational, interactive, and co-constructive view, the features of a sacred landscape are understood to interact with the images, ideas and desires of those for whom it is sacred and who take up its affordances in ways specific to this reverent stance” (2001: 214). It is, ultimately, the pilgrim/tourist who defines the experience. For those who participated in the labyrinth workshop, there was no clear boundary. Bill Swatos reaches similar conclusions in his examination of the interplay between tourism and pilgrimage in selected Church of England sites in London. He concludes “individuation and privatization virtually ensure that one person’s pilgrimage is another’s tourism, and vice versa. The multiplicity of meaning complexes— both of tourist meanings and pilgrim meanings—among a larger context of multiple meanings creates a web that is practically impossible to untangle” (2002: 110). A similar challenge exists in relation to Chartres and the labyrinth. The labyrinth may, as I have argued, be a heterotopia that creates strange inversions, juxtaposing multiple spaces and bringing the
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tourist, pilgrim and the sacred to one place. Obviously there is a great deal left to explore and to analyze on this topic. The notion of heterotopia offers an entry point into the labyrinth as site of religious tourism, encouraging us to attend to the ways in which the walker and the physical presence of the labyrinth come together to shape religious experience. The confluence of body and space is an important focus in the study of religious experience, as is the intersection of memory and space. This chapter is a beginning exploration of some analytical possibilities.1 References Artress, Lauren. 1995. Walking a Sacred Path. New York: Riverhead Books. Beckford, James A. 2003. Social Theory and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16: 22–27. Ivakhiv, Adrian J. 2001. Claiming Sacred Ground. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. James, William C. 1999. “Dimorphs and Cobblers: Ways of Being Religious in Canada.” Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses 28: 273–89. Matthews. W.H. 1970. Mazes and Labyrinths. New York: Dover Publications. McGuire, Meredith. 2003. “Contested Meanings and Definitional Boundaries: Historicizing the Sociology of Religion.” Pp. 127–38 in Defining Religion, edited by Arthur L. Greil and David G. Bromley. Greenwich: JAI Press. ———. 2006. “Rethinking Sociology’s Sacred/Profane Dichotomy: Historically Contested Boundaries in Western Christianity.” Forthcoming in Globalization, Religion, and Culture, edited by Peter Beyer and Lori Beaman. Leiden: Brill. Orsi, Robert. 2003. “Is the Study of Lived Religion Irrelevant to the World We Live in?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42: 169–74. Rose, Niklas. 1996. “Identity, Genealogy, History.” Pp. 128–50 in Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage. Rountree, Kathryn. 2002. “Goddess Pilgrims as Tourists: Inscribing the Body through Sacred Travel,” Sociology of Religion 63: 475–96. Slater, Terry R. 2004. “Encountering God: Personal Reflections on ‘Geographer as Pilgrim’,” Area 36: 245–53. Swatos, William H. Jr. 2002. “New Canterbury Trails: Pilgrimage and Tourism in Anglican London.” Pp. 91–114 in From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism, edited by William H. Swatos Jr. and Luigi Tomasi. Westport CT: Praeger.
1
The Joseph H. Fichter Research Fund of the Association for the Sociology of Religion and the Constant H. Jacquet Grant Program of the Religious Research Association provided funding to support my research on the labyrinth experience, which I gratefully acknowledge. I also wish to express my gratitude to Bill Mirola for a number of insights about ritual and symbol that he generously shared throughout my research. Nicole Saunders has enthusiastically and efficiently worked as research assistant on the project.
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Tomasi, Luigi. 2002. “Homo Viator: From Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism via the Journey.” Pp. 1–24 in From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism, edited by William H. Swatos Jr. and Luigi Tomasi. Westport CT: Praeger. Woodhead, Linda. 2007. “Religion as Normative, Spirituality as Fuzzy: Questioning Some Deep Assumptions in the Sociology of Religion.” Forthcoming in Religions of Modernity, edited by Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman. London: Routledge.
CHAPTER FIVE
SPIRITUAL TOURISM: BRAZILIAN FAITH HEALING GOES GLOBAL Cristina Rocha In my first morning in Abadiânia, a little town in central Brazil, I walked the short distance from my pousada (guest house) to Casa de Dom Inácio (House of Dom Ignatius), the healing center headed by the faith healer João de Deus. While I was walking and enjoying the soft seven o’clock sun, I glanced over my shoulder and was startled by the sight of a crowd of people dressed all in white (as recommended by the healing center), pouring from other pousadas and walking the same dirt road toward the Casa. As they passed by, I could hear languages from all over the world: German, French, English, Russian, but I heard no Portuguese. On our way to the Casa, we passed by an Internet café advertising broadband connection, a juice bar (with the latest detox juices, organic dishes, and a menu written in English), and a shop for crystals, Spiritist books and candles. I was later to find out that most of these businesses were owned by foreigners who had arrived as patients or healers and ended up staying. We also walked past little Brazilian children too poor to wear anything but a pair of old shorts, stray dogs, carts and horses, and unpainted cement block houses. The contrast was shocking: on the one hand we were in a poor village in central Brazil; on the other hand there was a mix of New Age chatter, organic food, and high technology typical of cosmopolitan cities. It was as if two very different worlds had collided. The town of Abadiânia seemed to have embodied the compression of time and space known as globalization. Indeed, as Néstor García Canclini argued in Hybrid Cultures, modernization does not end traditional forms of production, beliefs and goods, but creates hybrid cultures that encompass a complex, multi-temporal articulation of traditions and modernities (1995: 47). What is interesting in this case is that this hybrid culture that encompassed modernity and tradition hinged upon traditional faith healing in the figure of João de Deus.
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This chapter is based on ethnographic research conducted in Brazil in September 2005 and interviews with Australians in Sydney after they had been to this healing center. I argue that ‘spiritual tourism’ (i.e., the interconnection of sacred and secular tourism) is an important aspect in the cultural traffic between Brazil and Australia and adds to the construction of a ‘transnational imaginary’ of Brazil in Australia. Rather than being unidirectional, this spiritual network evinces the ‘rhizomatic’ quality (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) of these flows. In a rhizome, ‘centers’ and ‘peripheries’ have relational locations; centers can become peripheries and vice versa. Whereas Australia may be a center for Brazilian migrants, Brazil is becoming a center of spiritual tourism for Australians. João de Deus and Casa de Dom Inácio João de Deus (better known overseas as John of God) was born in a small town in the state of Goiás in 1942. He grew up in poverty and had very little schooling. João started prophesising at an early age and recalls having his first vision at sixteen. He tells of how while he was bathing in a river, Santa Rita de Cássia, an important saint in the Brazilian Catholic pantheon, told him to go to a religious center in Campo Grande, a much larger city in the state of Goiás. There, he maintains that he for the first time took on the entity of King Solomon and healed many people while oblivious to what he was doing. King Solomon thus became the first of the thirtythree entities he now channels. In this religious center, he was also introduced to Spiritist doctrine. After three months in this center, he left to look for work as a tailor, his father’s profession. He continued to work as a healer, but every time the news of his miraculous cures spread, the local doctor or priest would call in the law to imprison him. Indeed, one of the ways of persecuting adherents of religions other than Catholicism in the first part of the twentieth century in Brazil was through the Penal Codes of 1890 and 1940. Both prohibited unconventional practices of healing, regarded as curandeirismo, that is, witchcraft, sorcery or charlatanism. Under this rubric were Spiritism and Afro-Brazilian traditions, since healing was at the core of their practices. Brazilian historian Ubiratan Machado has pointed out that these Penal Codes were inspired by Comtean Positivist aspirations toward a modern
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society, as well as by the allopathic medical community’s and the Catholic Church’s desire to protect its own interests (Machado 1983: 175). Eventually, João saved enough money to follow the instruction of his spiritual guides to buy a small building near the highway in Abadiânia. He operated his healing center here for many years until 1978, when he moved it to the present location away from the highway but still in Abadiânia. He asserts that he is the medium of the spirits of deceased doctors, surgeons, healers, saints or people who were remarkable in their lifetimes. He takes on these entities in a trance and does not remember his acts when he becomes conscious again. His healing center is named after Ignatius Loyola, the Spanish nobleman who gave up all his possessions to proselytize after having a visions. Loyola is the founder of the Jesuit order and one of the entities João incorporates. Casa de Dom Inácio opens on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. There are two healing sessions a day: one at eight o’clock in the morning and another at two o’clock in the afternoon. When I was there in October 2004, there were around 250 people in each session. The usual procedure is for the patients to gather in the main assembly hall at eight. There they pray and listen to a preacher in Portuguese, while they wait for the ‘first time’ queue to be called. They then line up and go through a room called a ‘current room,’ where people are sitting in chairs meditating. As one can read on a Website of an American who brings patients over to the Casa: “This is where the ‘heavy’ energies of the ill and confused coming to see the Entities are ‘burned’ and harmonised by the Energy of Light being produced by those meditating.”1 This room functions like an antechamber linking the mundane world with the sacred world. Patients then go through a second current room. Mediums and other people meditating here have been invited by the entities and are there either to provide energy for the healing or to be healed themselves. Many people have reported being ‘operated on’ while sitting in this room. João tells his followers that one entity is working through his body, but that there are many others in the room 1
http://www.johnofgodhealing.com/john_of_god_healing_casa.htm (accessed 18 September 2005).
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(and all over the Casa complex, for that matter) working and helping. At the far end of the room, João (in some entity) is sitting in a chair. He tells the patients as they reach the front of the queue whether they will be operated on immediately or whether they should sit in the current room. He also prescribes herbs for each patient. Patients to be operated on move to the next room, where they are told to close their eyes and place their hands on the sick part of the body. João comes to the room to ask who wants to have a visible operation (with cut) and who wants an invisible operation.2 A volunteer from the Casa prays aloud while operations take place. After around ten minutes, operations are concluded, and patients go outside to have soup that has been blessed. They are then told to go back to the pousadas and rest for 24 hours before they can return to the Casa. Spiritism in Brazil Although Brazil is known as ‘the world’s largest Catholic nation,’ this description ignores the presence of many other religions and religious practices that have been introduced and creolised in Brazil since the Portuguese arrived in 1500 bringing with them Roman Catholicism. French Spiritism was first introduced into Brazil by the Brazilian elite in the late nineteenth century. Following an aspiration toward modernity, Brazilian elites were quick to embrace the latest French fashion. This is not surprising since France was a metropolitan center in the nineteenth century (cf. Needell 1987), no less than the United States has been in the second half of the twentieth century. Spiritism—or Kardecism, as it is known in Brazil due to its founder Hyppolyte Rivail’s pen name, Allan Kardec (1804–69)—was itself a synthesis of many religious practices such as Catholicism, Protestantism, and occult philosophies that flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe such as Swedenborgianism, Mesmerism, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry and Theosophy. At the core of the Spiritist doctrine is the idea of spiritual evolution through reincarnation, since Kardec was very much influenced by the positivist ideas of the nineteenth century. According to Kardec, 2
For more on visible and invisible operations at the Casa, see Marton (2002).
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the spirit, created by God, would go through several reincarnations until it achieved perfection. Karma, and its corollary, the law of cause and effect, would determine reincarnation: if one’s actions in a past life were negative, one would reincarnate into a life of suffering (through poverty, disease, unhappiness). By contrast, if one practiced charity in a past life (a concept Kardec drew from Christianity), one would reincarnate into a life of happiness. In this context, free will plays a key role, as human beings may choose what path to take in their lives. As a result, the evolution of the spirit would depend solely on its own choice and effort (cf. Cavalcanti 1990: 147–55; Hess 1991, 1994). Moreover, mediums would be able to channel or to ‘incorporate’ spirits and, by doing so, perform good deeds such as healing and dispossession. Spirits would be willing to help because it would assist in their own evolution. By deploying a scientific discourse affirming its tenets, Spiritism has drawn followers from white, educated elites. Indeed, Brazilian sociologist Lísias Nogueira Negrão has noted: “Spiritism is a literate religion. More than a religion, Spiritism claims to be both a science and a philosophy. Because of its high powers of persuasion in deploying logic, it is adopted by higher-educated social classes” (Varella 2000). Currently, Spiritism is so widespread in the country that according to anthropologist José Jorge de Carvalho, “In many aspects, the Spiritist world-view became part of the national ethos, as much as Catholicism and, more recently, Protestantism” (1994: 74). The latest census data showed that Spiritism is still expanding: whereas in 1991 it had 1.6 million followers, by 2000 the number increased to 2.3 million. Pilgrims and Tourists: A Quest for Tradition? Although Spiritism is widespread in Brazil, João de Deus is part of a small group of famous Brazilian Spiritual healers who rather than just laying on hands, actually operate on patients using everyday tools, such as kitchen knives. However, while the other faith healers are famous within Brazil, João de Deus is best known overseas. I heard of João de Deus for the first time from an Australian architect who had just returned from Casa de Dom Inácio in February 2002. Since then, I have come across a number of Australians organizing tours/pilgrimages to the center, building homes around the
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center, publishing books about it, and bringing its healing methods to Australia. Many have their testimonies at the Friends of the Casa Website (www.friendsofthecasa.org), a site in English managed by people who have been to the Casa. Moreover, Casa de Dom Inácio was featured on Australian TV in October 2003 (A Current Affair, channel 9) and March 2005 (SBS channel). Yet, when I talked to my friends and family in Brazil about my fieldwork at Casa de Dom Inácio, none of them had heard of it. While at the Casa, I mentioned this paradox to a person working at the center. He smiled and told me that, like me, another Brazilian woman told him that she lived in Amsterdam and had heard of João for the first time when he was giving talks in Frankfurt. After that, she went to the center when on a trip to visit her family in Brazil. What makes João so special to people overseas? Why are so many taking the very long and costly trip to Abadiânia? What fascinates them to the point of moving to a little town in central Brazil? Bill Swatos (2002: 92) argues that contemporary pilgrims travel for many reasons, one of which is personal need, the belief that being in a sacred location can bring healing, spiritual awakening, or other positive desires. Indeed, all the people I interviewed mentioned two reasons for travelling to the Casa: one was personal healing, but more important than that was their connection with the spiritual world. For instance, a man in his mid-thirties who has multiple sclerosis told me that the experience at the Casa is as much about spiritual healing as it is about physical healing. He says of his own experience: I stayed in a pousada [at Casa de Dom Inácio] for three months; I experienced so much and learned so much. That’s what needed to happen. When you go to Brazil, and spend time at the Casa, you learn that what you have [your illness] is for you learn from, and every affliction is for you to learn from. And it is what you learn and take back with you and develop. To me that’s what it is.
Like this man, others described their motivation for travelling to Abadiânia as being an individual quest for personal development and a transformation of the self. In addition, the sense of being in a sacred place where spirits dwelled coupled with the idea of religion as direct experience also informed their discourse. Echoing what I heard from the Casa personnel, many patients told me that the whole area around the healing center was sacred and that spiritual entities were always at work even when you were in your room at
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the pousada. At meal times at the pousada where I stayed, it was usual for people to exchange stories about things they felt, saw and/or heard (such as light, entities, family members) during the night, or while sitting in the current room. The experience of undergoing spiritual (or invisible) operations was also intensely discussed. I suggest that visiting the Casa is “an experiential way of ‘touching’ the numinous” (Tomasi 2002: 208), and therefore can be regarded as pilgrimage—that is, a religiously motivated travel to a sacred place or person. According to Eade and Sallnow, “In the eyes of the pilgrims, the power of a shrine can result from its association with a particularly holy person [and] from its location at a place where the divine realm made itself manifest in the human world” (in Badone and Roseman 2004: 5). Like pilgrims elsewhere, many pilgrims to the Casa return several times and affirm that the experience has changed their lives. For instance, when asked “how would you sum up your Casa experience?” a north-American woman replied: During our visit to Brazil, João asked me what I did for a living and I told him that I was in sales at a university. He said (through an interpreter) “You are a tremendously powerful medium and healer and that is what you are supposed to be doing.” I was very surprised. He also told me that I was functioning at 10% and that he would open me up. On my second visit, 3 months later, he said “We are happy with your progress, don’t be afraid, we are with you always. We will heal through you in the United States, and come back.” I have been back to Brazil many times now. I am officially a medium of the House of Dom Inácio. I return to the House at least twice each year to channel energy. Needless to say . . . the experience changed my life! Cynthia, USA.3
Another Australian man who spent three months at the Casa with his wife and 8-year-old son told me emphatically: “I can’t describe what has happened to her [his wife], what has happened to me, and what has happened to my son. My wife had an operation, she has changed. She is still the same person, but a different same person.” When analyzing the religious adherence of the North American baby boomer generation, Clark Roof has described it as a “quest culture” that emphasises personal experience over inherited faith. According to Roof, for boomers, spirituality is regarded as a journey of the self toward finding an individualized, authentic identity. 3
http://www.friendsofthecasa.org/Casa_experience.htm (accessed 16 September 2005).
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Since the self plays such a central role in religious choice, terms such as “experience, fulfilment, happiness and inner peace” traverse this religious discourse. In the name of these values, and in the search for individual identity, the individual makes his own combination of picking, choosing, mixing, hybridizing, and creolizing from different religious traditions according to his or her needs in his or her “spiritual journey” (Roof 1999: 46, 66–68). The same is true for Australia, where there is a marked increase of spiritualities of choice as opposed to religions of birth. Those who identified themselves as spiritualists, the census category which is closest to the religious practices of this healing center, expanded by 13.9% in Australia in the period between the 1996 and 2001 censuses. Bouma argues that there is a spiritual renewal taking place in Australia, with those declaring “no religion” decreasing in the 2001 census (2003: 64). Contrary to what was previously thought, it is clear today that modernity does not engender secularization. Instead, there is a marked increased of religious pluralism, the establishment of a religious marketplace, private religious choice, and turning to the self as a source of meaning. Some characteristics of modernity itself have shaped these changes. For example, the separation of state and church has made religious affiliation optional. Urbanization, migration, mass education and mass media, all intensified by the advent of globalization, have further increased pluralism and competition among different religious worldviews. As a result, in this marketplace no one religion can claim it contains all truth and that others must be wrong. Accordingly, religions cannot impose themselves but have to market themselves. The central feature of the religious marketplace is that ‘consumers’ are free to pick and choose among diverse religions. In this light, Roof identifies the open acknowledgement of doubt as one of the quest culture’s main characteristics. According to him, “the loss of faith in the secular alternatives—in progress, science, therapy, politics, consumption” shows that for this generation uncertainty encompasses not only religion, but most social institutions (Roof 1999: 47). Such mistrust of institutions paves the way for exploration of and experimentation with new beliefs. Indeed, many of the people I talked to said they did not trust Western medicine, and preferred a more holistic approach to healing. Others said that after doctors had told them that Western medicine could not offer them cures, they had turned to faith healing.
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Tourist Pilgrim or a Pilgrim Tourist? Pilgrimage and tourism (sacred and secular travel) many times overlap.4 As the Turners have argued, “a tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist” (1978: 20). Ecotourism, travels to disaster sites (e.g. Ground Zero in NYC), visits to War Memorials, and or tourism in holy cities, for instance, all have secular and sacred elements. Spiritual tourism, in particular, increasingly blurs the boundaries between the two types of travel. Luigi Tomasi has noted that, Given that tourists share the same attitudes as pilgrims—in other words, the search for authenticity at different levels of depth and involvement—it could be said that pilgrims are partly tourists and that tourists are partly pilgrims. Thus they complement one another; the promotion of “religious” tourism today, seen as both devotional and cultural, is proof of the existence of this common “search” (1998: 363).
The same is true for the people going to the Casa. Many take the opportunity to go sightseeing either before or after their stay. At breaks for lunch and dinner at the pousadas, many times conversation would steer toward places to visit in Brazil. People would bring maps to me so that I could point out particular places. Guides like the Australian Robert Pellegrino-Estrich take their clients to Rio and other sights before going to the healing center. He has also produced a video that shows the beaches in Rio and the Amazon jungle as an introduction to the spiritual healing at the Casa. In addition, these modern pilgrims behave as tourists in the sense that they book accommodations, organize package trips with a guide, and go sightseeing around Brazil in conjunction with their pilgrimage to the sacred site of Casa de Dom Inácio. These package trips are similar to medieval pilgrimages, as Tomasi has observed: “A certain resemblance to the medieval pilgrimage is to be found in organized groups of the sick and bereft that travel in large numbers to sanctuaries in the hope of being healed or finding help” (2002: 19). A Website of a North American guide who claims that he has lived in Abadiânia for twenty years advertizes the tourism-cum-pilgrimage package deal noted in Figure 5.1.
4 Cf. Eade (1992), Tomasi (1998), Swatos and Tomasi (2002), Badone and Roseman (2004).
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“Healing and Culture” John of God Brazil 15 Days 13 Nights Brasília—Pre-trip Excursion—Abadiânia—Brasília One day in Brasília at 5-Star Hotel, 2-day excursion to the Chapada dos Veadeiros or Pirenópolis for relaxed exploring of one of the planets most exotic and well-preserved ecosystems. This region of crystal beds and exuberant waterfalls is the storehouse of some of the purest air and water on the planet today. Includes walking and swimming, great food and intimate contact with nature and the regional culture, flora and fauna. Then on to a 11-day pilgrimage into self in Abadiânia at the Casa de Dom Inácio with John of God. On Saturday, we leave Abadiânia early in the morning to try and visit the Brasilia Crafts Market, tour famous churches and monuments, walk the labyrinth at the Temple of Good Will, have lunch (for groups with later departures) and check you in at the Airport. Includes Airport and hotel Transfers, Land Transportation, Hotels, Meals, Tours, Tour Guides, and Guide/Translation/Facilitator Services at all destinations.5
5 www.johnofgodhealing.com/john_of_god_healing_journey_itineraries.htm (accessed 15 September 2005).
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It is noteworthy that this guide advertizes his trips to Abadiânia promoting it much more as tourism, since he dedicates just one line for the actual reason for the journey: “pilgrimage to the self.” Moreover, the choice of terms such as “relaxed,” “exotic,” “wellpreserved eco-system,” “pure air and water,” “great food,” and “intimate contact with nature,” all elicit a sense of tourism as an escape from the consequences of advanced industrialization of the developed global North. In this light, a trip to Abadiânia is, in fact, a trip to the exotic Brazil, seemingly untouched by global flows of modernity. As Bruner (1991: 239) has noted, Western travel companies rely on a social discourse that opposes two images: that of an unchanging Third World ‘native object,’ and that of a Western tourist who is promised that on vacation trips she or he will experience not only renewal that results from relaxation, but also a ‘total transformation of the self.’
Consumption Not only is religion a matter of private choice and consumption under industrialization. Religion itself also entails consumption. Consumption is highly stimulated at the Casa. Although healing is free, there is an ever-increasing range of merchandise and services. All of them are strongly associated with the sacred and energetic healing. For instance, on the Casa grounds there is a store where blessed holy water, books, videos, crystals and jewellery made from crystals, rosaries, prayer triangles, t-shirts, and vouchers for post-operation photos and crystal bed treatments can be purchased. All healers and patients buy these products, particularly the rosaries, which they told me embody the healing powers of the entities. It is commonly believed that while one watches João heal the sick on video or reads about the phenomenon in a book, the entities may be at work curing the person who is watching or reading. To be sure, not only sacred items are found for sale at the Casa. There is also a snack bar where people can get freshly squeezed tropical fruit juices, sugarcane juice, fresh coconut milk, coffee, and home-baked treats. Tourism and pilgrimage overlap with foreigners excitedly exchanging tips on how to eat the meat once the coconut milk is consumed. Exoticism undoubtedly plays an important role in their experience of the Casa.
Photo 5.1. Shop at the Casa selling crystals, t-shirts, rosaries, books, and videos about João de Deus. Photo: Cristina Rocha.
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Photo 5.2. Canadian and French patients enjoy fresh coconut milk at the Casa. Photo: Cristina Rocha.
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Moreover, entities have increasingly given permission for certain people to offer services as healers. There is a local masseur and a dentist who are recommended by João, which means that they have a special connection with the entities and are imbued with healing powers. For instance, the dentist asserts he does not use anesthetics, while the masseur told me that in fact the entities work through him. In addition, foreigners who want to bring over their fellow nationals need permission before they start their business as guides to the Casa. Lately the entity has allowed some foreigners to take crystal beds (chromotherapy using Brazilian quartz crystals) back to their countries. Another development is the translation of books by Kardec into English and the publication of books about João de Deus by foreign guides to the Casa. This creates a growing global network of patients and healers who carry flows of ideas on French-Brazilian Spiritism, mediumship and particular methods of healing, and who continue to be linked to the Casa.6 Furthermore, there is also a new Web-based American company (Casa Crystals) that sells gems and jewellery, and produces frames for eyeglasses with incrusted crystals from the Casa. According to its Website: “[the frames] are charged with the healing and compassionate energy of the Entities of Casa de Dom Inácio.”7 I suggest that consumption of the sacred is a crucial element in the Casa experience. Commodities may endow people with something they desire: a healthy body, a connection with the sacred and the entities, a sense of purpose in life. Spiritual Tourism: Fantasizing the Exotic Other, Globalizing the Village One book stands out among the many written about João de Deus: The Miracle Man: The Life Story of Joao de Deus was the first one published in English by a guide to the Casa and even today is the main source of information for foreign healers and patients who go to the Casa. Robert Pellegrino, the Australian author, shuttled between 6 In Australia, there are two healers in Sydney and one in the central coast who offer crystal bed treatments, six guides who take people to the Casa, and a monthly gathering to read Spiritist books and pray. 7 http:www.eyeglasses.com/casa (accessed 20 January 2006).
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Australia, the United States, and Brazil guiding tours for many years. Today he lives in Abadiânia and meets his clients at the Brasília airport. According to his book, one of the tenets of Spiritism is that “The spiritual world is in contact with the material world, each reacting with the other” (2001: 52). He adds that according to Spiritism, science and religion are not in conflict with each other, but science simply reveals the laws of God. For him, Western society has lost connection with its spirit origins. In countries like Brazil, India and China the existence of a spirit world, living and working around us in our daily lives is totally acceptable. Most people in these countries live their lives within . . . the universal laws of love, honesty, morality, humility, charity and consideration. (2001: 83).
Likewise, many other people visiting Casa told me how they were impressed with the kindness and love they found in the country. Given that Brazil has one of the highest indexes of crime and homicide in the world, this picture of the country is greatly idealized. For instance, in the city of Rio de Janeiro the rate of violent deaths due to firearms among 15 to 19 year-old youth increased from 59 per 100,000 in 1980 to 184 in 1995; among 20 to 24 year olds it increased from 111 per 100,000 to 276. Data released by the Ministry of Health showed that 12.5 men to each woman died between 20 and 39 years old in 1991. This is comparable to countries undergoing civil war (Zaluar 1998: 249–50). These high levels of violence and the consequent fear are due to the immense gap between the rich and poor created by neoliberal policies in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, according to a 1995 World Bank study, “Brazil has the most unequal distribution of wealth of any country in the world; the richest twenty percent of the population earn twenty-six times as much as the poorest twenty percent of the nation (the comparative figure for India is five to one, and eleven to one in the United States)” (Eakin, 1998: 188). In addition, research in 1998 showed that while the top ten percent of the Brazilian population accounts for nearly fifty percent of all individual income, the bottom seventy percent earns about twenty-five percent (Eakin, 1998: 182). Such a disjuncture between the image and the reality derives from what Edward Said has referred to as the discourse of “Romantic Orientalism,” that is, a nostalgic yearning for a pure and pristine past. Although Orientalism usually refers to the geography and culture of large parts of Asia and North Africa, I believe that it can be
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expanded to include Latin America. Fantasies of Brazil as a country full of raw energy and unchanged tradition abound. A good example is the video called The Miracle Man produced by Pellegrino. To the sound of samba beat, and images of beautiful women in bikinis and men on jet skis in Copacabana beach, one hears the voice-over saying: Brazil: a land of rhythm and raw energy. Rio de Janeiro: where life pulsates to the rhythm of samba. This is the playground for the international jet set. With its modern monuments, ancient churches, endless greenery, Brazil, a unique mixture of cultures, lifestyles and spectacular scenery. Away from this vibrant city life, Brazil offers more energy like no other. Iguaçu falls is symbolic of this country’s powerful energy. Unknown to many in the Western civilization, Brazil is also the home to some of the world’s powerful spiritual healers . . .
After showing footage of João de Deus channelling entities and then operating on several patients, the video ends with images of indigenous people of Brazil paddling a canoe in the Amazon. The voiceover says: This land of Brazil is one of mystery and ancient tradition where modern science has not destroyed the natural healing methods of men. One person in particular carries the essence of men’s ability to connect to the universal creative force: João Teixeira. He truly deserves the title “The Miracle Man” [emphasis added].
This video clearly conveys ideas of a locale not touched or changed by global flows of modernity. It also imagines a mythic, enchanted past where humankind was connected with the spirits in everyday life. Abadiânia has changed very much in the past years as it becomes part of the circuit of sites of spiritual tourism in the world, and its internationalization is a noteworthy phenomenon. Abadiânia is a town of some 12,000 inhabitants located in central Brazil, 100 km southwest of Brasília in the state of Goiás. The highway from Brasília cuts the village in two. Because João has been attracting considerable number of pilgrims in the past ten years, the highway marks a sharp divide between the two sides. The left side resembles any village in rural Brazil. There are the horses, bicycles, a general store, some children playing on the street, and shops run out of cementblock garages. The scorching midday sun makes the streets empty and imparts a sleepy feeling to this scenery. On the right side, where
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the healing center is located, streets are lined by 23 pousadas (or guesthouses), but many other houses are obviously built by foreigners because of their style, colors and materials. There is a juice bar owned by an Irish man where all the foreigners get together after a day at the Casa. Here, there is a bulletin board for people to contact each other, rent or sell bicycles and houses (with prices in U.S. dollars), and offer to share taxi trips to the airport. There are also Internet cafés, restaurants, and a book store. One establishment offers massage, a restaurant with organic food, and a swimming pool surrounded by crystals. There is a strong feeling of being in an alternative community which could be anywhere in the world. Most businesses in town advertize in English, and pousadas always have one person speaking the language. A taxi driver told me that they are all learning English to cater to this new influx of foreigners. He said things had changed considerably since foreigners started arriving. There was now a lot of prosperity and money going around, and this was slowly beginning to reflect on the other side of the village too, where he and other people who serviced the foreigners lived. After around thirty years in the center, João has started to take trips overseas at the invitation of his network of followers. In August 2004, he went to Germany for the first time, a trip which he took again in November 2005. In April 2006, he went to New Zealand.8 He never conducts visible operations overseas due to medico-legal issues in the host country. When I was at the Casa in October 2004, some patients at told me they had heard him speak in Germany and so decided to come. People working at the Casa also told me that every time he goes overseas, there is an increase in the number of patients from that particular country. Furthermore, as I mentioned earlier, flows of French-Brazilian Spiritism are arriving on Australian shores through books, word of mouth, and television programs. Conclusion In this chapter I have analyzed a particular case of a much wider phenomenon of spiritual tourism. By effacing the dichotomy between 8
See http://www.johnofgodnewzealandhealing.com/frame.htm.
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pilgrimage and tourism, spiritual tourism helps us to analyze how flows of belief travel around the globe. In an era of mass tourism, due to faster and cheaper means of communication and transport, these flows are intensified and become more relevant. An increasing array of books, videos, Websites, guides, healers and patients carry ideas and beliefs about João de Deus, Casa de Dom Inácio, and Spiritism to many parts of the globe. João himself embodies such flows when he travels to different locales where his own followers organize his talks. It is noteworthy that Spiritism originated in France, was appropriated in Brazil, and more recently has produced offshoots in other countries. As in a rhizome, these flows spread unevenly; they connect, disconnect, and spring up in places that were not connected before. For instance, someone who finds out about João de Deus through one of the many Websites on the healer can book a trip on the Internet with one of the guides, then later on himself or herself become a guide, as we saw in the case of “Cynthia USA.” I was particularly interested in people’s motivation to undertake such a long and expensive journey. I found out that people travelling to Casa de Dom Inácio to see João de Deus did so for many reasons. First, there is a search for a return to the past and tradition as a way of resisting the rationality of the modern world. The modern pilgrim seeks transcendental values to overcome the loss of meaning characteristic of modernity. A second factor, and intimately related to the first one, is that religion in advanced industrialized societies is associated with individual pursuit and personal direct experience. People choose and mix from diverse religious matrices, and Spiritism is increasingly part of this phenomenon. Third, although healing must be stressed, it is not only the healing of the body, but also healing of the soul. It is a holistic experience that, as one of my informants told me, “reconnects the individual with the universe.” References Badone, Ellen, and Sharon Roseman. 2004. “Approaches to the Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism.” Pp. 1–23 in Intersecting Journeys, edited by Ellen Badone and Sharon Roseman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bouma, Gary. 2003. “Globalization, Social Capital and the Challenge to Harmony of Recent Changes in Australia’s Religious and Spiritual Demography: 1947– 2001.” Australian Religion Studies Review 16: 55–68. Bruner, Edward. 1991. “Transformations of the Self in Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 18: 238–50.
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Carvalho, José Jorge. 1994. “O Encontro de Velhas e Novas Religiões: Esboço de uma Teoria dos Estilos de Espiritualidade” [“The Meeting of New and Old Religions: An Outline of a Theory of Forms of Spirituality”]. Pp. 69–98 in Misticismo e Novas Religiões, edited by Alberto Moreira and Renée Zicman. Petrópolis: Vozes/UFS/IFAN. Cavalcanti, Maria Laura Viveiros de Castro. 1990. “O Espiritismo” [“Spiritism”]. Pp. 147–55 in Sinais dos Tempos: Diversidade Religiosa no Brasil, edited by Leila Landim. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto de Estudos da Religião. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eade, John. 1992. “Pilgrimage and Tourism at Lourdes, France.” Annals of Tourism Research 19: 18–32. García Canclini, Néstor. 1995. Hybrid Cultures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hess, David. 1991. Spiritists and Scientists. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ———. 1994. Samba in the Night. New York: Columbia University Press. Machado, Ubiratan. 1983. Os Intelectuais e o Espiritismo [Intellectuals and Spiritism]. Rio de Janeiro: Edições Antares, Instituto Nacional do Livro. Marton, Yves. 2002. “I Saw It With My Own Eyes”: An Ethnography of Visions and Other Anomalous Phenomena among Participants in Candomble, Umbanda and Spiritism from Rio de Janeiro e Abadiania, Goias (Brazil). PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles. Pellegrino-Estrich, Robert. 2002. The Miracle Man. Goiânia: Grafica Terra. Roof, Wade Clark. 1999. Spiritual Supermarket. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Sharf, Robert. 1998. “Experience.” Pp. in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by M. Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Swatos, William H., Jr., 2002. “New Canterbury Trails: Pilgrimage and Tourism in Anglican London.” Pp. 91–114 in From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism, edited by William H. Swatos, Jr. and Luigi Tomasi. Westport, CT: Praeger. Swatos, William H., Jr., and Luigi Tomasi, eds. 2002. From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism. Westport, CT: Praeger. Tomasi, Luigi. 1998. “Pilgrimage/Tourism.” Pp. 362–63 in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Society, edited by William H. Swatos Jr. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. ———. 2002. “Homo Viator: From Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism via the Journey,” pp. 1–24 in From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism, edited by William H. Swatos, Jr. and Luigi Tomasi. Westport, CT: Praeger. Turner, Victor, and Edith Turner. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Varella, Flávia. 2000. “À Nossa Moda: Criado na França, o Espiritismo deu certo apenas no Brasil, onde a Doutrina Mística com Pretensões Sientíficas é Culto da Classe Média” [“In Our Style: Created in France, Spiritism flourished only in Brazil, where the Middle Classes follow this Mystic Doctrine with Scientific Claims”]. Veja, 26 July: 78–82.
CHAPTER SIX
DESERT PILGRIMAGE: LIMINALITY, TRANSFORMATION, AND THE OTHER AT THE BURNING MAN FESTIVAL Lee Gilmore Every year at the end of summer, tens of thousands of people from around the globe descend upon a desolate and otherwise obscure corner of northwestern Nevada known as the Black Rock desert. Their destination is a colorful and eclectic arts celebration called the Burning Man festival. For one week, the empty desert is transformed into Black Rock City, which temporarily becomes the fifth largest metropolis in the state of Nevada. Participants—collectively known as ‘Burners’—dwell in tents and imaginative temporary shelters that are laid out along a carefully surveyed system of streets forming an arch of concentric semi-circles. These streets extend for over two miles and surround an open central area upon which participants create an extraordinary assortment of interactive and often monumentally scaled art installations. At the center of it all stands the eponymous Burning Man—a 40foot high lattice-work wooden effigy poised atop a fanciful platform, lit with neon, and filled with explosives designed to detonate in a carefully orchestrated sequence when the figure meets its fiery demise at the festival’s climax—an event colloquially termed ‘the Burn.’ Although many participants describe this central ritual and the week of carnivalesque events leading up to it as cathartic, transformative, and (for some) spiritual, event organizers resist ascribing any fixed meaning to this central icon, instead preferring that individuals should find their own meanings. At the festival’s conclusion, the entire city fades back into the dust, as all physical traces of this momentary habitation are completely eliminated and participants return to what they have come to refer to as ‘the default world.’ Burning Man was born in 1986, concocted as an unpremeditated celebration by a man named Larry Harvey and a handful of his closest friends who, for no particular reason, decided to build an
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Figure 6.1. Black Rock City Map: 2005. Used with permission of the Black Rock City LLC.
Photo 6.1. The Burning Man (2004). Photograph: Patrice Mackey. Used with permission of the Black Rock City LLC.
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eight-foot tall wooden effigy and burn it on a San Francisco beach at the summer solstice.1 As they set fire to this sculpture, the spectacle attracted onlookers from up and down the beach and, as Harvey now tells the tale, someone began to strum a guitar, others began to dance and interact with the figure, and a spontaneous feeling of ‘community’ came upon those gathered. A decision was soon made to repeat the event the following year. With each subsequent iteration, both the crowd and the sculpture grew substantially in size until by 1990 attendance had grown to over 800 rowdy revelers, and ‘the Man’—as the figure itself was by now known—had become forty feet tall. When local park police were called to the scene to prohibit the burning, it became clear that the event had outgrown its original setting. Harvey and his companions—some of whom were members of a loose-knit group of adventurers and pranksters calling themselves the Cacophony Society—subsequently decided to relocate the Burn to the Black Rock Desert on the following Labor Day weekend, where it has continued to grow and evolve into an annual international festival.2 Less than a hundred intrepid souls made the trek in 1990, but attendance roughly doubled with continued annual celebrations, until the event drew around 8,000 participants in 1996. The growth rate is no longer exponential, but has continued to rise steadily each year such that it was populated by approximately 35,500 individuals in 2005. Burning Man now is now a carefully planned event organized by a year-round staff of about two dozen full- and part-time employees who are assisted by over 3,000 volunteers, and is legally held by the Black Rock City Limited Liability Corporation (LLC), consisting of the six most senior staff members, with Harvey as its executive director. The event is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, ranging in 2005 from $175–$250 each (depending on date of purchase), which serves to build the considerable infrastructure of Black Rock City, pay a per-person-per-day usage fee totaling well over a halfmillion dollars annually to the BLM (the Bureau of Land Manage1 Much more information about Burning Man’s history can be found in Doherty 2004. 2 The Cacophony Society—a confederation of self-proclaimed free spirits who orchestrate absurd public performance ‘happenings’ and private underground art parties—is still in existence, and also has chapters in Portland, Seattle, Denver, and Los Angeles, among other locations. See http://www.cacophony.org (accessed 20 December 2005).
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ment, the federal agency in charge of the Black Rock desert), and covers insurance and miscellaneous administrative costs.3 These funds also enable the organization to sponsor participant-created artwork that tie in with an annual theme developed each year by Harvey and other organizers.4 Finally, organizers promote an expansive ethos—which is by and large embraced and championed by participants—tied to ideals of free expression and personal responsibility, as signified by the terms radical self-expression, radical self-reliance, radical inclusion, and perhaps most significantly participation and its corollary no spectators. Other related concepts include community, expressing the sense in which Burners perceive themselves in relation to one another, and gift economy, entailing a mandate that there be no vending within the confines of Black Rock City. This means that participants must bring all their own food, water, and other supplies with them to the event, and that within Black Rock City resources and artwork are to be freely shared rather than bought and sold. Finally leave no trace requires all participants to pack out all of their own refuse at the festival’s conclusion and scrupulously comb over their campsites to remove as much minute debris as possible.5 Since I first began attending this event in 1996, I have been both a participant and an observer (an endeavor made especially interesting
3 For more on the organization’s finances, see http://afterburn.burningman.com (accessed 20 December 2005). 4 Recent themes have included The Floating World (2002), which transformed the desert into an oceanic spectacle of boats, fantastical marine life, and pirates; Beyond Belief (2003), intended as an exploration of the boundaries of world religions, rituals, and faiths; The Vault of Heaven (2004), which paid homage to cosmic grandeur, alien worlds, and scientific discovery; Psyche (2005), conjuring up explorations of the mind, human emotions, and dreams; and The Future: Hope and Fear (2006). 5 An exception to the gift economy edict is made for the Center Camp Café— where coffee and tea can be purchased—with the intention that this provides a central community gathering place. Another exception is made for an ice concession, the proceeds of which are donated in part to the local communities of Gerlach and Empire, Nevada. While the pragmatism of selling bags of ice—given the length of time that participants must maintain perishable food supplies in the heat of desert—seems indisputable, the Café is more controversial. Some participants feel that the Café is a commodified—and hence tainted—space, providing a service that participants would do better to fulfill in their own self-reliant (and gifting) ways. The catch phrase ‘leave no trace’ was initially developed by federal land-management agencies in an effort to educate visitors to wilderness areas about the need to protect the natural environment from potentially damaging human activities and waste. Burners generally support environmental responsibility and have, by and large, earnestly adopted this model, although its implementation is not perfect.
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and challenging by this community’s distinct emphasis on participation). In addition to hundreds of informal conversations, my formal research included dozens of semi-structured field interviews, focusing on participants’ perceptions of and experiences at this festival. I also developed a survey as a tool for broader inquiry on these issues, distributed via the numerous (and global) online communities associated with this event, which enabled me to garner a broader set of data on participants’ narratives about the event than would ever have been possible by limiting my ethnographic research to the festival site alone. Those who responded to this online survey were entirely selfselected, but the main purpose for conducting the survey was not to generate a statistically significant or random cross-section of the Black Rock City populace, but to supplement and substantiate my ethnographically based observations. I received 315 responses from Burners throughout the United States, as well as few from Canada and the United Kingdom, constituting roughly one percent of annual attendance in the year that I conducted the survey (2004). Because the nature of my interest was to discern individual and collective experiences and narratives, my intent with these interviews and surveys was qualitative rather than quantitative, although I did tabulate common themes that emerged in these narratives, some of which are discussed below. There are a number of experiences that are shared by all (or nearly all) participants in the Burning Man festival—the heat and dust of the desert, the climactic ritual Burn—but there is one aspect that is of necessity universal: the journey. Whether they join the thousands who trek over California’s Sierra Nevada range from the San Francisco Bay Area, wend their way through the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, soar by plane from the East Coast or continents abroad, or simply amble down the road from the nearby town of Gerlach, the festival’s remote location requires all attendees to travel to join in the event. Many make this journey more than once, despite the numerous challenges and hardships necessitated by the location’s harsh desert environment, and many return with the feeling that their lives have been irrevocably changed. Having seen, heard, and experienced this dynamic operating on numerous fronts, I sought to understand what it is about this journey that engenders such widespread feelings of transformation by looking to the ritualistic frameworks of this journey—alongside some of its intertwined
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physical, economic, and cultural elements—in order to illustrate how experiences of Burning Man are situated within narratives of pilgrimage and within variously constructed discourses between ‘self ’ and ‘other.’ In so doing, this chapter begins with an exploration of the experiences and perceptions of space, land, and environment that are produced by and connected to the festival’s desert setting, considering participants’ bodily movements to, from, and within the event site. Because experiences or opportunities for personal or social transformation have often been given as among the definitive qualities of pilgrimages, this chapter assesses participants’ narrative claims of emotional and spiritual transformations engendered (in part) by this physical transition, and also considers their occasionally discordant voices. A literature of both pilgrimage studies and tourism studies is useful here in locating this event within these contexts, beginning with Victor Turner’s influential but disputed application of rites-ofpassage theory (1969; 1974; 1982; 1986), borrowed from Arnold van Gennep (1908), to the practice of pilgrimage (1978), looking to see how this model both succeeds and fails to characterize this festival aptly. Turner’s critics also provide insights into what makes this event tick, as do more recent examinations of tourism and tourist dynamics from scholars such as Dean MacCannell (1976; 2001) and Kevin Meethan (2001). In this regard, I conclude with an interrogation of the ways in which Burning Man both reflects and resists the quotidian forces of tourism and commodification, and participates in discourses concerning various constructions of modernity. Black Rock City, U.S.A. It is not without significance that deserts have a long history as loci of transformative possibilities in the Western popular imagination, from Christ to Carlos Casteneda, and Burning Man plays to these ideational sensibilities. Located approximately a hundred miles northeast of Reno, the dominant feature of the Black Rock desert is a 400-square mile prehistoric lakebed called the playa—a flat alkali plain dried to a hard crackle that expands outward for many miles before meeting distant mountains on the horizon. In its natural state, the playa is utterly empty, and I know of no plant or animal species
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that is indigenous to this inhospitable environment.6 In its seemingly endless expanse and otherworldly terrain, the Black Rock playa evokes a feeling of both surreality and limitless possibility. Many participants see the geography of the playa as a tabula rasa upon which anything is conceivable. The physical experience of being in this setting for up to a full week (or longer for many organizers and volunteers) is daunting. Daytime temperatures in late summer routinely exceed one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit, while at night temperatures can drop into the chilly forties. The environment here is extremely dry and inexorably wicks the moisture out of one’s body, such that all attendees need to be constantly drinking water in order to avoid suffering severe dehydration. The Black Rock Desert is also frequently beset by strong winds, which can rage with near hurricane strength up to seventyfive miles per hour. These winds vigorously assault all in their path and will easily take down tents and shade structures that are not adequately secured with rebar stakes and guy wires, and even so can wreak havoc on participants’ temporary homes. Then there is the dust: Though the surface of the playa is baked hard after the winter rains (which temporarily transform this prehistoric Lake Lahontan back into a shallow lakebed), the sudden influx of so many thousands of people breaks up this encrusted plain into a fine alkali powder that coats everything within moments of entry into this environment. The winds then capture this particulate matter, thereby fomenting phenomenal dust storms that can create white-out conditions, and which have been known (albeit on rare occasions) to last for days on end. The physical challenge of this environment is part of what induces the possibility for transformation, as participants are able to experience survival and success in adverse conditions. Dust, wind, and even occasional rainstorms may be difficult to endure, but they can also be thrilling, as some participants enjoy the harsh reminder that they too are subjects of nature. In the face of this extreme space within nature, participants annually reconstruct Black Rock City, with its carefully measured streets, lampposts, downtown area (known
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I have on rare occasions seen a few insects on the playa, and even once saw a very lost looking seagull, although I believe that none of these was indigenous to the playa. It is more likely that the insects blew in from the nearby hills, while the seagull probably hailed from Pyramid Lake, about 50 miles south.
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as ‘Center Camp’), and other civic amenities, recreating a kind of urbanity within this unusual setting. Black Rock City blends this seemingly alien nature with a para-urban setting, creating a space that is both totally other and oddly ordinary. Yet in fulfillment of the event’s leave-no-trace imperative—as mandated by the BLM—the ‘city’ must be completely removed within a month or so of the festival’s close, hence recreated from scratch the following year. In producing and negotiating this aesthetic paradox “betwixt and between” emptiness and abundance, Black Rock City evokes a sense of “liminality,” to follow Victor Turner’s metaphor. The spatial metaphors upon which the concept of liminality depends are also pertinent here in participants’ physical movement from home to desert and back again. The aforementioned Cacophonists who first trekked to the desert in 1990 dubbed their journey a “Zone Trip.” As Louis Brill, one of the original participants, described the experience: We all got out of our cars as one member drew a long line on the desert floor creating what we accepted as a ‘Zone gateway.’ This was one of our Cacophony rituals, for the zone as we defined it took on many forms, it could be a weird house, a particularly strange neighborhood (like Covina, CA), or a desolate, deserted warehouse. Today it was the base of a mountain range in Northern Nevada. We crossed the line and knew we were definitely not in Kansas anymore.
As this quote indicates, Cacophonists enacted other Zone Trips over the years (this was number four), each an adventure of both the imagination and the body, as participants physically crossed into some idea or notion of an otherworldly, or liminal Zone.7 In the more recent iterations of this event, the act of physically and ritualistically crossing over some threshold remains. However, where once there was a simple line drawn on the playa and breached by Cacophonists as they stepped into the Zone, there is now a long queue of cars on approach to a strictly enforced gate. Following an uncompromising check for tickets, adequate supplies, and stowaways, arrivals then proceed to the Greeter’s Station where they are more 7 See “The First Year in the Desert.” www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/1986_ 1996/firstyears.html (accessed 21 December 2005). According to journalist Brian Doherty: “the notion of the ‘Cacophony Zone Trip’ was derived from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a beloved art-school film that features a mysterious Zone that looks like the rest of the world but in which bizarre, inexplicable things occur” (2004: 49).
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warmly welcomed ‘home’ and oriented to the festival. First-time attendees are then encouraged to step out of their vehicles and onto a waiting platform to ring a bell, a rite publicly declaring their intention to participate. As the festival grew, it began to be associated or equated with other Zone metaphors, particularly the concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones (or TAZ) as proposed by cultural critic Hakim Bey (1991: 101), who wrote: The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen before the State can crush it. Because the State is concerned primarily with Simulation rather than substance, the TAZ can ‘occupy’ these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a while in relative peace.
This concept quickly caught on amongst Burners, despite Bey’s original intention that, “the TAZ be taken more as an essay (‘attempt’), a suggestion, almost a poetic fantasy” (1991: 99), rather than as a necessarily or specifically instituted (and institutionalized) reality as Burning Man has become. Still, this concept seemed to capture appropriately the aspect of “ontological anarchy” (1991: 1) inherent in the Burning Man spirit, particularly in its earlier, more anarchistic permutations. Finally, once they are within the boundaries of the festival’s desert site, Black Rock citizens interact with and within this space in specific ways. Participants perform a kind of internal pilgrimage, as they wander from site to site, art installation to art installation, and theme camp to theme camp. Everyone (or nearly everyone) at some point (and most likely multiple points) during his or her stay on the playa will visit the more prominent artwork and ritual sites, particularly loci of special significance such as the Man. Indeed, this act of strolling or cycling about and taking in the sites is an integral activity—an essential part of what one does—at Burning Man, and Black Rock City’s design features with two major promenades along which participants traverse.8 The Esplanade serves as the alpha street in 8
For safety reasons, all driving on the festival grounds by nonhuman-powered vehicles is prohibited, with an important exception made for “art cars,” which are restricted to a five mile-per-hour speed-limit (an additional exception is made for official and emergency transport). Also known as “mutant vehicles,” art cars are
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BRC’s semi-circular layout and faces the open area reserved for artwork, and features the most prominent and interactive theme camps, while a bisecting walkway leads from Center Camp out to the Man and beyond. (see Figure 6.1). Black Rock City’s layout is intentionally designed to generate a certain orientation toward both the populated encampment and the larger playa by way of its organized formation of civic space. Harvey has said that he chose to keep the circle open because he wanted to continue to invite a sense of openness and wilderness into this civic space, and he also wanted the Man to reside at some distance from the main camp area (interview, 8 January 2004). The circular layout is reminiscent of a labyrinth or mandala when viewed from above and leads to an observation of the widespread cultural absorption of ritual theories as evidenced at Burning Man. The placement of the Man at the center of Black Rock City’s concentric circles and radial spokes readily allows it be perceived as an exemplar of what Mircea Eliade (1954) called the axis mundi—a symbolic manifestation of the sacred center of the cosmos and the location of hierophany, which is the eruption of the sacred into the profane world. Here, the Man forms the axis around which space and time are fixed— space, because the Man forms the locus around which streets are laid in concentric semi-circles and in relation to which most of the other art is placed; time, because the Burn is generally perceived as the festival’s climactic zenith. In 2003, when the Beyond Belief theme expressly invited reflection on ritual and religious issues, this long extant correspondence was at last explicitly acknowledged as the Man’s central locale was actually labeled “axis mundi” on a Black Rock City map.9 This constitutes one of the more obvious appeals to academic theory in devising the contexts of this festival, although others are also observable. These various constructions of space— both physical and imaginal—reflect a number of qualities that lend themselves to the concept of liminality, bound up as it is not only with physical space and metaphors of movement, but also with an experience of transformation for the individuals who undergo whatever liminal or liminoid rite or act is being performed. creatively modified autos that have been transformed into mobile interactive sculptures and have come to be a beloved feature of the event. Hence, many participants bring bicycles to serve as their primary means of transport. 9 See www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/2003/03_theme.html (accessed 20 December 2005).
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lee gilmore Narratives of Transformation
In the collective journey to a distant desert outside the realm of ordinary experience, participants may encounter transformations of perspective and identity that reach deeply and unexpectedly into their lives in an enduring fashion. Whether or not transformation is the intention impelling participants to make the pilgrimage to Burning Man, many do experience profound and real changes in their lives as a result of their participation in this festival. Of the hundreds of individuals I surveyed and interviewed, 74 percent replied affirmatively to my query, “Has Burning Man been a life or perspective changing experience for you?” I phrased the question in this way because I wanted to encourage participants to think of ‘transformation’ in broad terms, in recognition of the probability that individuals would have different understandings or perspectives on this term. I also asked participants to say more about how they felt that transition had transpired in their experience, as well as to reflect on what they thought it was about Burning Man that brought about that feeling of transformation. The resulting narratives tended to display certain common tendencies and themes while remaining varied and individualistic, as befits the heterogeneous nature of this event. Indeed, 59 percent of the respondents indicated that their own understandings of how and why they felt Burning Man had in some way changed them stemmed from more than one source. Thus, it should be noted that the classifications and percentages given below simply reflect the total number of respondents who voiced these particular orientations, rather than any particular typology. The dominant themes voiced by respondents to this query reflected various qualities associated with Burning Man’s ideology, a trend that I had not initially foreseen. Chief among these were notions of self-expression, self-reliance, and community. Many respondents reported that Burning Man had engendered some encounter with self, including feelings of increased self-knowledge, personal growth, challenge, expanded boundaries, opened horizons, freedom, and increased confidence. Other respondents spoke of having learned self-acceptance or self-affirmation through this event. Additionally, a number of participants acknowledged that the physical environment had influenced or affected their sense of how this experience had transformed them. Other noteworthy themes referenced by multiple participants included art and creativity, ritual and play, as well as
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spirituality and religion. These narratives revealed that in the context of Burning Man, it is often an exchange between self and other— broadly and multiply constructed—that engenders experiences of transformation, as many respondents indicated that their experiences of transformation through Burning Man had stemmed from an interaction or encounter between self and community. Indeed, Harvey has often asserted that people come to Burning Man for the experience of freedom and ‘temporary autonomy’ afforded by the notions of radical self-expression and radical self-reliance, but that the reason they keep returning is for the community.10 Nearly all respondents (82 percent) made some mention of community as an important aspect their experience of Burning Man, whether or not they personally felt they had been changed by this experience. Of those who reported that they had been somehow transformed by this event, nearly three-quarters made some mention of community. The extent to which respondents referenced some concept of ‘community’ in their replies to this query underscores its prevalence as an important aspect of participants’ experiences of transformation within this festival. However, the term ‘community’ in this context has multiple—but not mutually exclusive—meanings, as participants displayed varied understandings of what their experience of ‘community’ at Burning Man meant to them. For some, it indicated a corporeal community—that is, the actual individuals who constitute their friends, companions, and loved ones. For others, it referenced an idea that encompassed the physical bounds of Black Rock City in its temporary and inclusive form. Some spoke of an understanding of a broadened perspective on human possibilities and the parameters of culture, while others spoke directly of having ‘found’ a community of friends and like-minded others who continued to be important aspects of their lives beyond the temporal confines of Black Rock City. For others, their notion of community referenced emotional qualities of fellowship, affinity, and unity. Indeed, several respondents (24 percent) named more than one common quality of community—such as connections with others, trust, friendship, as well as the unifying or homogenizing sentiments of communitas—in their experiences of transformation, as typified by statements such as: 10 For example, see http://afterburn.burningman.com/01/future.html (accessed 20 December 2005).
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lee gilmore It has changed the way I look at myself. I can accept who I am because of it. . . . I realized that the kind of people who were at Burning Man were the kind of people I wanted to be like. And I saw myself in them, and they recognized themselves in me. They accepted me, after I accepted myself. It has also changed my perspective on what is important in life. . . . I realized that once I got there I couldn’t just be a spectator. I couldn’t just watch it all happen and not be a part of it. I had to open up. I had to reach out to people.
In this individual’s account, it can be seen that it was not just a multiply constituted ideal of community that changed him, but rather the encounter between self and community, or self and others, that was a key to his sense of transformation through Burning Man, through having had to ‘open up’ and see himself reflected in others who, for the moment, were all on the same level, and recognize that they were “the kind of people [he] wanted to be like.” This man was not alone in referencing similar experiences, as 38 percent of respondents similarly indicated that it was some dynamic encounter between self and other that led to their sense of transformation. For example: It certainly changed my identity—or rather, solidified it. I learned more about myself as an individual and in community. . . . Like any major change in life, and especially in forming one’s identity, transformation is not a simple operation. Burning Man brought everything to extremes— heat, dry, dust, working together, working against each other, dissolution of friendships, formation of new friendships, you learn who your friends are and who is empty cargo, in the desert.
As with this individual, the natural desert landscape and the challenge of surviving in this environment was named by 20 percent of respondents as having been critical to their personal sense of transformation though this event. For example: “Every time I attend, I seem to gain a major shift in perspective. Part of it is a result of the physical environment; the stress of being in the desert and the need to focus carefully on my physical well-being sensitizes me.” For some, their experience of self within community resulted from active participation in the event, leading to an increased understanding or knowledge of themselves, such as a woman who stated: First there was kindness in the face of cluelessness, and that kindness inspired me to contribute. Through contribution came community, and my interactions with that community helped me figure out who I am and what I have to offer the world. . . . Being involved with this community sparked my own creative juices.
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This woman was among those respondents (18 percent) who indicated that for them, ‘community’ meant an actual group of friends whom they had found through Burning Man, and who continued to be important in their lives year round. For some individuals, this newfound community reinforced their own sense of identity in affirming and accepting the life choices that placed them outside of what they understood to be the ‘mainstream,’ as with this man: It did restore a community to my life, which had been absent for a decade and a half. This has been a huge plus, in my experience. While I did not experience anything like the epiphanies that many other friends have, I was reminded that there are others out there who don’t fit well into the constraints that mainstream society dictates.
Several others (totaling 15 percent) also referenced a feeling of increased self-affirmation or self-acceptance (as already seen in some of the other voices above). For these individuals, the event both enabled and affirmed their individual quests to be more truly themselves, whatever that might mean for them. For example: I would say Burning Man has been a life and perspective affirming experience. . . . When I first arrived at Burning Man I felt an immediate sense of ‘home.’ It was a place I could live by the principles I normally live by and feel total acceptance, little struggle, and it affirmed the attitudes I fight to keep in everyday life. This not only provided a sense of freedom—existing in my ideal community as I would have imagined it—but allowed me to further examine my lifestyle choices. Burning Man provided a working example of what I always suspected—that people are happiest when they can express themselves freely and enjoy the expression of others in a nurturing non-judgmental environment.
Another common theme also related to a broad notion of community was mentioned by 24 percent of respondents who stated that that the event had in some way changed their experience of or perspective on humanity, generally for the better, by giving them greater hope through having witnessed and been an active participant in a perceived better way of doing things. For example, “Burning Man renewed my faith in my fellow man. It showed me that people from entirely different cultures, social settings and economic classes can come together and create wonderful things.” In addition to those who expressly mentioned some encounter with community or culture in their response, a large block of respondents (46 percent) traced their experience of transformation through this event at least in part to experiences of self-expression at or through
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the event. These feelings could take on a wide range of forms, as for some it meant expressing themselves creatively, or an increased ability to act with less self-restraint, such as: “Burning Man has pretty much completely changed my life. [It] gave me the tools necessary to become the creative person I am and to realize that my own radical self-expression is a key component to the person I actually am. Or have become.” Still others spoke of learning new self-reliance and of personal growth through having had their boundaries pushed and having successfully faced various challenges: I saw that at the festival, being who you are was celebrated. It wasn’t about conformity or not making waves, it was about radical self-expression. My first few years taught me to be more accepting of myself and to fly my freak flag high and proud. It also taught me that, as far as making decisions, I can play safe or take risks. And that although taking risks and pushing my boundaries a bit was more frightening and challenging, it also brought greater rewards and wonderful experiences I may not have otherwise had. That is something I try to remember every day.
The prominence of themes of self-expression and community at Burning Man furnishes an example of the extent to which participants are performing the ideology of Burning Man as it maps to their own personal experiences. Indeed, many respondents (37 percent) made some reference to other aspects of Burning Man’s stated ideals, like gifting, leave no trace, and participation, such as this individual who mentioned all three of these qualities: The ideals of radical inclusiveness and gifting have had a huge impact on how I live my life. I’ve become very aware of litter, and trash. I’ve become more politically active, because I’ve learned that people are people, and life is not a spectator sport. I am less intimidated by ‘politicians,’ or performers, or actors, or whatever. . . . I’ve realized that it’s important to participate in the processes that greatly affect my life, rather than complain uselessly about things that are happening that I don’t like.
In addition, there were some (11 percent) who felt that the event had changed them in some ways, but that other aspects or experiences within their lives had been more significant for them personally. These respondents also tended to reflect some engagement with the overall ideology or ethos of Burning Man. Many said that they already held these values prior to attending, or had in some other way undergone some fundamental transformation in relation to their orientations toward both self and culture. For example:
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I do not think that I changed my perspective so much as I was able to realize my perspective more. I think that I basically have the same value system as I did prior to Burning Man. It is just that I am able to live out those values in a much more real way within the community that surrounds this event.
Although various notions of self-expression, community, and other elements of Burning Man’s ideology were the predominant themes in participants’ responses to questions of transformation vis-à-vis Burning Man, a number of other qualities were raised by several respondents, some of which have already been alluded to in previous narratives, such as references to art and creativity made by 25 percent of respondents. For some, this was tied to notions of self-expression, while for others it was the observation of and/or interaction with artwork created by others that served as a perspective-changing catalyst, such as: For me, art used to be something that hung on a wall, and though it ‘should’ be thought-provoking, there was very little interaction in it. Now, I see art as all types of things—stuff people make for you, food given to you, a massage, a thought-provoking movie, etc. But, it also helped me to understand that I could be creative, too. In the past I’ve always been a math/science computer nerd. Now, I understand that those things can be artful, and I also have more interest in executing on my non-linear artsy ideas.
Finally, there were a few individuals who also named an experience of ritual (6 percent), or of spirituality and religion (7 percent), and in a handful of cases pilgrimage, as having helped to foment their transformative experiences through this festival, such as: “Burning Man for me has become a spiritual pilgrimage every year. It has renewed my faith in what humans can achieve, in terms of community.” From these various voices, it can be seen that while the sources of transformation at Burning Man are multinodal, they collectively referenced specific themes. Often their sense of perspectival shift came from exposures to and engagements with the elements of Burning Man’s ideology. Most frequently it was some experience of self, community, and/or natural environment operating in tandem and dynamic tension with one another that lead participants to confront new perspectives on both themselves and others. In connecting with an experience of otherness—both in various concepts of ‘community,’ as well as in an environment that is often perceived as alien—participants encountered an opportunity to reflect on their
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own sense of self as informed by this encounter with otherness. The nexus between these multiply constructed and multiply located senses of connectedness between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ and ‘other’ lead many to ascribe ‘transformative’ significance to their experiences of Burning Man. However, despite the significant extent to which experiences of transformation are frequently reported by Burners, it is also important to remember the inherent heterogeneity of Burning Man, which intentionally leaves itself open to divergent interpretations and experiential modes. In this regard, it should be noted that there were nine percent of respondents who did not feel that the event had changed them in any way. While for many it may be a profoundly life-changing or spiritual experience, for others Burning Man is only a grand party, an excuse for debauchery, and a license for transgressive behavior that is disconnected from any overt sense of spirituality or any occurrence of significant change in one’s life, community, or culture. Of course, these aspects need not be mutually exclusive. Indeed, many Christian pilgrimages were historically associated with simultaneously occurring festivals, which were often the real attraction for many of pilgrims, as Victor and Edith Turner (1978) noted in their classic study of pilgrimage. With its strong emphasis on playfulness and a healthy dose of decadent display, the carnivalesque aspects of Burning Man can certainly be seen to function within that legacy. These motives are as much part of the overall experience of the event as are the spiritual or psychological transformations engendered by it. Furthermore, it must be emphasized that not all participants necessarily experience this festival in ways that neatly replicate Turner’s theories, as they both succeed and fail to describe this festival. Turner and Pilgrimage In my own quest to understand what it is about Burning Man that engenders such widely reported experiences of transformation, I early on in my research discovered the Turners’ examination of Christian pilgrimages, in which they came to see these phenomena as neatly mapped to the tripartite structure of rites of passage, and as thereby including the qualities of communitas and liminality that he saw as inherent within all such rites. In the ritualized journey and hard-
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ships encountered through a pilgrimage, they identified, “some of the attributes of liminality,” including: release from mundane structure; homogenization of status; simplicity of dress and behavior; communitas; ordeal; reflection on the meaning of basic religious and cultural values; ritualized enactment of correspondences between religious paradigms and shared human experiences; emergence of the integral person from multiple personae; movement from a mundane center to a sacred periphery which suddenly, transiently, becomes central for the individual, an axis mundi of his faith; movement itself, a symbol of communitas, which changes with time, as against stasis which represents structure; individuality posed against the institutionalized milieu; and so forth (1978: 34).
On first reading this passage, I was struck by the number of qualities that Burning Man can be seen to evince, with its abundant ritualized enactments, as well as reflections on and negotiations of religious and cultural values, symbols, and correspondences. Yet on further reflection, I also began to recognize numerous ways in which Burners also do not display these traits. For example, participants leave behind their everyday lives and mundane urban contexts (separation), journey to a distant, unforgiving wilderness, entering into the carnivalesque setting of Black Rock City (liminality), and often return home with a changed perspective or renewed understanding of themselves in relation to the world (aggregation). In leaving behind the default world of their daily lives—and in framing their sense of separation with such language— Burners experience a release from mundane structures. The very act of making the trip to Burning Man has certain ritualistic elements as the necessary preparations, often repeated year after year, combined with the journey to a distant and unforgiving environment, converge to give participants a sense that they are performing ritualized behaviors and enacting a kind of pilgrimage. In this journey, Burners also move from center to periphery, in traveling from the urban environments that most people call home to the wilderness of the remote and inhospitable Nevada desert. Burners have even adopted their own term for the aggregation phase—decompression—a reference to the challenge many participants experience in reintegrating themselves back into their ordinary lives following the event. Yet this term also indicates the extent to which the aggregation phase is not seamless transition in social status or location. Nor is the separation here total. As different as Burning Man or
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the playa itself may be from the default world, Black Rock City is an intentionally para-urban environment that consciously recreates a familiar civic infrastructure, complete with streets, newspapers, and peace officers (including representatives of both external governmental agencies, as well as its own internal team of volunteer Rangers, who patrol the event and mediate conflicts). In addition, many participants bring both the comforts and the faces of home with them as they set up reasonably comfortable camps (with some traveling and staying in air-conditioned RVs) and often do so in the company of friends and family. In these regards, the separation from the mundane, ordinary, or default is not as total or extreme as the Turners’ model ideally intended. The Turners also identified ordeal as among the core qualities or experiences of pilgrimage, and Burning Man generally does not disappoint in this regard. Participants must be prepared to endure a degree of physical hardship and moments of trial in the harsh environment of the desert. The shared experiences of extreme heat, cold, wind, and dust can serve as visceral reminders of the fragility and limits of this human body we inhabit. Burners also often commit enormous amounts of time, energy, and money well above the nontrivial expense of admission and supplies, in order to create elaborate art projects and theme camps, and this ‘gift’ to the community can be understood as a kind of a personal sacrifice. However, these elements of hardship are also mitigated by many of the amenities of modern living—automobiles, ice chests, and the ability to port in ample water being chief among them in this case. In this regard, I think of pioneers en route to Oregon not much more than a century ago who would occasionally make an ill-advised turn late in their truly arduous journeys that took them through the Black Rock Desert. Some died, while others sacrificed all but what was absolutely needed for survival, leaving their possessions alongside the trail as they struggled not to perish.11 Yet for Burners, their trip to the playa is a choice—a vacation even—and the technological advances of our contemporary world have made surviving, and
11 The Black Rock Desert was declared a National Conservation Area in 2000 in part as a recognition of the historical value of these trails. They are, it should be noted, several miles away from the part of playa where Burning Man now takes place, which is intentional on the part of the BLM in their mandate to protect the historical sites.
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even thriving, in this inhospitable realm ultimately quite manageable. Indeed, part of the fun of ‘playa living’ can be to attempt to live as decadently and elegantly as possible, in the face of the physical challenge. One participant noted this tamed challenge in saying, “I had never been to anything like it; the closest thing was Boy Scout jamborees. Same sense of exploration, ‘fake hardship’ and self-reliance, and camaraderie.” Burning Man also invites a degree of the homogenization of status— although in this context participants’ shared condition is more typically marked by flamboyant and eccentric dress and behavior, rather than the austere garments of a hajji, for example. There is a very real sense in which the playa becomes a level playing field, as many of the standard roles individuals live with in the default culture fall away at Burning Man by means of the shared experiences all must undergo in order to arrive at and survive in the desert. The valorized sense of community—situated in critical opposition social hegemonies—that so dominates the discourses of Burning Man includes a pervasive sense of egalitarian ideal and social leveling that manifests in feelings of connectedness, unity, and hope for humanity. But again this homogenization is not straightforward or universal. There remains an extent to which Burning Man participants replicate society’s class structures and other differences by what they bring with them to the desert, thus undermining the ideal of communitas. For example, some can afford to travel and stay in RVs, others cannot; some have the resources to create large technologically complex art projects, others do not. The expense of the event (tickets, supplies, etc.) also renders the festival mostly inaccessible to those without sufficient middle-class incomes.12 Stereotypical gender-based divisions of labor are also often reproduced. While it should be emphasized that there are ample exceptions to these generalizations, it is still most commonly men who make the big (and often pyrotechnic) art, and it is also more often men who build shade structures and pound rebar stakes into the ground. And even within the Burning Man organization, it is men who run the Rangers and the Department of Public Works (who construct the Black Rock City infrastructure), while women are in charge of Communications and Community Services, even while there are both male and female leaders in all 12 The Burning Man organization does make small number of low-cost ‘scholarship’ tickets available.
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capacities. There is also a physical differentiation in status on the playa between those who are members of prominent and favored theme camps that are given preferential placement along the Esplanade. This often includes a more generalized differentiation in status between more experienced, long-time Burners, and first-time attendees, sometimes (semi-disparagingly) called ‘newbies.’ These differences can become sources of tension and territorial dispute on the playa. Furthermore, the event has changed a great deal from its humble and spontaneous beginnings as it has had to negotiate the concerns of the State in its various institutionalized aspects, and this is in turn reflected in the tone or quality of liminality, communitas, or autonomy at the event, down to its most basic rituals. For example, while the Man once stood directly on the playa surface and was pulled upright by a significant number of participants in a ritualistic act of shared endeavor, it is now elevated on ever more elaborate platforms and erected long before most attendees arrive. This increasing distance between participants and the Man has been deemed necessary given the increasingly large crowd sizes. Also consider the difference between stepping across a physical line drawn upon the surface of the playa as the Cacophonists did, and waiting in a long line of cars to have one’s ticket checked at the gate. With these changes, communitas at Burning Man has become more and more a normative or ideological communitas, rather than the free spontaneity still desired and idealized by many participants. In its juxtapositions between participant/spectator, self/other, and nature/culture Burning Man also provides opportunities to reflect on the meaning of basic religious and cultural values, as they relate to the self and identity. The nexus of experiences of self, community, nature, spirituality, and transformation at Burning Man supports the Turners’ assertion that through an experience of liminality, pilgrimages serve as rites of passage, generating experiences of both personal and social transformation, and cultivating a strong sense of connection and communitas among some participants. Yet even those who have experienced profound life and perspective adjustments at Burning Man often outgrow what was once a deeply radicalizing experience. For some who have attended several times in a row, the opportunities to see the world and one’s position in it from a different vantage point tend not to be ongoing experiences. The once extraordinary experience can become almost routine as the festival loses its initial enchantment and mystery for
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those who have now learned what to expect. Many formerly avid participants have stopped attending as they have burned out, and chosen to move on to new interests and other life experiences. Others who do keep attending, often do so for that sense of community it provides—as their time in Black Rock City becomes a family reunion of sorts in the opportunity to spend some quality time with good friends. This general phenomenon is related to the propensity of many long-time attendees to criticize various aspects of the event as increasingly lacking in whatever quality of magic it was that initially, and repeatedly, drew to them the event in the first place. For example, one former participant described her decision to stop attending Burning Man by saying that it had become, “too big, the event interferes with my appreciation for the desert environment, it’s losing its impact on my psyche, and it’s time to seek new perspective adjustment tools.” Another told me that he feels there are now, “too many people [and] too much spectacle for the sake of spectacle. [I’m] moving on in my own life. I’ve been involved with Burning Man year-round for the last three years and I want a break.” This too is an aspect of the experience of transformation prompted by the Burning Man festival. Although many individuals on this pilgrimage repeatedly encounter life- or perspective-changing experiences, it may be that this experience cannot be reproduced indefinitely. Following Eade and Sallnow, pilgrimage may be better understood “as a realm of competing discourses” (1991: 5), both secular and religious. For while events such as Burning Man may temporarily break down societal structures—as Turner theorized—they also support and reproduce many dominant ideologies. More often, pilgrimage can be shown to serve multiple purposes simultaneously. Burning Man participants display a plethora of diverse voices and attendant discourses, deployed as they seek to frame and construct their individual experiences of the event. William Sax (1991) similarly criticized Turner’s interpretation of pilgrimages as universal sites of communitas, finding instead that—within the context of his own ethnographic study in northern India—pilgrimage was more concerned with the power of place in the construction of social identity, as well as riddled with conflict and contention. As these and other criticisms demonstrate (Grimes 1990; Bynum 1984), Turner tended to constitute ritual in general and pilgrimage in particular as fitting broadly into a universal model, although he did acknowledge that the experience of communitas within pilgrimage was only an
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ideal (Turner 1974: 204, 206). Such cautions are particularly relevant to a ‘secular’ pilgrimage such as Burning Man, for despite the relative ease with which Turner’s theories are applicable to this festival, numerous other discourses operate within Burning Man as participants seek to disrupt traditional and popular perceptions of community, culture, self, ritual, and spirituality. Yet even while the ideal of spontaneous communitas has in many ways dissipated within Burning Man, participants are thereby compelled to critique its absence. The very observation of this absence points to the extent to which communitas remains a fundamental desire within the dynamic and multi-faceted experiences of this festival. Tourism, Commidification, and Modernities Other studies have begun to look at how the model of pilgrimage can be applied to instances of travel in more traditionally secular contexts, and are furthermore recognizing that in our contemporary contexts traditional pilgrimages can be understood as forms of ‘religious tourism.’ The Turners observed that “a tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist,” noting that tourists too seek some experience of communitas (1978: 20). Anthropologist Nelson Graburn (2001) took this correspondence one step further in mapping tourism to Turner’s (and van Gennep’s) tripartite structure of rites of passage, situating the tourist’s quest as a pursuit of the ‘sacred,’ as apart from the ‘profane.’ Given the realities of contemporary global travel, it is increasingly difficult—and perhaps irrelevant—to try to determine precisely where the ‘secular’ tourist ends and the ‘spiritual’ pilgrim begins. Surely we can say that while some Burners might regard themselves as pilgrims, it is unlikely that they would want to be considered ‘tourists,’ given the widespread stigma around that term. Indeed, at Burning Man the term ‘spectator’ is often deployed with the same general disdain that the term ‘tourist’ commonly evokes— participation being so key to the Burning Man ethos. However, my goal here is not to demarcate a line between ‘pilgrim’ and ‘tourist,’ even in so far as it applies to Burners, as that question is beyond the scope of this project. Instead, I seek to interrogate some of the commercial dimensions of Burning Man as a travel destination, as well as some of the implications of the copious layers of multi-cultural appropriation and bricolage that are in
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abundant evidence in the festival’s artwork and participants’ costumings. There are doubtless other aspects of tourism that could be explored here—including the complex relations between the host communities in Nevada and Burners as guests, among numerous other cultural, historical, and ethical perspectives on contemporary travel and leisure dynamics. But given the constraints and primary interests of this study, my focus here remains largely on select issues of commodification, as well as insights to be gleaned from discourses on tourism as a quest for what has been labeled variously the authentic, the exotic, or the other. Burning Man ideologically resists commodification through its idealized enactment of a ‘gift economy.’ Yet despite the popular participant embrace of this ideal and practice, there nevertheless remains an extent to which the event is unavoidably tied to capitalist market dynamics. On a most basic level, the organization must remain fiscally solvent from year to year by selling tickets and engaging in a limited number of commercial activities, such sales of T-shirts and calendars made available through the burningman.com Website. Organizers defend these business practices as necessary ‘commerce’ that remains ideally untainted by ‘commodification,’ stating: We have drawn a dividing line around our desert event in order to separate direct, immediate experience from the commercial world of manufactured desire. It’s not that we are against commerce, but we are against commerce without community, consumption without purpose and profit without value.13
In this distinction, organizers attempt to locate the exchange of goods and services upon which society depends as an activity that need not turn human relationships and experiences into mere products, devoid of any genuine, un-alienated, and non-objectified human connections. Market researcher Robert Kozinets (2002; Kozinets and Sherry 2005) concluded that Burning Man provides only a temporary and conceptual space in which to locate oneself momentarily outside the irrepressible forces of capitalist markets, rather than a total escape from that reality—a conclusion reached in part by the extent to which the task of traveling to and adequately supplying himself for the event resulted the rapid depletion of his research budget. Yet even if only as a fleeting ideal, Burning Man does actively 13
See http://marketplace.burningman.com (accessed 21 December 2005).
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resist traditional market dynamics, commodification, and corporate cooptation. For example, one of the ways in which organizers strive to keep this festival based on more ‘organic’ relationships is in their refusal to advertise the event commercially. They also consistently turn down all offers of corporate sponsorship or ‘co-branding.’ These efforts in turn supports organizers’ attempts to safeguard the event’s public image while also maintaining a higher degree of self-selection among of those who are drawn to the event. Organizers also endeavor to be selective about both the content and venues of the publicity they receive as they recognize both the value and potential damage that can be conferred by media coverage. The mass media have had a significant impact on who has heard of the event and what they’ve heard about it, and thus who decides to attend. As one example that is particularly relevant to the issues of tourism, organizers routinely decline invitations to have Burning Man listed in the event calendars of any one of a bevy of publications geared toward the international ‘rave’ scene. Despite the fact that various forms of ‘rave,’ ‘techno,’ or ‘electronic’ music feature prominently in many of Burning Man’s nighttime danceoriented theme camps, organizers insist that the event is more than ‘just’ a party, and that it is not a ‘rave’ per se. They also dissuade internationally known DJs—such as Paul Oakenfold, among others— from promoting their attendance as an ‘appearance’ at Burning Man. Those that do ‘spin’ at the event are told that it must be as a ‘gift’ to the community and not actively publicized (and certainly not charged for), and thus far such individuals have complied. Organizers publicly downplay both the rave-like and ‘party’ elements of the event, as experience has shown that those who are drawn merely for these reasons may be less likely to uphold the ethos of Burning Man. This general concern is borne out to at least some extent in my own and others’ observations. For example, in 2004 Burning Man was featured in an E! Entertainment cable network television show that counted down the “top ten party spots in the world.” Burning Man was listed at number three, just behind Cancun, Mexico (parts of which are dominated by hordes of drunken college-age tourists) at number two, and the island of Ibiza, Spain at number one, which with its innumerable nightspots is a major international youth and ‘party’ tourist destination. Beginning in 2002, my friend and colleague Mark Van Proyen, who spends part of most summers traveling around various parts of
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Europe—and thus waiting on train platforms with many of those headed to and from Ibiza—reported that he was beginning to see more and more individuals who looked to hail from what he called this “Ibiza set”—young, wealthy, and fashionably attired—showing up at Burning Man. There is also often a pronounced influx of attendees showing up very late in the week solely for the one big night of the Burn. For example, I have in various years observed a large number of individuals who were a little too clean and well-dressed to have been ‘on the playa’ for more than a few hours hanging out in the Center Camp Café on Saturday afternoon, which is often a day-time refuge for those who have come only to party for one night and thus have probably not bothered to set up their own camps. These examples illustrate the extent to which Burning Man both attracts and resists attracting attendees that are considered by most participants to be mere ‘spectators’ or ‘tourists,’ organizers’ attempts to select for a certain character of participant notwithstanding. Still, Burning Man remains in many ways a far cry from the kind of commercial touristic spectacle that is a place like Ibiza. It is also worth noting that for many participants, Burning Man is their primary annual vacation. In a society in which many workers are only allotted two weeks vacation per year, it is perhaps remarkable that some choose to spend one of these weeks at Burning Man, where they can have an experience of participation that is often physically demanding hard work. Yet many Burners prefer this experience, which is idealized as non-commodified and hence non-touristic, over a more conventional and perhaps more relaxing holiday elsewhere. Another very different kind of tourist site to which Burning Man— with its potpourri of interactive theme camps and ‘attractions’—has been compared is Disneyland. Burning Man founder Larry Harvey has called Burning Man “Disneyland in reverse” (Weiners and Plunkett 1997), as everything in this context is strictly D.I.Y. (do-it-yourself ) and ‘de-commodified.’ Yet, there are times when and ways in which it can feel like Burning Man slips a bit too close to a Disneylandlike spectacle. The ‘official’ art tour offered by a team of volunteers who coordinate the placement and exhibition of artwork on the open playa is one example. I took this tour in 2004 and can attest that it was certainly a convenient way to see many of the artwork at the event, as well as an opportunity to view and learn some things about these artwork that I otherwise may not have been likely to discover on my own. Nevertheless, it seemed rather strange to be ferried
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about in an open-air “art car,” listening to a guide explain what was what via a loudspeaker. The experience felt distinctly touristic.14 Dean MacCannell’s groundbreaking study The Tourist (1976) situated tourism, travel, and sightseeing within the capitalist contexts of modernity, framing these practices as expressions of and outlets for individuals’ discontents with modern society. Noting that modern tourism depends financially upon the capitalist economic mechanisms that provide both the leisure time and disposable income necessary to travel, MacCannell observed that tourism thereby furnishes a release for perceived dissatisfactions with that very system, as individuals go in search of something felt to be more authentic. In this regard, he concluded that tourism has become integral to the construction of modernity, saying that: “sightseeing is a kind of collective striving for a transcendence of the modern totality, a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of modernity, of incorporating its fragments into unified experience” (1976: 13). Through this cultural production, what is valued is some experience deemed to be authentic, rather than any tangible product of labor. In this dynamic, a kind of romanticism emerges whereby ordinary modernity becomes associated with the ‘fake,’ while the ‘exotic’ and ‘primitive’ remains what is valorized as truly ‘real.’ This quest for cultural and experiential authenticity surfaces at Burning Man as it offers itself up as an alternative to the non-real, the commodified, the inauthentic, the bureaucratic, and the institutionally religious. Participants situate Burning Man in ideological opposition to that default world, and thereby critique the event wherever they perceive that may be it sliding away from the authenticity of its own utopian ideals as it is brought into increasing tension with the ordinary bureaucratic and capitalistic world. More recently, MacCannell (2004) retreated from his prior advancement of authenticity as the central quest or reward of tourism, saying that tourists can see right through this pretense. Tourists, he said, know that the experience is a kind of “fake authenticity,” but they desire it nevertheless. Instead, it is an experience of otherness that MacCannell (2001) now emphasizes as at stake in the touristic. As cultures themselves become increasingly commodified, the ‘product’ that is sold to the Western tourist is some encounter with the ‘other.’ Even early on, MacCannell posited that “self-discovery through a 14
Cf. n. 8.
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complex and sometimes arduous search for an Absolute Other is a basic theme of our civilization” (1976: 5) and went on to argue that tourism is a zone for the “staging of otherness” (1976: 84). This desire resonates in a number of ways with Burning Man, for as we saw above it is often the dialectic between communally embedded experiences of others, and a concomitant encounter with the self that engenders feelings of personal transformation and also contributes to a vision of a way to transform society for many participants. At Burning Man, the other is not so much what you are not, as what you desire to become. Recall for example, “I realized that the kind of people who were at Burning Man were the kind of people I wanted to be like. And I saw myself in them, and they recognized themselves in me.” And, “through contribution came community, and my interactions with that community helped me figure out who I am and what I have to offer the world.” The environment too becomes a kind of other at Burning Man, encounters with which are also cited as sources of transformation by many Burners. Through connecting with a sense of community, in being moved to reflect on oneself as reflected in others, or in being challenged by the embodied experience of the playa, the Burning Man experience provides models by which participants are invited to create and negotiate their own frameworks of identity. Furthermore, through its multicultural bricolage of artwork, theme camps, and rituals that partake of images and ideas from an enormous range of other cultures, Burners perform idealized and valorized versions of the other as the ‘primitive’ and ‘exotic,’ while also often parodying elements of our ‘own’ culture as inauthentic. To provide the briefest illustration of how this is so, artwork at Burning Man have appropriated themes from South Asian art and architecture, Russian Orthodoxy, Plains Indians, Aztec civilization, Christian mysticism, and Japanese Shinto, to name just a few examples.15 And over the course of my involvement with Burning Man, I have observed (or heard of ) numerous and varied ritualistic activities, including Vipassana meditation, Reiki attunement classes, Yoga workshops, aura cleansings, Wiccan circles, Unitarian Universalist worship services,
15 Given the limitations of this essay, the curious reader is invited to peruse the database of images available from http://images.burningman.com (accessed 22 December 2005).
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Kabbalah instruction, and kecak (more commonly advertised in this context as “Balinese Monkey chant”). Ironically, while this appropriation creates a context considered to be and experienced by most participants as more authentic, the very borrowed or reproduced nature of these symbols and narratives renders them, on some fundamental level, inauthentic. By this paradox, Burning Man provides a context in which participants can apperceive the extent to which culture is a construct, thereby understanding the ultimate inherent plasticity of culture, and in turn play with varying notions of cultural boundaries and authenticity. Through acts of cultural appropriation, Burners recreate themselves as their own exotic others, which can ironically entail or induce an experience of becoming more authentically oneself. The dynamic tensions surrounding constructions of exotic others in this context also reveals itself in a popular media trope that paints Burning Man as “techno-paganism” (see Gilmore 2006). Yet, within tourism studies (as elsewhere in the scholarly world), there is an increasing recognition that demarcating some essential dichotomy between ‘modernity’ and ‘non-modernity’ is limiting, misleading, and ultimately empty, and further that situating tourism as a superficial or bourgeois quest on the part of ‘modern’ individuals longing for some romantic notion of the ‘pre-modern,’ distorts the complex relations that underlie the dynamics of tourism. For example, sociologist Kevin Meethan has argued that, “the development of tourism analysis needs to proceed beyond static concepts that reduce complexity to an essential either/or choice, modernity versus the primitive, the inauthentic versus the authentic, the local versus the global” (2001: 15). It is perhaps more productive to think of our contemporary globalized world in terms of simultaneously existing multiple modernities— rather than simplistic binary oppositions or reified essences ascribed to specific historical-cultural eras—as conceptual tools by which to situate contemporary tourist practices within broader historical and cultural contexts. Meethan argues that tourism studies should move away from simplistic and essentialist renderings of the ‘modern’ and the ‘non-modern’ that are suggested by framing tourism in terms of quests for either authenticity or the other. As he writes: The central problem here, I would suggest, is a result of seeing modernity as an end product or a steady state, as being that which ‘we’
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have, and ‘others’ should avoid. In turn, this can imply a static model of equilibrium in which cultures are classified as either modern or nonmodern, and the intrusion of the former into the latter through the medium of tourism can only result in destabilisation and the erosion of authentic ways of life (2001: 165).
As a theoretical and methodological stance, I concur that this is a productive direction. Yet Burning Man participants themselves engage in these discourses of modernity, authenticity, and otherness, as the concepts and practices generally signified by the terms ‘pre-modernity’ and ‘modernity’ (as well as ‘post-modernity’) do operate within the context of this festival. Burning Man engages with issues often considered to be symptomatic of ‘modern’ constructions of ‘pre-modernity’—that is, a fictive authenticity or exotic ideal of otherness, alongside questions of commodification. Ironically, however, what first drew Meethan’s text to my attention was not, I must admit, its content but rather its cover, which features a photograph of a prominent artwork from the 1996 Burning Man—Pepe Ozan’s City of Dis. Yet the book itself makes no mention of Burning Man, not even within the photo caption on the book jacket. When I queried Meethan about this choice he simply told me that he had found this photograph to be a compelling image when the painting he had initially suggested for the cover was unavailable, stating: “It struck me as both strong and strange, so I cut it out [from The Independent newspaper] and filed it away. Then when I was thinking about the cover, it came to mind.”16 I cannot help but read this choice as reflecting an idea—as ironically perceived through the gaze of a scholar of tourism—of Burning Man (or at least a key early image from that festival) as exemplifying a touristic quest that embodies romantic notions of pre-modernity emerging in a distinctly modern (or post-modern) milieu such as Burning Man. Conclusions Burning Man is a creature of contradictions that facilitates significant reorientations in time and space, often sparking remarkable life changes. Participant narratives speak to diverse themes of transformation and
16
Personal correspondence, 26 October 2003.
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pilgrimage, as many find that through undertaking this journey they experience something beyond the ordinary—touching, for a moment and in their own individual ways, a sense of something meaningful in their own lives that was missing before. While Burners express a multiplicity of perspectives on what brought about these personal feelings of transformation, this experience often emerges from or takes root in some encounter with community. In this context, it is dynamic and variously constructed encounters between self and other, in tandem with embodied experiences of the desert, that often helps to free many participants of their own perceived constraints, enabling them to transgress some of the boundaries imposed by the normative or default culture. The connections with others that are forged or deepened during the festival often have real and lasting impacts that transform participants’ daily lives well beyond the event itself, as ‘community’ is often one of the most pragmatic ways in which individuals take the event home with them. Nature itself is often productively perceived or experienced as other in the exotic otherworldliness of the Black Rock playa. The desolate desert landscape invites the imagination to populate its open terrain, as participants create a mind-boggling array of expressive projects, producing a stark visual contrast between geographical emptiness and imaginative abundance. The desert also evokes a potent imagery of mystery, abstraction, and limitlessness as well as time-honored connotations of hardship and sacrifice, creating the context for esoteric experiences in a quasi-mythical setting. Burning Man contains numerous ritualistic elements—symbolic experimentation and thematization, the agency and reflexivity afforded by participation, the visceral experience of fire, along with the arduous journey of pilgrimage—that all lend themselves to experiences of life passage and transformation. Through this pilgrimage, many individuals experience changes in life or perspective that vividly invite comparison to Turner’s theories about rites of passage, while the full complexities of this festival also challenge that structure in many ways. Finally, as actors on the global stage of commodified tourism, Burners play with, contest, and negotiate varying notions of authenticity, otherness, modernity, and pre-modernity that participate in broader contexts of cultural discourse. Burning Man provides an opportunity to play with and negotiate varying notions of other-
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ness—based on models of community and practice that embody the event’s ideology, as well as on ideals of a fictive authenticity or exotic purity—and thereby recreate and transform oneself based on these models and frameworks.17 References Bey, Hakim. 1991. T.A.Z. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Bynum, Caroline. 1984. “Women’s Stories, Women’s Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner’s Theory of Liminality.” Pp. 105–25, in Anthropology and the Study of Religion, edited by Robert L. Moore and Frank E. Reynolds. Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion. Doherty, Brian. 2004. This is Burning Man. New York: Little, Brown. Eade, John and Michael Sallnow, eds. 1991. Contesting the Sacred. London: Routledge. Eliade, Mircea. 1954. The Myth of the Eternal Return. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gilmore, Lee. 2005a. “Fires of the Heart: Ritual, Pilgrimage, and Transformation at the Burning Man Festival.” Pp. 43–62, in AfterBurn, edited by Lee Gilmore and Mark Van Proyen. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ———. 2005b. “Embers, Dust, and Ashes: Pilgrimage and Healing at the Burning Man Festival.” Pp. 155–77, in Pilgrimage and Healing, edited by Michael Winkelman and Jill Dubisch. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press. ———. 2005c. Theater in a Crowded Fire: Spirituality, Ritualization, and Performativity at the Burning Man Festival. Ph.D. dissertation, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. ———. 2006. “Media Mecca: Tensions, Tropes, and Techno-pagans at the Burning Man Festival.” Forthcoming in Religion, Media, and the Marketplace, edited by Lynn Schofield Clark. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Graburn, Nelson H.H. 2001. “Secular Ritual: A General Theory of Tourism.” Pp. 42–50, in Hosts and Guests Revisited, edited by Valene L. Smith and Maryann Brent. New York: Cognizant Communication Corporation. Grimes, Ronald. 1990. Ritual Criticism. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Kozinets, Robert V. 2002. “Can Consumers Escape the Market?: Emancipatory Illuminations from Burning Man.” Journal of Consumer Research 29: 20–36. Kozinets, Robert V. and John F. Sherry, Jr. 2005. “Welcome to the Black Rock Café.” Pp. 87–106. AfterBurn, edited by Lee Gilmore and Mark Van Proyen. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. MacCannell, Dean. [1976] 1999. The Tourist. New York: Schocken Books. ———. 2001. “Remarks on the Commodification of Cultures.” Pp. 380–390, in Hosts and Guests Revisited, edited by Valene L. Smith and Maryann Brent. New York: Cognizant Communication Corporation.
17 This chapter is largely based upon research done in completion of my doctoral dissertation at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. I have drawn upon some of these same materials for several other recently published pieces (see Gilmore 2005a, 2005b, 2005c, 2006). This research was also assisted by a Joseph H. Fichter grant from the ASR.
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———. 2004. Presentation at the Tourism Studies Working Group. University of California, Berkeley, 13 February. Meethan, Kevin. 2001. Tourism in Global Society. New York: Palgrave. Sax, William. 1991. Mountain Goddess. New York: Oxford University Press. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre. New York: PAJ Publications. ———. 1986. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 1986. Turner, Victor and Edith Turner. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Van Gennep, Arnold. [1908] 1960. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weiners, Brad and John Plunkett, eds. 1997. Burning Man. San Francisco: HardWired.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE POLITICS OF PILGRIMAGE: THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF GROUND ZERO Jennifer Selby When two hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center buildings 11 September 2001, lower Manhattan was littered with debris, dust and fires, with pieces of the fallen buildings and planes, and with the bodies of nearly three thousand victims. Since that day, hundreds of thousands of visitors have traveled to New York City to witness the space now visually immortalized in news footage and photographs, known as ‘Ground Zero.’1 Soot, fires, rescue efforts: these have been the lasting images of ‘that day’ that heralded ‘the post-9/11 era.’ The site is dynamic and time-changing: initially it was “more than a crime scene, more than a gravesite, more than a gigantic crematorium” (Kingston 2001: SP1). Now it is a cold and orderly visitation site, with panels and explications of that day’s events and its ‘heroes.’ While visitors’ accounts differ, particularly those from the early months after September 2001 to those following the creation of the gridded space, their accounts are generally notable for the way in which these sixteen acres have been conceived and expressed as ‘sacred.’ Indeed, within a month of 9/11, Ground Zero was described by residents, by survivors, by visitors, and by the print media as hallowed ground. Thousands of people have visited the site since September 2001. What might be their motivations? How does tourism, if considered a pleasure and experience-seeking, often superficial activity of the upwardly leisure class (MacCannell 1976; Smith 1977: 2), encounter the ‘sacrality’ and the aura of death which initially overwhelmed the site? Can ‘tourists’ be distinguished from ‘pilgrims’? How does the contemporary socioreligious context of the United
1 This vivid ‘new’ phrase is more than fifty years old, stemming from the World War II when it referred to a bombing target. After Hiroshima, however, it came to have a more particular meaning as the flashpoint of a nuclear blast.
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States shape public representations of the sacred at Ground Zero? What is at stake politically in defining and in framing the site? With consideration of these questions, this chapter seeks to problematize the separation of pilgrimage and tourism, through a methodological critique and a brief ethnographic study of the significant changes at Ground Zero in New York City from 2002–2005. Working within a theoretical framework informed by the work of Victor Turner (1969, 1974, 1992), Victor and Edith Turner (1978), Jonathan Z. Smith (1982), and William Paden (1992, 1996), I argue that the definitional slippage between tourism and pilgrimage at the World Trade Center site is necessarily foregrounded by the social construction of a liminal, ‘sacred’ space at the former World Trade Center. I also use the work of John Eade and Michael Sallnow (1991) to frame my analysis of the politics of pilgrimage. Setting the Socioreligious Context of ‘9/11’ The sacrality of Ground Zero—which I contend evokes the allusion/illusion of pilgrimage to the site—emerged within a publicly secular and capitalist space, arguably linked to a reactionary neonationalist sentiment. To begin, the public reaction to and subsequent personal and government-sanctioned commemorations of 11 September 2001 in New York City must be contextualized within the contemporary religiopolitical landscape of the United States. Western literature has often proposed a steady decline of the social importance of religion since the Enlightenment. A significant shift, however, has marked recent scholarship on secularism, from philosopher Charles Taylor (1998) to sociologist José Casanova (1994), philosopher Marcel Gauchet (1998), and anthropologist Talal Asad (1993, 2003), who argue that while the social space of religion has moved from public spheres it has remained sociopolitically important. Social scientists have proposed differing models to describe the linkages between notions of secularity and the state. Taylor ties the emergence of secularism to the rise of the early modern state (1998; see also Greenfield 1998: 8; Gellner 1983: 13, 1997). Thus, rather than an unchanging element of sacrality at the site in New York City, according to Taylor’s framework, secularism comes to legitimize the nation. Benedict Anderson adds that nationalism takes the place of religion in “command[ing] . . . profound emotional legiti-
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macy” (1991: 14). Anderson suggests that the idea of the nation provides a secular framework of meaning within which existential questions, like suffering or mortality, can be situated and resolved (cf. Badone 2002). In this way, the ‘imagined community’ instills an ‘otherworldly’ sense of the eternity of the nation, socially useful in moments of uncertainty, like the initial gaping 16–acre fissure in Lower Manhattan. Contrary to these arguments that explicitly unite nationalism to secularism, and more useful in thinking of how the sacred is linked to the nation, José Casanova rejects the assumption that religion, under the conditions of modernity, is restricted to the private realm of personal belief (1994: 12). Casanova critiques and reformulates the Weberian Western secularization model by insisting that modern religiosity is both “repoliticized” and “deprivatized” (1994: 5). He claims that propositions which equate secularization with religious decline and privatization are unconvincing (1994: 7, see also Gauchet and his ‘exit from religion’ paradigm [1998: 11]). Thus, though social scientists have argued that the Western world is becoming increasingly secularized—that is, that religion has become less publicly pertinent and relegated to private matters—post-9/11, it has become apparent that a shared public religion is prevalent in the United States (see Weaver 2002 for other historical examples). I argue that this configuration appears under the auspices of a ‘civil religion,’ whereby Ground Zero assumes a sacred quality. Speaking to a nonsectarian faith with cultural roots in Protestant Christianity whose sacred symbols are rooted in national polity and history, American civil religion works as culture building and affirming (Williams and Demerath 1991: 417; Toolin 1983: 46). American sociologist Robert Bellah’s initial presentation of civil religion is particularly pertinent to this contemporary American context owing to its sensitivity to both individual self-interest and collective welfare (see Hammond 1989). Likely first conceptualized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract (1762), civil religion is a unifying nationalist discourse that uses religious means and words to promote national values and patriotism (again, contrary to Benedict Anderson’s equation of secularism to nationhood). Inspired by the inaugural speech of John F. Kennedy in 1961, Bellah notes how Kennedy was careful to refer to a concept of God—one which would be acceptable and desirable for most Americans, but would inevitably hold multitudinous meanings, becoming an empty sign. Bellah clarifies that “though much is
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selectively derived from Christianity, this religion is clearly not itself Christianity” (1970: 175). Civil religion is therefore not a state or institutional religion, but rather an expression that ‘religionizes’ national values and ideals. In this context, civil religion becomes a unifying treatise that utilizes religious rhetoric to promote a shared nationalism, arguably, necessary following the traumas of 9/11.2 There is a minor but notable divergence, however, between Bellah’s conception of civil religion and that of Bush: the God or supreme power in Bellah’s civil religion is “much more related to order, law, and right than to salvation and love” (1970: 175). He is one who can judge the nation and its citizens. Bush’s God shares a similar focus on order, but also legitimates war and sides with Americans, thereby bringing together a diverse society and minimizing individual agency, integral actions to garner support for a counterattack. Ultimately, these political discourses seek to define the moral parameters of the ‘other,’ the enemy, while, attempting to homogenize resistance. Similarly, the rhetoric used to describe the space where the World Trade Towers once stood is civil religious in its sacredness, though more immanent than transcendental. How does this profane space become sacred if sacrality is understood, as it is typically portrayed, as distinguished from the profane by virtue of a unique and a special quality (Eliade 1959: 9–11)? Ground Zero as ‘Sacred’ Space Historically, the category of the ‘sacred’ has been approached by phenomenologists Mircea Eliade and Rudolph Otto, and by sociologist Emile Durkheim. These thinkers depict the sacred not only as the hallmark of religion, but as its very essence (Anttonen 2000: 272). This sui generis ontological category formulates the sacred as separate
2 A brief analysis of the public political response of President George W. Bush— specifically his 20 September 2001 address to Congress detailing the political and military response of the US government—highlights its embodiment of this same civil religious discourse. As in other speeches that followed, Bush and his speechwriters needed to create a national shared public response. Thus, despite the official privatization of religion in the United States, religious discourse was used metaphorically to define both the conflict and the “enemy of freedom.” Relatedly, discourse on American Exceptionalism affirms this type of national identity (see Abbott 1999). Following 9/11, Bush’s rhetoric has thus been characterized by a religiously-based symbolism that interprets the nation’s place in the world in terms of a sacred order.
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Photo 7.1. An iron supporting beam found among the wreckage has remained at the site throughout its clean-up (February 2005). Photo: Jennifer Selby.
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from a cultural or a subjective experience: it is inherently and transcendentally marked. In his introduction to The Sacred and The Profane, Mircea Eliade denotes the profane as completely distinguished from an immanent reality. Eliade characterizes the sacred as nothing which is part of the human or the cosmic realm; it goes beyond human experience: “a reality that does not belong to our world, in objects that are an integral part of our natural ‘profane’ world” (1959: 11). The sacred/profane (the “two modes of being in the world”) and the real/unreal are dichotomized, where the typical human subject longs for the reality of the sacred for a total experience of life. The alternative, the “profane experience,” is less valuable, one where “space is homogeneous and neutral” (1959: 22). In the same way, the sacred manifests in what Rudolf Otto calls the “holy other” (1957 [1917]). The sacred thus becomes apparent dualistically in its distinction from the profane; this approach has been critiqued for its ahistorical and apolitical position (see McCutcheon 1997, 2001). Durkheim also considers the sacred dualistically, in contrast to the profane sphere, as a part of his sociology of religion. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), the sacred is explained as the ideal and as part of the transcendental world, whereas the profane is utilitarian and entrenched in the everyday. Not only are these realms separate from one another, but as Durkheim explains, “There does not exist in the history of human thought another example of two categories of things which are differentiated so profoundly, so radically opposed to one another.” He adds that they are “hostile and jealous rivals of one another” (Durkheim 1991: 95, 97 [my translation]). Durkheim’s dualistic opposition is again not particularly helpful when thinking of Ground Zero because the space is simultaneously sacred and profane, nowhere and everywhere. In contrast to these social functionalist influences, other notions within the work of Durkheim are of greater importance. His focus on the time-bound worldliness of sacrality is useful, particularly how, within The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, religion acts as social unifier and moral regenerator. The sacred exists not as a spiritual reality but rather as a product of social forces (Coleman and Elsner 1995: 199). In this Durkheimian socio-historicized approach, each sacred object or space is thereby a construction containing the force of its society’s tradition (Paden 1992, 1996: 7; James 1998). Nothing is inherently sacred; it is the mark of society which enables its sacred character (Anttonen 1996: 9, 37). The perspective and context of the viewer is impera-
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tive. John Urry’s “tourist gaze” similarly involves the symbolic translation of ordinary objects, places, and experiences into sacred ones (Urry 1990; see also Watson 1994). Roland Barthes’sacralization of the ordinary also runs parallel to this conception: based on human conditions and context, anything can become sacred and then mythologized (1972). Rather than a phenomenological or dualistic approach, I seek to place Ground Zero within its cultural and political context. The sacred does not exist in a sociocultural vacuum (Paden 1996: 10). Indeed, Colleen McDannell argues that these sacred/profane, religious/secular, and arguably, pilgrim/tourist dichotomies work to hinder understanding of how religion works in the world. If we were to look at what people “do rather than what they think, we cannot help but notice the continual scramble of the sacred and the profane” (1995: 4). These sixteen acres in New York City demand a different typology because their unchanged sacrality—despite radical physical changes—lies primarily in that they are completely separate from the routines and the everyday lives of those who surround them. In the face of the powerful emotions of anger and grief evoked by this act of terrorism, survivors seek a meaningful interpretation of the event. Conceiving this space as sacred also serves to construct a narrative of the events of 9/11. A necessary exclusion of randomness and of chaos speaks to a desire to restore normalcy in New York City. Furthermore, as British sociologist Tony Walter’s work on modern Western visitations to war graves suggests, a redemptive and healing effect may occur for travelers to Ground Zero: “the pilgrim is healed and becomes whole, complete, in the presence of the bones of the saints, or at the hero’s grave” (1993: 86). While he notes that medieval shrines often developed because of stories of physical healing, visitations to modern war graves have a greater relation to emotional healing. In compiling the most effective methodological tools to comprehend this space, taking into consideration the negative, the impure and the apparently unsacred elements of Ground Zero, Jonathan Z. Smith’s work on ritual and sacred space is most helpful, particularly his metaphor of sacred space as a “focusing lens.” Smith’s ritual theory utilizes the term ‘place’ as a geographical and metaphorical indicator instead of the often-used phenomenological ‘sacred space’; he also privileges place over action (critiqued by Grimes 1999). Smith argues that this lens directs attention to forms and objects and with
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this awareness gives them religious significance: “The ordinary (which remains, to the observer’s eye, wholly ordinary) becomes significant, becomes sacred, simply by being there. It becomes sacred by having our attention directed to it in a special way” (1982: 55). In LéviStraussian terms, the idea of the sacred is like the numerical value zero: “It signifies nothing, but when joined to another number it is filled with differential significance” (Anttonen 2000: 276). The sacred therefore exists only in relation. This conception of Smith’s lens implies that Ground Zero is sacred because it performs a religious function, not necessarily because it has particular aesthetic or physical sacred qualities. Smith also directs attention to the way sacred sites slide in and out of the common places around them (Lane 2001: 62), allowing for a sacred/profane slippage. In “The Bare Facts of Ritual,” Smith posits that “The sacra are sacred solely because they are used in a sacred place; there is no inherent difference between a sacred vessel and an ordinary one” (1982: 56). Both the categories of religion and sacred space are thus inherently manifested in the mundane ordinariness of life. Smith (1982: 55) utilizes Arnold van Gennep’s notion of the “pivoting of the sacred” from Les Rites de passage (1909) to elaborate this notion of sacred/profane slippage. This pivot suggests that there is nothing that is categorically sacred or profane, but instead, the sacred is conceived through situational or relational categories that shift according to the map being used, or according to its cartographer (Smith 1978). In short, there is nothing which is intrinsically sacred, but rather relational situations which are sacred to those who define them as such. Not surprisingly then, the striking physical changes, massive excavation and reconstruction at Ground Zero since 9/11 have had little impact on whether the space is considered by visitors as sacred. Still, the political implications of the space cannot be ignored. Talal Asad warns that ‘the sacred’ can become a civilizing value which masks political exclusion, dogmatism, and sociopolitical discrimination (1993: 16). Therefore, for many American political leaders and citizens, Ground Zero as a space that is sacred and in need of definition carries rhetorical power related to notions of civil religion and American exceptionalism. Another way we can see the site becoming sacralized is by the degree of pilgrimage and of visitation to the site.
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The Evolution of Ground Zero Ground Zero is an emergent phenomenon; visually, its images are constantly shifting, its meanings and symbols are malleable. In this section I sketch how, since 11 September 2001, the space (and its sacrality) has remained consistent, while it has physically changed dramatically. Despite rescue and recovery efforts, Ground Zero will forever be a gravesite: hundreds of bodies were impossible to recover from the debris. Its appearance has shifted: it is no longer as visually striking, and its odors have been quelled. By the beginning of March 2002, more than one-and-a-half million tons of debris had been cleared from the site. Initially, as a sacred space, it was most captivating and heartbreaking to its visitors because of the paradoxical absence and presence of the Towers. Now, the steel and concrete from two hundred floors of offices have been hauled away. As time has passed, pilgrims, tourists, and loved ones who visit have seen an orderly excavation site, and now new buildings are being erected as part of the Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corporation plan, formed 6 November 2001. On 14 January 2004, a thirteen-member jury along with the current Governor and Mayor selected “Reflecting Absence” by architects Michael Arad and Peter Walker as the memorial for those lost in the 26 February 1993 and the 11 September 2001 attacks on the Trade Center Towers. Until its completion, the design and model are on display in the nearby Winter Garden of the World Financial Center (LMDC: 2004). As of September 2005, the excavation work and the reconstruction of fallen buildings (and the controversy surrounding their conception and creation) continue. The largest organized visitation to the site of the World Trade Center was for an interfaith memorial service, 28 October 2001. Visitors arrived with photographs of those killed, many seeing the destruction and devastation of the site directly for themselves—rather than on television—for the first time. This service also inspired a rare quietness in the area; until that day the recovery workers and rescue crews had stopped only for a moment of silence marking one month after the first hijacked plane struck the trade center’s North tower (Huffstutter 2001: A1). Five thousand chairs were placed on the periphery turned toward Ground Zero; thousands more people stood in surrounding blocks. After the service, families walked east to Pier 94, where city representatives gave them relic-like wooden
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urns containing ash from the site. The remains of only five hundred victims have been identified, while thousands of others are classified as missing. The urn represents a tangible object for families to bury or memorialize. Other important memorials have followed suit, though few have been open to the general public or have been televised. In the autumn and winter months of 2001–2002, visitors to the World Trade Center site had little access to the area.3 Initially, they found themselves blocked by temporary walls and closed streets, and were able to see far more via television coverage. Seekers and mourners therefore began to leave tokens and create mini memorials in front of St. Paul’s Chapel of Trinity Parish, which neighbors the World Trade Center site, and remained (some say miraculously) unscathed following the attacks: Mourners pour into Lower Manhattan from all over the world, seeking a glimpse of the disaster site and a place to leave tokens of sympathy and support. . . . The church [St. Paul’s] has responded to a pressing emotional need by inviting visitors to write their names and messages of support on large canvas dropcloths hung from the church’s fence. The dropcloths fill up quickly and are placed in storage, with the hope that they will one day be put on display (New York Times Editorial Desk 2001: 26).
Messages on these cloths and on the wooden viewing tower mounted 30 December 2001 ranged across: “The Towers will Rise Again,” “God Bless America,” “God Be With you Dana—Love, Mom,” “We Miss You, Richie Allen,” and “Avenge Them.” 3 Since the attacks, the number of pilgrims has grown tremendously and their participation at the site has shifted. The New York Daily News estimates that in the early months of 2002 more than 7,700 tickets were issued for the Church Street viewing platform every day, a thirteen-foot-high wooden deck opened on 30 December 2001 to give visitors an unobstructed view of the recovery efforts (Shin 2002: 26; see photo). Tickets were distributed beginning 9 January 2002 to allow several hundred people access in one-hour time-slots; the viewing platform was open from 9am to 8pm, seven days a week. Thousands lined up to see the site for their allotted thirty minutes, though the view was usually unremarkable (construction trailers, workers, American flags, and a deep hole with nearby trucks rumbling). A landscape and urban designer who sits on the current Memorial Process Team panel noted, “The hiding of the site is not a good idea. Seeing the site, gives the site a chance to heal and the people a chance to heal” (Smith 2001). Since this platform was dismantled and visitation to the site is no longer so carefully controlled, it is difficult to determine the number of visitors with any accuracy. In April 2002, there were approximately 4,500 visitors to the site every day (Lee 2002). As of late-2005, more than four years after the attacks, the site continues to draw large crowds and tours of the city now promise a visit to the site alongside more traditional tourist attractions.
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From 12 September 2001, the two hundred and thirty-five yearold chapel—“the oldest public building in continuous use on the island of Manhattan” (Chapel brochure: 1)—was utilized by rescue workers, police and firefighters as a place to rest and to distribute food and supplies; when electricity was restored on 21 September, hot meals were served on a twenty-four hour basis. A pair of boots placed on the church’s iron fence became a first memorial to firefighters on the scene on 9/11. As they changed from their ‘civvies’ (civilianwear) into their rescue gear, firefighters hung their civilian shoes on the fence spikes outside the church; unclaimed footwear at the end of the day marked those who did not return. In October 2001 when Broadway was reopened for public access outside of St. Paul’s Chapel, this same fence around the chapel became an impromptu memorial shrine. Visitors left photographs, poems, messages, American flags, candles, and other mementoes. Images like Photo 7.3 of the fences surrounding St. Paul’s capture a remarkable shift at the site—that is, these mementoes are no longer permitted at the site. The gridded area has several markers asking “Please do not write anywhere on the viewing fence” and “Please understand all articles left behind must be removed.” The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey have also outlined several regulations which prohibit the distribution of printed materials within 25 feet of the fence, the sale of merchandise without a permit, “coordinated expressive activity” of a group of more than 25 people without a permit, and attaching or leaving items. Compared to the number of articles left in the early months of the attacks, the odd bouquet or messages written in permanent marker do not have the same effect. Such changes characterize pilgrimage shrines: “A pilgrimage’s foundation is typically marked by visions, miracles, or martyrdoms. The first pilgrims tend to arrive haphazardly, individually, and intermittently, though in great numbers, ‘voting with their feet’; their devotion is fresh and spontaneous. Later, there is progressive routinization and institutionalization of the sacred journey” (Turner and Turner 1978: 25). This image taken in April 2002 captures the raw emotional response of survivors of the incident. Personalized messages of grief, of support, of sorrow and of anger are scrawled on the large wooden panels used to construct the viewing tower. Flags, toys, rescue-worker-related objects, crosses, and pictures were placed together in a makeshift collage in an attempt to make public the loss of individuals. Visitors
Photo 7.2. The fences surrounding St. Paul’s Chapel became the place of ‘instant memorialization’ as thousands left momentoes behind (February 2003). Photo: Jennifer Selby.
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to the site in the first months following the attacks shared a more ‘authentic’ vision of the events of 9/11 than later visitors, as debris was still being removed. For instance, in a visit to the site in April 2002, while most wreckage had been removed, a set of widow blinds remained lodged in the highest branches of a lone tree near St. Paul’s chapel. These blinds became what Dean MacCannell calls a “truth marker” (1976). Visitors photographed the damaged blinds, linking them to the scale and unexpectedness of the attacks. By the spring of 2003, however, the site had been barricaded by a large metal-gridded fence. The sole items on the fences are information placards coordinated by The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey which chronicle the events of 11 September 2001, list the ‘heroes’ and other areas of interest relating to 9/11, like The Sphere in Battery Park. An aura of logic and control emanates as the space is orderly and organized. Despite the atmospheric shift, St. Paul’s Chapel remained central to the public memorialization of Ground Zero. A special Thanksgiving service and meal were held at the church in November 2001; the Vienna Boys Choir visited in December 2001; former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani delivered his final valedictory address at the chapel; and a closing barbeque was held for rescue workers and volunteers in June 2002. The exhibit “Unwavering Spirit: Hope and Healing at Ground Zero” was inaugurated 11 September 2002 and circles the chapel on the inside walls. Documentation in the chapel is noteworthy, for despite being a chapel of the Episcopal Church, it seeks to create an ecumenical space—literature in the pews includes an Invitation to Prayer representing twelve faiths—to mourn those lost, and to share uplifting narratives of volunteers and rescue workers.4 In a pamphlet which includes his poem, “St. Paul’s Chapel,” one volunteer concludes that St. Paul’s became the ‘spiritual home’ of Ground Zero, and that beginning with its miraculous escape from the devastation of the Trade Towers, the chapel offered
4 Other actions have been taken to document the lived experiences of those in New York City the day of the attacks. The “September 11, 2001 Oral History Research Project” directed by members of Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office, with support from the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy had, within a week following the attacks, conducted hundreds of interviews. The team is also interested in probing how memory and history define the interpretation of major events, as well as how individual and social memory are constructed (Clark 2002; Culler 2005).
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hope and solace to those in need. Another volunteer adds in a passage distributed in the chapel: “It stood in place of other sorts./It stood when nothing else could./The great had fallen, as the brute hardware came down./It stood.” By 7 March 2004 over one million guests had toured “Unwavering Spirit.” The exhibit engendered a response great enough to create a Website for those unable to visit the chapel (www.stpaulschapel.org) which includes an artifact archive, an interactive timeline, community messages, as well as a video anthology. A large metal cross found among site wreckage, a photograph of three firefighters, and The Sphere are the three primary sacred symbols of the site. On 4 October 2001, a large metal cross formed by steel beams from the North Tower was found and left at the site, becoming the central Christian-inspired symbol at Ground Zero. Surrounded by the physical changes to the site, it has remained a constant, highly visible marker within the void of the site’s skyline. It is central to Christian religious pilgrimage to the site. The other immanent symbol replicated on innumerable souvenirs—from Tshirts, to bumper stickers, to buttons and Christmas ornaments—is an impromptu photograph of three firefighters during the initial recovery efforts. Tom Franklin, a photographer for a New Jersey newspaper, captured the firefighters hoisting a flag on top of a large pile of rubble. The image came to symbolize a redemptive element in the rescue efforts and is likened to another famous photograph taken at Iwo Jima.5 The image is not without controversy, however, and speaks to the politics behind the memorialization of Ground Zero. Tom Franklin later wrote, “I am disappointed that the photograph—the source of so much unity and pride—become the subject of such division” (2002: 65). Here Franklin refers to issues of political correctness in a memorial statue based on the photograph 5 Four flags found in the rubble of the Trade Center and their later locations speak to their importance in symbolizing this disaster. One was marched into the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah after flying at memorial services for many of the victims. This badly torn flag was also flown at the World Series, at the Super Bowl, and at New York City’s Veterans Day and Thanksgiving Day parades. Another is destined for the Smithsonian Institution. A third is feared to have been thrown out with rubble. The last hung from the Theodore Roosevelt, a leading warship in the ‘war on terrorism.’ The commanding officer of the Roosevelt explains that this flag “is a silent message of inspiration not only to us but to all Americans that we will be victorious” (Gittrich 2002: 20). These flags thus represent the ‘sacredness’ of Ground Zero in varying contexts separate from the site itself.
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designed to honor the city’s ethnic diversity, although the firefighters in the original photograph were Caucasian. The Sphere has also become a key symbol at the site. Originally located in the World Trade Center plaza fountain prior to the attacks, the twenty-five-foot-tall Sphere sustained heavy damage, but remained structurally intact (again, ‘miracle’ discourse is employed). Originally created by German sculptor Fritz Koenig in 1971 to symbolize world peace through global trading, it now sits in Battery Park south of the Trade Center site. Current New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has stated that The Sphere is an interim memorial intended to create a space for mourning and reflection, and to serve as a symbol of the courage and resilience of New York City (Press Release LMDC: 2002). Today a small eternal flame burns below the globe, and small flags and other items are left behind by visitors. Despite their dissimilarities—a cross, a photograph, and a damaged sculpture—these symbols are integral to the creation and maintenance of the hallowed nature of the site. As Victor and Edith Turner explain, “Pilgrimages often begin when a considerable number of people are satisfied that a ‘sign’ of supernatural intervention in human affairs has indeed been given at a particular place in a particular way” (1978: 205). Messages left at the site—ranging from “God Bless America” to personalized edicts, to “Avenge Them”—highlight some of the contesting discourses at Ground Zero. In the first months after the attacks, visitors had greater access to the site, causing concern for the New York Police Department, who asked crowds not to take pictures because of its crime scene status. Also, some critics, understanding these pilgrims to be gawkers, decried the photography and selling of Americana memorabilia nearby as lacking in respect for the sacredness of the site. One man who lost his brother wrote to the New York Times: “I, too, feel as if I am at a cemetery when I am near or viewing the site, and I find it offensive that some visitors are not sensitive to this” (Mindlin 2002: A28). The site also attracts those seeking to make profits. One homeless man has dedicated several months in 2005 to pacing in front of the visitor’s fence announcing to visitors: “Learn the facts. Learn the facts. No one’s paying me to do this.” He explains the number of buildings that fell (many visitors are under the assumption that only the two towers fell) and the number of undeclared workers who died in the attacks who do not appear on the ‘Heroes of September
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Photo 7.3. The Sphere, found intact at Ground Zero has become a symbol of resilience. It is now located south of the site, at Battery Park (February 2005). Photo: Jennifer Selby.
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11, 2001’ list of those who died. He distributes maps which highlight the other fallen buildings and accepts donations. Another man, Philip Ralph Belpasso, known as the ‘9/11 Piper’ sits across from the fence playing “Amazing Grace,” promoting peace, and distributing information about a calendar change prompted by the attacks. These personalities and other unauthorized vendors of small commemorative photo albums seem to be monitored by police. In February 2005, I witnessed two vendors selling items (within the illegal 25 feet from the viewing fence) who were escorted away from the area by undercover police officers. Authorized vendors in the next block sell FDNY t-shirts, caps, post-cards, commemorative books and glass prisms featuring the towers (at $5US, their best seller). Tourists Seeking the Sacred: Methodological Considerations This section explores how, because of and in spite of its constructed sacrality, Ground Zero has become a key destination for visitors to New York in a dual process of commemoration and collective meaningmaking that shares features with visitation to more traditional pilgrimage shrines. Since the viewing platform was built in late December 2001, hundreds of thousands of people have visited to observe the absence of the Trade Center and to pay their respects. Most visitors reflect quietly and leave flowers or brief messages, a practice started by former New York City mayor Rudolph Guiliani. Are these visitors tourists, “a derisive label for someone who seems content with his obviously inauthentic experiences” (MacCannell 1976: 94)? Or, are they pilgrims, making a journey characterized by confrontations with rituals, holy objects, and sacred architecture (Coleman and Elsner 1995: 6)? Nelson Graburn deems tourism “The Sacred Journey,” noting that most Westerners conceptualize their lives as divided between sacred/ nonordinary/touristic periods and profane/workaday/stay-at-home periods. In this model, tourism becomes equated with the sacred. Graburn adds that the rewards of travel are “phrased in terms we now hold up for worship: mental and physical health, social status, and diverse, exotic experiences” (1977: 24). The sacred therefore meets the tourist. On a larger scale, the distinctions between these categories of pilgrim/tourist (like sacred/profane) have been challenged. As Victor and Edith Turner describe: “a tourist is half a pilgrim, if
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a pilgrim is half a tourist. Even when people bury themselves in anonymous crowds on beaches, they are seeking an almost sacred, often symbolic, mode of communitas, generally unavailable to them in the structured life of the office, the shop floor, or the mine” (1978: 20). Anthropologists Ellen Badone and Sharon Roseman concur that these dichotomies are no longer tenable in the wake of “postmodern travel” (2004: 2). So why do people visit the site? Gauging peoples’ motivations is nearly impossible. Badone and Roseman explain this task as one of the “perennial problems in ethnography” (2004: 2, 180). MacCannell’s notion of authenticity helps to elucidate the visitation impetus. Those who have seen the site are often awestruck by the enormity of the destruction, and the solemnity of the site’s atmosphere, unrepresented elements in television broadcasts. The images of planes striking these buildings have become familiar to most, as media footage has been infinitely replayed. Many visitors admit the video images of the event seem surreal, like a Hollywood blockbuster film. One visitor characteristically describes that “We watched the whole thing on TV and it looked too surreal. It looked like a movie set. This [visit] helps bring it close to home, and hopefully helps us get over it” (Hamilton 2001: A3). Pilgrimage to Ground Zero is thus a complex affair. It is scrambled with voyeurism and a dogged attempt to make the unbelievable real: “The pictures of the World Trade Center collapsing in ruins were . . . not a senseless act but cost-efficient and highly leveraged, the arrival of the second plane timed to the expectation of the arriving cameras, with production values akin to those of Independence Day and Air Force One” (Lapham 2001: 39). Mary Marshall Clark, head of The September 11, 2001 Oral History Project at Columbia University, claims many of those interviewed perceived the attacks directly and indirectly as an apocalypse: “Of all of our interviewees, the people who had the most ‘complete’ framework with which to understand the catastrophe were themselves already religious or apocalyptic thinkers” (2002: 569). Visiting Ground Zero is also about coming to terms with the aftermath of the drama of the attacks (see Lincoln 2003 on the dramatized clash of ideal types). Perhaps the immediacy of the experience of visiting Ground Zero is integral in dealing with the enormity of the disaster. Both MacCannell (1973) and Cohen (1988) note that the tourist, seeking ‘authentic’ experiences, becomes the modern embodiment of the religious pil-
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grim; tourism acts as a modern surrogate for religion. MacCannell adds that “settings are often not merely copies or replicas of reallife situations but copies that are presented as disclosing more about the real thing than the real thing itself discloses” (1976: 102). Going to these areas is part of a quest for authentic experiences, perceptions and insights. MacCannell’s notion of “truth markers” helps us to understand how a set of blinds lodged high in a tree becomes a symbol of the radical destruction which took place at the site: “Truth markers function to cement the bond of tourist and attraction by elevating the information possessed by the tourist to privileged status” (1976: 137). Furthermore, this space possesses an interactive element enabling visitors to incorporate personal responses and to leave or take items of material culture. Since these tokens are often sold near the site, they represent an intersection between pilgrimage, tourism and consumerism. A year after the attacks one journalist quipped “The September 11th Anniversary Industry” (Saunders 2002: 1). These relics help pilgrims reconstruct their sacred journey in the imagination, becoming tangible and immediate links with the pilgrim experience (Coleman and Elsner 1995: 6). In the early weeks of September 2001, visitors to lower Manhattan took home charred papers and dust: “It’s something to remember this by, something I’ll be able to show my children. I want a momento,” explained one visitor (Hamilton 2001: A3). Literature on tourism highlights the importance of this commoditization (see Cohen 1988: 372). Toward a Present-Day Conception of ‘Touristic Pilgrimage’ This section, which examines methodological conceptions of pilgrimage and tourism, treats in particular a noteworthy methodological shift from the work of Victor Turner (1969, 1974, 1998; Turner and Turner 1978) to that of John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow (1991). While Turner maintains that pilgrimage sites generate communitas, Eade and Sallnow argue that pilgrimage is more likely to give rise to conflict and contestation. This segment investigates which of these perspectives is more relevant for those who visit Ground Zero, allowing the possibility that visitors experience elements of both communitas and contestation. Also influential is the work of Dean MacCannell (1976), Nelson Graburn (1983), and Simon Coleman
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(2002) who examine how tourists seek meaning and cultural ‘authenticity’ through their travels in ways similar to traditional pilgrims. Until the “postmodern shift” in the fields of anthropology and sociology, the works of Victor Turner in the anthropological analysis of ritual were seminal. His principal model proposes a tripartite deterministic framework for ritual. Borrowing from van Gennep, Turner develops what he sees as the three essential phases within all ritual—separation, margin and aggregation (1969: 94), or the preliminal, liminal, and postliminal (1969: 166). The first of these three moments of the ritual process is that of separation, where the individual becomes detached from his or her society and corresponding cultural identity. The second, the liminal or the “betwixt and between” stage (1969: 95), is the element of ritual to which Turner devotes most of his attention. In this case, the ritual participant is outside of the social order while in the middle or transitional phase of a rite of passage. The individual, having left society in a symbolic sense, becomes transformed and stands between social worlds. This period is also characterized by an erasure of the individual’s former identity and social positioning. Turner coins the notion of communitas; it does not endure; it is a temporary cultural experience with no stable form. The last stage which Turner includes in this tripartite structure is that of integration whereby the individual, now transformed, takes on a new identity and a new role within society. This framework of ritual has been utilized within several academic disciplines; Turner and Turner also apply the term liminoid to the phenomenon of pilgrimage which has some of the “liminal phase attributes” one finds in rites of passage (1978). Unlike rites of passage, however, pilgrimage is voluntary and therefore more liminoid than liminal. Its liminality is in its release from mundane structures and its homogenization of status. One steps out of one’s social structures, wherein the role and the self in the role are determined by the social body, in order to join a community of participants who share the common goal of some kind of journey. Turner indicates that communitas is the underpinning experience that allows pilgrims a sense of socially unencumberedness which then contributes to a universalized human self. Pilgrimage also acts to support or subvert the established social order. John Eade and Michael Sallnow’s position opposes the Durkheimian notion that a sacred space functions as a social unifier and the Turnerian notion of communitas, replacing it with the notion
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of contestation, seeking to recognize pilgrimage as an arena for competing religious and secular discourses. They add that there is little ethnographic evidence to support Turner’s theory and that rather than an attenuation and dissolution of social boundaries, these confines are frequently reinforced in pilgrimage (1991: 4). The flow of money is an example of this contestation. Eade and Sallnow note that “one frequently encounters intensive secular commerce taking place in or around the sanctuary precincts. The conjunction of markets and pilgrimage is well documented for many parts of the world” (1991: 26), including organized tours, like a handful available in New York City. An article from the travel section of the Los Angeles Times states: For better or worse, it’s now [visits to Ground Zero] what defines New York tourism. For months, city officials have been groping for the right way to handle the prickly issues of etiquette, decency and morality as thousands come to bear witness to the devastation of Sept. 11. Given the high demand, it was only a matter of time before the private sector jumped in (Duke 2002: C1).
Anne Kingston explains the way in which visiting the space is as big of a cultural event as attending a hit Broadway show, although no one would dare say so: “That would be gauche” (2001: SP1). Spiritual tourism is an integral economic component of the construction and commodification of sacred spaces. Travelers are willing to pay for these types of experiences. There are thus clear economic and social transactions at sites like Ground Zero within the diffusion and rediffusion of ideas and practices. Simon Coleman and John Elsner critique Eade and Sallnow’s position, claiming they have an “anthropological agenda” in their claim that “the carried cultural assumptions of pilgrims and the power struggles of society are evident at pilgrimage sites” (1995: 200). Coleman and Elsner are also concerned about a postmodern negation, that “Eade and Sallnow have in a sense invoked the idea of pilgrimage only to dismiss it as a meaningful category for study” (1995: 202). They see the existence of the sacred beyond society (a “constitution” of the sacred rather than a “contestation”). Most important in these critiques, though Turner’s three-part system seems like a benign structure, there are politics at play whose implications seem to be ignored in the Turner’s treatment. Thinking of Ground Zero, The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is careful to delineate the geopolitical space of the former World Trade Center towers, which wholly shapes the experience of those who visit the site.
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Seeking to prevent alternative interpretations from being voiced at the site, the Port Authorities have made careful choices to avoid contestation, like not allowing visitors to leave items behind or gatherings of more than 25 persons without a permit. A last central element in pilgrimage to Ground Zero is its voyeurism combined with opportunities to explore loss and grief: the site serves as a memento mori. In attempts to make sense of the attacks of 11 September 2001, the spectacle of mass death has given rise to collective reflection, through efforts to construct order and meaning (Geertz 1973). As Victor Turner’s seminal article, “Death and the Dead in the Pilgrimage Process” (1992) indicates, themes of mortality and the relationships among the living and deceased others are integral to many pilgrimage sites. One visitor explained, “We feel the families’ pain not only because their loss was so colossal, so sudden, and so senseless, but because we, too, might have died if our paths had taken us to Lower Manhattan that day” (Zukin 2002: 14). Architect Mark Wigley notes a voyeuristic desire like stopping to observe the scene of a huge traffic crash (2002: 73). Ian Reader similarly describes how “tragedy, disruption, death and images of death, along with the heroes and saintly figures associated with these issues” often come together in modern, secularized forms of pilgrimage (1993: 2). The experience affirms and reiterates the existence of those who died, asserting that their sacrifice was not in vain. While most visitors take photos of the site when they visit, many others are interested in finding a relic, even, as I mentioned, resorting to collecting dust or waste papers which carry a greater stamp of authenticity than FDNY t-shirts. Coleman and Elsner note “the boundaries between pilgrimage and tourism become blurred further in the case of commemoration of the dead,” citing wide-ranging examples like the mausoleum in Red Square and the home and grave of Elvis Presley (1995: 215). Somewhat analogous in its touristic dimension, Tim Cole describes visitors to Auschwitz as “tourists of guilt and righteousness: guilt at the almost pornographic sense of voyeurism ahead. And yet guilt tampered by a sense of righteousness at choosing to come to this place” (2000: 97). In his examination of Auschwitz, Graceland, the Bridge over the River Kwai, the site of John Lennon’s assassination, and the Paris underpass where Diana the Princess of Wales died, Cole points to a recent influx in what he calls “death tourism.” He also describes “Holocaust tourism,” noting cynically how tourists flock to Auschwitz,
Photo 7.4. A perspective on the current viewing fence. Visitors walk the perimeter of the site, looking through a metal grid and reading posted information about 9/11 (February 2005). Photo: Jennifer Selby.
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the Anne Frank House, Yad Vashem and other museums and buy postcards to write “Wish you were here” (2000: 17). Central to this tourism is a similar sense of voyeurism and secular ritualism. Chris Rojek offers a parallel typology in “black spots” (1993). These spots highlight the commercial developments at grave sites and areas where celebrities or large numbers of people met with sudden or violent death. While interest and visits to these sites may seem distasteful, it would be imprudent to deny that it is widely shared and that such sites take on a monumental and immediate quality in Western culture (cf. Blasi 2002). Ground Zero is one of these sites where thousands died unexpectedly, where there is a sense of voyeuristic interest in the scale and unexpected nature of the attacks. This voyeurism seeks to fathom and to understand mortality and thus cannot be quickly dismissed as crude or in poor taste. A Space in Flux In many ways, the physical and social constructions of this sacred space are ongoing. How this space is understood now, and the way it will continue to be perceived as a place of pilgrimage and of tourism is an ongoing debate. Some conclusions, particularly the sacrality of these sixteen acres in Manhattan, are more certain. While it is generally accepted that life in the United States has changed irrevocably, it will take years before the cultural meaning of the terrorist attacks in New York City, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and in the skies of Pennsylvania comes into focus. A sense of the sublime—of beauty and of terror—continues to pervade Lower Manhattan at the site of the former World Trade Towers. Ultimately, as part of a shared ritualized moment, travelers construct their own interpretations of ‘Ground Zero’ and the ‘9/11 Era’ through a personal and collective connection with the site as it is so carefully presented to them.6
6 Portions of this chapter have appeared in an earlier version as “Ground Zero as Sacred Space,” Religious Studies/Theology 21(1) 2002: 75–88, and have been reworked by permission.
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References Abbott, Philip. 1999. Exceptional America. New York: Peter Lang. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. London: Verso. Anttonen, Veikko. 1996. “Rethinking the Sacred: The Notions of ‘Human Body’ and ‘Territory’ in Conceptualizing Religion.” Pp. 36–64 in The Sacred and Its Scholars, edited by Thomas A. Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2000. “Sacred.” Pp. 271–82 Guide to the Study of Religion, edited by Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon. London: Cassell. Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2003. Formations of the Secular. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Badone, Ellen. 2002. “Identity and Democracy—A Forum on La Religion dans la démocratie: Parcours de la laïcité.” French Politics, Culture & Society 20: 121–25. ——— and Sharon Roseman, eds. 2004. Intersecting Journeys. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Barthes, Roland. 1972 [1957]. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang. Bellah, Robert N. 1970 [1967]. “Civil Religion in America.” Pp. 168–192 in Beyond Belief. New York: Harper and Row. Blasi, Anthony J. 2002. “Vistation to Disaster Sites.” Pp. 159–180 in From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism, edited by William H. Swatos, Jr. and Luigi Tomasi. Westport, CT: Praeger. Bush, George W. 2001. “Address to a Joint Session of Congress in Washington.” Toronto Star. Sept 21: A8–9. Casanova, José. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clark, Mary Marshall. 2002. “The September 11, 2001, Oral History Narrative and Memory Project: A First Report.” Journal of American History 89: 569–79. Cohen, Erik. 1988. “Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 15: 371–86. Cole, Tim. 2000. Selling the Holocaust. New York: Routledge. Coleman, Simon and John Elsner. 1995. Pilgrimage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coleman, Simon. 2002. “Do You Believe in Pilgrimage? Communitas, Contestation and Beyond.” Anthropological Theory 2: 355–68. Culler, Gregory. Personal Interview. 4 February 2005. Oral History Research Office, Columbia University. Duke, Lynne. 2002. “The Pilgrimage to Ground Zero; Officials and Tourists Walk A Fine Line on Solemn Ground.” Washington Post. Feb. 27: C1. Durkheim, Émile. 1991 [1912]. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: le système totémique en Australie. Paris: Librairie Générale Française. Eade, John and Michael J. Sallnow, eds. 1991. Contesting the Sacred. London: Routledge. Editorial Desk. 2001. “The Pilgrimage to Lower Manhattan.” New York Times. Nov. 14: A26. Eliade, Mircea. 1959. The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. ———. 1971. Myth of the Eternal Return. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Franklin, Tom. 2002. “The After-Life of a Photo That Touched a Nation.” Columbia Journalism Review 40(6): 64–65. Gauchet, Marcel. 1998. La Religion dans la Démocratie. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Religion as a Cultural System.” Pp. 87–125 in The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
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———. 1997. Nationalism. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Gennep, Arnold van. 1960 [1909]. The Rites of Passage, new ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960. Gittrich, Greg. 2002. “Fate of Four Battle-Worn WTC Flags.” New York Daily News March 4: 20. Graburn, Nelson H.H. 1977. “Tourism: The Sacred Journey.” Pp. 17–31 Hosts and Guests, edited by Valene L. Smith. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 1983. “The Anthropology of Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 10: 9–33. Greenfeld, Liah. 1996. “Nationalism and Modernity.” Social Research 63: 3–40. Grimes, Ronald L. 1999. “Jonathan Z. Smith’s Theory of Ritual Space.” Religion 29: 261–73. Hamilton, Graeme. 2001. “The Fallout: Gawkers Converge on Ground Zero.” National Post. Sept. 29: A3. Hammond, Philip E. 1989. “Religion and Nationalism in the United States.” Pp. 167–72 in Religion and Political Power, edited by Gustavo Benavides and M.W. Daly. Albany: State University of New York Press. Huffstutter, P.J. 2001. “Response to Terror; The Aftermath; Thousands at Ground Zero Grieve.” Los Angeles Times. Oct. 29: A1. James, William Closson. 1998. Locations of the Sacred: Essays on Religion, Literature and Canadian Culture, 2nd ed. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press. Kingston, Anne. 2001. “Every Second Person’s Going: Pilgrimage to Ground Zero is the thing to do.” National Post. Nov. 24: SP1. Lapham, Lewis. 2001. “Drums Along the Potomac: New War, Old Music.” Harper’s Magazine. 303 (Nov): 35–41. Lane, Belden C. 2001. “Giving Voice to Place: Three Models for Understanding American Sacred Space.” Religion and American Culture 11:1 53–81. Lee, Gary. 2002. “In Lower Manhattan, Looking Back and Moving On.” Washington Post. Apr. 14: E4. Lincoln, Bruce. 1989. Discourse and the Construction of Society. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2003. Holy Terrors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. LMCD. (Lower Manhattan Development Corporation). 2002. “Governor Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation unveil plans for an interim memorial for the victims of September 11th and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.” March 5. Press Release. http://www.RenewNYC.com. ———. 2004. “Architect Michael Arad and Landscape Architect Peter Walker unveil winning design for World Trade Center site memorial: Reflecting Absence.” January 14. Press Release. http://www.RenewNYC.com. MacCannell, Dean. 1973. “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Spece in Tourist Settings.” American Journal of Sociology 79: 589–603. ———. 1976. The Tourist. New York: Schocken. McCutcheon, Russell. 1997. Manufacturing Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2001. Critics Not Caretakers. Albany: State University of New York Press. McDannell, Colleen. 1995. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mindlin, Elizabeth. 2002. “Pilgrimage to a Shrine of Sorrow.” New York Times. Jan 17: A28. Murray, George. 2002. “After the Fall: Remember Reflect Renew.” Globe and Mail. Sept. 7: F1. Otto, Rudolf. 1957 [1917]. The Idea of the Holy, 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press. Paden, William. 1992. Interpreting the Sacred. Boston: Beacon Press.
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———. 1996. “Sacrality as Integrity: ‘Sacred Order’ as a Model for Describing Religious Worlds.” Pp. 3–18 in The Sacred and Its Scholars, edited by Thomas A. Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan. Leiden: Brill. Reader, Ian. 1993. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–25 in Pilgrimage in Popular Culture, edited by Ian Reader and Tony Walter. London: Macmillan. Rojek, Chris. 1993. “Fatal Attractions.” Pp. 136–72 in Ways of Escape. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Saunders, Doug. 2002. “The Secrets of the Sept. 11 Anniversary Industry.” The Globe and Mail. July 13: F1, 7. Shin, Paul H.B. 2002. “Thousands Still Visit WTC Site.” New York Daily News. Apr. 5: 26. Smith, Dinitia. 2001. “Hallowed Ground Zero; Competing Plans Hope to Shape a Trade Center Memorial.” New York Times. Oct. 25: E 1. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1978. Map is Not Territory. Leiden: Brill. ———. 1982. Imagining Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Valene, ed. 1977. Hosts and Guests. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. St. Paul’s Chapel [brochure]. Parish of Trinity Church in the City of New York. http://www.trinitywallstreet.org Taylor, Charles. 1998. “Modes of Secularism.” Pp. 31–53 in Secularism and Its Critics, edited by Rajeev Bhargava. Dehli: Oxford University Press, 31–53. Toolin, Cynthia. 1983. “American Civil Religion from 1789 to 1981: A Content Analysis of Presidential Inaugural Addresses.” Review of Religious Research. 25: 39–48. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1974. “Pilgrimages as Social Processes.” Pp. 166–230 in Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1992. “Death and the Dead in the Pilgrimage Process.” Pp. 29–47 in Blazing the Trail, edited by Edith Turner. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Turner, Victor and Edith L.B. Turner. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage. Walter, Tony. 1993. “War Grave Pilgrimage.” Pp. 63–91 in Pilgrimage in Popular Culture, edited by Ian Reader and Tony Walter. London: Macmillan. Watson, G.L. 1994. “Interpretations of Tourism as Commodity.” Annals of Tourism Research 21: 643–60. Weaver, Danny. 2002. “Responding to September 11—and October 7 and January 29: Which Religion Shall We Follow?” Conrad Grebel Review (Spring): 79–100. Wigley, Mark. 2002. “Insecurity by Design.” Pp. 69–86 in After the World Trade Center, edited by Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin. New York: Routledge. Williams, Rhys H. and N.J. Demerath. 1991. “Religion and Political Process in an American City.” American Sociological Review 56: 417–31. Zukin, Sharon. 2002. “Our WTC.” Pp. 13–21 in After the World Trade Center, edited by Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin. New York: Routledge.
CHAPTER EIGHT
RELIGIOUS TOURISM IN JAPAN: KYÔTO’S GION FESTIVAL Michael K. Roemer On 17 July every year, hundreds of thousands of Japanese and foreigners crowd downtown Kyôto to watch, record, listen to, and experience Gion Festival. Of the two major attractions, the larger float-carts tower down the streets at eighty feet in the air, they carry from twenty to thirty musicians, and they are adorned with exquisite brass and gold decorations and tapestries donated centuries ago from all over Eurasia. The smaller float-carts also display an array of beautiful tapestries, and they each carry different symbolic figurines. A host of young men in period costumes carry the floats and carefully maneuver these multi-ton historical treasures at corners and through narrow streets. The leaders of each of the thirty-two float-carts don outfits previously restricted to the samurai class, and they walk prominently ahead of and behind their neighborhood floats. Exactly why so many attend this month-long series of rites and festivities has never been carefully researched. In this chapter, I rely on a combination of quantitative and qualitative data I collected in 1995, 2003, and 2005 to explore reasons for this festival’s popularity. I focus on this particular festival because it is one of Japan’s most famous festivals and attracts a large population from all over the country, thus it offers an ideal setting in which to examine patterns and perceptions of religious tourism in contemporary Japan. Moreover, in so doing I focus on a form of religious tourism in Japan that has not been significantly addressed heretofore: the major urban shrine festival. The results of my studies strongly indicate that festivals such as Gion Festival offer participants and sightseers a seamless blend of sacred and profane experiences, and they provide scholars with an appropriate context within which to understand better contemporary Japanese religious trends. Therefore this study uses a distinctive yet important approach to exploring Japanese religious
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tourism and religiosity, and it introduces the English-speaking world to one of Japan’s oldest and most elaborate festivals.1 As in studies of religious tourism by European and American scholars (e.g., Brown 1998; Carrasco 1996; Cohen 1979; Eade 1992; MacCannell 1989; Rinschede 1992; Turner 1973), this chapter indicates that Japanese tourists vary when it comes to the religious nature of their visits. Religious motivations depend on the context or situation, and they are not necessarily a constant in one’s life (Davis 1992). In fact, the few studies that specifically address examples of contemporary Japanese religious tourism claim that ‘pilgrims’ and sightseers alike often explain their motivations as secular in nature (Graburn 1983) or as an overlapping combination of the religious and profane (Kitagawa 1987; Reader 1991, 2005; Thal 2005). In this manner, Japanese who make special visits to shrines and temples or attend festivals resemble tourists and pilgrims from other cultures. What became apparent after analyzing the data I compiled in 2005 was the fact that the festival-goers’ syncretistic mix of emotions and experiences is simply another example of contemporary Japanese religiousness. Previous influential studies on religion in Japan (e.g., Davis 1992; Reader 1991) indicate that, though Japanese commonly deny religious membership on surveys and in brief interviews, once probed, these same respondents tend to admit ritual participation and even beliefs. This discrepancy indicates that something significant may be occurring below the conscious surface. Unconsciously, perhaps, Japanese are religiously motivated to maintain traditional rituals and visit historic and cultural religiously significant sites and events, such as Gion Festival. To explore these phenomena, I will first provide an abbreviated overview of the recent history of Japanese religious tourism. Because the current trends seen in pilgrimages and attendance at festivals closely resemble those of the recent past, a brief historical explanation is necessary. Next, I will explain my methodologies from my fieldwork in 1995, 2003, and 2005. I conclude with a discussion of the results of these studies—especially the 2005 survey results—to
1 Although there are publications that include brief summaries of or commentaries on the festival (e.g., Gonick 2002; Plutschow 1996; Rousmaniere 2002) and several much older works (Akiyama 1929; Chapin 1934; Takagi 1906), there are no recent works in English that cover this festival’s historical, cultural, and religious significance as this chapter does.
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reveal how tourism to Gion Festival serves as a highly relevant example of both religious tourism and religiousness in contemporary Japan. Religious Tourism in Japan: A Brief Overview In this volume, it is apparent that there are a variety of forms of religious tourism that are present in cultures around the globe. Japan also has a rich history of long-distance and ‘short-term’ pilgrimages (Rinschede 1992) as well as journeys to specific shrines and temples for special occasions. Many of the patterns present in today’s pilgrimages, for example, have their roots especially in the period from the 1600s to the 1800s.2 As early as 1705 over three million Japanese from all walks of life abandoned their fields and places of business to make pilgrimages to one of Japan’s most revered Shinto shrines, Ise Grand Shrine (Davis 1992: 49). Although everyone had the same ultimate goal in mind—to visit Ise Shrine—each person seems to have had varying degrees of religious intentions, and people benefited from the trip in various ways: for some, spiritual solace, for others financial or lustful gain. These monumental pilgrimages, known as okage-mairi, involved approximately five million transients in some years and affected people throughout the country (Davis 1992: 49). Despite the undeniable presence of the secular and even the violent, according to sociologist Winston Davis, such pilgrimages are a testimony to the influential presence of religious practices in pre-modern Japan.3 In contemporary Japan, millions continue to make pilgrimages to Ise and other main shrines and temples (Konishi and Kitano 2002). For our purposes, therefore, such pilgrimages remain important examples of Japanese ‘religious tourism.’ Contemporary Pilgrim-Tourist Practices According to Ian Reader, contemporary pilgrimages in Japan are considered “one of the most prominent elements in Japanese religious structure” (2005: 9). Pilgrimage routes, such as the one he describes in tremendous detail, often encompass dozens of Buddhist 2 Religious pilgrimages in Japan date back at least to the eleventh century ce (Kitagawa 1987). 3 But cf. Leheny 2003 for an alternative point of view.
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temples and Shintô shrines, and they can cover hundreds of miles. For example, the Shikoku pilgrimage Reader describes includes an eighty-eight-temple/shrine circuit and covers about 870 miles. This is one of the grandest and most famous routes, and each year approximately one hundred thousand make the trek by foot, car, or bus— or a combination thereof. Motivated by a desire to amass “spiritual merit and eradicate negative karma,” and to offer thanks for blessings received (Reader 2005: 90–91), millions of Japanese continue to travel to hundreds of historical and new religious places of worship.4 If we include all shrine and temple visits as forms of pilgrimage, the practice becomes even more common. Shintô shrines and Buddhist temples do not offer regular worship services at which congregations of believers could join together. Rather, people make long or short trips to pay respect to, give thanks for or request something from the gods or deities at temples and shrines across the nation. Such visits—whether formal or casual—are crucial for the financial and spiritual success of these places of worship (Leheny 2003), and they are quite common. Even at small neighborhood shrines, passersby may bow their heads in reverence or stop in to conduct the short ritual practiced at Shintô shrines throughout Japan: two bows, two claps, and another bow (and possibly pray while bowed).5 In larger shrines, such as Gion Festival’s Yasaka Shrine, there is constant traffic of at least a few people during the day throughout the year. One of the main reasons so many visit these places of worship all year round is that they (literally) advertise as specializing in some kind of ‘worldly benefit’ ( genze riyaku). Ian Reader and George Tanabe (1998) have described this extensively, listing reasons such as mental and physical cures (see also Ohnuki-Tierney 1984), academic success, and matchmaking as common attractions. Some more recent additions are: protection from AIDS, success for sports teams, and credit card shaped amulets. Today there are plenty of guidebooks that are geared toward helping people sift through the tens of thousands of temples and shrines to find the one that can help them with their needs. In addition to traditional nation-wide holidays such 4 For other examples of pilgrimages see Thal (2005), and see Davis (1980) and Hardacre (1986) for discussions of more recent pilgrimages to sacred sites of ‘New Religions.’ 5 This is a common, ‘official’ version (see Ono 1993); however, it varies slightly at different shrines. Still, the core ritual—a series of bows and claps—generally remains the same.
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as the New Year (during which millions of people squeeze into famous and local shrines and temples to pray for good fortune in the upcoming year) or the Obon season in August (when they make trips to their ancestral graves to pay their respects), many shrines and temples receive a relatively steady stream of visitors throughout the year. These visits—whether long or short—are also important examples of religious tourism in Japan. What’s Missing Every year, millions of Japanese travel from throughout the country to experience some of the major shrine and temple festivals. Because Kyôto’s Gion Festival is considered one of Japan’s “top three,” it tends to attract some of the largest crowds. In 2005 in particular, the main three days happened to fall on a weekend (Friday–Sunday) and Monday was a national holiday. So the city was hit with unusually large crowds. On the evening of 15 July, approximately 340,000 people jammed into the heart of downtown Kyôto (about three square miles) to see some of the main attractions of this ancient festival: the yama and hoko style float-carts. On the next night, over half a million showed up—40,000 more than the previous year, and the following day, during the main parade of these float-carts, 240,000 were counted in attendance (Kyoto Shimbun 2005a–c). The tourist aspect of Gion Festival, therefore, should be evident by the shear numbers of people who travel from around the country (and the world) to witness some of the main events of this 1136-year-old festival. But why do so many flock to Kyôto every year for this festival? Are they motivated by the aesthetics, the excitement, and/or entertainment, or are they coming as ‘pilgrims’ to pay respect to and ask for aid from the multitude of gods and deities (kami ) involved in the rituals and festivities of Gion Festival? Simply stated, the answer is both. Gion Festival is a perfect example of how Japanese seamlessly blend the sacred and profane in their celebration and worship of the ‘superempirical.’6
6 Replacing the frequently used term ‘supernatural’ with ‘superempirical’ acknowledges the presence of “the unseen order,” or gods, deities, and spirits that reside within nature—as is the case in Japan (Smith 2003: 98; see also Levin 1994: 1479).
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Data for this chapter were gathered during three studies I conducted in the past decade. After six months of informal and semi-structured interviews with priests from Yasaka Shrine in 1995, I was invited to participate in and observe almost all of Gion Festival’s rituals and festivities, including some that are normally restricted to shrine and festival neighborhood members. These unique experiences allowed me to gain an in-depth understanding of the festival from a religious perspective. In 2003, I returned to Kyôto to conduct fieldwork for my M.A. thesis on the connection between psychosocial health and festival involvement (Roemer 2004). That summer I completed over twenty hours of semi-structured interviews and follow-up interviews with shrine priests, an organizer of the festival, and twelve residents of the festival’s thirty-two float-cart neighborhoods. Both studies relied heavily on qualitative methods that provided me with a rich understanding of the roles played by the priests and the float neighborhood resident-participants. However, I have not been able to find any research in English or Japanese that focuses on the tourist’s experience at Gion Festival. Consequently, I decided to create my own study of this influential topic for the summer of 2005. Because of the tremendous historical and cultural influence of Gion Festival and the enormous crowds that it attracts, I felt it was important that we better understand the motivating factors behind such attendance. Therefore, for this project, I surveyed 42 randomly selected Japanese at several of Gion Festival’s main events and conducted face-to-face interviews to discover their motivations for coming to the festival and to test their religiosity in general. To design the survey, I first pre-tested the main questions in a focus group of Japanese who are temporarily living in the United States. Then I wrote the questionnaire in Japanese with the help of a Japanese linguistic anthropologist and a linguist. The thirty-nine-item survey took six to ten minutes to administer, and although this yielded a smaller sample size, it allowed for a more exhaustive comprehension of people’s motivations and religiosity. I personally administered all of the surveys. Because the exact number of attendees at each event is unknown, it is impossible to generate a simple random sample. To decrease bias, though, I blindly selected participants at pre-selected spots along the parade routes.
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Therefore, although I cannot make statistical inferences about the population, these data offer important empirical insight into motivations for attending these famous urban festivals.7 Key Events in Gion Festival’s History In order to understand best Gion Festival’s present function as a simultaneously religious and secular social force, we must first investigate its past. The origins of Gion Festival can be traced back to rituals performed in 863, 865, and 869 CE (Mayumi 2000: 53–54). Because of an epidemic that was quickly spreading throughout the capital of Heian (modern-day Kyôto), in 863 the emperor requested that certain rites and entertainments be conducted to end a curse believed to have been caused by the souls of five imperial cabinet members who had been unjustly accused of a crime (Nishitsunoi 1985: 67). Six years later, in 869, the ceremonies were expanded to include parading 66 halberd spears (hoko) through parts of the city.8 Afterward, they were erected in Shinsen-en, an imperial garden. Because the plague had spread to other parts of the country, the spears were included to represent the 66 provinces of Japan at the time. After conducting rituals, reading prayers, and making offerings to the Epidemic Gods (Ekikami ) and the aforementioned former court officials’ cursed spirits ( goryô ), the park was flooded to wash away the spears and the pernicious goryô. The final step in the ceremonies of 869 was the inclusion of Gion Shrine’s deity Gozu Tennô (now commonly known as Susano-o Mikoto or Gion-san).9 After the destruction of the spears, Gozu Tennô was carried around in a sacred palanquin (mikoshi ) to purify the area. This pattern of attracting the malicious deities and spirits to the spears in Shinsen-en, destroying the spears, then worshipping Gozu Tennô was known originally as Gion Goryô-e (Gion Assembly of the Goryô), and it set a precedent for a series of other similar goryô-e ceremonies throughout Japan. 7 A copy of the survey and more specifics about the methods are available from the author upon request. 8 The spears were approximately 6.06 meters (19.88 feet) long (Harris 2001: 188). 9 According to McMullin (1987) the original deity worshipped at Gion Shrine was Yakushi Nyôrai, the Buddha of Medicine, and this was not until 876. This discrepancy can be explained, in part, because Mayumi (2000) asserts that Yakushi Nyôrai and Gozu Tennô are different names for the same deity.
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Thus, the origins of today’s Gion Festival can be traced back over a millennium, and its influence can be seen well beyond the capital. ‘Secular’ Attractions to Gion Festival Since 970, Gion Festival has been conducted almost annually; however, over time it has evolved considerably.10 During the last century, especially, Gion Festival grew from a two-week series of rituals, parades, and entertainment for the people and the kami to a month of all kinds of attractions. From 1 July until the month ends, there are purification and thanksgiving rituals and ceremonial offerings conducted at Yasaka Shrine and throughout the float-cart neighborhoods. The events that attract the largest crowds, though, tend to be the dances, music, and most important, the parades. Namely, these are the Welcoming Parade (10 July) the Float-cart Parade (17 July), the Mikoshi Parades (17 and 24 July), and the Hanagasa Parade (24 July). For over four centuries, though, people have come from throughout Japan mainly to see the elaborately decorated float-carts that replaced the simple spears originally used to attract then destroy the evil kami and goryô. The Parade of the Float-carts Today, there are two main styles of float-carts in the Float-cart Parade (Yamaboko Junkô ) of 17 July. The older of the two float-cart styles, the yama, have been included since 998.11 They are squareshaped, weigh 1.2–1.6 tons, and carry near life-sized dolls or oversized animals and insects. Jutting from the back of almost all of the yama are pine, bamboo, or sacred sakaki branches, and these serve as temporary landing spots ( yorishiro) for the kami (Mayumi 1994). Although this is also the purpose of the figurines, unlike the branches, they are too precious to destroy each year. Today, approximately fifteen to twenty young men—mostly college-age volunteers12—push 10 The festival was halted during the Ônin Wars (1467–1500), when the Tokugawa government mandated that parts, at least, be temporarily canceled (Berry 1997: 216), from 1943–1947, and in 1962 because of major road construction (Moriya, Yamaji, and Ueki 1994: 211). 11 All photographs were taken in 2003 or 2005. 12 Because of changing neighborhood demographics, twenty-one of the thirty-two float-carts rely on volunteers outside the neighborhoods to pull and push them
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Photo 8.1. Hakuga Yama. Photo: Michael K. Roemer.
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the yama around the two-square-mile parade route that runs through the heart of downtown Kyôto. The other main float-cart style—the hoko—was added to the parades in 1225, and they are grand spectacles that tower about eighty feet (twenty-five meters), weigh approximately twelve tons, and carry thirty to forty musicians (Moriya et al. 1994). Each hoko has a tall tree that juts from the center of the roof of the cart in which the musicians sit. This tree serves as a beacon for the kami, and it certainly increases the impressiveness of these float-carts. It takes thirty to forty men to pull the hoko with long ropes along the parade route, while the musicians within play flutes, small bronze gong-shaped bells, and small drums, and two men (ontôdori ) stand on the hoko at the front and move a folding fan in specific patterns and shout rehearsed chants to tell the pullers when to stop, start, continue, or turn these massive structures. Each hoko has its own music (although they are all of the same traditional, unique genre—Gion Bayashi ) and the ontôdori for each float often vary in their movements and calls. Although the floats are similar in basic design and style, there has always been a sense of competition among the float neighborhoods to have the most spectacular and elaborate hoko or yama. Like the yama, hoko-style float-carts also have a doll in the main cart with the musicians. Until the late 1400s (Nishitsunoi 1985), the hoko neighborhoods hired young boys to serve as chigo—boys who become “like gods” during the main festival days and ride in the floats.13 Traditionally, these boys had to come from wealthy, wellreputed families, and selection was very strict (Takagi 1906). Today, only the Naginata Hoko has three living chigo—all other hoko use dolls, and although competition is still stiff, family name and character no longer play a significant role in the decision process. Perhaps the most famous attractions to the yama and hoko are their tapestries. There are over 900 tapestries that are owned, maintained, and displayed by the various Gion Festival neighborhoods and organizations, and they were purchased or received as gifts over the centuries during the parade—a tremendous money-saver for these neighborhoods. The remainder still hire young men for this job. Although most are in their twenties, there are older men as well. Girls and women are traditionally excluded from these positions. 13 Personal communication with Mr. Tsuji, a Shintô priest from Yasaka Shrine, July 2003. According to tradition, from the moment these boys are deified at Yasaka Shrine, they are prohibited from sharing meals with women (including their mothers), and they are not allowed to participate in any activities that jeopardize their health or sanctity. In present times, these rules are not taken as seriously, though.
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Photo 8.2. Niwatori Hoko (foreground) makes a turn. Photo: Michael K. Roemer.
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from China, Korea, Persia, and parts of Europe. Gloria Gonick notes, “The city of Kyôto not only possesses the most extensive collection of imports in its treasure houses but has also nurtured the longest-lived interest in exotic trappings,” and almost all of these can be seen at some point during Gion Festival. Each float has its main set of tapestries—one in the front, back, on each side, valances that drape over the tops of each side, a “farewell hanging” that adorns the back-side, and a back-up set. The latter are generally only slightly less precious and are sometimes used as “rainy day draperies” (2002: 188–89). Many of these textiles are centuries old, and because they have become priceless, those involved in the festival, from neighborhood associations to formal organizations (e.g., the Gion Matsuri Yamaboko Rengôkai), have worked tirelessly to ensure their longevity and beauty.14 Finally, it is not only the people who value and admire these elaborate float-cart decorations. In recent decades the Japanese government has also recognized their worth. For example, in 1962, the twenty-nine yama and hoko were made Important Tangible Cultural Properties, and 16 years later, all of the Gion Festival events were honored as Important Intangible Cultural Properties.15 With such honors and recognition, the yama and hoko are a tremendous source of pride for many of the residents of the thirty-two neighborhoods that are traditionally affiliated with each float-cart (Roemer 2004; Tani and Masui 1994). Because of the abundance of beautiful works of art, Gion Festival has attracted tremendous crowds for centuries. Famous six-paneled screen paintings from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries reveal how popular Gion Festival was in the past (see Harris 2001; Hickman 1996; Ienaga and Watanabe 1966), and when Japan began to modernize in the Meiji era (1868–1912), this festival was one of the attractions it used to lure Western visitors and boast of its rich cultural history (Gion Matsuri Yamaboko Rengôkai 1982; Takagi 1906). These famous paintings (some of which are Important Cultural Prop-
14 The Gion Matsuri Yamaboko Rengôkai (Gion Festival Float Association) is a non-profit entity that helps coordinate the dozens of groups involved in this festival. 15 Today, there are a total of thirty-two yama and hoko. Ayagasa Hoko, Tôrô Yama, Shijô Kasa Hoko were re-added in 1979, 1981, and 1988, respectively (Moriya et al. 1994: 211).
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erties [see Moriya et al. 1994]) are not only beautiful works of art; they also reveal how popular the artwork has been within the festival for hundreds of years. Viewing the Artwork of Gion Festival Because of its size and splendor, perhaps the most trying aspect of Gion Festival is fighting the masses of sightseers. Still, there are a number of opportunities to see these treasures in the days just prior to the main parade of 17 July. The fourteenth through the sixteenth of July (known as Yoiyama) have become prime opportunities to walk around the festival neighborhoods, to see the float-carts and some of the decorations that have been added already, and to enter into some of the storage areas and view many of the tapestries and other float-cart decorations. Some residents even open their homes to— usually—invited guests to show them pieces that are no longer used, have become too fragile to display in public, or are not being used that year. Thus, though the construction of the float-carts begins as early as 10 July most years, during the Yoiyama days, many of the festival’s main attractions are displayed for the public. The single most popular event in Gion Festival—in terms of the number of sightseers—is the Yoiyama of 16 July. In 2005, for example, according to a local newspaper approximately 520,000 people crowded into the three-square-mile radius from the float-cart neighborhoods to Yasaka Shrine (Kyoto Shimbun 18 July 2005). Granted, because this Yoiyama and the famous Float-cart Parade occurred on a weekend that year—something that happens only every couple of decades, the crowds were somewhat larger than usual. Nonetheless, every year this area is packed with people who are there to view the float-carts, possibly go up into a hoko, eat some of the festivals foods, buy beer, or win a prize from the hundreds of temporary stalls that line the streets. The atmosphere is extremely festive, and many don their customary summer kimono ( yukata) to add to the tradition and beauty of the event. Furthermore, during the Yoiyama evenings the float-carts are lit with hanging paper lanterns, and this helps create a dramatic view of the towering structures. Naturally, the other way to see the yama and hoko in their completely decorated forms is on the seventeenth. By early morning, all the final touches are made on each float-cart, and before nine in the morning, many float-carts begin making their ways to the start
Photo 8.3. Fourth Street on a crowded Yoiyama day. Photo: Michael K. Roemer.
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Photo 8.4. Yoiyama at night. Photo: Michael K. Roemer.
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of the parade.16 So, one can head to these neighborhoods—where there are only a few photographers, sightseers, and locals—to view the float-carts. The more popular option is to stake out a spot along the main parade route and watch the massive yama and hoko being pushed and pulled down the streets and hear the unique Gion Bayashi music and the creaking of the centuries-old wooden floats. Either way, it is difficult to imagine how this incredible festival could not please the aesthetic senses of a witness (human or divine) of these elaborately decorated, history-laden float-carts. Sacred Attractions to Gion Festival Both my own research and that of others on similar events suggest that the primary attractions to major urban festivals tend to be secular (e.g., Graburn 1983). In Gion Festival, they are the countless treasures that have become an inseparable part of this series of rites and events. Today, one could easily spend years trying to see all of the works of art on every float-cart—especially because they are on display for only a few days out of the year. Although these forms of art also include traditional performances and clothes, ornate gold and bronze decorations, Gion Festival music, and the three sacred mikoshi (palanquins), it is the yama and hoko that serve as the main attractions to this famous festival. They are the ‘core’ (chûshin) of Gion Festival.17 Nonetheless, the religious connections of Gion Festival remain a driving force in its preservation. What began as a series of private rituals for the imperial court has evolved into a month of rites, parades, dances, and other forms of entertainment to please both the tourists and the kami. The float neighborhood resident-participants, especially, are keenly aware of the presence and significance of the kami involved. Additionally, as the results of my survey in 2005 indicate, there are a number of tourists who admit that these kami are present at many of the events (61%), and some agree that the festival continues to protect them from epidemics today (27%). 16 Though Naginata Hoko is traditionally always at the head, the rest of the order is decided in a public ceremony that is conducted with representatives from each float-cart and city councilmen, including the mayor, on 2 July at city hall. 17 Personal communications with several informants (1995, 2003); see also Mayumi (1994: 91).
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Thus, religiosity continues to play an important role in Gion Festival for its participants and for the sightseers or religious-seekers. Gion Festival Rituals and Entertainment Perhaps the most obvious signs of the religious component of this festival are the numerous Shintô rituals that are performed throughout July. Beginning on the first of July at ten o’clock in the morning, the chigo of Naginata Hoko are purified at Yasaka Shrine, and the head priest reads an ancient prayer for a safe month of rites and events. During the next five days, priests (usually in pairs) are dispatched from the shrine to each of the thirty-two float-cart neighborhoods, where they recite prayers and purify the sacred objects used on each yama and hoko. The latter ceremonies are private, and— other than the neighborhood leaders who are deeply involved in the festival—generally only passers-by peak into the houses or small neighborhood shrines to watch. The events at Yasaka Shrine draw larger crowds because they are advertised (in magazines, newspapers, and at the shrine) and because they are centrally located. Major shrine rituals include the one on the first of July and others on the seventh, tenth, thirteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, twentieth, twenty-third, twenty-fourth, twenty-ninth, and thirty-first. Although crowd size varies per event, most of these attract several dozen to hundreds of on-lookers and worshippers. Additionally, there is a series of traditional entertainments that are performed to attract and please the kami. These include sacred tea ceremonies within the Main Worship Hall, theatrical and instrumental performances, and a variety of dances. All take place at Yasaka Shrine, and there is an obvious mix of passers-by, tour groups, other sightseers, and worshippers. Today’s performances are arguably as much for the secular sightseers as they are for the kami within the shrine, and even though they take place on ‘sacred’ ground, not all audience members recognize or admit to the presence or efficacy of the kami and goryô supposedly being attracted by these performances. Sacred Meanings of the Yama and Hoko It is also important to recognize the sacred significance of the yama and hoko. As previously mentioned, hoko spears were originally used to attract the unsettled souls of the five court officials. These spirits
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are known as goryô, or “unfriendly spirits of the dead” (Murakami 1983: 113). Since its inception, therefore, Gion Festival has been associated with the goryô faith, and the hoko (and later the yama) were an essential component of the ceremonies. Nishitsunoi (1985: 89) argues that the “important religious roles” of hoko can be found in official documents as far back as the Kojiki (complied in 712 CE), and many continue to respect these functions. Prior to the Heian era (794–1185), a belief in what is called yorishiro began. A yorishiro can be defined as the “temporary abode to which a deity is believed to descend when it is invoked for a festival ceremony” (Nitschke 1994: 114). In the Gion Goryô-e of 1136 and the Gion Festival of today, the same concept applies. Many believe that kami descend to the tops of the hoko and trees or figurines attached to the yama so that the people may then be rid of the goryô and Epidemic Deities. Although the extent to which people today acknowledge the religious roles of the Gion Festival yorishiro varies, these sacred and historically important spears, branches, and figurines are treated with particular care by the festival neighborhood residents, and they are put on special display during Yoiyama. It is apparent that the yorishiro of the yama and hoko continue to play religiously essential roles to many—over a millennium later. The Mikoshi Parades The most outwardly religious events that are best attended are the Parades of the Mikoshi (Sacred Palanquin) on 17 and 24 July. Mikoshi parades are common at shrines throughout Japan and are usually very exciting to watch. At larger shrines, such as Yasaka, the mikoshi are ornately decorated with brass and gold, and dozens of scantily clad men take turns carrying and rocking the mikoshi throughout the shrine’s neighborhood precincts. Because Yasaka Shrine has three mikoshi and because of the size and beauty of these three-ton structures, they are major attractions to Gion Festival. It is believed that the three mikoshi hold the main kami of Yasaka: one for Gozu Tennô, one for his wife (Kushiinada Hime no Mikoto), and one for their eight children (Yahashira no Mikogami). Each ‘temporary shrine’ is carried its separate way for several miles—taking rests here and there so the men can catch their breath, drink some of the tea, beer, or water from supporters along the way, or grab a bite to eat.
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From the time the mikoshi leave Yasaka Shrine, it takes approximately five hours to complete their routes and reach their final destinations. For this reason, most sightseers watch only the very beginning or end of these Parades. On the seventeenth, several hours after the Float-cart Parade has ended, a procession of Shintô musicians, priests on horseback, and men in period costumes carrying long torches to purify the pathway before the mikoshi proceed from the South Gate of Yasaka Shrine to the street intersection in front of the main (West) gate. Here, the entourage is greeted by hundreds of spectators who cram into the narrow sidewalks and spill into the streets to cheer on the mikoshi carriers. After brief speeches from the mayor and Yasaka Shrine’s head priest, the mikoshi are simultaneously purified, and the pullers celebrate the start of their tours by lifting the multi-ton carts over their heads then rocking them back and forth. Bells and ornaments on the mikoshi jingle and rattle, the men chant, and the crowds applaud. This is by far one of the most invigorating and enthusiastic parts of Gion Festival, and it is a definite crowd-pleaser. The ultimate purpose of the rocking and chanting, however, is to entertain the kami within the mikoshi. Because it is such a spectacle to see these men straining to raise and jolt the mikoshi, though, it naturally pleases the audience as well. During the tour, crowds dwindle to a handful of neighborhood residents and passers-by. The tour continues for miles, and the times that I have followed these mikoshi from start to finish, only family members or very close friends accompany the mikoshi for its entire route. Although this is obviously not seen as a type of pilgrimage, there were at least a dozen men and women who stopped, bowed their heads, and uttered prayers as the mikoshi passed them. Most simply watched or clapped to the rhythm meticulously chanted by the mikoshi carriers. Only those who were stopped in traffic and had to wait several minutes as the procession crossed major roads seemed displeased by the tour. Most are excited and pause to watch it pass.18
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When I walked behind one of the mikoshi as a Shrine member in 1995, a woman exclaimed to her young daughter, “Look, a mikoshi!” When she noticed me pass by in my traditional samurai outfit she said—with equal enthusiasm, “Look, a foreigner!” The parade contains all kinds of attractions and elicits much enthusiasm.
Photo 8.5. The start of the Mikoshi Parade in front of Yasaka Shrine’s West Gate. Photo: Michael K. Roemer.
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According to tradition, after the Mikoshi Parade on 17 July, the three mikoshi must be stored somewhere off the shrine grounds to bring the kami into closer proximity with the people. It is a way to transgress physically the usual bounds between sacred and secular, pure and impure, and invite connection and communication with the kami. For several decades, the mikoshi have been stored in a temporary building (Otabisho, owned by Yasaka Shrine) in the middle of Fourth Street’s shopping district. It is an extremely busy part of the city, and therefore an ideal location for achieving its goal of at least bringing the kami in close proximity to the people. Although some are unaware of their presence, most at least pause to look, comment to their friends as they drive by, and some stop to light a candle and say a prayer. This is as physically close as most will ever get to these kami because when they are in the shrine, they reside behind locked doors that are about 10 feet from where worshippers are sometimes allowed to sit within the Main Worship Hall. Most, however, must pray outside the Worship Hall and can barely see the doors deep inside the relatively dark hall. For these reasons, this week in which the mikoshi (and the eleven kami within them) are placed on Fourth Street is an important example of the religious nature of Gion Festival that remains. On the evening of 24 July, the three mikoshi once again make their rounds through three separate areas, and these routes differ from those of the seventeenth to ensure complete coverage. Again, before the mikoshi depart, large crowds congregate at the temporary building where they have been stored. There is a mix of those who are there for that purpose and others who just happened to be there and stop out of curiosity. After three separate purification ceremonies led by several priests from Yasaka Shrine, each mikoshi is enthusiastically raised above the heads of the pullers, the audience applauds, and the mikoshi depart— one by one. After the third mikoshi is carried off, the crowd quickly dissipates, and soon traffic resumes in the busy downtown streets. The majority of the Mikoshi Parades on this day resemble those of the previous ones—spectators and worshippers are few. The final stage of the Mikoshi Parade is the return to Yasaka Shrine and the enigmatic re-enshrinement of the kami from these palanquins to their places within the Main Shrine Hall. By around ten o’clock at night, all three mikoshi return to Yasaka Shrine, and the men vigorously rock them one last time and encircle the shrine’s stage that
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lies just in front of the Main Worship Hall. In 1995, a crowd of hundreds packed themselves into the small area, and taiko drummers added to the excitement and intensity of these final rites.19 The excitement reached its climax when the men rocked the mikoshi on the narrow stage—almost falling off. When I witnessed this part of the festival ten years later, however, there were no drummers, and they no longer rocked the mikoshi on the stage. Considering how dangerous it was, I am not surprised. For whatever reason, though, the crowd in 2005 was only about 100–200 people. Furthermore, by the time the extra decorations were removed from the mikoshi and the symbolic exchange of the kami from the mikoshi to the shrine was about to take place, only a few dozen remained.20 The mystic exchange is undoubtedly one of the most mysterious rituals in Gion Festival. Because of the small crowds, though, it is obvious that such religious events are not the main attractors to the festival. Just before the rite, all of the shrine’s lights are turned off, and announcements repeatedly warn everyone not to take any photographs or video recordings of this sacred event. Suddenly, silence is broken by the plucking of open strings on a koto and a priest who periodically chants, “ooooh” as he leads the other priests from the Main Hall to the mikoshi.21 Both the music and the moaning are extremely rare in Shintô rituals, and this alone creates a very dramatic ambiance. The auditory mysteriousness of the rite is compounded with the literal shrouding of the head priest. Six priests carry a thin white tarp and cover him on all sides. They guide the head priest to each mikoshi, where he removes the symbolic object that represents the kami. He then returns to the Main Hall. There, still hidden by the tarps and guided by only a small lantern, he places these secret objects back in their appropriate places in the shrine. With a loud flick of a switch, the lights come back on, and the ceremony is officially ended. For those who have stayed to witness this event— one drastically different from the loud shouting and cheering of the Mikoshi Parade, there is a tangibly somber mood and perhaps a feeling of immediacy with the kami of Yasaka Shrine.
19 Taiko are the traditional Japanese drums used at shrine festivals (and other celebrations) for centuries. 20 Because I was inside the Main Worship Hall in 1995, I cannot compare crowd size for that ritual. 21 The koto is a long, 13-stringed traditional Japanese instrument.
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The continuation of these rituals strongly suggests that Gion Festival maintains a significant religious component, despite the predominant presence of secular attractions and festivities. The next section explores how this micro-level example offers a broader understanding of contemporary Japanese religiousness. Results The results of my research on Gion Festival over the past decade strongly indicate that those who come to watch major urban festivals such as Gion portray the religious characteristics commonly seen in other studies of religion in Japan today. Japanese religiosity is a syncretistic blend of mainly Buddhist and Shintô practices. Although religious rites certainly take precedence over beliefs in the existence in or potency of kami, buddhas, or ancestors, faith can—and often does—matter. Japanese Religion in Brief Concerning daily rituals, Japanese commonly admit to owning small Shintô shrines (kamidana) in their homes, and even more regularly make offerings at their family ancestral altars (butsudan). In his chapter on kamidana-related statistics, Ishii Kenji summarizes several sources to reveal that the percentage of people who own them has declined from 1981 to 2003; however, in 2003 an average of 50% still claim to have kamidana in their houses (2004: 32). In local and national surveys across Japan, ownership of butsudan was as high as 67% in the late 1980s (Okada 1994: 607). Furthermore, as previously mentioned, shrines and temples are completely packed during the New Year’s holidays, and the season of Obon is also a time when most Japanese visit their ancestral gravesites to pay respect. In a 1984 study by Japan’s national broadcast company (NHK), 81% responded that they went to shrines and temples at the New Year, and 89% replied that they visit their family gravesites during the Obon season (Okada 1994: 607). These ritual acts are common throughout Japan, and they are some of the most obvious signs of religious behavior. Measuring belief in the presence or potency of kami, buddhas, or ancestors is more difficult, however, and most scholars argue that the Japanese place little importance on their religious faith (e.g., Davis 1992; Earhart 1982; Kawano 2005; Martinez 2004; Traphagan
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2005). Again, Ishii has compiled the results from a number of surveys in Japan to show how the category of ‘belief ’ has remained in the 20 and 30 percent range for the past several decades (2004: 29). Rather than interpreting such low statistics as an indication of lack of religiosity or a sign of secularization in Japan, it is generally argued that belief simply plays a much smaller role in Japanese religiousness.22 For example, Ian Reader states, “belief, or at least expressed belief, is hardly a reliable guide to [ Japanese] religious behavior” (1991: 12). Similarly, in Scott Schnell’s discussion of the functions of a rural community festival, he argues, “Whether participants believe in the literal existence of this [kami ] has little bearing, for it is as a symbol that its presence is being employed” (1999: 18, original emphasis). One does not need to believe in the physical presence of a kami to understand and appreciate its symbolic purpose. As we shall see below, the respondents to my 2005 survey at Gion Festival reflect such (lack of ) beliefs. Another frequent discovery is that most Japanese say that they are “not religious” (shûkyô wa nai ) or claim “no religion” (mushûkyô ). The first label is commonly given by informants to foreign researchers who indicate that they are studying Japanese religion (e.g., Earhart 1982; Reader 1991). In my research in 2003, several Gion Festival leaders began the interview with such comments, but then during the course of semi-structured interviews admitted to “belief (shinkô ) in the presence and efficacy of certain kami and explained how they regularly paid ritual respects to their ancestors (Roemer 2004). Additionally, Satsuki Kawano notes that those who claim “no religion” are denying that they are members of “any religion that emphasizes personal faith.” She adds, however, that these same people are not necessarily atheists, since they tend to enact rituals at temples and shrines that are closely tied to cultural norms and “social convention” (2005: 36).23 This tells us more about what they are not rather than what they are (see also Yanagawa 1991). What is generally accepted is that practice is more significant than belief for most Japanese, and that there is significant variation among those who admit to having “faith” in the ‘superempirical.’ 22 For discussions on the lack of secularization in Japan since modernization, see Davis (1992), Eger (1980), Sasaki and Suzuki (1987), Susumu (1996), and Swyngedouw (1976). 23 Indeed, Miller (1998) argues that it is often difficult to distinguish inarguably between the secular and sacred in Japanese culture (see also Ohnuki-Tierney 1984; Martinez 2004).
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2005 Survey Results The results from my study support these claims. Generally, there were few people I interviewed who said they were attending for specifically ‘religious’ reasons. Religious practices, beliefs, and cognition are all relatively low in comparison to more secular responses for their motivations for coming to Gion Festival. Table 8.1. Survey Questions (2005) and “Religious” Responses Survey Question/Topic a
“Yes”
First time to Gion Festival? First time to this event? Did you buy (a) religious item(s)b? Did you buy (a) chimaki c? Is your chimaki for religious reasons? Did you attend Gion Festival for religious reasons? Are you a “pilgrim” today? Have you done shrine/temple visit? Ever been on a pilgrimage? Do you have a kamidana at home? Do you have a butsudan at home? Are you a religious member? a b
c
Percent “Yes” Total number of respondents
1 3 8 18 15 2
2.38% 7.14 19.05 45 83.3 0.045
42 42 42 40 18 42
9 31
24.32 77.5
37 40
8 16 16 16
20.0 41.03 41.03 41.03
40 39 39 39
For exact question wording, contact the author for a copy of the survey. Religious items asked about were shrine/temple amulets (omamori ), shrine/temple prayer requests/thanksgiving tablets (ema), shrine/temple fortunes (omikuji ), and shrine/temple talismans (ofuda). Chimaki are amulets sold specifically during Gion Festival.
Table 8.2. Frequency of rituals conducted at butsudan How often do you make offerings or say prayers at your home butsudan? (n = 16) More than Once/day 1–3/week 1–3/month Sometimes Rarely 1/day 5 (31.25%) 4 (26.95%) 2 (12.5%) 2 (12.5%)
0
Never
2 (12.5%) 1 (6.25%)
If you do not have a butsudan, how often do you make offerings or say prayers at your relative’s butsudan? (n = 22) Always
Usually
Sometimes
Rarely
Never
10 (45.45%)
7 (31.82%)
4 (18.18%)
1 (4.45%)
0
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Tables 8.1 and 8.2 focus on practices, and although the first half of Table 1 is specifically connected to Gion Festival, the latter half is more general. Only a few items seem to indicate high religious behavior (e.g., reasons for buying a chimaki, a Gion Festival amulet; those who said they had been to a shrine or temple for specific requests or in thanksgiving; and frequency of rituals involving the family—at home or at an immediate family member’s ancestral altar, or butsudan). These findings tend to support most literature on Japanese religions today. Because publicly available individual-level survey data in Japan generally falls short in the dimension of religious faith and beliefs, I designed a number of questions for that purpose in this survey.24 The results indicate that, although ‘belief ’ may not be as frequently admitted as participation in certain rituals, it certainly exists. In all categories, a strong majority of respondents either “Strongly agree” or “Agree” that Shintô kami are present at Gion Festival events (combined total 61%), that they exist in general (64%), and that buddhas and ancestors (hotokesama)25 exist in general (68%). Efficacy, on the other hand, varies. Only 27% of the 37 who answered feel that Gion Festival still “definitely protects” or “does protect” the Japanese from epidemics. Most chose to ride the fence on this question—51% answered that it “might protect” them. Belief that Shintô kami “help and protect” respondents on a daily basis, however, was higher. Thirty-four percent “Strongly agree” and 24% “Agree” to this statement. Interestingly, it is the help and protection from ancestors that elicited the most significantly positive responses: 46% “Strongly agree” and 27% “Agree” that their ancestors (senzo) “definitely help and protect them in their daily lives.” In fact, on several occasions, respondents stopped the interview to correct me and explain that it is the ancestors (not the kami or hotoke) in whom Japanese believe and to whom they look for guidance and protection. Nonetheless, the respondents at the 2005 Gion Festival were overwhelmingly positive in admitting the existence and influence of various superemperical beings at the festival and even more so in their everyday lives.
24 Indeed, Brinton (2003) argues that because most individual-level data are restricted in Japan, gathering one’s own data (as time-consuming, expensive, and arduous as it is) is sometimes one’s only option. 25 According to Kawano, the word hotoke carries multiple meanings, including the Buddha; however, in vernacular it typically means one’s ancestors (2005: 23–24).
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Before continuing this discussion, it is necessary to recognize some important factors in these outcomes. For example, it can be argued that these signs of religious belief are a result of the setting in which the questionnaires were administered: a shrine-related festival. It is quite plausible that people felt pressured to respond positively simply because they were at a festival, and that if these same questions had been asked on a typical day in a more ‘secular’ setting, responses would have been less positive. Because these questions have never been asked in Japan before (as a Likert scale, rather than dichotomous, yes/no, items), there is no way to test this either way with the current data set. Previous studies have shown that Japanese generally do not openly admit their “religious opinions” (Davis 1992: 232). Thus, it is possible that—rather than a simple contextual explanation—the different methodology used in this case elicited higher levels of belief. In other words, my results can be explained—in large part, at least—by the fact that I used a Likert scale and asked questions that are not commonly used on a sample of Japanese from around the country.26 Furthermore, there is variation in the responses, including some who denied any existence or aid from the kami, buddhas, and ancestors. Perhaps my strongest argument stems from further inspection of the results themselves. If we analyze these data by looking at the discrepancies of responses and individual respondents, we see that this sample shares many of the mainstream religious characteristics previously discussed in this chapter. For instance: 1) Twice as many sightseers as pilgrims “Strongly agree” or “Agree” that kami are present at Gion Festival (69% versus 33%). 2) Slightly more sightseers than pilgrims “Strongly agree” or “Agree” that Gion Festival protects Japan from epidemics (60% versus 56%). 3) Almost half of everyone who did not know the name of the main kami of Gion Festival still admitted to its presence (42%). 4) Slightly more than half of the pilgrims did not know the main kami involved, or gave the wrong answer (56%).
These figures are highly relevant because they reveal the seemingly incongruent relationships between practice and belief that are common 26 About 55% of the respondents were from outside of Kyôto, and they came from areas as far as Nagasaki, Yokohama, Tôkyô, Hiroshima, and Wakayama. Respectively, these range from approximately 381 miles (609 km) to 50 miles (78 km) from Kyôto City. Most out-of-towners came from Ôsaka—about 40 minutes away by train.
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in Japanese religiosity. For instance, just because one describes oneself as a ‘pilgrim’ does not mean that one is particularly devout or even knowledgeable about the religio-history of the festival. Similarly, many respondents feel that there are kami present without knowing specifically who the primary kami involved is. Rather than dismiss these relationships as ‘problematic’ or the result of a troubled study, it is essential to recognize that these figures represent the way Japanese religions tend to be practiced and interpreted. Both quantitative and qualitative studies attest to this. In Japan, people are less concerned with faith in or understanding of the presence or efficacy of specific kami, buddhas, or ancestors as they are with the rituals involved and the general feeling that there are kami, buddhas, and ancestors to whom they can turn in time of need or celebration. Conclusion Because the religious characteristics that I have observed and measured in ‘sightseers,’ ‘pilgrims,’ festival participants, and Shintô priests match those of other influential studies on Japanese religiousness, I think it is fair to claim that festivals such as Gion Festival are an important part of religious tourism in contemporary Japan. They offer Japanese the same opportunities to enact or find support in their actions, beliefs, and prayers that famous pilgrimages or special trips to shrines and temples do. Gion Festival, like other major urban festivals, also offers a wealth of entertainment, and much of this is secular. People travel from across the country to view the gorgeous tapestries, ornate figurines, and exquisite decorations that adorn the historical yama and hoko. They also come because they want to see for themselves why this festival is so famous. They are aware of its cultural significance, and they, too, want a chance to view or even sit inside the float-carts, experience the exciting mikoshi parades, and observe the traditional entertainments that take place throughout the month of July. The religious nature of Gion Festival has not disappeared in that process, however. This festival—like almost all other shrine festivals in Japan—is characterized by a mix of divine rituals and fun entertainment (Ashkenazi 1984; Kawano 2005; Martinez 2005; Nelson 1996; Schnell 1999; Traphagan 2004). Through in-depth interviews with a number of priests from Yasaka Shrine and a dozen festival
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leaders who live or work in or near the festival neighborhoods as well as survey data on those among the crowds, it is apparent that the reasons people attend and are involved in Gion Festival reflect this dualistic structure. Festival-goers do not have to admit “religious” intentions or beliefs outwardly to believe in the kami being worshipped or know who it is. Indeed, John K. Nelson argues that it is precisely because Shintô does not enforce specific beliefs on the “casual participant” in a shrine ritual that Shintô still flourishes throughout Japan. In other words, shrine worshippers and festivalgoers are left with “considerable interpretive freedom to find and apply meaning only when it matters” (1996: 37). I hope that in the future, more scholars of Japanese religion will turn their attention to urban festival tourists. Although it is difficult to gather a sample that accurately reflects the population of tourists (since that population is unknown), a team of researchers would be able to gather a significant sample size that could, no doubt, support and add to the conclusions of this work. Studies using qualitative data that address reasons for attendance at festivals in general would also be possible and further our understanding of this phenomenon. Because religion plays such an important and influential role in societies throughout the world, it is necessary for us to continue exploring its many manifestations. Works such as this volume that include a variety of cultures and expressions of religiousness are essential parts of that exploration. It is only by recognizing and studying the various forms of religiosity that we will be able to understand and appreciate better the impacts and functions of religion in general.27 References Akiyama Aisaburo. 1929. The Gion Festival. Kyoto: Sosha Jigyokudo. Ashkenazi, Michael. 1984. Matsuri. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Berry, Mary Elizabeth. 1997. The Culture of Civil War in Kyôto. Los Angeles: University of California Press. 27 My study in 1995 was supported by a grant from Connecticut College’s Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts program. Funding for the 2003 study was provided by a Mitsubishi Fellowship and an Asian Studies Study Abroad Scholarship from the University of Texas at Austin’s Asian Studies Department. The 2005 project was completed with assistance from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion’s Jack Shand Research Award program.
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Brinton, Mary C. 2003. “Fact-Rich, Data-Poor: Japan as Sociologists’ Heaven and Hell.” Pp. 195–213, in Doing Fieldwork in Japan, edited by Theodore C. Bestor, Patricia G. Steinhoff, and Victoria Lyon Bestor. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Brown, Frances. 1998. Tourism Reassessed. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. Carrasco, David. 1996. “Those Who Go on a Sacred Journey: The Shapes and Diversity of Pilgrimages.” Pp. 13–24, in Pilgrimage, edited by Virgil Elizondo and Sean Freyne. London: SCM. Chapin, Helen. B. 1934. “The Gion Shrine and the Gion Festival.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 54: 282–89. Cohen, Erik. 1979. “A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences.” Sociology 13: 179–201. Davis, Winston. 1980. Dôjô. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 1992. Japanese Religion and Society. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Eade, John. 1992. “Pilgrimage and Tourism at Lourdes, France.” Annals of Tourism Research 19: 18–32. Earhart, H. Byron. 1982. Japanese Religion, 3rd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Eger, Max. 1980. “ ‘Modernization’ and ‘Secularization’ in Japan: A Polemic Essay.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 7: 7–24. Gion Matsuri Yamaboko Rengôkai. 1982. Gion Matsuri [Gion Festival]. Kyoto: Gion Matsuri Yamaboko Rengôkai. Gonick, Gloria. 2002. Matsuri! Japanese Festival Arts. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Graburn, Nelson H.H. 1983. To Pray, Pay, and Play. Aix-en-Provence: Université de driot, d’economie et des Sciences, Centre des hautes études touristiques. Hardacre, Helen. 1986. Kurozumikyô and the New Religions of Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Harris, Victor, ed. 2001. Shintô the Sacred Art of Ancient Japan. London: British Museum Press. Hickman, Money L. 1996. Japan’s Golden Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ienaga Saburo and Watanabe Yoshiro, eds. 1966. Nihon bunka-shi, vol. 4 [A History of Japanese Culture]. Tokyo: Chikumashobô. Ishii Kenji. 2004. “Kamidana saishi: Jingu tama no genzai no rikai ni mukete” [For a Better Understanding of Household Altars: Kamidana and the Distribution of Jingu-tama]. Pp. 23–40, in Shintô honchô kyôgaku kenkyû kiyô daikyûgo [Bulletin of Shinto Institute, vol. 9], edited by Kôji Itô. Tokyo: Jinja Honchô Kengaku Kenkyûsho. Kawano Satsuki. 2005. Ritual Practice in Modern Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Kitagawa, Joseph M. 1987. On Understanding Japanese Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Knight, John. 1996. “Competing Hospitalities in Japanese Rural Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 23: 165–80. Konishi Saburô and Kitano Musashi, eds. 2002. Genzai tsûruzumu kenyû no shosô [Modern Tourism Study Results]. Kobe: Kobe University Economic Management Research Center. Kyoto Shimbun. 2005a. “Hito, yama, hito, hoko . . . 34-man nin” [Person, Yama, Person, Hoko . . . 340,000 People]. 16 July: Sec 1:1. ———. 2005b. “52-man nin no taiga michiafure” [A Large River of 520,000 Flows Down the Streets]. 17 July: Sec 1:1. ———. 2005c. “Nokisaki kasume nichiyôbi no junkô ” [Sunday’s Parade from the Edge of the Eaves]. 18 July: Sec 1:1. Leheny, David. 2003. The Rules of Play. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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Levin, Jeffrey S. 1994. “Religion and Health: Is There an Association, Is it Valid, and is it Causal?” Social Science and Medicine 38: 1475–82. MacCannell, Dean. 1989 [1976]. The Tourist. New York: Schocken Books. Martinez, D.P. 2004. Identity and Ritual in a Japanese Diving Village. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Mayumi Tsunetada. 1994. Shintô no sekai [The World of Shintô]. Osaka: Toki Shobô. ———. 2000. Gion shinkô [Gion Faith]. Osaka: Akasagi Shobô. McMullin, Neal. 1987. “The Enryaku-ji and the Gion Shrine-Temple complex in the mid-Heian Period.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 14: 161–84. Miller, Alan. 1998. “Why Japanese Religions Look Different: The Social Role of Religious Organizations in Japan.” Review of Religious Research 39: 360–71. Moriya Tatsusaburô, Yamaji Kôzô, and Ueki Yokinobu. 1994. Gion Matsuri daiten: [Major Developments in Gion Festival]. Kyoto: Kyoto Shinbunsha. Murakami Shigeyoshi. 1983. Japanese Religion in Modern Society. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Nelson, John K. 1996. A Year in the Life of Shinto Shrine. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Nishitsunoi Masahiro. 1985. Sairei to fûryu [Festival and Elegance]. Tokyo: Iwasaki Bijutsusha. Nitschke, Günter. 1994. “Building the Sacred Mountain.” Kyoto Journal Book 25: 110–18. Okada Shigeru, ed. 1994. Approaches to Japanese Religion. Osaka: Toho Shuppan. Ohnuki-Tierney, Emile. 1984. Illness and Culture in Contemporary Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ono Sokyo. 1993. Shinto. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company. Plutschow, Herbert. 1996. Matsuri. Surrey: Japan Library. Reader, Ian. 1991. Religion in Contemporary Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. ———. 2005. Making Pilgrimages. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Reader, Ian, and George J. Tanabe Jr. 1998. Practically Religious. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Rinschede, Gisbert. 1992. “Forms of Religious Tourism.” Annals of Religious Tourism 19: 51–67. Roemer, Michael. 2004. A Healthful Dosage of Festivities. M.A. thesis, Department of Asian Studies, University of Texas, Austin. Rousmaniere, Nicole, ed. 2002. Kazari. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Sasaki Masamichi and Suzuki Tatsuzo. 1987. “Changes in Religious Commitment in the United States, Holland, and Japan.” American Journal of Sociology 92: 1055–76. Schnell, Scott. 1999. The Rousing Drum. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Smith, Christian. 2003. Moral, Believing Animals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Susumu Shimozono. 1996. “Aspects of the Rebirth of Religion.” Pp. 171–83, in Religion in Japanese Culture, edited by Noriyoshi Tamaru and David Reid. Tokyo: Kodansha International. Swyngedouw, Jan. 1976. “Secularization in a Japanese Context.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 3/4: 283–06. Takagi Teijiro. 1906. The Great Gion Matsuri. Kobe: Tamamura Shashinkan. Tani Naoki and Masui Masaya, eds. 1994. Machi Gion Matsuri sumai [Houses of the Gion Festival Neighborhoods]. Kyoto: Shinbunkaku Publications. Thal, Sarah. 2005. Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Traphagan, John W. 2004. The Practice of Concern. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
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———. 2005. “Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness/Spirituality for Use in Health Research in Cross-Cultural Perspective.” Research on Aging 27: 387–419. Turner, Victor. 1973. “The Center Out There: Pilgrim’s Goal.” History of Religions 12: 191–230. Yanagawa Keiichi. 1991. Genzai Nihonjin no shûkyô [Religion among the Contemporary Japanese]. Kyoto: Hôzôkan.
CHAPTER NINE
JUBILEE 2000: A COMPUTER-ASSISTED ANALYSIS OF THE RELIGION OF JUBILANT PEOPLE Roberto Cipriani Man ploughs the world and the groves stay the same as the time goes by1
The Jubilee Pilgrimage has a special significance. Before the year 1300, visiting Rome was a widespread habit, but only with Boniface VIII and the constitution of the Holy Year, exactly in the year 1300, did it assume official status. Even though ninety-six Jubilees have been carried out since the concept was inaugurated in the Roman Church, the historical and sociological importance of such events has yet to be assessed. The Jubilee period of the year 2000 had wide popularity, not only in terms of widespread information through mass media, but also because of the symbolic representation it recalled in the imagination of people. It was linked to a millenarian tradition, and it was the first to mark a new millennium. As the Holy Year was approaching, the ‘Research Group on the Jubilee of the Year 2000,’ initiated by Costantino Cipolla at the University of Bologna and myself, had already been defining over a few years’ time specific projects for the sociological analysis of the internal and external socioreligious dynamics of the Jubilee celebrations. A detailed dossier, edited by Stefano Martelli, professor of the sociology of religion at the University of Naples, proposed eleven research projects on the Jubilee: 1. “Why Go to Rome?”: A survey on the motivations of potential pilgrims and tour operators prior to the Jubilee itself. 2. “Walking Religiosity”: Participant observation among pilgrims of the five continents.
1
Chris, a pilgrim who walked from Cornwall to Rome.
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roberto cipriani 3. “A Multicolor Festival”: An inquiry on a multinational sample of pilgrims. 4. “Daily Life in Rome During the Jubilee”: Visual sociology, with video recorded images. 5. “The Jubilee between Secularization and Desecularization”: Inquiries to experts belonging to various religious and intellectual tendencies. 6. “Double Mobility”: Interviews during the Jubilee with tour operators and pilgrimage leaders in different home countries. 7. “Under the Sun of the Sacred”: An inquiry on the religious experience through life histories of pilgrims. 8. “The Media Jubilee”: Analysis of the content of media in five languages and construction of a multimedia archive on the Jubilee. 9. “Beyond the Holy Door”: A sociological reconstruction through the symbolic characteristic and significance of a religious celebration. 10. “The Stressed City”: An inquiry on institutions and on social and logistic services in relation to the mass of pilgrims. 11. “Couch Pilgrims”: Research on the Jubilee from the point of view of those who did not participate in it (control sample).
These inquiries have been completed, and the results are published. (Cipolla and Cipriani 2002; Cipolla and Faccioli 2002; Cipriani 2003; Corposanto and Berzano 2003; Losacco 2003; Martelli 2003; Nesti 2003). It is my intention in this chapter, however, to focus on a smaller sample than the thousand that formed a part of the empirical stages of the research since 1996. Here I will concentrate on detailed interviews of 96 subjects of different backgrounds on the supposition that freedom of expression, without any kind of restriction and with no pre-coded responses, can give way to a higher level of spontaneity in the answers and as a consequence a deeper knowledge of some crucial issues of the Jubilee. The 96 interviews of this sample have such an abundance of content that in this chapter I can give just a few significant examples with a monothematic point of view. The documents gathered could be used for more complex interpretations and knowledge. The interviewees, both men and women, supply us with their remarks, descriptive analyses, and motivations that the language of standard answers provided by the questionnaires would render impossible. In many cases it is possible to understand also from a single passage, or a simple allusion, even a suspended judgment or an incomplete phrase, that there are meanings, hopes, hypothesis, reactions, episodes and considerations that go far beyond the literary
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meaning of single words, and this all adds much more variety to the profiles of the pilgrims of the Jubilee. We have not called them ‘jubilant people’ (i giubilanti ) by chance. This neologism was applied to the jubilee pilgrims already in the volume that publishes the quantitative results of the research (Cipolla and Cipriani 2002: 166). But the title is not entirely new: it reminds one of a well-known work by Carlo Ginzburg on historic and religious issues: I Benandanti [Night Battles], first published in 1966. Such a similitude is not casual and is not a matter of simple assonance between the two words giubilanti and benandanti. In fact, in both cases there is a clear reference to popular religiosity. Building a phenomenology of popular characteristics is in open contrast to the official image, which is aiming at giving a ‘cultured scheme’ (or exploited scheme) of the event. To a certain extent, the interviews of the jubilant people are like confessions, just as the interviews that were studied by Ginzburg in order to end misinterpretation and misleading considerations. The Jubilant People The use of the phrase ‘jubilant people’ has turned out to be particularly apt for this research, especially for the widespread attitude that most of the pilgrims of the 2000 Jubilee seemed to be sharing. One of the signs that shows the attitude was the way of queuing, sometimes for hours, waiting to enter Saint Peter’s basilica through the Holy Door. The evidence of such an attitude of the pilgrims was clearly visible the last days of the Holy Year, in particular at the beginning of January 2001, until the definitive closing in the night of the 7th January, at the very first hours of the day. The pilgrims of the year 2000 were truly ‘jubilant people,’ men and women coming from all over the world. More than a penitential spirit, they had a joyful attitude of the soul (apart from some individual cases or belonging to particular countries, such as Poland for example). The joy of the pilgrims was clearly expressed in gestures, by their looks, and in the festive attitude in which they were experiencing the Jubilee. They walked through the streets of Rome with astonishment and devotion, caring more about the beauties offered by the city than by the heavy traffic jams and the long distances they had to face. They did not show any intolerance. The joyful
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attitude in participating in the Holy Year experience was particularly dominant among young people, but also older pilgrims were visibly delighted by being in Rome, for they had been given the possibility to experience in the Capital of the Catholic Church the most important religious meeting of all their life, at least so for many of them. Visiting Rome (hoping to see the Pope as well) and its most important monuments is a longed-for goal for many Catholics. In some cases they have been waiting for years for such an occasion, therefore they were keen to overcome any kind of economic or physical obstacle in order to be there. It is accurate to say that the celebration of the Holy Year was a great occasion. And it is true mostly for the intimate joy of the pilgrims visiting Rome, rather than for the solemnity of the rites, the wide number of the participants in the events, and the magnificence of the city of Rome completely restored for the occasion. If we look at the frequency of songs, hymns, prayers and acclamations, it all seems to confirm the unusual condition of being pilgrims in Rome at the end of the century and the millennium. It is the beginning of a new era and is an extraordinary event to have the chance to live through it among crowds of pilgrims. Sometimes the young people are more turbulent, but most are casual, not really worried about their short stay, or about the heat or the lack of facilities and structures. However, it is better not to stress the representation (largely emphasized by the mass media) of a triumphant Jubilee, with excess joy, manifestations of power, and with a participation of the more faithful cadre of Catholics. More than once the attitude of the crowd at Piazza San Pietro or in Tor Vergata may have caused wrong ideas both on ecclesiastical issues and in secular concerns. What remains of that Jubilee of the end/beginning of the millennium is the evidence of a dominant and widespread popular religiosity which follows the ordinary and extraordinary events with its own character—a religiosity apart from official structures, apart from religious and political hierarchies, apart from appearance. Life histories analyzed by our research group, which was working at the Study, Practice and Research Activities Laboratory (L.A.S.E.R.) of the University of Roma Tre, offer a picture is that often problematic and hard to classify into predefined categories, but it is also extremely stimulating for an interpretation of the dynamics of Catholicism, which is culturally varied and cannot be reduced solely
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to the point of view of orthodoxy. On the other hand, the issues expressed by the life histories raised crucial problems and anticipate future conflicts, in William James’s words (1961), between institutional religion and individual religion. That is why James preferred the biographical approach, even though he recognized the importance for research of technical support such as the questionnaire: the biography gave high value to “human evidence.” The life histories of our jubilant people are human evidence as well. They are directly built up by the pilgrims who took part in the Holy Year 2000 and are reconstructed by us in a scientific view toward the future—with the hope that this kind of research, realized with 96 life histories and for the first time after 96 Jubilees, will not remain one of a kind, but become the starting point for a new series of applied studies to Jubilee events. Of course our wish is for future research by other sociologists, with more experience and a further developed methodology and technique. Rite, Indulgence and Forgiveness The Papal encyclical of John Paul II Tertio millennio adveniente of 10 November 1994, published as “Preparation for the Jubilee of the Year 2000,” and the Incarnationis mysterium bull of 29 November 1998, published to announce the Holy Year 2000, present the essentials of Jubilee ceremonies. The most operative indications are written at Point 7 (on the pilgrimage): “it is an exercise of operative ascesis, of penitence for human weakness, of being constantly alert to one’s own fragility, of interior preparation for the conversion of the heart. The pilgrim keeps advancing on the way to Christian perfection being aware, fasting and praying”; Point 8 (on the Holy Door): “it evokes the passage every Christian is expected to realize from sin to grace”; Point 9 (on indulgence): “it is one of the essential elements of the jubilee. In the indulgence the mercy of God is manifested, which encounters everybody in the name of love, and through this love forgives everybody’s sin,” (and on forgiveness itself ): “God grants it for free, and it implies as a consequence a radical change of life, a progressive elimination of the interior evil, a renewal of existence”; Point 10 (on sin): “at first, if it is heavy, the consequence is a loss of communion with God and, as a consequence, exclusion from eternal life”; Point 11 (on purification of the memory): “it is an action of courage and humbleness in admitting sins and omissions from
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those considered Christians . . . The joy of forgiveness shall be stronger and greater than any other grudge”; Point 12 (on charity): “it opens people’s eyes for those who live in poverty and isolation”; Point 13 (on the memory of martyrs): “their testimony shall not be forgotten. They announced the Gospel and dedicated their life in the name of love.” It is not easy, reading the life histories collected, to find a direct relation between aspects that are expected to be strictly connected— such as rite and indulgence or rite and forgiveness. The ritual reference is an essential step to indulgence and forgiveness, if we speak in terms of the official, liturgical and behavioral side of the Jubilee. However, this link does not exist at all in the responses of our interviewees. The pilgrims of the Holy Year 2000 do not seem to be aware either of the most ancient tradition (Israelites begging for forgiveness during the expiation feast) or of the recent teaching of the Catholic Church (forgiveness of sins reached by such sacraments such as Baptism, Penance, Holy Communion, administered by priests who hold the ‘power of the keys,’ which is the remission of sins). They seem to be unaware of the liturgical significance of the rite itself, which causes a consequent unawareness of the relation between the rite and the acquisition of forgiveness. The same thing can be said for indulgences, obtained by means of Penance and praying, because the pilgrims do not relate these two acts to the remission of sins— or at least they do not relate to it explicitly. Furthermore, one interviewee only (Maria, 29 May) seems vaguely to connect indulgence and forgiveness (using the word “condonation,” however) in one paragraph of her interview: “We need God’s Grace. The Jubilee is not something superfluous. Condonation, plenary indulgence—we need it, we really feel . . . this necessity of purification.”2 If we consider the concept of condonation as a synonym of indulgence, the direct link between indulgence and forgiveness would be totally ignored also in this interview. However, we have to take into consideration that condonation is related more to penalty, while forgiveness has to do directly with sin.
2
All interviews reported here were carried out in 2000.
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Ritual Celebrations Quantitative research has already shown the strong impact of ritual aspects that have framed the whole period of the Jubilee, since Christmas Eve 1999 (followed by 44.3% of interviewees) until the closure occurring between January 6th and 7th 2001: 80.1% of Jubilee pilgrims interviewed declared that they had participated in Mass; 60.2% participated in Holy Communion, 43.8% participated in Confession. 60.8% of the interviewees regularly observe the Church’s obligatory feast days. 57.7% are not used to going on a pilgrimage, as they declare that they had not been on a pilgrimage in the last three years. 22.1% have gone on pilgrimage at least once. And 23.2% went on two, three or even more pilgrimages in the last three years. Qualitative inquiry, even if it largely confirms the results of quantitative approach, brings to light as a ‘key element’ of the Jubilee experience the marginal position of rite. When interviewees talk about rite, they usually refer to past experiences (pilgrimages to Lourdes or to the Holy Land, their marriage, the Sunday Mass, or religious celebrations during retreat). This is what Liliana said about her visit to Israel (interviewed 30 May): All the rites . . . rites in the major basilicas, as the rite at the Holy Sepulchre, that of the Nativity. Where there are . . . struggles for the timing, because each rite needs its own space and time. Watching all these different populations, all these different religions, groups . . . willing to . . . wait for their turn to pray, I was deeply touched by that . . . by going to the places were Jesus lived, to pray. I honestly did not expect that I could bring on my way back the others’ devotion, the rituality . . . well I discovered a different modality of rituality more as desire . . . I often wondered what the others were thinking while praying . . . I think there was the desire to find an intimate personal contact with . . . eternity, with . . . God and I felt very close to this necessity . . . and I tried to socialize, to identify myself with all the others also belonging to other rites. I have also seen bizarre things, which are unusual in our liturgy, such as turning incense many times violently.
Potential embarrassment is unavoidable when pilgrims are not prepared for such an intercultural impact. The reaction is, however, acceptance of “other” rites that “touch one deeply,” and an open reconsideration over the sense of one’s own religiosity is usually expressed with prayer. If on the one hand the diversity is appreciated because it vanishes in relation to God, on the other hand there
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is a certain difficulty in accepting some “unusual” rites (such as the turning incense). From other interviewees, however, the consideration goes more deeply, and there is a distinction between rite and personal beliefs. In our interviews there is no precise relation between rite and indulgence, even though the Church is continuously insisting on this crucial relation. In all 96 biographical documents, rite and indulgence never appear together in the same life story. Also between rite and forgiveness there is a total lack of logical and descriptive relation. As a matter of fact, the co-occurrence between rite and forgiveness is never to be found. The rite does not assume a more evident profile even within worship and devotion. It remains hidden and is usually referenced to situations previous to the Jubilee. There are only a few exceptions, among which was Alba (interviewed 24 July) who affirms: “our parish priest has concelebrated, and we all participated in the holy communion, in the best way.” At times the emotion obtained from a ritual is expressed, such as crossing the Holy Door, and Angela, interviewed on 16 May, says: “the most beautiful thing is . . . is while going to Saint Peter . . . Entering the Holy Door gives such an energy . . . a strength . . . the strength in . . . in spirit . . . of humanity for watching all these people.” Or as said by Concetta on 10 June: I knelt in front of the Holy Door, and I went to the Church at San Giovanni, and I had such a strong emotion. I knelt through it and I saw Christ above me . . . today I had a testimony, today when we had . . . well, we went up the stairs on our knees and the people started to understand: “Jesus is high up,” well then high up is only the Holy Lord and no one else.
Emiko, on 22 August, talks about his experience: “I was deeply touched by the visit at St. Peter’s. I passed through the Holy Door three times, because it was a dream come true . . . I was touched because I saw live on television Christmas Eve in Saint Peter’s, the Pope who opened the Holy Door.” Hortense, on 6 June, affirms: “the Holy Door? Oh my God! It is touching, and beautiful, and when you enter, you feel it, there is something coming out from you, and I had tears in my eyes.” A Polish interviewee adds: “I wanted to pass through the Holy Door. It was a highly spiritual experience.” A particularly strong emotion is caused by looking at the old Pope kneeling at the ostensory during the processional rite of the feast of
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Corpus Christi on June 22, 2000. According to Dolores, one of our interviewees: Yesterday we had a beautiful experience when the Holy Father passed close to us. In the exact moment he was passing nearby, before he stopped, I had an emotion deep inside of me, something very beautiful. We always watch him on television, and we saw him also in Puerto Rico, but from a long distance. But how is it possible that he passed so near, and with all that faith, it is a marvellous thing. Such devotion and intimate moments are beautiful because he conveys such peace when passing with the Most Holy Sacrament. For me this pilgrimage has been a wonderful experience.
Another particular emotion is described by a Polish woman: “the Mass at Montecassino was very touching . . . everybody was crying . . . and it is a special place for the Polish . . . In the cemetery at Loreto and Montecassino lay all those that did not go back to their countries.” Here the rite refers to events of World War II and in particular to the cruel struggle near the sanctuary of Montecassino. Therefore the significance of the historical memory gives more importance to the eucharistic celebration and offers an image of strong characters: religious and patriotic at the same time. The Acquisition of Indulgence According to the questionnaires, 80% of pilgrims believe that the Jubilee is “a time of penance for sins.” 74% of pilgrims consider it “a period in which the punishment for sins is cancelled.” 88% think it is “an occasion to reflect on one’s life.” The motivation of 67% of pilgrims for being “jubilant people” was the acquisition of indulgence. 22% observed penance, and 8.1% fasted. 59.2% know that plenary indulgence can be obtained in every church in the world; 33.6% reduce this number to the churches suggested by bishops; 7.2% believe that it can be obtained only in Rome. 25.7% of the pilgrims explain the meaning of the “remission of sins” as an abolition of the punishment for sins, while 71.7% think it is the forgiveness of sins. Therefore the majority of pilgrims do not have a clear meaning of the Jubilee indulgence. An official leaflet of the Vatican Publishing Bookshop, on the issue of the Apostolic Constitution of Paul VI Indulgentiarum doctrinae (Normae 1–3; in Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 59 [1967], 5–24), explains the practice in this way: “the indulgence is the remission of sins in front of God for the temporal penalty. The conditions for gaining indulgence for
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oneself or for the dead are as follows: 1. Confession. 2. Eucharistic Communion. 3. Prayer according to the intentions of the Pope.” The same document makes a list and exemplifies some services to be offered. In particular it is a matter of: Compassion Services: the pilgrims and the pious visit churches specified by the Ecclesiastic Authority and accompany such action with prayers. Penance Services: for example fasting, generous offers for the poor, avoiding superfluous consumption (smoke, alcohol, and so forth). Charity Services: activities of mercy for invalids, prisoners, old people in solitude, handicapped people, abandoned children, young people in trouble, and all the brethren who live in difficulty, because Christ exists in their lives.
One element is undoubtedly emerging from the interviews we gathered during the central period of the Holy Year: there is no clear knowledge among pilgrims about the Jubilee practice. The terminology used is also proof of confusion: someone says “we have done the plenary indulgence”; someone else thinks he “receives the plenary indulgence”; some others say “we have asked for the plenary indulgence”; and some others, astonished, ask themselves “Oh my God, what is it?” and they arrive at the conclusion, once they have obtained the explanation on the “cancellation of sins,” that “I did not think about it, really . . . It doesn’t seem to be so important.” These are not the only doubts, however. Somebody believes that there is a “protocol that has to be respected in order to obtain indulgence” and states in this regard: “It was a strange thing. I want to carry out all that, but I do not think it is a magic formula . . . I think it is my faith that carries out everything.” Liliana is even more uncertain, interviewed on 30 May, she declares: “I do not know if I obtained indulgence at this Jubilee, probably I didn’t have this as a first . . . as a first goal, I just thought I was having faith in God’s benevolence, in His mercy; it was an act of faith, of pure faith . . . without asking for something in particular . . .; I don’t know, I didn’t ask for it, I don’t know if I really obtained indulgence.” Maria, on 26 June, says that she is “waiting to obtain all indulgences by God.” Another Maria, interviewed on 29 May, believes that “the indulgence can be applied also to dead people, one at a time every time there is a Jubilee,” as if to say that one has to do as many Jubilees as there are dead people for whom to care. Roberto, interviewed on 27 May, declares straightaway that: “I still do not understand whether the concept of plenary indulgence exists or not
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when one comes to the Jubilee, and what the plenary indulgence is.” Sueyoshi, a Japanese pilgrim, is very critical on the whole event: I say exactly what I think; in Japan they say that you can obtain indulgence if you pass trough four Holy Doors, but I am against that. I have not expressed my opinion to be in conflict with the decision of the authorities, but I think that as at the time of Luther, those who are rich are saved. By chance I have the money to come here, but there are thousands of people that would have liked to come with me and cannot come. I am ashamed that this political decision, similar to those of years ago, has now been chosen. It would be far better to tell us to pray in silence for fifteen, twenty minutes exactly where we are. I wouldn’t like to say all that openly, because there are many people who are very happy to have obtained indulgence coming here. But I really do not like all that.
There are, of course, also pilgrims with more clear ideas, but it is not easy to find them. What is very peculiar is also the complete absence in the interviews of subjects referring both to indulgence and sins, as if the connection between the two elements is not being considered. Once again we have to note a peculiar lack of information and formation, on a large scale. The Practice of Forgiveness In the questionnaires, 81.1% of the interviewees expressed their agreement with the Pope for having asked for forgiveness of the sins committed by the Catholic Church in the past. Much more complex is the opinion displayed in the life histories. If it is true that forgiveness is not always in direct relation to the ritual dimension or through the acquisition of indulgence, according to the interviews gathered, the theme is however widely represented and not only in reference to the forgiveness asked by the Pope for the Catholic Church and its people. Finally, forgiveness doesn’t seem to be possible among human beings. And it is exactly on the divine character of mercy that the Papal Apostolic letter (Motu propriu) by John Paul II entitled Misericordia Dei speaks in underlining the traditional Catholic teaching on forgiveness. A dozen biographical documents are very explicit and open on the subject of forgiveness: “I believe that God is a being full of love and forgives everything, if we fall once again he still loves us” (Beba, 23 June). The human dimension is completely different, as Maria Paola expresses in her interview on 29 May: “this Year of mercy is extraordinary, mercy is not a human quality.” Paolo, interviewed
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23 June, faces the same subject of forgiveness, but in relation to the sacrament of confession: Forgiveness of sins occurs during confession, when the priest says he is forgiving you for your sins if you to say three Our Fathers . . . the confession is to me more like a deepening inside myself, in order to think about what I am doing and what I am not in my life . . . a reflection on conversion . . . if . . . it should be like travelling inside oneself . . . at least it has been my experience. I felt . . . when I confess, I feel lighter, but . . . I still believe that real forgiveness comes from Christ, my Christian understanding tells me that . . . and it happens at the end after my death . . . not on earth.
Margherita poses the same perspective, interviewed 9 June, when she talks about . . . Arriving there at the end clean, deserving all. I believe, however, that it is always a long lasting period that can give . . . It is not the short relief that you can receive from absolution that can give . . . peace, salvation. It is always the outcome of what you have sown during a certain period of time, which may seem too long, but for spiritual life it is very, very short. Error, however, is part of . . . of the process and also repeating and learning from errors, means to question oneself about things and habits that have become routine in our life . . . and all that is part of the learning process.
Interviewed 29 May, Maria brings about a different point of view on the Jubilee. She seems to look at the whole Holy Year as an occasion to obtain forgiveness of sins, the remission of the penalty: “the Jubilee is condonation, condonation of penalty.” Roberto, interviewed 23 June, says the same things in other words: “people see the Jubilee as the Year of Grace that the Lord offers us for the forgiveness of sins.” Jubilant people affirm they are particularly touched by the act of the Pope of asking for forgiveness more than once. Angela, interviewed 16 May, describes her participation in the procession for bringing the crucifix back to the Roman church of San Marcello. That crucifix has been used in the rites for forgiveness asked by the Pope for the sins committed by the Catholic church in the past: We were in the procession . . . with the crucifix that I have seen him take from the church of San Marcello, where he asked for forgiveness . . . With this crucifix and all the confraternity . . . we followed the procession and brought it back to San Marcello. It was marvellous . . . Such a beautiful event that the Pope asked for forgiveness as
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well, but what does he have to be forgiven? . . . the Pope, with his things . . . if I believe that he had something to be forgiven as well, therefore . . . it was an extraordinary event for us to be in the procession with this crucifix . . . looking at the crucifix through which the Pope asked for forgiveness . . . if the Pope asked for forgiveness . . . we are sinners as well, we have to ask him for forgiveness.
Beba confirms Angela’s feelings, as she answers with admiration: “The public admission of the Pope for the sins committed by the Church, and the consequent request for forgiveness is a wonderful event.” The Centrality of Prayer During the Jubilee 28.2% of the people said the rosary, and 83.6% experienced prayer in general, (while 80.1% participated in Mass). Motivations of praying are as follows: 90.7% of pilgrims pray “to thank God,” 86.9% “to thank him for the family,” 77.5% “for peace in the world,” 74.6% “to have personal graces granted,” 71.3% “to ask his grace for friends or acquaintances,” 40.1% “for the problems of one’s own country,” 27.3% “for the problems of one’s own city,” and 26.1% for other reasons. Those who answered the questionnaire affirm that they perceive a presence in their life especially when they pray (75%). The frequency of people praying is quite high: for 64.3% of the interviewees it is constant, one or more times a day; it is less frequent for 31.8% of them. Only 4% of them never pray. There is no doubt that prayer has been the more frequent practice among jubilant people. More than one-third of the interviewees in our qualitative sample present reflections on praying. It can be said that praying represents the leading issue of many life histories: its frequency—either constant, alternating or intense—marks various steps of rich and complex existences. In the qualitative interviews with the jubilant people, the theme of prayer is always linked to the past with previous experiences, and to the present, with the jubilee experience. The experience that Mimmo (27 June) has with prayer and with God is very peculiar and subjective: I turned to this God and said: “Listen, I know that you are there”— I will say exactly what I thought—“but you have to let me die, because I cannot carry on like this. This is not life. I cannot live this way. I
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The prayer of Agathe has another style completely. On 7 June, she said: “I always prayed to the Lord and asked him to keep me in life enough to bring up my children, in order to prevent them from having the experience I have had. And then it happened like this: ‘and please forgive me Lord. Because I was blaming it on you’.” Aiki is praying for the others: “At the beginning I was praying for people who suddenly went into coma and for their recovery, but after a while I started praying for their recovery only if it is in God’s will” (22 June). Albert has replaced mass with prayer, as he affirms in an interview made on 30 July: “I have replaced Mass because my friends would make fun of me, but I have always prayed with my mother. My mother understood that it was a normal behavior for a young man.” Hortense, on 6 June, says: It has been three years, almost four, that I have been praying. I decided to enter truly into prayer and I . . . I always asked God, Jesus in my deep feelings, from . . . to open my heart from deep inside and for always to Jesus, I ask for more and more faith, more attention, more . . . finally . . . if he could take all of me with him, because there is no other way . . . in this era . . . than Jesus.
Liliana doesn’t pray much, as she declares on 30 May, but she is very attentive to others: I preferred to be alone, because I needed to pray, and this . . . this prayer that I don’t believe I have dedicated a long time to. I am fortyseven, and I dedicate a small percentage of my time to prayer . . . however, I live my feeling of compassion in a different way . . . paying attention to others, helping them . . . but this Christmas Eve when . . . with
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the opening of the Holy Door and the proclamation of the Jubilee, well . . . I wanted . . . to pass Christmas Eve by myself, because I felt I had to pray.
On 8 September, Marisa states: “I started to pray again, even if I felt I was a hypocrite because I was praying when I needed it . . . afterwards I realized that God understood.” Robert, in his response of 25 June, remembers: “The day before my marriage I passed the whole day praying, and my wife as well, and we really paid little attention to the organization of the ceremony, as most of the people do.” The Jubilee is a good occasion for praying, of course, but Roberto, on 27 May, observes: “It cannot be that the Jubilee is the fatherland of only those who are praying . . . and of those who believe and come here to pray, because . . . I do not pray, at all.” Such a point of view remains isolated, though, in the universe of jubilant people. It is nevertheless a significant indicator because it clearly shows that the others “come here to pray.” Monika says it explicitly in an interview on 25 June: “the first reason why I came here was to pray.” In other cases prayer is already a previous habit: “We prayed together for particularly difficult situations.” “That group has a prayer meeting every Thursday.” “When we have a prayer meeting, which is to say that on a certain date you pray, we start in the morning at nine a.m., and we finish at five p.m. It depends on the subject. We pray and sing and eat. We clap our hands and we tease each other, and the meeting is also a feast. Each month we have a prayer meeting in one of our homes.” “Sometimes we go to Mount SaintAubert, near Tournai, a Protestant area, and we pray together.” “I belong to a prayer group that meets every Wednesday.” Travelling to Rome, however, has something special, as Maria underlines (29 June): “It is deeply touching to see the . . . enthusiasm, and it is also the silence of the people that make this Jubilee . . . and . . . everyone with its . . . or with their congregation or parish they belong to, they all meet and pray . . . and beg God for forgiveness, at first for ourselves, and then for our beloved and the dead.” Moreover, “to reach Rome in order to pray at . . . at Saint Peter, well, even if we do it in our own cities, here spirituality has another dimension, isn’t it true?” Yet another regrets that it is not easy to pray in silence in the basilicas: “Saint Peter, Saint Paul . . . and . . . it is difficult to reach concentration in moments with more silence and
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concentration, for praying; there is always a certain amount of confusion . . . What I was lacking in this Roman journey were moments of silence and prayer, reflection and intense solitude . . . it was very difficult to find all that in the Churches.” Finally, there are those who criticize saying the rosary: “The Gospel doesn’t say anything about saying the rosary, therefore I ask: is it right to do so? I don’t think it is, because there are such beautiful psalms, such as the prayer that David, King David said to God when he was in peril.” Rite, indulgence, forgiveness and prayer are all essential aspects of the Holy Year, but at this point it is quite evident that the experience of prayer is practised more, is deeply touching and more relevant in the experience of jubilant people. Jubilant People’s Courses of Life Autobiographical materials gathered during the inquiry on the jubilant people of the Year 2000 are not proper life histories for many reasons. First, they are not long enough to have a complete life story of the interviewee. Furthermore, the duration of interviews did not permit adding simple observations outside those relating to Jubileerelated issues. Our observations were conditioned by the limits of time for the interviewees, who were pressed by busy schedules (especially so for the Japanese interviewees), usually inflexible and predefined in all details. The second part needed in every qualitative inquiry based on life histories was lacking —that is, coming back on the social actor as central character of the story, in order to go deeper into some subjects either left behind or unclearly expressed or even crucial aspects where the subjects were at first blush reticent to comment. The itinerant character of the research approach makes the utilization of the expression tranches de vie (parts of life) difficult, because that was not the case. We did not gather partial testimony, on a chronological basis, on the entire vital circle, but just a few hints of contingent issues. We decided to opt for a totally new expression from a technical point of view to signify both the tendential, unstable nature of intersubjective praxis between interviewer and interviewee as well as to refer to the content of the research. That is the reason why we decided to define the protocols of transcribed interviews as ‘courses
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of life,’ that is to say current life, existences in progress, vital dynamics. This modality did not regard interviewees only, but it involved interviewers as well, who had to change their personal way of living, their daily life, in order to accompany the life of other subjects even if for only a few minutes (apart from some special cases in which the interaction was prepared by a long approaching phase and/or it was followed by an extraordinary extension of the periods of face-to-face relations). The expression ‘courses of life’ is not codified in manuals of social sciences, but it emerges many times in similar disciplines. For example, Donata Francescato, a psychologist, uses it in order to reveal the remote reasons or excuses for a separation and gives a scientifically based explanation, through pieces of interviews: “in order to understand why two human beings come together and/or separate, it is crucial to reconstruct their particular course of life (that is the reason why, when one falls in love one is very curious about the previous habits of the partner). However, what we believe to be peculiar is often an individual expression of a collective movement” (1992: 15). Many things can be understood and deduced by reconstructing a way of living, reasoning in terms of probable interpretations and conclusions to be proposed as deductions emerge from the biographical protocols. A researcher can also have a number of affectionlike attentions toward the interviewee, and then as for a beloved person, he tries to understand as much as he can, starting from the previous experiences in order to consider and interpret the present situation as it emerges from the past. No doubt it would have been very interesting to understand why some of the people who were asked to be interviewed did not accept. What criteria played an important role in such decisions? The uneasy situation in which an interviewer was working did not allow enough space and time to inquire into these issues. We have to keep in mind that positive responses to participating in a biographical interview presupposed a selection decided by the universe of the research. In other words, the data used refer only to the subjects who agreed to tell their stories, and it could not be otherwise. All courses of life approach a goal, a purpose, a decided finality. This is common to many religious practices, which envisage processional rites to reach the place of worship and complicated acts of preparation—ablutions, purifications, acts of mental inclination and concentration, piacular liturgies for the expiation of the specific sins,
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without which it would be sacrilegious to approach the holy. In Hinduism, for example, as Max Weber (1990) reminds us, there are different paths that bring salvation, which is to say to the renaissance of a new life on earth or to the assumption in God’s presence or to the elevation to the All-in-One. Dharma, or the ritual duty, is the crucial aspect. Between the Indian concept of dharma and the Chinese one of tao there are many things in common: the Chinese ideogram that indicates the travel, the path, the way, the trip, is transcribed as dao. Both dharma and dao have ethical content, which gives a conduct to follow, a guide by which to move successfully within life experience, along that trip that the pilgrimage also represents and shares In Buddhism salvation is also obtained after a particular itinerary, the so called eight-fold path: proper faith; proper decision; proper word; proper action, proper way; proper effort; proper memories; proper concentration. Such an itinerary leads to nirvana, which is the end of desire. Here there are many affinities with Christian pilgrimage, in which faith and effort, word and path, decision and action, memory and concentration coexist. Quantity and Quality in the Inquiry on Jubilant People Many of the results of the inquiry with the questionnaire carried out among pilgrims at the Jubilee 2000 are validated by qualitative research among the 96 Jubilant people of the present sociological study. Not only do we have confirmations, but there are also details that strengthen what is said in the conclusion of the quantitative volume Pilgrims of the Jubilee: The Jubilee has represented many different things for the participants, both for individual subjects and for the various ‘pilgrims’ compared. In this sense it is possible to understand a more-or-less strong attitude, which is a praxis as well, that can be considered a form of autodirection (scarce institutional direction), which includes one-third of the sample. On the other hand, we find faithful believers, who are another third of the sample, with a further third who are in an intermediate position or of a more solipsistic nature. . . . [Moreover,] from our data emerge a critical ability and an autonomy on the part of jubilant people that is clearly greater than what we would have expected, owing to an interplay of orthodoxy and heterodoxy which is not easy to understand and is highly articulated (Cipolla 2002: 14).
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Any quantitative value that cannot find application here seems to be confirmed by the existence of a religious pluralism within the Catholic Church. Among the perceptions related to the Holy Year, three perspectives emerge: 1) Jubilee as traditional and ‘classic’ redemption of faith in a world always more fragile and disenchanted, made of sweetness and lightness, unable to understand and solve the crucial points of human life; 2) Jubilee as world affirmation of Catholic identity which, even if in many varieties, cannot concern the others, or the non-Catholics; 3) Jubilee as religious, social, historic ecumenism, which aims at changing and improving the Catholic Church, with the historic urgency of purification toward the past, as well. (Cipolla 2002: 12)
What Cipolla concluded according to the quantitative data revealed by the questionnaires is largely repeated by qualitative analysis. That is to say, a specific kind of “religiosity expressed by the ‘pilgrims’ of the Jubilee of the year 2000 with nuances and contradictions, but also with clarity and coherence in faith: the exemplification of a ‘lay’ religiosity, but highly religious” (Cipolla 2002: 22). The hypothesis formulated by Luigi Berzano and Daniela Teagno, according to which “the pilgrim, arriving in Rome in 2000, perceived and lived the Jubilee according to his sensibility and religious education” is confirmed. “The importance of tradition, spiritual experience, cultural events, and touristic occasion expresses a wide variety of possibilities of approaching religion (belief, experience, belonging, practice, etc.), which are realized in just as many forms of sensibilities and religious subcultures.” Our group of 96 interviewees is likewise “situated within a religious model of Catholic origins, which is why one seems not to notice the process of secularization: such a strong presence of regular practicing believers is particularly significant.” It is not by chance that the pilgrimage to Rome: “is, for the faithful, a way to express one’s real religiosity: which is a religious practice more than an intellectual activity, made of materiality and symbolism.” Moreover it is “difficult to talk about a pilgrimage, not only for quantitative reasons, but also for the great number of participants coming from all over the world, because those have different orientations and behaviors, which lead to a plural modality of interpreting and living the jubilar event” (Berzano and Teagno, 2002: 44–46).
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These are not the only confirmations of what has been previously verified on a quantitative level. Some of the major issues revealed by the inquiry by questionnaires are as follows: The jubilant people have experienced the pilgrimage of the Holy Year with a spirit of joy rather than in suffering; . . . the jubilant people are a universe widely variegated in terms of orthodoxy and heterodoxy; they are faithful to rules but also have a critical attitude, of sacralization but also of secularization; the doctrinal contents (indulgence, penance, remission, forgiveness, etc.) of the Jubilee are not particularly understood by pilgrims; the Pope has exerted a certain influence, but he has not been dominant; linguistic and national differences correspond to diversities in the way of living the Jubilee; . . . the basilica of Saint Peter and its Holy Door were the places visited the most, even more than the other canonical jubilar places (Cipriani 2002: 166).
The Jubilee of the year 2000 can be considered a “total social event,” in Marcel Mauss’s (1990) terms. The definition of “total social event” involves many methods of research, leading to exploration and analysis of multiple aspects. The most important survey, however, has been conducted on the pilgrims participating in the Jubilee. It is convenient at this point to summarize the results of the quantitative inquiry, in order to have a basis for reference. There were 1023 people interviewed through a multilingual questionnaire: 396 Italian speaking, 138 English speaking, 102 French speaking, 103 German speaking, 40 Portuguese speaking, 157 Spanish speaking, 46 Japanese speaking, and 41 Polish speaking. The sample was multiethnic, including people from 18 to 75 years old, women (58.1%) and men (41.9%), lodging in hotels (4 stars, 3 stars, 1–2 stars) and religious residences or day-trippers. The research was completed by sociologists working in seven Italian universities: Rome, Bologna, Trent, Turin, Florence, Benevento, and Palermo. Before our research no complete sociological study was done on a Jubilee event. The main results of this study are as follows: (1) the Jubilee event was successful; (2) international participation was large and mixed; (3) it was a relevant phenomenon of religious tourism, which is to say a spiritual experience in a sociocultural and aesthetic context; (4) travelling and praying together was the key feature of the Jubilee pilgrimage; (5) a spirit of joy characterized the Jubilee pilgrims, much more than a spirit of penance; (6) the Jubilee of the year 2000 was a major event of popular religiosity; (7) Italian participation was meaningful in terms of people coming to Rome; (8) year 2000 pil-
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grims were educated people; (9) housewives were not very numerous; (10) Jubilee pilgrims were not orthodox in practices and beliefs; (11) the official contents of the Jubilee program are not well known (indulgence, penance, forgiveness of sins, life revision); (12) seeing the Pope was not the most important reason to visit Rome in the year 2000; (13) national and linguistic differences influence the Jubilee perception; (14) Jubilee pilgrims are regular in their religious practice, but not in behavior and attitude; (15) during the Jubilee of the year 2000 prayer was a common and widespread religious experience; (16) the celebration of Gay Pride in Rome was a controversial issue in the pilgrims’ evaluation; (17) in general the Jubilee organization was considered satisfactory, but there was some criticism with respect to traffic, guided tours and lack of assistance; (18) Rome was very attractive because of churches, monuments and museums; (19) Saint Peter’s Basilica and the Holy Door were the most visited places, more than other major basilicas and Jubilee official sites; (20) political preferences of Jubilee pilgrims was well distributed from right to left wing. Those who have been interviewed in order to tell their life story seem to “confirm a basic endurance both of conservative and traditional Catholicism and of a less traditional religious attitude.” It is evident, however, that there is “a limited consciousness on the significance of Jubilee.” As a matter of fact, [M]ore than one interviewee revealed he was unprepared about the foundational themes expressed by the Pope at the celebration of the Holy Year 2000. Just a few of them were adequately prepared for the Roman Jubilee with previous readings, meeting experts, and being properly informed. Many of them neglected the symbolic value of the acts done during the pilgrimage, apart from some generic considerations toward commonplaces, which are not confirmed by well-founded explanations and convincing rationalizations. . . . [Their stories] offer interesting issues in this regard, sometimes as an index of original personal deepening, sometimes as a confused connection of concepts and relative interpretations. In conclusion, the Great Jubilee of the year 2000 offers contradictory interpretations: a considerable participation on the one hand, but not enough comprehension of the actions done on the other (Cipriani 2002: 167).
There are more aspects resulting from quantitative studies which are confirmed by this qualitative analysis. Particular contradictions concerning what is already known thanks to the questionnaire do not seem to emerge, but certainly the biographical notes go through
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other attitudinal and behavioral fields, which are not touched by the previous approach, which is mainly statistical and representative. The Most Significant Results As a general rule, according to the analysis of content of the 96 biographies gathered, some conclusions can be drawn. Without pushing through a certain limit the level of analysis and without expecting a complete theory relative to the phenomenon, according to the usual criteria of grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Strauss and Corbin 1990), we suggest some interpretation, the validity of which remains partial and temporary, but can be considered rather innovative in light of previous attempts. The plurality of scientific modalities and techniques applied, from the software Nvivo to psychosociological perspectives, offers sufficient guarantees of reliability not always acquired with other solutions. Hence, with these cautions, it is possible to explain some significant or exemplary trends. The documents about individual life histories constitute the ideographical basis, and it seems to be quite reasonable to consider the results we obtained to be both valid and convincing, even more so if we take into account the precision and scientific legitimacy of the procedures. According to an order that does not have to do with either classification or with priority of emerged ‘evidences,’ we can conclude as follows: 1) Jubilant people join together a certain amount of orthodoxy and respect for the official teaching of Catholic matrix, but at the same time they are quite tolerant on many aspects of moral and religious character. 2) Among the pilgrims of the Jubilee there is a certain ‘ecumenic’ propensity toward positions that are not aligned to the religion of the Church. 3) Linguistic and national groups of jubilant people show some peculiar properties linked to specific cultural factors—especially in the case of Polish and Japanese people, but also German-speaking and French-speaking pilgrims are distinguished by some peculiarities. 4) The practice of prayer has had great relevance, which results as being the religious activity preeminently present among jubilant people—almost a red line that goes through the entire Jubilee.
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5) The ritual dimension has a less emphasized character in comparison to what emerged from the questionnaire. 6) Many interviewees manifest in their biographies some difficulties in linking the ritual aspect to that of indulgence, showing a certain weakness in the jubilar communication managed by the Catholic magisterium. 7) Also, the acquisition of indulgences is not fully understood by the interviewees, either in its significance or in its modalities. 8) The practice of forgiveness benefits from a wider comprehension, especially in relation to the example given by the Pope who dedicated a solemn liturgy to forgiveness. 9) The figure of the Pope assumes a central role in the imagination of pilgrims, who consider him a great testimony of Catholicism and recover through him faith in the Catholic church. 10) Among the jubilant people a certain individualism emerges along with a spiritual subjectivity that refuses regulations and praxis learned during religious socialization. 11) Work and life are themes widely recurrent in biographical narratives of jubilant people and are often considered similar (except for the Japanese). 12) Gender has a significant role among jubilant people, because women are more engaged in the jubilar experience, and not only on an emotional level. 13) Family, love, friendship, solidarity and tradition are the preferred values by the pilgrims of the year 2000 and are invested with religious content. 14) The political preferences of pilgrims of the Holy Year comprehend all the nuances that go from the right to the left, with a quite even distribution. 15) There is no clear position among the 96 interviewees on the relation between the Church and the State—there are many different ideological positions and their opinions are rather articulate, with the Polish being most traditional. 16) The relation between the Church and its rules seems to be problematic for interviewees, who also live with emotions and cultural traditions. 17) There are no specific demands on the Catholic church, aiming at changes especially in relation to ethical problems and actual needs. 18) There are differences among young Italians and foreigners— the former care about religiosity, politics and prayer, while the latter
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are diverse as far as character is concerned and are typically national, but they are not fond of politics. In general, tradition and religiosity coexist within them, but in very personal forms. 19) Jubilant people talk more about death, illness and senility, and less about poverty. And for the first three elements the reference is the figure of the Pope. 20) Cultural and touristic aspects have had a decisive influence in orienting pilgrims for the trip toward Rome. 21) Emotional and personal aspects are very important for interpreting the joyful side of the jubilar event. 22) Besides the city of Rome, the basilica of Saint Peter and the Holy Door, the year 2000 also represented a symbolic call of particular relevance. 23) Some disillusioned jubilant people complain about the secular character of the event rather than the spiritual one. 24) Some of the pilgrims experienced the Holy Year in their ‘own way,’ independently from the indications supplied by the organizers of the jubilar celebrations. 25) The interviewees define themselves as pilgrims, but also tourists, visitors, and so forth. 26) Not only religious issues prevail. Many interviewees were motivated by touristic reasons. “Rome is a magnet.” 27) Major criticisms concern the commercialization of the Jubilee and the Roman traffic. 28) One of the more recurrent remarks from the pilgrims of the year 2000 is that they did not have enough time to do as much as they expected. 29) Japanese were especially packed in quick visits, continuously moving from one place to another with rigid schedules, which rendered the job of researchers very difficult because they lacked time for gathering the life histories. 30) Moreover, the Japanese, who are used to quite an interiorized religiosity without ostentation, commented on the lack of sobriety, simplicity and discretion in the places and rites of the Jubilee. 31) Polish people were the most satisfied. They were also more orthodox, owing to religious socialization received within parishes. They followed the penitential guidance of the jubilar trip. Their leading reference was the figure of the Pope. They gave a religious and patriotic character to their journey to Rome, including the visits to Polish war cemeteries.
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32) Jubilant people have outstanding features that distinguish them: they are consciously committed or they are particularly motivated to the jubilar trip; they can participate with the family or youth prayer groups; they can be attentive to the religious practice or they can be representative of the faith of the past or even keen on giving importance to values and to the sense of acting, as it is demonstrated by the presence of many words—in their biographical narrations— which are important to give sense to their actions. The Jubilee event is therefore considered in positive terms as an extraordinary period of time, a religious and public event of personal involvement. 33) Usually jubilant people have a strong sense of present time; they speak a little about the past and even less about the future. 34) The emotional dimension of Jubilee participation is largely confirmed and is accompanied by different basic feelings (fear, anger, detachment, pleasure, silence, shame, attachment) and from different profiles (ritualist, militant, researcher, emotional, conventional, intimist, devoted). As can easily be seen, the results from the qualitative analysis are far more numerous and exhaustive than those than can be obtained from a quantitative approach. But the more remarkable datum seems to be a confirmation, on a qualitative level, of what has been verified with percentages, cross-tabulations, statistical classifications, and the like. After all, in 2000 Rome was probably not transformed for twelve months into a factory of spiritual exercises—as Massimo D’Azeglio observed at another Jubilee—but on the other hand Rome remains the capital of Catholicism, which is also shown by its many artistic and cultural attractions. Methodological Appendix3 A preparatory phase of the research was devoted to training the interviewers in respect to both the choice of subjects to interview and the modalities to adopt in collecting the biographical material. The subjects were not chosen using methodologies of statistical representativeness but according to principles of categorical representativeness on the basis of a common protocol. Each interviewer had
3
This appendix has been prepared by Domenico Schiattone and Fabrizio Leonardi.
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to get a packet of ten interviews, following precise criteria. First among these was language group: the aim of the research was to form a sample of 100 interviewees of different linguistic areas, which were chosen as those most representative of the pilgrims of the 2000 Jubilee. Besides Italian, the chosen linguistic groups were: French, Japanese, English, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and German, as shown in Figure 9.1. Figure 9.1 Linguistic group
Country
Intended interviews
Completed interviews
French
Belgium
2
2
France
6
6
French Guyana
2
2
10
11
Japanese
Japan
English
Australia
1
1
Great Bretain
4
4
Ireland
1
1
U.S.A.
4
4
Polish
Poland
10
10
Portuguese
Brazil
5
5
Portugal
5
0
Argentina
2
2
Columbia
1
1
Puerto Rico
1
1
Dominican Republic
1
1
Spain
5
5
Austria
4
4
Germany
6
6
Spanish
German
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Within each packet of ten interviews from a linguistic group, the interviewers had to ‘weigh’ other variables to choose the interviewees. As far as the Italians were concerned, the significant criteria to take into account were sex, age, geographic provenance, place of residence in Rome. Each packet of interviews of Italian pilgrims had to include six females and four males. The women had to be: one in the age group 18–35, two in the group 32–60, two in the group 61–75. The Italians were also selected according to their geographic origin: the interviewees had to be equally distributed among three geographic areas: South and Islands (2 females and 2 males), Center (2 females and 1 male), North (2 females and 1 male). Finally, the Italians had to be selected in relation to their place of residence while in Rome: six interviewees in accommodations such as B&Bs, hostels, convents; three in hotels (one for each category: 4 star, 3 star, 1–2 star); in addition, for the Italians only, a day tripper was also required to be selected, that is to say a pilgrim who finished his jubilee in one single day, without the possibility or the need to stay in Rome more than one day. Following a careful analysis of the flows of arrivals, the coordinators of the research group established that in order to represent the Italian linguistic group proportionally, it was necessary to form at least three packets, each with 10 interviewees, for a total of 30 pilgrims. For the other linguistic groups the criteria of selection were the same. The variables taken into consideration were sex, age, place of residence (excluding day trippers). The variable related to the ‘geographic area of origin’ was employed by country for all language groups except Japanese and Poles, where it was excluded. Modality of Collection and Transcription of the Interviews This phase of data collection is an extremely delicate and serious one. The interviewers, consulting the data related to the forecast of pilgrim flows, based on various sources (Azienda Provinciale per il Turismo di Roma; APRA—Associazione Provinciale Romana Albergatori; SPI—Segretario Italiano Pellegrinaggi; Agenzia Romana per il Giubileo; Giornale del Pellegrino), had to identify the linguistic group, get in touch with the organizer, select the pilgrims according the variables shown in the packet, and then find a suitable time for an interview.
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The free time of a pilgrim belonging to a group (virtually the entirety of the people attending the Jubilee) was almost nonexistent, especially for the Japanese. The pilgrimages to Rome foresaw, often in just a few days, a real tour de force of visits to holy places, participation in religious services and celebrations, visits to the main monuments of the city, meals and transfers. It was not unusual for an interviewer, tape recorder in hand, to conduct an interview standing in a line, waiting to visit a monument, a show, or a holy place. For the Portuguese language group the interviews were actually collected in a bus travelling from Rome to Florence. Even for the pilgrims who were available for an interview, time was limited. For this reason the interviews were often very short. In addition, at least in some cases, some group leaders considered the interviewers a handicap to the pressing rhythms of the pilgrimage. Sometimes there was even mistrust of a deeper, almost ‘ideological’ kind, and leaders made demands to check the interviews. From the temporal point of view, we were aware that there it would not be possible to collect real life histories, but rather some fragmented tranches de vie, some narrative interviews, hence the coordination staff had set a 30-minute time limit for each interview. Another problem faced by the coordinators of the research was finding the interviewers. For each linguistic group it was necessary to select native speakers, in order to avoid an incorrect use of the language in the interviews. At the same time, they had to know Italian perfectly, for the translation of the biographical accounts, since every adjective, every name, every detail, every element of whatever kind can have great importance for the research program and the accuracy of its results. In the interviewers’ training, great emphasis was laid on some methodological guidelines, most especially the necessity to avoid undue interferences and influences. The modality not to ask direct and explicit questions—trying, instead, to let the interviewees speak freely on their own behalf—was repeatedly recommended. In particular, any request for explicit information on the religious event or on the Jubilee was to be avoided, though this was not always possible, especially in light of the short time available for an interview.
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Construction of the Protocol of Analysis Quite a few meetings of the research group were devoted to the construction of a grid for the analysis of data. Initially, only the coordination staff was involved in this process, starting with the construction of several widely different analytical grids. After a series of meetings, it was decided to propose to the research group a simple list of words, afterwards called ‘items,’ considered meaningful for both the analysis of the material and the purposes of the research. In adherence to the assumptions of the grounded theory developed by Glaser and Strauss, the aim was to build sociological theory starting from the collected data. It was then decided to involve the interviewers fully in the construction of the grid of analysis; they were asked to check their own packet of interviews for the presence or absence of the proposed items. After the interviewers had produced some tables in this regard, several meetings were held aimed at the construction, according to their suggestions, of a grid of analysis or ‘dictionary,’ formed by words selected by the research group as key-words for the analysis of the data. The final version of the dictionary comprises 91 items. The first page appears as Figure 9.2. Computer-Assisted Qualitative Analysis Until the 1980s, qualitative researchers could not rely on any applicative software to support their work. This was essentially due to two related factors. On the one hand, computer programmers (and above all the companies which produced software) had little interest in creating programs that would be used by just a few scholars. On the other hand, scholars themselves did not endorse a strong request for computer programs, because they saw in the use of computers a too rigid (and basically quantitative) ‘cage’ for the richness and depth of their data. Now things have changed. Qualitative research has been rediscovered and is attracting a growing interest, while the widespread use of personal computers has contributed to modify in a radical way the behavior of qualitative researchers who, starting from word processors, have learned to appreciate computer resources. Several programs of qualitative analysis have been developed recently to
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Figure 9.2 Dictionary of 21 February 2001 Items
Synonyms
abortion
voluntary interruption of pregnancy
Contraries
References
other religions other people
our neighbour
I we
friendship
Love affection benevolence harmony confidence cordiality familiarity brotherhood intimacy liking brotherly solidarity
antipathy aversion enmity malevolence hate hostility repulsion loathing
love
Worship affection attachment devotion passion
aversion antipathy hostility disregard indifference
soul
spiritual side spirit spirituality
body matter materialism
heart
Heat energy inspiration feeling
detachment coldness
aged
young
on foot
means of transport
belonging
Relation inclusion bond relation
exclusion extraneousness
expectations
Expectancy assignation waiting hope
desperation
Church church
spirituality
young people
hope
religious movement Basilica cathedral building temple
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respond to the demands of contemporary researchers. Of course, the existing computer packets, and probably those that will be developed in the future, are helpful tools but cannot substitute for the work of a researcher. Rather than producing results, these programs are powerful supports in treating and controlling data. The methods of qualitative analysis are characterized by the collection of an enormous quantity of data. In the richness of elements offered by life-stories, for example, the researcher often risks being engulfed by the collected data, and not always able to deepen the analysis as much as one would like. Furthermore, while the phases of quantitative research are fairly well structured, in qualitative analysis—and especially in grounded theory—the collection of data, the analysis, and the construction of categories don’t follow a linear path, but imply a cycle that recurs repeatedly during the research. The analysis that follows the collection of data can generate new categories, raising other issues that can be faced by means of new data, thus generating a very complicated process. The categories of qualitative analysis develop during the research produce further classifications. One finds oneself manually scanning thousands of pages of textual data in order to elicit contexts and categories. The use of computers and specific programs is an important support for researchers, not only relieving them from a series of repetitive actions in the phase of text codification, but also helping them with a series of instruments tailored to the construction of the categories and to their representation. Our research group has been engaged in computer-assisted qualitative analysis for about a decade. Among the diverse software available on the market we have used in previous research Data base testuale (D.B.T.) and The Ethnograph, two programs designed to codify and discover data; in this research we have used NVivo, which supplies many other functions besides retrieval and encoding. The packet supports qualitative research, and it is classifiable, at least in part, as software tailored to the construction and representation of theory. The program has been devised to be extremely flexible and seems to answer quite well the very de-structured approach of qualitative research. The descriptive/interpretative approach is based upon the techniques of ‘cut and paste.’ The main objective of the researcher is to find the recurrences in the data, ‘cutting’ from the whole those segments of text referring to a certain topic and then ‘pasting’ them in
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a new document, so as to gather all materials and to compare different segments referring to a certain topic. In the approach based upon the construction of theories, the researcher’s intervention aims at drawing from data the elements of a new theory through observation and analysis, through the definition of categories, even processing high quantities of data. NVivo has all these functions, necessary to the researcher for quantitative analysis: it is possible to identify and to code the segments in a flexible manner; codes referring to categories can be easily identified because they are associated with the name of the document and with the number of a paragraph and of a section within the document itself. NVivo can be used to work on the research project as a whole, not only on a single text or group of texts. The creation of a project allows the management of a research team to underline different roles (responsible, supervisor, interviewer, observer, analyser and so on), and to draw up a research diary with the different phases. The program runs Documents and Nodes. The documents can be of NoMemo type (for example, the interviews or life-stories themselves) or Memo (notes on the interviews). They can be entered with an internal text editor or easily imported from any word processing program. The program offers a text-managing tool (Browser) and an exploration tool (Explorer). It is also possible to create links to documents: memos, multimedia files, text files. The nodes can be free or tree. The free nodes identify the parts of codified text that refer to conceptual categories. The tree nodes are generated in case of structured interviews. The nodes can be visualized with various instruments (coding strips, colors), and the text can be segmented with several codified nodes. Each nodes and documents can be associated with specific attributes (for example, structural variables such as sex, age, or language). Each can be managed and explored with both Browser and Explorer. They can also be organized in sets (specific outlooks on the project through relevant filters). Furthermore, NVivo supplies a powerful tool to search both documents and nodes, allowing five types of inquiry: on Nodes, on Attributes, on Text, with Boolean research, on Proximity. When qualitative data are used, it is important to create and later insert mental notes, comments, or remarks—which NVivo lets the researcher manage very freely through specific files called Memos. The program also offers the possibility to use some files called Proxi in order to represent data which one cannot or does not want to
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import directly (reports, books, photos, films, audios). Through simple procedures NVivo can create connections among these Memo and Proxi files and the qualitative data themselves (interviews, life-stories and so on). The program also permits the creation of models to represent the data and the relations among them. Limits of the Research Protocol The qualitative research on Giubilanti del 2000 is a significant contribution to the sociological analysis and interpretation of the Catholic Jubilee. Nevertheless, from a methodological point of view the investigation was not without flaws. Here is a short but hopefully accurate account. First, the problem of language/s: in an international research project, especially using a qualitative approach, mother-tongue interviewers are a necessity. But not all the selected interviewers had sociological training. Some were first-time interviewers. A qualitative interview is obviously more demanding and less ‘neutral’ than a structured questionnaire with closed answers. During the meetings of the research group we tried to provide the interviewers with the basic information to carry out a qualitative interview and try to control the unavoidable interference of the researcher. Unfortunately, we lacked the opportunity to implement some trial interviews, which would have been useful to gain experience in order to refine the methodology of investigation and reach a shared approach. In fact, the 96 interviews present important differences. First, in terms of length: some interviews fill a dozen pages, others not even a couple. The way the interviews were carried out was also very different; some interviewers interfered as little as possible, others kept pressing on with their questions. A further problem was the comprehension of some terms not easily understood. (Think of the Japanese language, for example.) The interviewers in a foreign language were required to be absolutely faithful in translating all their interviews into Italian. In some cases there were serious difficulties in interpreting the key terms used by the interviewees. Another difficulty was having some extra interviewers, should the need arise. A research project is a scientific experience, but also a social act, a human fact, where the unexpected can happen. Thus, in the case of the interviews in Portuguese, the objective of forming
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a packet of ten life-stories was not reached: the two appointed interviewers only collected five, because they suddenly abandoned the research for personal reasons. We also had trouble in recovering the recorded tapes, and we had to entrust the translation and transcription to another researcher. This involved not a few setbacks, jeopardizing the research plan of 100 interviews. The most delicate problem, however, was allocating the various items to portions of the interviews. The interviewers—using the dictionary of items—had to identify the passages to be linked to a chosen item. Everyone had contributed to the construction of the dictionary, which was the result of many meetings of all participants in the research project; but sharing such a long process proved insufficient to arrive at a unique interpretation of meanings. In examining the interviews, one can see that the interviewers have not always given the same meaning to the various items. The analysts had to restore to their original meaning some items that had been misunderstood. In order to avoid errors in the interpretation, it would certainly have been useful to create, besides the dictionary, a glossary of the items, shared by all the researchers as a guide for the analysis. Finally, a problem also arose from the use of NVivo. Only the main functions of the software (treatment, coding and search) were used, because of no previous experience in its application to other contexts of research. While processing the collected information, we discovered more specific functions of the program. However, this method proved positive because the program was used according to the demands of data analysis and data processing. Often the use of computer programs risks reducing the sociological imagination of the researcher, adapting the data to computer procedures. The program works at its best if used by the analyst himself, because she or he has a great flexibility, typical of qualitative researchers. As we said above, a scientific project is also a social action, a human fact. We are pleased to remember the spirit which animated the research group: scientific rigor but also empathy; methodological precision but also understanding of the difficulties faced by the participants in the research; a careful and correct use of the techniques of data processing, but also a high regard for sociological imagination.
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References Berzano, Luigi and Daniela Teagno. 2002. “Pratiche giubilari tra fede e cultura” [ Jubilee Practices between Faith and Culture]. Pp. 42–61 in Pellegrini del Giubileo, edited by Costantino Cipolla and Roberto Cipriani. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Cipolla, Costantino. 2002. “Introduzione” [Introduction]. Pp. 9–22 in Pellegrini del Giubileo, edited by Costantino Cipolla and Roberto Cipriani. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Cipolla, Costantino and Roberto Cipriani, eds. 2002. Pellegrini del Giubileo [ Jubilee Pilgrims]. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Cipolla, Costantino and Patrizia Faccioli, eds. 2002. Religiosità a confronto [Comparing Religiosity]. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Cipriani, Roberto. 2002. “Conclusioni” [Conclusions]. Pp. 164–69 in Pellegrini del Giubileo, edited by Costantino Cipolla and Roberto Cipriani. Milan: FrancoAngeli. ———, ed. 2003. Giubilanti del 2000 [ Jubilant People of the Year 2000]. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Corposanto, Cleto and Luigi Berzano, eds. 2003. Giubileo 2000—non tutte le strade portano a Roma [ Jubilee 2000—Not All Roads Lead to Rome]. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Francescato, Donata. 1992. Quando l’amore finisce [When Love Ends]. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1974. I benandanti. [Night Battles]. Turin: Einaudi. Glaser, Barney G. and Anselm L. Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Chicago: Aldine. James, William. 1961 [1902]. Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Collier Macmillan. Losacco, Giuseppe. 2003. Godstock. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Martelli, Stefano, Gianna Cappello, and Lorella Molteni. 2003. Il Giubileo “mediato” [ Jubilee and Media]. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Mauss, Marcel. 1990 [1925]. The Gift. New York: Norton. Nesti, Arnaldo. 2003. Jubilaei Spectaculum. [ Jubilee Spectacle]. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Strauss, Anselm and Juliet Corbin. 1990. Basics of Qualitative Research. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Weber, Max. 1990 [1920–1923]. Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon Press.
CHAPTER TEN
THE NEW PILGRIMAGE—RETURN TO TRADITION OR ADAPTATION TO MODERNITY? THE CASE OF SAINT JOSEPH’S ORATORY, MONTRÉAL Martin Geoffroy and Jean-Guy Vaillancourt Situated on beautiful Mount Royal in the city of Montréal, Saint Joseph’s Oratory celebrated its hundredth birthday in 2004. With 2.5 million visitors a year, it is the most popular pilgrimage site in the province of Québec and one of the most popular in the world. What started with the inauguration of a small chapel dedicated to Saint Joseph and the healing ministries of ‘Brother André’ in 1904 has become one of the major tourist attractions of the city of Montréal. But in the last hundred years, the situation of the Church in the province of Québec has changed considerably. The Roman Catholic Church is no longer the dominant cultural and political institution it was in the province from the beginning of the century to the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s.1 Still, the Oratory remains a very popular religious and cultural icon of Québec society, even for nonbelievers. If many heritage churches and monasteries have disappeared or are now in serious jeopardy in Québec, due to lack of funding and worshippers, the site of Saint Joseph’s Oratory keeps expanding. An ambitious program of renovation and expansion of the site started in 2005 and should be completed by 2008. The objective of this chapter is to show why the Oratory remains a popular pilgrimage destination, in spite of the undeniable decline of the Catholic Church in Québec in the last forty years. We also want to show that this maintenance as a cultural icon has a price in a society that is fast becoming one the most secularized territories of North America.
1 The Quiet Revolution is an important period in Québec’s history. It is generally situated by historians in the 1960s and is characterized by a major institutional, political and cultural shift from a traditional catholic and generally conservative French-Canadian society to a modern secularized nationalist-provincial Québec state.
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We will begin with a very short sociohistorical overview of the first hundred years of the Oratory. This will enable us to see how it started as the impossible dream of a controversial diminutive college doorman called Brother André to become a cultural and religious center of French-Canadian religious life by the middle of the century. Through the Oratory’s history after the 1950s, we will be able to see the major transformations the Catholic Church has undergone as a result of the second Vatican Council and the rejection of the traditional authority of Roman Catholic Church in the 1960s by Québec society. The second part of the chapter will deal with a selective critical review of mostly French-language theorization of the new pilgrimages of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Utilizing the “pilgrim” ideal-type of French sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger (1993, 1999), we will show why we think Saint Joseph’s Oratory constitutes a perfect case study of modern pilgrimages as a form of tourism. After that discussion, we will illustrate the theory empirically with our own interpretation of an extensive survey done in 1999 on the site of the Oratory. This interpretation will show the profound transformation of the traditional pilgrimages that had occurred there. We will close the chapter with more extensive remarks on the future of traditional pilgrimage at the Oratory and in other similar places of worship around the world. Brother André’s Charisma and the Foundation of Saint Joseph’s Oratory (1869 to 1937) Saint-Joseph Oratory on Mount-Royal came to life for the first time in Brother’s André imagination. From the doorway of his porter’s lodge at the College Notre-Dame, a boy’s school run by the Holy Cross Congregation, the lay Brother could contemplate the mountain that was purchased by the college authorities in 1896. His love of silence and prayer drew him there every time he had a moment to spare. He installed a small statue of Saint Joseph in a small shrine and dreamt of building a chapel on that site, so he could attract to it people who would entrust their health, financial problems and moral distress to the care of Saint Joseph. Born in Mount-Saint-Grégoire in the province of Québec in 1845, Alfred Bessette came from a poor family, which was the case for most rural French-Canadian families at the time. The English busi-
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ness elite was in power in Lower Canada (Québec). The British Army had just crushed the French Canadian rebellion of 1837–39, and the British crown had made a pact with the Catholic Church to help keep the French-Canadian secular elite in check in exchange for the control over the French population by Catholic clergy. It seemed at the time that the only way to get out of misery for an uneducated French-Canadian was to get involved somehow with the Church. At age 16, young Bessette went to work in the United States as many other French-Canadians were doing at the time. It was a very difficult four-year experience working in the booming factories in New England. The working conditions at the time were harsh, and Alfred was physically a small and fragile man who could barely speak a few words of English. But he viewed the experience as a form of mortification, which was a positive thing at the time for this very pious man. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Côtes-des-Neiges area was not yet part of the city of Montréal. It was a little leisurely village outside of the city borders where city folk would go on weekends to play golf or enjoy a walk on the mountain. The Holy Cross congregation is a French religious order devoted to Saint Joseph, founded in Le Mans, France, in 1856. In 1861, the order received a charter from the Vatican allowing it to teach the “classical college curriculum,” and the College St-Laurent was thus officially opened. Alfred Bessette arrived as a resident on 22 November 1870, and he became Brother André on 27 December of the same year. He received his first obedience in 1871, becoming responsible for the infirmary. He also washed the clothes of the community and took care of some parts of the building. In 1869, faced with an increasing number of new students, the Holy Cross Congregation opened an annex to the College St-Laurent, the College Notre-Dame, where Brother André became the new porter in 1871. Being responsible for the infirmary, Brother André would obviously meet a lot of sick or injured people in the practice of his duty. He would also frequently do house calls to comfort people in need of spiritual or physical healing. Many times, he would rub people where they hurt with a special oil he left all night in front of St. Joseph’s statue. By the time the congregation bought the mountain land in front of the college in 1896 to transform it into a park for the students, Brother André’s reputation as a healer had already started to spread in the parish, but not without controversy. At first, many doctors,
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like Dr. Joseph Albini-Charette, were saying that Brother André was a phoney pretending to be doing miracles with his St. Joseph’s oil. The college authorities were not too pleased with this kind of publicity, especially when Brother André met his ‘patients’ on the mountain and said he was feeling St. Joseph wanted him to build a chapel for him on the site. The college hierarchy did not give a cent for his strange project, but he managed to raise the money himself with the help of mostly lay people. The chapel was then constructed, and it opened on 19 October 1904. In 1906, the Montréal newspaper La Presse was already talking about an annual pilgrimage to St. Joseph’s Oratory. The small Chapel rapidly became too small for the pilgrims who came in increasing numbers. In 1908, the Chapel was enlarged, and the following year a restaurant, a souvenir boutique, and a chamber for Brother André were added to the site. It is interesting to note that at the start, the Catholic hierarchy wanted nothing to do financially or organisationally with Brother André’s site. A lay committee was in charge of finances and construction for the first four years until some members fell into a corruption scam, and the Church felt it had to take over the administration of the site. In 1909, the St. Joseph’s Congregation was created by a decree from the Vatican to care exclusively of the site of Saint Joseph’s Oratory. Between 1910 and 1913, miracles were multiplying on the Oratory’s site. The blind started to see and crippled people started to walk on their own and leave their crutches in the chapel as a proof of the marvels of the Oratory. On 17 September 1910, Montréal Bishop Bruchesi initiated a formal canonical inquiry into the miracles of Saint Joseph’s Oratory. The results of the inquiry, published in May of 1911, proclaimed that the Saint Joseph’s Oratory’s devotions conformed to Church dogma but did not pronounce definitively on the question of the miracles. By 1912, the Oratory had an annual budget of C$5,000 and personnel were working full time on the site under the supervision of Brother André. But the Chapel could accommodate only from a one to two thousand pilgrims at a time. A new building called ‘the crypt’ was built between 1914 and 1917, which could accommodate around three thousand pilgrims at a time. A progressive social orientation in Catholicism dates to the beginning of the twentieth century in both Europe and North America. This new brand of ‘social Catholicism’ was mainly a reaction to a loss of the working class by Catholicism, and to the fear of atheism
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deriving from the communist doctrine that was spreading throughout the world, especially after the 1917 Russian revolution. As a counter measure to the growing popularity of Marxism, the Jesuits founded in 1904 in Montréal the Association of French Catholic Youth. This association was firmly implanted in most parishes and colleges at the time. In 1911, the church created the Popular Social School that organized the Canadian Social Week in 1920. A small elite of social Catholic activists started to come often on a pilgrimage to the Oratory. Notwithstanding the development of Catholic unions in Québec, many feared the diverse manifestations of communist discourse in society. Starting in 1920, the Oratory became the gathering site of Catholic unions on each Labor Day. Between 1918 and 1920, there were substantial changes in the landscape at the Oratory’s site. The primitive chapel was moved, the store was selling more statues and images of St. Joseph, and the crypt was furnished in order to put the spotlight on the many crutches accumulated over the years as a testimony to the ‘miracles’ obtained by the prayers and intersession of St. Joseph and of Brother André. In the meantime, the number of pilgrims kept increasing, so the congregation invited many architects to draw plans for a future basilica to be built over the crypt. On 10 October 1920, 50,000 pilgrims came to the Oratory at the invitation of the Catholic Youth Association. It was the biggest gathering to date on the site. In the meantime, newspaper articles on Brother André, healing ministries and on his great ‘simplicity’ were multiplying, and his popularity was growing not only in Canada and the United States, but also in Mexico and in Brazil (Robillard 2005: 128). The Oratory newspaper Les Annales constantly published pictures and miracle healing stories. In 1921, Arthur Saint-Pierre published the first official history of the Oratory, and the journalist George Ham published a very successful English biography of Brother André, entitled The Miracle Man of Montréal, in 1922. Every major gathering of Catholic groups from the province of Québec seemed to be converging toward the Oratory at the time, and even non-Catholics were attracted to the festive atmosphere at some events like the fifth anniversary of the blessing of the crypt in December of 1922. On 23 June 1923, the first event recognizing publicly the healing powers of Brother André happened at the Oratory. Thanking Brother André for the ‘miracle’ healing of her mother, a young girl made her first communion at the Oratory. After that event, many more sick people came to put their crutches in the crypt
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or to testify about the miracles of Brother André. All this publicity brought an ever growing number of pilgrims to the Oratory all year long. In 1926, the construction of a basilica over the crypt began. The design was inspired by the famous Montmartre Basilica in Paris. The construction was slow because it entirely depended on the availability of funding from the private sector and on pilgrims’ generosity. In 1936, Brother André even went to New York in order to convince American millionaires like Rockfeller to donate money for the construction of the Oratory’s basilica. He came back to Montréal with a couple of checks, whose amount was never disclosed. In 1925, a million pilgrims came to the sanctuary. From 1934 to 1936, the Oratory had around three million visitors per year (Robillard, 2005: 173–175). At that time, pilgrimages were seen as a way not only to heal the body but, most important, the soul, by being a place of devotion and sainthood. The Building and the Institutionalization of Sainthood (1937–1960) Saint Joseph’s Oratory would never have existed without the manifestation of Brother André’s charisma and healing powers. When he died on 6 January 1937, it was a major drama not only for FrenchCanadians Catholics, but also for the Québec’s Anglophone elite, not only Catholics but also Protestants in some cases, who appreciated him too. His body lay in state for six days in the crypt, where people came to pay their respects to him both night and day, and he was then interred in a special section in the crypt. One million people visited in the eight days following Brother’s André death. Thousands of letters talking about miraculous healings and answered prayers were delivered to the Oratory in the weeks following the funeral. Many of his personal belongings were kept and exhibited to the public as souvenirs. In honor of Brother André, a group of around forty of his friends reunited once a month for an hour of prayer. It was this same group, The Friends of Brother André, who helped with the continuous financing of the construction site of the basilica. They were hoping to have the basilica finished for the three hundredth birthday of the city of Montréal in 1942, but in order to do that they had to collect more donations and sell more subscriptions to the Oratory’s newspaper. In 1937, Rome gave permission to apply for a loan, which facilitated the restarting of construction.
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Because of the renewal in religious art going on at the time, the contract for the construction of the basilica was given to Dom Bello, who redrew the plans already made by Viau and Venne. On 27 April 1937, the construction of the basilica started. On the 24 July 1938, Monsignor Alfred LePailleur celebrated the first mass in the basilica, even though it was not fully finished. In the meantime, the number of pilgrims visiting the site was still strong. In the years 1937–39, 3.5 million pilgrims came each year. This brought an even greater devotion to St. Joseph with an increased participation in traditional religious holidays and an increase of organized pilgrimages. In 1938, there were 140,000 subscribers to the Oratory’s newspaper. The site was in constant expansion and restructuring during that highly active period for Catholicism in Québec. The 1940s were a turning point, not only because of World War II, but also due to the evolution of Québec society. In 1941, the nomination of an Anglophone auxiliary bishop for Montréal caused an outburst of anger in Québec’s ultranationalist Catholic milieu, notably through the Saint-John-the-Baptist Society.2 They felt humiliated and attacked at the roots of their French-Canadian spirit of survival. Saint Joseph’s Oratory did not escape the great turmoil going on in the Church and in the outside world at the time. The Cold War had additional repercussions on the worldwide Catholic community: priests were disappearing, being put in jail, or killed in many Eastern bloc countries. Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger presided over many peace protests at the Oratory during that period, which kept alive the progressive traditions of the sanctuary. The site of the Oratory continued to evolve. The Friends of Brother André asked that the congregation give access to Brother André’s chamber and office to the public. His heart, which was conserved in the crypt at the time, was also placed in his office. Facing a reconstruction of his chamber is a room where a priest welcomed pilgrims everyday. The organization promoting (some would say ‘exploiting’) Brother André’s memory was getting more rational by the day. Starting in October 1940, a new professional management team took
2 The Saint-John-the-Baptist Society was at the time a lay voluntary association of French-Canadian Catholics devoted to the preservation of French-Canadian culture, language and religion. It was secularized in the 1960s and became a political pressure group devoted the defence of Québec’s culture and the creation of an independent Québec state separated from the rest of Canada. The association is still responsible for Québec’s annual national holiday festivities on 24 June.
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charge of the activities that used to be taken care of by the Friends of Brother André. That same year, work also started on Brother’s André beatification documents to be presented to Rome. In order to promote Brother’s André accomplishments, the Oratory’s team hired a publicity director from Notre Dame University. The new director, Tom Barry, was convinced that the American public would be interested by the holy man’s story and by the Oratory. He published Brother André’s biographies in English and French, and a religious radio program went on air once a week. He also launched the idea of doing a short documentary film on Brother André and the Oratory. At this point, the Oratory entered a more rationalistic phase, as the managing team started to exploit more efficiently the symbolic resources and values of the site and of those who founded it. While war was raging in Europe and destroying many holy places, the site of the Oratory continued to grow. At the same time, testimonies in favor of Brother André’s beatification were continuously collected. Thinking they were carefully planning for the Vatican’s assessment, the management eliminated all traces of a cult to Brother André on the site of the Oratory, a situation that, as it turned out, worked to the detriment of his candidacy. In 1945, Brother André’s body was moved from the front of the crypt to a new tomb in the back that was finally finished in 1949. Between 1944 and 1954, a contract was in place between the Oratory Corporation and Dr. Lionel Lamy in order to accumulate scientific proof of the ongoing miraculous healings. The beatification trial imposed a substantial effort to translate Brother André’s story into as many languages as possible. Between 1946 and 1950, it was translated into Italian, Portuguese, German, Hindi and Cree by the Holy Cross congregation and some Oblates Brothers from Western Canada. In 1952, a Brother André museum was opened on the sanctuary’s site. A new pilgrimage organization for the sick (OPM) that started at the time of the war was expanding Brother André’s ministries and bringing one thousand sick people to the Oratory every year. In 1949, Saint Joseph’s library was opened. In the 1950s, the well-known children’s choral group Les Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal was founded. It is still today one of Québec’s cultural icons. The apostolic trial for the beatification of Brother André finally started in Rome on 10 April 1960. But it was only twenty years later, after a long and complicated procedure, that Pope John Paul II finally beatified Brother André on 23 May 1982. To this date,
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Brother André’s name has not been yet involved in any process of canonization. A Fall from Grace and a Modern Adaptation (1960–2005) The religious crisis of the 1960s and 1970s profoundly transformed Québec society. The school and health care systems were taken away from the Catholic Church and nationalized. This crisis transformed the Oratory’s pilgrim clientele. The sight of tightly packed lines of visitors has been less common since then, but the attraction of the sanctuary and Brother André’s popularity continue nonetheless. The visitors themselves have become much more diverse ethnically, even as far as religious identity is concerned. Many tourists and Montréalers who profess Oriental religions come to visit the Oratory. The faithful from all of the world’s great religions in fact go to the Oratory to experience the mystical virtues of silence and contemplation. The 1960s were marked by an enormously fast change in the religious mentality of Québecois. The Oratory did not escape the generally drastic drop of church attendance and interest that struck all Catholic institutions at the time. Another indicator of the profound crisis the Oratory was facing at the time was the significant drop of subscribers to L’Oratoire:3 from 204,000 subscribers in 1945 to 127,000 in 1961 (Rémillard, 2005: 386). Traditional Easter and Christmas confessions were practically abandoned. In 1962, a new managing team was formed in order to apply the new liturgical reforms and build a better collaboration with lay people. An effort was also made to accommodate the increasing numbers of visitors from other countries. But even when church attendance was dropping, the Oratory remained the most visited place in Montréal, yet many people no longer went there to participate in traditional religious services. The fact that Oratory was exempted from some taxes enabled the management to invest the money in the permanent embellishment of the site. The site’s bureaucracy also got heavier with the creation of four departments: pastoral, promotion, administration, and landscaping. In 1964, the Oratory’s staff consisted of 19 priests, 6 brothers, and
3 The Annales newspaper which became L’Oratoire/The Oratory in 1944, is still published today in the form of a magazine in French and English.
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235 other people including 210 lay people in charge of adminstrative tasks. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Oratory’s museum recovered many religious works of art from the many churches that were closing their doors due to a lack of attendance. A permanent religious art museum was inaugurated in 1979 and is still a great tourist attraction today. The Oratory is, after all, the starting point of Québec’s own version of the Compostella pilgrimage. The proposed itinerary to pilgrims implies travelling on foot trough the Saint-Lawrence valley with five sanctuary stops: Saint Joseph’s Oratory (Montréal), Mère d’Youville (Varennes), Notre Dame du Cap (Cap-de-la-Madelaine), Canadian Montmartre (Québec City), and a sort of Sainte Anne de Beaupré (Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré). For Rémillard (2005: 420), the Oratory has become a public place, an international crossroad where a diverse mass of believers and nonbelievers is invited to practice tolerance, dialogue, and respect for each other. The next part of this chapter seeks to verify this affirmation empirically through the interpretation of a survey done in 1999 on the Oratory’s site. Theorizing the Modern Pilgrimage Theorizing the modern Catholic pilgrimage is not an easy endeavor because of the great variety of pilgrimage sites around the world. It seems that new ones pop up somewhere every year or so and attract visitors. Even if many of them remain marginal, other traditional sites are now well known throughout the world—Fatima, Lourdes, Loretto, La Salette, Guadelupe, and Medjugorje for example. It seems that most of these contemporary pilgrimage locations center on apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Many times the ‘messages’ of the Virgin are critical of the sins of sexuality and atheism. These countercultural messages are somewhat different from those emanating from the story of Brother André. The Oratory’s story and message tends today to be more pluralistic and inclusive than the message that emanates from most other large Catholic pilgrimage sites. Nevertheless, the Oratory has some points in common with the other modern Catholic pilgrimage sites. Jaime Vidal (1996: 54–55) clearly distinguishes the differences between a church and a sanctuary: A church is a space reserved for the praying believers, and the site
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is determined by the availability of property and its usefulness to the community. The site of a sanctuary is supposedly decided by supernatural forces, usually in a relatively unknown place where people believe a door has been opened between earth and heaven, where the presence of the sacred has been experienced to an extraordinary degree. The Oratory’s site not only qualifies as a standard Catholic sanctuary site in Vidal’s definition, but we could add that it also coincides with the Japanese tradition of pilgrimage to a sacred mountain. For Vidal (1996: 58), there are two types of sanctuary: one is based on historical events and another on a devotion to a saint or pious object. The Oratory actually fits into both of these types. Vidal also says that there are two kinds of modern pilgrimage experiences: the individual pilgrimage, which will usually be on foot in a foreign setting, and the collective pilgrimage, which will be more traditional and happen in a local setting. It is clear that the Oratory was a French-Canadian collective pilgrimage at the beginning of the century, but it is increasingly becoming an individual pilgrimage destination. David Carasco (1996: 29) lists three stages of the development of the modern pilgrimage: first, there is a deviation from the spatial, social and psychological status quo; second, there is a passage in a marginal and liminal space with an ensemble of social relations that produces a theophany; in the third stage, the pilgrim reintegrates into society as a renewed and changed human. The pilgrimage is a geographical and social separation from the mundane (1996: 30). This theory affirms clearly that there is definite pattern to the development of a pilgrimage site. Usually it starts with a humble person who receives a message or illumination from God. At first, the Church will be skeptical of the miracles until a formal inquiry is initiated. Once convinced of the truthfulness of the affirmation and of the divine presence, the Church usually takes control of the site by declaring it a sanctuary. Once it is officially recognized, a spectacularly huge building will be built on the site, and the sanctuary will start expanding. As we have seen earlier, this pattern corresponds exactly to the foundation of Saint Joseph’s Oratory. For French sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger (1993, 1999), functional definitions of religion are incapable of mastering the limitless expansion of religious phenomena in modern society and can show only the uncontrollable dispersion of religious symbols in society. On
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the other hand, substantive definitions of religion are condemned to fail because they are linked solely to historical religions and, therefore, can theorize only about the losses or gains of religion. One of the central questions that stands out in the sociology of religion today is the localization of religion in modernity. Hervieu-Léger thinks we must analyze the mutation of the structure of belief systems in modernity, not necessarily the content. The case of the evolution of Saint Joseph’s Oratory from a national shrine of French-Canadian Catholicism to an international tourist attraction is an example of this mutation of the structure of beliefs in modernity. We could even add that this structural mutation is also a spatial one inasmuch as the space has been intentionally reconfigured in order to adapt it easily to multifaceted groups of people using it for their own specific purposes. Hervieu-Léger’s main hypothesis is that there cannot be any religion without both the act of believing and the authority of tradition. But tradition is not necessarily a sterile repetition of the past; it is rather the rearticulating of the present. Modernity is characterized by the autonomy of the subject, and paradoxically, this autonomy produces the need for tradition’s authority. But since the sacred is separated from religion in modernity, religion has been transformed in modern culture into a cultural resource of signs and values. Hervieu-Léger argues that religions have a tendency today to present themselves as a primary source of symbolic matter that can be shaped toward each individual’s interests (1999: 59). This has been is the case of Saint Joseph’s Oratory for quite a while. Since the 1970s, in fact, the Oratory has been used for a number of public events that have little to do with religion. From rock concerts to peace demonstrations, the Oratory has been used not only for its great location, but also for its cultural significance in Québec history. An example of this is the Millenium Symphony. On 3 June 2000, the Symphony, a musical creation directed by local composers Walter Boudreau and Denys Bouliane, was performed in front of 40,000 people on the site of Saint Joseph’s Oratory. Beyond the purely aesthetic dimension of the work, a more symbolic dimension mixing history, art and religion was omnipresent. Being a major component of the work, the use of the sacred conferred an air of uniqueness in which the qualities of a collective experience, amplified by the media, was brought to the fore. From a religious studies perspective, Robineau
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(2000) has observed that responding to the need for the sacred is an important challenge for the community. For groups searching for social legitimacy like contemporary musical composers, the claim to satisfy this need allows for the reappropriation of symbols like the Oratory and the reconstruction of sacred ‘gathering places’ for the manifestation of local art. Hervieu-Léger sees the convert and the pilgrim as two opposite models of religious sociability in modernity. She says that even if the ‘pilgrim’ has been present throughout the history of all religions, we are currently witnessing the institutionalization of pilgrim practices. She says her pilgrim type is an evolution of Troeltsch’s mystic type. It is characterized by a network structure with minimal institutions and a tolerance of diverse pilgrim practices. She calls it ‘pluralism management,’ and in her view it permits the emotional gathering of the modern pilgrimage in the context of advanced institutional deregulation. The theory of pluralism management is very useful for our case study. We will mainly draw on Hervieu-Léger’s theory and definition of pilgrim practices to show how the new networks of international pilgrimages is reshaping not only the Catholic faith in general, but also the Oratory’s geographical and architectural space itself. Methodology and a Sociodemographic Snapshot of the Oratory’s Pilgrims The raw data cited in the next pages of this chapter are drawn from a research project done in the summer of 1999 by the Groupe de Recherche en Écologie Sociale, a research group of the University of Montréal. The data were collected by Raymond Chenel and JeanGuy Vaillancourt on the site of the Oratory. A bilingual (French and English) questionnaire, partially inspired by a similar one made by the Italian sociologists Paolo Giuriati and Gioia Arzenton (1992), was distributed to 590 persons. It is worth noting that 40% of the questionnaires were answered in English. The survey was followed by seven focus groups that were conducted in the late summer of 1999. The data-set was completed by intensive fieldwork participant observations on the site of the Oratory done by Martin Geoffroy in the summer of 2005, and by ongoing participant observations over the past twenty-five years by Vaillancourt.
22 41.5 7.2
57 47.5 18.6
N %L %C
N %L %C
Reflection
Tourism 204 38.6
63 52.5 32.3
31 58.5 15.9
35 36.1 17.9
40 25.6 20.5
26 34.7 13.3
125 24.2
59 51.3 48.8
13 24.1 10.7
27 28.7 22.3
9 6.1 7.4
13 16.9 10.7
18–35
118 22.9
27 23.5 24.5
21 38.9 19.1
19 20.2 17.3
15 10.1 13.6
28 36.4 25.5
36–50
Age
144 27.9
18 15.7 13.1
16 29.6 11.7
39 41.5 28.5
39 26.5 28.5
25 32.5 18.2
51–65
129 25.0
11 9.6 9.2
4 7.4 3.3
9 9.6 7.5
85 57.4 70.8
11 14.3 9.2
66 +
29 11.4
6 5.0 10.5
5 9.8 8.8
15 15.3 26.3
23 15.9 40.4
8 10.0 14.0
P
173 33.3
35 29.2 21.5
24 47.1 14.7
24 24.5 14.7
58 40.0 35.6
22 27.5 13.5
118 22.7
28 23.3 24.8
9 17.6 8.0
27 27.6 23.9
32 22.1 28.3
17 21.3 15.0
Education S C
* N signifies the number of respondents; L represents the percentage of the line; C the percentage of the column.
325 61.4
62 63.9 20.3
N %L %C
Prayer
N %L
116 74.4 37.9
N %L %C
Pilgrimage
Total
49 65.3 16.0
N %L %C
Religious service—Mass
Gender W M
Table 10.1. Sociodemographic Variables of Saint Joseph’s Oratory Visitors*
169 32.6
51 42.5 31.7
13 25.5 8.1
32 32.7 19.9
32 22.1 19.9
33 41.3 20.5
U
590
131 — 23.6
58 — 10.5
105 — 18.5
175 — 31.5
85 — 15.5
Total
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Table 10.1 crosses three sociodemographic variables (gender, age and education) with five motivational variables (religious service, pilgrimage, prayer, reflexion, and tourism). If we add the percentage of people who responded that they go the Oratory for a pilgrimage (31.5) to the ones who go there for tourism (23.6), the table shows that 55.1% of the people who go Saint Joseph’s Oratory go there for either organized or individual travel. We have put the two variables together because there is a distortion when we regrouped the pilgrimage with the age variable. This is because most the people who answered that they were coming for pilgrimage came with organized groups and were mostly elderly people (57.4%). At the other end of the spectrum, more than half (51.3%) of the people in the 18–35 age group say they came for tourism or could be called an individual pilgrimage. In this regard, the younger generation shows at least one of the characteristics of the modern pilgrim described by Hervieu-Léger, namely that they seem to stay away from any kind of organized pilgrimage. Again, when we analyze further the religion of the young pilgrims at the Oratory, we can see a generational difference. If we look at the total number of respondents, 85.5% of them said that they were Catholics. But only 65% of the 18 to 35 category and of the tourist category said they were Catholics. The rest of the young people were: 12.5% without religion, 11.7% from other Christian traditions, and 10.8% from other religions. Religious, ethnic, and social motivations In Table 10.2, the same five motivational variables are crossed with five ethnolinguistic variables. First, most people come from Western Europe (69.2%), while the ‘other’ category is composed of 32.1% of people from Eastern Europe, 20.8% from Africa, and 19.5% from Asia. About half of the people had French as a first language (51.9%), while the second half was composed of 28.1% English speakers, and 20% of other languages. As we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, this shows that Saint Joseph’s Oratory is not an exclusively French-Canadian site of pilgrimage as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Around 90% of the respondents believe in God. Again, the 18–35 and tourist categories have a slightly lower result, with 80% of believers. If a large majority of respondents believe in God, the concrete
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Table 10.2. Ethnic Origin and Language of the Oratory’s Visitors Ethnic Origin Language Total Western Other French English Other Europe Religious service— N Mass %L %C
58 76.3 18.4
18 23.7 12.5
54 69.2 20.9
5 6.4 3.5
19 24.4 18.4
85 — 15.5
Pilgrimage
N %L %C
97 72.4 30.8
37 27.6 25.7
78 49.7 30.2
65 41.4 45.8
14 8.9 13.6
175 — 31.5
Prayer
N %L %C
53 61.6 16.8
33 38.4 22.9
56 59.6 21.7
12 12.8 8.5
26 27.7 25.2
105 — 18.5
Reflexion
N %L %C
41 85.4 13.0
7 14.6 4.9
41 78.8 15.9
6 11.5 4.2
5 9.6 4.9
58 — 10.5
Tourism
N %L %C
66 57.4 21.0
49 42.6 34.0
29 23.8 11.2
54 44.3 38.0
39 32.0 37.9
131 — 23.6
N %L
335 69.2
149 30.8
275 51.9
149 28.1
106 20.0
590
Total
expression of their faith differs greatly from one category to another. More than 80% of the participants say they pray at least once a day. But the younger they get, the less they pray: only 50.9% of the 18 to 35 year olds pray; that proportion passes to 78.9% for the 36 to 50 year olds, then to 92.1% for 51–65, and it finally explodes at 99.9% for the over-66 year olds. Globally, around 70% of the participants in the survey go to a religious service at least once a week, while 23% do so every day. Women seem to practice a little bit more than men, but again it’s the age variable that brings about the most striking differences. For example, 90.3% of the population aged 65 years and older go to at least one religious service a week, while the percentage drops to 40% for the 18 to 35 year olds. People who are separated, divorced or living in free unions do not go frequently to religious services; only 46.5% say they go once a week. Finally, the people who come to the oratory for reflection partici-
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pate in religious services in a proportion of only 32.7% (40.3% for the tourist category). We note here too that the segments of population who consider the Oratory as a place of reflection is the category that has less people over 66 years of age (only 3%), but the one that has more people who are divorced, separated or living in free unions (26.4%). Devotion to St. Joseph and Brother André It is surprising that a place like Saint Joseph’s Oratory, a shrine dedicated from the start to the cult of St. Joseph and then later also to its founder Brother André, draws a significant number of people who do not necessarily know much about them before entering the sanctuary. Again, the generational gap is enormous. Of the 81% of the respondents who know of St. Joseph, the proportion rises to 97% for 66 years olds and over, and drops significantly under 50% for the 18 to 35 year olds. If we take the ethnolinguistic variable into account, 92% of the French know of St. Joseph; in comparison the English-speakers know he is the father of Jesus in a proportion of 70%. This figure drops only slightly to 66% for respondents with another language. Only half the tourists (50.4%) know who St. Joseph was; this figure shows rather clearly that the traditional purpose of developing a devotion to St. Joseph in the Oratory, initiated a century ago by Brother André, is slowly but surely being diluted by the increasing masses of tourists visiting the site every year. On this point, only 15.7% of the respondents in the tourist category say they have a particular devotion to St. Joseph. Even in the pilgrim category, the proportion (71.2%) of people who have a particular devotion to the terrestrial father of Christ is surprisingly low, considering that the Oratory has been dedicated as a pilgrimage site in honor of St. Joseph for the last hundred years. Another figure that shows the site is more and more used for other purposes than devotion to St. Joseph is that only 36% of the 18–35 year olds go there for that reason. A little less than two thirds (63.7%) of the total respondents claim to know of Brother André. The age variable here again is very significant: only 43.7% of the 18 to 35 year olds know him. It also seems that the linguistic variable has a role to play here because 87% of French speakers have knowledge of Brother André, in comparison to 40.8% for Anglophones. Almost 60% of the French speakers
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say that their parents introduced them to the story of Brother André, while only 15% of the Anglophones claim the same thing. That figure drops to less than 5% for the respondents with other languages. Most of the Anglophones (57.3%) and the speakers of the other languages respondend that they have heard of Brother André for the first time when they visited the Oratory. An observational example from the summer of 2005 verifies this: Coming to the tomb of Brother André, two Latino tourists seemed to be much more excited by the fact that Pope Jean Paul II had knelt on that spot a few years before than by the legacy of Brother André. Yet one would think that no one could help but be impressed by the room full of crutches through which one must go before entering Brother André’s tomb. It is a long, narrow and dark passageway illuminated only by thousands of candles. The decorations of the walls are even more striking: thousands of crutches hang on the walls, a testimony to the miracles attributed to Brother André during the last hundred years. Less than half (47.6%) of the respondents have a special devotion toward Brother André. This proportion goes up to 59.4% for the Francophone and drops dramatically to 20% for the Anglophone respondents. Devotion to Brother André is actually more popular with the other-language category at 37.5% than with the Anglophones. We can summarize the description of these data by saying that the vast majority of people who go to St. Joseph’s Oratory believe in God. We are not sure what kind of God it is they believe in, because the expression of that faith is highly variable, especially as far as the age categories are concerned. Even if the Oratory is a pilgrimage site dedicated primarily to St. Joseph and secondarily to Blessed Brother André, the devotion to these two holy men is highly variable. The Main Attractions of Saint Joseph’s Oratory We know that the Oratory attracts a wide variety of people. To satisfy this diversity, the Oratory has many attractions to offer, some are material (the beauty of the site), others are spiritual and are usually linked to devotion to St. Joseph and/or to Brother André. In the survey’s questionnaire, Chenel and Vaillancourt (1999) listed 12 reasons why people go to the Oratory and asked each respondent to choose their own top three motivations. The first choice was given two points and the second and third choices were given one point each, the results were added up and are compiled in Table 10.3.
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Table 10.3. Reasons for Visiting the Oratory of Saint Joseph 1–
For specific prayers to be fulfilled
388
2–
Particular devotion to St. Joseph or to Brother André
330
3–
The beauty of the site
301
4–
To be able to pray with people sharing our faith
254
5–
A tourist visit
218
6–
Thanking St. Joseph or Brother André for a fulfilled petition 158
7–
Quality of liturgy
93
8–
Anonymity of a popular religious site
87
9–
Long opening hours
61
10–
Cultural diversity
57
11–
Proximity
37
12–
Security (due to presence of personnel)
16
As we can see, the most important reasons to visit the Oratory are still religious, especially to request favors from St. Joseph and Brother André. But the beauty of the site, which is less obviously related to religion, comes in a close third. These reasons change variably from one category of respondents to another. For instance, and men in the 18–35 age bracket, people with a university diploma, and respondents coming for reflection and tourism all say that they come there first and foremost for the beauty of the site. In the case of the English and other-language categories, the beauty of the site is as important as the possibility of having one’s request for favors fulfilled. For French speakers, the particular devotion to St. Joseph and to Brother André and the fulfillment of requests are by far the most popular choices. Conclusion: Saint-Joseph’s Oratory: A Compromise between Tradition and Modernity? This brief description of the sociocultural historical evolution of SaintJoseph’s Oratory has shown how the site has transformed itself from a traditional ethnoreligious shrine at the beginning of the twentieth
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century to a contemporary pilgrimage and tourism center. We have seen that the transition from tradition to modernity involves a sometimes tenuous process of rethinking the communal organizational mode to give a greater place to the individual as an autonomous subject. An enormous drop in religious service attendance can be observed in many societies when they go through that passage from tradition to modernity. In the case of Québec society, the ‘Quiet Revolution’ of the 1960s gave the chance to French-Canadians to break away from what sociologist Guy Rocher called “sociological Catholicism,” where people go to church mainly by conformism. Many have associated this dramatic drop in church attendance to a loss of faith, when it was for a good majority of Québecois, a form of protest against the traditional communal modes of the expression of faith. In this context, the drop in attendance at religious services in the traditional parish is much more an expression of a need for individuality that challenges the conformism of the traditional parish, not necessarily a rejection of faith itself. The Oratory gives people the opportunity to pray in solitude while at the same time being with many others who share a similar faith. It offers believers an alternative to the parish. It operates for them a sort of synthesis between tradition and modernity. The Oratory does not put pressure for integration into a community as a normal parish usually does. It truly has adapted tradition to modernity, offering a synthesis of both. The Oratory is also a textbook example of a Weberian style routinization of charisma that has transformed itself into a bureaucracy practicing “pluralism management.” From the survey’s results and from our observations, it seems clear to us that the Oratory demonstrates that religious tourism is a new form of pilgrimage. A very high number of the survey’s respondents (around 70%) said they have come to the Oratory’s site for a pilgrimage without being in an organized group. This clearly shows that traditionally structured collective manifestations of faith, which are still the case with many pilgrimages, do not appeal to everybody. In this day and age, people go either alone or with a small group of friends, on pilgrimages as an individual act of faith to be made in a place where other likeminded persons are present. Many people declared they come to the Oratory simply for a tourist’s visit, but most of them (80 to 90%) are also saying that they believe in God. Are they going back to a form of traditional, old-time religion, or are they creating a form of new age pilgrimage? It seems obvi-
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ous that they are coming in order to establish a more direct link with their religious roots and identity, adapting them to present modernity. It also seems that the traditional elements of the Oratory are more important to the older generation. But in the case of young adults, going to the Oratory appears to be more of a personal quest for authenticity through spirituality as well as the discovery of historical roots through a constantly evolving system of beliefs. This is one of the main characteristics of the modern pilgrim. References Carasco, David. 1996. “Ceux qui accomplissent un Saint-Voyage: formes et diversité des pèlerinages” [“Those who Accomplish a Sanctifying Voyage: Forms and Diversity of Pilgrimages”]. Concilium 266: 27–39. Chenel, Raymond and Jean-Guy Vaillancourt. 1999. “Le passage vers la modernité: Enquête sur les populations fréquentant l’Oratoire Saint-Joseph, Rapport final” [“A Passage to Modernity: A Population Survey of Saint-Joseph’s Oratory’s Visitors, Final Report”]. Montréal: Unpublished manuscript. Deroy-Pineau, Françoise. 2004. L’étrange destin d’Alfred Bessette dit Frère André [The Strange Destiny of Alfred Bessette or Brother André ]. Montréal: Fides. Giuriati, Paolo and Gioia Lanzi Arzenton. 1992. Le sens du chemin. Padova: Centro Ricerche Socio-Religiose. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. 1993. La religion pour mémoire [Religion as a Chain of Memory]. Paris: Cerf. ———. 1999. Le pèlerin et le converti [The Pilgrim and the Convert, St-Amand-Montrond: Flammarion. Robillard, Denise. 2005. Les merveilles de l’Oratoire [The Marvels of the Oratory, Montréal: Fides. Robineau, Anne. 2000. “Les nouvelles stratégies des artistes dans l’utilisation du sacré: le cas de la Symphonie du Millénaire” [“The New Social Strategies of Contemporary Artists in the Utilization of the Sacred: The Case of the Millenium Symphony]” Religiologiques 22: 85–99. Tomasi. Luigi. 1998. “Pilgrimage/Tourism,” Pp. 362–63 in Encyclopedia of Religion and Society, edited by William H. Swatos, Jr. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press. Vidal, Jaime. 1996. “Le pèlerinage dans la tradition chrétienne” [“Pilgrimage in the Christian Tradition”]. Concilium 266: 53–67.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PLACE AND PILGRIMAGE, REAL AND IMAGINED Lutz Kaelber The landscape looks forlorn, bereft of trees and larger shrubs. The place is used as fields, ploughed by local peasants. The one thing standing out from these fields is a solitary marker, relatively unadorned and inconspicuous. The recent photograph that captures this scene has a solemn tone to it, conveying to the knowing observer a deep sadness inscribed in the landscape. The place relates to events that happened some time ago in Dalnik, not far from Odessa in the Transnistria region of what then was the Soviet Union, and the photograph is part of a book full of pictures depicting similar places and markers, equally stark and austere. The book’s Russian title is èÓÎfl ëÏÂÚË, or “Killing Fields” (Langenheim 1999). Its subject matter is the remnants of an unspeakable crime: Hitler’s self-professed “war of annihilation” against the Soviet Union that in the span of four years left more than twenty-five million Soviet citizens dead. The primary target for annihilation was, of course, Jews, and in the area of Dalnik about 20,000 of them were shot, machinegunned, blown apart by grenades, and burnt alive with gasoline in the span of a few days in autumn 1941. Military maps of the Western parts of the former Soviet Union are dotted with massacre sites such as this one, where German members of the Einsatzgruppen but also regular army units, “ordinary men” and all their allies, and locals committed their heinous acts in a battle that involved more men and materiel than ever before or after in human history.1 Yet in the post-World War II Soviet Union, Jewish survivors of such crimes and their families and descendants were usually not allowed to erect formal memorials to these events: no group or community, so the party-line went, was to stand out 1 Ordinary Men is the title of Christopher Browning’s (1998) famous study of the deeds of the German police battalion 101. The Hamburg Institute for Social Research (2002) and Dean (2000) document the involvement of regular army units and auxiliaries in the Holocaust. Ueberschär (2003) surveys various places of atrocities.
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from the lines of Soviet comrades who had become victims of fascist aggression. For many surviving Jewish communities, small markers of sites of atrocity were the only physical objects linking memory to place. Due to the makeshift nature of these informal memorials, many fell into disrepair and eventually disappeared, and some were even removed by the authorities.2 Yet the informal nature of the sites did not prevent them from becoming sites of small-scale ceremonies of memorialization and pilgrimage, long before, to paraphrase one scholar, Holocaust tourism became a secular ritual (Kugelmass 1993). Pilgrimages and other such rituals have helped institutionalize the memory of events that still have a vivid presence in the minds of surviving observers and witnesses. The photographer who went to Dalnik some fifty years after the massacres occurred reports that he generally had no trouble finding older local residents who walked him to the exact locale of a massacre and told him their personal observations: “Here the others had to wait.” “Here they burnt them.” “I saw it with my own eyes” (Langenheim 1999: 14). About five centuries earlier, the German Dominican friar Felix Schmid (Latinized: Fabri) participated in a very different type of travel. Twice he went on a pilgrimage to the place where Christianity originated, the Holy Land, and wrote detailed accounts of his experiences that represented a new form of travel writing. For in the fifteenth-century, the author as a traveling subject assumed a personal voice, emphasizing experiential narrative over the accounting of holy topography, thus being less a travel guide and more a travel report (Carls 1999). In Schmid’s case, he wrote for several audiences. One intended audience was his fellow friars, whom he told in his Evagatorium (1483–84) what they might wish to know before going on such a long and arduous trip themselves. To them, Schmid expressed that he was not satisfied with his first trip, in 1480, for which he noted that “We did not spend more than nine days in the Holy Land, during which we went the round of all the usual holy places in a great hurry, working day and night at the accomplishment of our pilgrimage, so that we were hardly given any time for rest” (Fabri 1896: 23–24).
2
See Gitelman (1993), who also includes pictures of such memorials.
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Schmid’s disappointment is palpable after “having perfunctorily visited the holy places,” but he also had some misgivings about fellow travelers, as reflected in another account, his Sionpilger (Palestine Pilgrims, 1492), which he wrote primarily for nuns who were unable to go on the trip on their own. It in, he distinguished between “spiritual pilgrimage” by these “Palestine pilgrims,” which takes place mentally, and “physical pilgrimage” by what he called “pilgrim knights,” involving the traversing of physical space. The mental pilgrims, he noted, are not to behave themselves like the pilgrim knights, who give a bad example by playing cards, dancing, and singing worldly songs (Fabri 1999: 80). Purity of mind for them was as important as for the physical pilgrims, so he advised them to ‘travel’ with the two genders kept apart—in spirit, of course (Fabri 1999: 79). For Schmid, save for receiving indulgences, which was a spiritual award the Church reserved to those who traveled physically, those traveling in spirit participated in a full or ‘real’ pilgrimage, and proper conduct was required of them. These two historical vignettes not only illustrate but also problematize aspects scholars commonly attribute to religious pilgrimage. These aspects include the sacrality of place, the sacralization and profaning of site (and sight), and changes in sites and site experiences that reflect a transformation from what I will call ‘Fordist’ to ‘post-Fordist’ pilgrimages. I address each aspect below before concluding with a brief discussion of the ‘new frontier’ in religious voyages: cyber-pilgrimages. The Sacrality of Place Émile Durkheim suggested long ago that cultures distinguish the sacred from the profane by setting the sacred apart through prohibitions. Prohibitions are a part of a “negative cult” that serves to limit contact between the sacred and profane, whereas practices such as asceticism, which he saw as the stripping of the profane from the sacred, reflect a “positive cult” by which the sanctity and the distinctiveness of the sacred are maintained and affirmed (Durkheim 1995: 34–39, 303–21). While his argument’s empirical foundation in the anthropology of his times may be suspect and his functionalism myopic, Durkheim’s perspective expresses a sociological truism: there is no inherent sacredness to an object or an essential sacred quality
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to a place. Humans conceive of and perceive sacrality because they construct it as such, and the construction of sacred place is both an ongoing process and an undertaking that involves collective agency (cf. Lane 2001, ch. 2). Sacred places that become the object of pilgrimage have an affinity to, and perhaps even a natural origin in, what I call ‘holy spots.’ A holy spot does not necessarily possess materiality, but it is a location, whether physical, virtual, or wholly imaginary, that represents a place of provenance of numinous conceptions.3 These numinous conceptions are tied to a specific location, or spot, before they become disembodied religious experience and tradition and achieve placelessness and (double) transcendence.4 Holy spots express, to use Mircea Eliade’s (1961) terms, ruptures in space and time from ‘normal’ existence and the profane world.5 It is not difficult to see how mythical areas of divine activity in a religion or the places of birth of prophets who founded religious communities lend themselves to becoming holy spots, as they can be rather easily associated with an Eliadean type of rupture. For prophetic authority, the emergence of holy spots is a potent solution to the Weberian problem of the routinization of charisma and legitimate acquisition of authority “by the successors of the charismatic [religious] hero” (Weber 1958: 262; cf. 1978: 241–54). Thus, when Muslim pilgrims travel to Mecca or Hindus to a holy river, their holy spots allow for purification, community, and symbolic recreation of the rupture that represents a major change in cosmic events. In Felix Schmid’s case of imagined pilgrimage to Palestine, the Christian spiritual pilgrims had a similar focus: They, too, went on a pilgrimage in order to partake in these functions of holy spots. Major scholarly studies surveying the sacrality of place and depicting the varieties of pilgrimage to them and the pilgrims’ experiences exist for many religious traditions (see Coleman and Elsner 1995; Westwood 1997). Yet some of these studies tend to conceptualize 3 Cf. Gieryn (2000: 465), who includes physicality among the features of ‘place.’ Felix Schmid’s example shows that pilgrimage need not involve corporeal travel, nor does virtual pilgrimage (which is discussed further below). 4 ‘Holy spot’ in religion is an analogous concept to “truth spot” in science, a physical location where claims to epistemic truth originate in local knowledge (Gieryn 2002a). 5 Students of history will note a certain irony in my reference to Eliade here after using an example from the Holocaust in the introductory paragraph, for Eliade embraced both fascist and anti-Semitic views before and during World War II.
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and represent holy spots in too narrow a manner. Established religions are not the only entities that lay claim to a sacrality of place, and those who commemorate and recreate it in pilgrimage are not confined to established religious communities. Surely the survivors and descendants of the Jews murdered in the Odessa region in 1941 can claim a sacred space as well. When the Nazis’ quest for ‘living space’ turned Poland and the western parts of the Soviet Union into a vast “death space” (Aldor 1940) and Dalnik into a ‘thana-spot,’ their victims and the communities they lived in experienced an epic rupture in time and place. The encounter of such a catastrophic (and often unforeseen) loss is firmly attached to a location that assumes a lasting transcendent meaning as it is commemorated in a pilgrimage. A secular event thus initiates practices that immediately attach sacrality to place and represent examples of the cultic activities Durkheim saw as demarcating the sacred. No scholarly analysis exists of such cultic activities among those who have practiced commemoration, and perhaps continue to do so, at Dalnik, but studies of war grave pilgrimages provide supplemental evidence (Walter 1993; see also Lloyd 1998; Brandt 2003). While they show that motives for and experiences on such pilgrimages can be heavily framed by contemporary sociocultural conditions, they also evince moving testimonies of relatives who sometimes in old age seek to visit such sites to complete their lives, and the tone in which those travels are undertaken is usually somber. While holy spots often derive from thana-spots, which themselves tend to be a constitutive element of a community of bereavement, the occasion for the emergence of thana-spots varies. Paul Post has studied the creation of spontaneous memorial sites and what he calls disaster rituals around thana-spots that mark traffic deaths (Post, Pieper, and van Uden 1998; Post 2003; see also Eyre 1999).6 Other thana-spots that involve pilgrimages as disaster rituals include sites of terrorist attacks and natural disasters, and locations that are tied to a mythologized past, such as the assassination spots of murdered American presidents and other persons who have come to be seen as political martyrs (Phipps 2004: 78–81; Foote 2003; Lennon and Foley 2000).7 6 Cf. Rojek (1994), who uses the term “black spots” to designate thana-spots that have become commercially developed and thus constitute sites of “fatal attractions.” 7 The above analysis reflects an attempt to take sacred place as physical space seriously. Despite this attempt at what Thomas Gieryn (2002b) has called “giv[ing]
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Pilgrimage as physical, imagined, or virtual movement to and from holy spots usually helps sacralize these locations through its ritualistic elements, but it can also profane them. In the context of tourism, Dean MacCannell has described the process by which a site as a physical location becomes a sight, or something imbricated in meaning and thus ‘worth’ seeing by a ‘sightseer’ (aka tourist), in terms of a transformation from an ‘object’ to an ‘attraction.’ This process, which he calls sight sacralization, involves five steps or stages: first, the naming phase, by which a site that is to become an attraction is named or identified by a marker and thus designated as worthy of special status; second, the framing and elevation phase, by which an object (or site) is physically demarcated from its surroundings; third, the enshrinement stage, in which the marker itself is included in sacralization, and the fourth and fifth stages, mechanical and social reproduction, in which the sacralized objects (or sites) are physically recreated and metonymically transplanted (1999: 43–45). It seems clear that MacCannell’s object-to-attraction model is not confined to tourism but is also imminently applicable to ‘pilgrimage attractions’; yet few studies have picked up on it, with the partial exception of scholars who have employed similar processual models to the beginning stages of object veneration in pilgrimage to emergent shrines in new religious movements, marginal groups, and local cults (see Ivakhiv 2001; Hetherington 1996; Orsi 1985). Sacralization is but one of several possibilities through which sites can be transformed in dealing with events of numinous significance. Focusing specifically on the ways in which people grapple with the meaning of tragedies in America’s history, geographer Kenneth Foote (2003) suggests that, besides what he calls site sanctification (a term with obvious parallels to MacCannell’s), the modification of landscape around thana-spots as a response to tragedy can have three other outcomes: “Designation” of landscape involves sacrality in the making, as there are no rituals of consecration such as pilgrimage (yet)—often, as he points out, such sites represent minority causes that get buried in mass culture and are subsequently forgotten until place a chance” in sociological analysis, the analysis of sacred place in general has not managed to proceed to Gieryn’s “second revolution,” namely by recognizing the agentic capacity of space and incorporating it into the analysis.
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the significance of a place is recognized.8 “Rectification” of landscape involves its cleansing from the strains of tragedy, so that it can once again be recognized as a rehabilitated site, whereas “obliteration” involves a further step: the destruction of all traces of the disaster. Thus, while sanctification and designation denote a sacrality-of-place in the making, rectification and obliteration pertain to the profaning of (potentially) sacred sites. It is possible that sites shift back and forth from sacred status to a profane one as they (and pilgrimages to them) undergo alternate processes of sacralization and profaning, such as has been shown for the site of the Bastille in Paris (Smith 1999). Interestingly, one of the sites that Foote himself specifically mentions as having “lain vacant for over fifty years” (2002: 4), a place stigmatized by history and thus obliterated from memory, namely the site of the former Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, has recently undergone a remarkable transformation. Part of a larger complex of buildings that also includes the dwellings of the SS leadership and the Reich Security Main Office, it is now the site of an exhibition, the “Topography of Terror.” This site, which has been said to map not only the origin of Nazi terror but perhaps also a ‘new’ German national identity (Till 2005; Rurüp 2002), is physically demarcated by its visual austerity and temporariness from a major site that lies across from it, Europe’s largest building site throughout the 1990s, the multi-billion-Euro Sony Center, and has attracted several hundred thousands of visitors (who are often pilgrims as well) a year.9 It should be noted that many pilgrimage sites never progress beyond local site sanctification or designation. After all, religion, perhaps just like politics, is a social sphere where most events are immensely local. Yet sacred places commonly attract scholarly attention only after they have reached the fourth and fifth stages in MacCannell’s model, 8 The Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Martin Luther King was murdered, is mentioned as an example. A part of the National Civil Rights Museum, it is now a place of (secular) pilgrimage and tourism. 9 I visited the site in the summer of 2005 and observed the visitors on one morning. The atmosphere was solemn to the extent that the air was pregnant with Fassungslosigkeit, or incapacity to comprehend fully what is displayed in front of oneself. At the same time, the splendid facades of the Sony Center and other buildings demonstrably erected by multinational blue-chip companies and visible from the site impressed on the visitor the arrival of a new century in which Germany has re-found and reestablished its place among European countries and in the global community of nations out of the rubble of its recent past.
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by which time the sites, their objects of veneration, and travel to and from them tend to involve a larger number of pilgrims and can become commercially and touristically appropriated. The commodification of these types of pilgrimages, which sometimes coincides with the profaning of sites, ranks among the master tropes of a vast current literature that looks at the boundaries between tourism and pilgrimage (e.g., VukoniÆ 1996; Swatos and Tomasi 2002; Gmelch 2004; Badone and Roseman 2004; Timothy and Olsen 2006). This literature reflects a somewhat uneasy relationship between two scholarly camps: Just as some tourism scholars appear to be unfamiliar with sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of religious communities and practices, so are pilgrimage scholars occasionally unaware of major social trends involving and affecting all travel, including pilgrimage, and the conceptual tools that tourism scholars have assembled, analyzed, and put to use with great skill. In the following sections, I will comment on some of those tools and focus on one of these trends: the shift from Fordist to post-Fordist pilgrimages. The Transformation of Pilgrimages: From Fordism to Post-Fordism Mass travel became truly democratized in the twentieth century. The expansion of leisure time, rising income levels, advances in transportation and communication technologies, and the commercialization of travel destinations together with a major demographic expansion have led to an increase in tourism that is truly staggering. For 2005, the World Tourism Organization has pegged the number of international tourist arrivals at over 800 million, and Germans, whom some have called the world champions of travel, are planning an astounding number of 60 million vacation trips of at least five days duration in 2006—this in a country with less than 90 million residents.10 No one should be surprised to find that religiously motivated travel has increased as well. The number of more than 200 million people who go on pilgrimage a year is a (wild) guesstimate, as is the number of tens of millions of participants in the Hindu pilgrimage festival of Khumb Mela in 2001, variously labeled the “the largest 10 See http://www.world-tourism.org/newsroom/Releases/2006/january/06_01_24.htm and http://www.germany-info.org/relaunch/info/publications/d_nachrichten/2006/060118/wi2.html (both accessed 31 January 2006).
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pilgrimage festival known to man” and the “biggest religious gathering of humanity” on Earth.11 In the course of the twentieth century, many ‘traditional’ or mainstream forms of pilgrimage to sacred places that experienced the fourth and fifth stages of MacCannell’s model of sight sacralization have turned into large-scale and mostly non-local enterprises by increasingly intersecting with tourism and Fordist mass production of travel opportunities and experiences. Fordist travel expresses a modernist “paradigm of travel” (Kaelber 2006) and reflects, in the terminology of George Ritzer, its “McDonaldization.” This process stands for an increase in the predictability of travel and travel experiences through standardization; more efficiency through avoidance of slack and inefficiencies such as in package tours, better calculability through the elimination of (unwanted) surprises and orchestration of travel scripts, and stronger control over humans by an increased reliance on technology and travel routines imposed on travelers (Ritzer 2004; Ritzer and Liska 1997). There is no reason to believe that the McDonaldization of travel has not found its counterpart in the McDonaldization of religious pilgrimage, with the latent function of profaning rather than sacralizing both pilgrimage sites and travel. Building his argument on a Foucauldian foundation, John Urry (2002) uses the concept of the “tourist gaze” to denote the type of regularized site production and consumption that Fordist travel stands for. While Urry’s emphasis on the visual nature of the gaze and his insufficient attention to travelers’ agency seems problematic (see MacCannell 2001), a corresponding ‘pilgrim gaze’ (my term) denotes its equivalent in pilgrimage and plays an important part in the appropriation of religious imagery (see Morgan 2005).12 The existence of such a routinized, and to some extent, profaning, pilgrim gaze is well attested to at least as early as in the Middle Ages, when pious Catholic pilgrims around the time Felix Schmid penned his notes were admonished not to travel “with the intention of seeing the world or from ambition and pride to say, ‘Been there! Seen that!’” (quoted in Morris 2002: 146), but it has arguably increased in prevalence. Quite poignantly, in anticipation 11 Jackowski (2000); see also Rinschede (1992), who uses a similar number; http:// www.kmp2001.com/kumbha_mela_info.html and http://kumbh-mela.pilgrimage-india.com/kumbhmela-festival.html (both accessed 31 January 2006). 12 Cf. Urry (2002: 150), who now acknowledges the existence of a “reverential gaze” in the visual appreciation of a site.
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of American pilgrims to the 2000 Jubilee, the pastor of one of Rome’s churches lamented that “surrounded by professional travel consultants, group dinners, and frozen itineraries, many Americans during the Holy Year will be quickly hurried past the spiritual richness of Rome. While their trip might be called a pilgrimage, they will be little more than religious tourists with great expectation and little spiritual direction” (quoted in Kaelber 2002: 74 n. 72). This anecdotal evidence of the difficulty of demarcating Fordist from traditional (religious) appropriation of sacred space reflects findings in studies that look more systematically at tourism/pilgrim/worshipper interactions at sacred sites. For example, Chia Hwee Kim (1999) addresses such interactions at sites of worship in different religions in Singapore. She finds tensions between the commercialization of these sites as tourist attractions by the Singapore government, which also provides much-needed funds to the religious communities, and the interests of worshippers and pilgrims, who sometimes benefit from these funds indirectly but also often directly experience the Fordization of sites as profaning. Consequently, some religious sites are left somewhere in limbo between a temple and a circus. Digance (2003) focuses on the contest over access and use of sacred sites that occurs between owners and pilgrims wishing to keep essential elements of sacrality intact versus managers and commercial operators of religious tours who are less sensitive to this issue. She shows the difficulties in finding a common ground for these different parties and their various religious and secular interests. Jacobs (2004) notes similar tensions between Jews commemorating the loss of Jewish life and culture at major Holocaust sites and residents who continue their day-to-day lives in the vicinity. Just as religious geographers’ depictions of major religious pilgrimage sites invariably include many locations that double up as major tourist destinations (Nolan and Nolan 1992; Rinschede 1999), these tensions indicate fault lines in the profaning and sacralization of such sites that more often than not become magnified with the increase in both secular and sacred travel and site commercialization.13 Fordist influences on both tourism and religious pilgrimages remain important. Yet in the last quarter-century the literature on travel has 13 For a case study of such a dynamic, see Davis and Marvin’s (2004) analysis of Venice’s transformation from a site of pilgrims’ rest to the “world’s most touristed city.” However, see also Kaufmann (2005), who argues that Lourdes would never have developed into the major religious shrine it became at the turn of the twentieth century had it not been for a massive commercialization of the site.
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shifted its focus away from production to consumption and thereby from Fordist forms to travel to post-Fordist ones. As Urry (2002: 14) has noted, post-Fordist consumption stands for “much greater differentiation of purchasing patterns in different market segments; greater volatility of consumer preferences; the growth of a consumer movement and the ‘politicizing’ of consumption; reactions of consumers against being part of a ‘mass’ and the need for producers to be much more consumer-driven . . .; the development of many more products, each of which has a shorter life; [and] the emergence of new kinds of commodity which are more specialized and based on raw materials that imply non-mass forms of production.”14 In the analysis of post-Fordist types of travel, the varieties of consumption and cultural appropriation of objects, sites, and landscapes expressed in this passage come to the fore. The analysis is carried out from different angles in the scholarly literature, but insofar as sacrality is involved, it concerns itself with the broad term of consumer religion (Lyon 2000). Alan Bryman’s (2004) concept of cultural “Disneyization” denotes relatively new ways or emphases in the consumption of time and space, which in the context of travel may include the theming of locations, the hybrid consumption of space, the merchandising of travel experiences, performative (emotional) labor as part of the site experience, and control and surveillance of travel and site behavior.15 Postmodernist scholarship advances on the notion of Disneyization by taking the cultural term in travel analysis further, espousing the argument of a “liquid modernity” (Bauman 2000) characterized by a by-now familiar laundry list of transitory processes: time-space compression, dedifferentiation of social spheres, eroding boundaries between signifier and signified, breakdown of meta-narratives, dominance of surface images and simulacra, volatility of social practices, fragmentation of identities, etc. (see, e.g., Baudrillard 1983; Harvey 1989; Jameson 1992; Lyotard 1984). Through the lenses of Disneyization and postmodernism, postFordist pilgrimages in the twenty-first century thus tend to become increasingly mediated, image-driven, and fragmented into a plethora of pilgrimage styles, experiences, and sites. There is ample empirical
14
The literature on changes in consumption echoes Urry’s ideas; see, e.g., Gabriel and Lang (1995) and Miles (1998). 15 See Kaelber (2006) for a more extensive analysis of these issues and the ones that follow below.
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evidence that many religious pilgrimages now overlap and are difficult to distinguish from other types of pilgrimage travel and even tourism (see also Campo 1998): political pilgrimages, to worship political heroes or martyrs and celebrate the (real or imagined) implementation of political ideals ( Jensen 1997; Holland 1997; Soyer 2000); pilgrimages to “cathedrals of consumption” and even entire “landscapes of consumption,” where consumers are said to seek a reinchantment of the world by performing ritual worship at ceremonial centers and themed temples to materialism, which themselves are often located within larger “tourist bubbles” (Ritzer 2005, ch. 7; Zepp 1997; Judd 1999); heritage tourism and educational travel, to establish links to cultural roots and traditions (Urry 2002, ch. 6; Trotter 2001; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998), including (mythical) religious ones (O’Guinn and Belk 1989; Hawkins 1999), or to affirm a national civil religion or identity around national shrines and memorials (Zelinsky 1990; Koshar 2000); and various forms of thana-tourism and dark tourism, previously addressed, to commemorate deaths of cultural or sociopolitical significance (Seaton 1996; Slade 2003; Strange and Kempa 2003; Ashworth and Hartmann 2005).16 Of course, not all pilgrimages to sacred places are subjected to these types of interpenetrations of motives and experiences. Just as there is the phenomenon of the “post-tourist” who recognizes the ubiquity of commodified, Disneyfied, McDonaldized travel and is critical of it (see Ritzer 2004: 202–12; Gottdiener 2001: 162–67),17 so might be those out there those—the ‘post-pilgrims’—who resist a perceived profaning of sacred place and seek for new ways to appropriate it by leaving the pilgrim bubble, physically or spiritually. Perhaps the attractiveness of pilgrim paths that make up the Camino de Santiago and others leading to sacred sites that have largely remained under the radar screen of touristic development lies in the 16 Davidson, Hecht, and Whitney’s (1990) study of visitors to Graceland provides a very nice example of the overlap of motives and experiences in post-Fordist travel and pilgrimage. In what is arguably the best empirical analysis of this site as sight so far, the authors distinguish between three types of travelers: the “immigrant pilgrims,” who chose to move to Memphis to be close to the King and in the vicinity of events upon his resurrection; the “transient pilgrims,” who indicate having a more spiritual relationship to him; and tourists, who like his music and are interested in his life. 17 This term has been brilliantly conceptualized by Maxine Feifer (1986, ch. 9), and remains one of the most misunderstood concepts in the theoretical analysis of tourism and travel; see also Kaelber (2006: 56–57).
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fact that they remain, to some degree, off the beaten track and may allow for an more reflective encounter with sacred place, especially if it involves non- or semi-motorized pilgrimages (see, for example, Frey 1998). Issues of motive and purpose often expressed and discussed by religious pilgrims in this context may well echo those considered by ecotourists and those engaged in volunteer tourism (Fennell 1999; Wearing 1999). While such ‘post-pilgrims’ continue to occupy a significant place in contemporary pilgrimage, another form of pilgrimage has appeared on the scene. Though the ultimate form of postmodern travel, it has hardly been studied in the scholarly literature: cyber-pilgrimage. Outlook: Dark Pilgrimages in Cyberspace The current frontier in post-Fordist pilgrimages is the expansion of religious journeys into the worlds of cyberspace and multi-media generated hyper-reality (Eco 1986; see also Apolito 2005). In many cases official as well as unofficial Websites in cyberspace offer potential or actual travelers to sacred sites guides and other information, and they sometimes act as virtual depositories of local knowledge that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to obtain. For example, whereas historical accounts of the infamous massacre at Dalnik are fairly easy to get, very few depictions exist of the site itself and the commemorative rituals that take place at it. The book mentioned in the beginning of this chapter contains several rare pictures, but a Russian Website entitled “The Unstudied Holocaust” provides pictures of small monuments erected at this and nearby sites as well as a narrative of commemoration.18 Some Web pages go further by providing imaginary pilgrimage guides and reports à la Felix Schmid, or even offer virtual pilgrimages. While some skepticism about wholly equating ‘offline’ and ‘online’ travel appears to be in order (see Cowan 2005), these types of on-line pilgrimages combine the pilgrim gaze with a “virtual gaze” (Kaelber 2001). A few examples, some of which I have mentioned elsewhere (Kaelber 2001, 2006), bear mentioning (or repeating and updating): pilgrims can go to ‘virtual cemeteries’ to commemorate the dead at cyber-graves and contemplate the possibility of a ‘virtual heaven’ (see Schwibbe and Spieker 18
http://www.moria.farlep.net/ru/almanah_03/01_32.htm (accessed 9 February 2006).
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1999; 2001);19 the Khumb Mela in 2001 offered virtual pilgrims an opportunity for virtual penance and cleansing in the Ganges river by way of faxing a filled-out survey form with personal characteristics and a head picture to an agency at a local place, which then superimposed the head onto another picture likened to their body form and had it dipped into the holy river; and Web sites offer the option of emailing, text messaging, or faxing a prayer to Jerusalem’s Western Wall, where it will then be read or posted.20 Some virtual pilgrimage sites offer a curious mix of kitsch, commerce, and salvation (MacWilliams 2002), and many seem to vanish as quickly as they spring up.21 Sometimes fakes are part of the deal, especially when gullible pilgrims use media embellishments of actual events or fictitious creations as their guides (Chidester 2005; The Economist 1998; Maclean’s 1998). These virtual pilgrimages to sites considered sacred must not necessarily be of a benign nature, at least not in the context of what I wish to call ‘dark pilgrimages.’ I concluded a recently-published essay (Kaelber 2006) by referring to William Miles’s notion of “darker tourism” and its envisioned advances in virtual animation and the future of darker tourism as ominous, if indeed what Miles wrote became true: “[M]useum cyberguides and curators will take their virtual tourists on real time tours of active detention camps, killing fields, death rows, and execution chambers. . . . [L]ongstanding psychological distinctions between real and virtual, here and there, subject and object may themselves loosen. If so, then the dark cybertourist may not in fact sense a substantial difference between walking and browsing through Auschwitz” (2002: 1177). As I have discovered in the short time since, at least “browsing through Auschwitz” as a form of dark pilgrimage has become more realistic and is no longer a problem in 3D: virtual reality movies of all major Nazi concentration camps (or rather what is left of them) are available as pedagogical tools from the Website of the Florida Center for Instructional Technology in the College of Education at the University of South 19 Interestingly enough, the authors’ second publication appeared in a “virtual journal” and was exclusively available on-line. It is currently no longer accessible but can be accessed through http://www.webarchive.org. 20 See http://www.aish.com/wallcam/Place_a_Note_in_the_Wall.asf; http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2003/09/001740.htm; and http://koudinov.info/holyland/jerusalem4. html (accessed 7 February 2006). 21 Many of the sites MacWilliams analyzed are no longer accessible or appear to have been abandoned.
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Florida.22 The way in which these tours are offered is as respectful memorials to genocide, but even they are no longer cutting-edge. That trophy is now owned by the creators of the documentary “Auschwitz,” commissioned by the traditionally stout and respectable British Broadcast Corporation on occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the camp by the Red Army, which aired in February 2005. The documentary includes a three-dimensional recreation of a virtual gas chamber and crematorium. In an apparent attempt to inject realism into the recreation, the documentary takes television viewers on a tour through these virtually reconstructed facilities, in the way actual victims proceeded through them: from the outside down some stairs into the undressing rooms and further on into the actual gas chambers, where the tour concludes with a view at an air shaft built for the purpose of releasing the hydrogen cyanide. It fortunately refrains from going even further by not including avatars of victims or virtually recreating how these facilities had actually worked.23 To be sure, the series is meant to educate the public about the horrors of Auschwitz, but one can only wonder what destinations future postmodern pilgrimage in virtual reality will seek out and what, if any, moral boundaries it will respect. The writing is on the wall—virtually, that is.
22 http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/VR.htm. Another site offers a virtual 3D tour of Auschwitz: http://www.remember.org/auschwitz (accessed 7 February 2006). 23 Laurence Rees, the series’ writer and producer, noted in an interview with the Public Broadcasting System that he had “some of the very best computer graphic houses in the world” at his disposal (http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/about; accessed 7 February 2006). The virtual recreations in the series, kept mostly in grayish tones, appear not to have maxed out on the technological possibilities. The gas chamber tour is first given at the end of episode 2 and then repeated in episode 4, where it is alternately overlaid with a double narrative: one by an Auschwitz survivor and one by the series’ narrator herself, whose words accompany the camera as follows: “The Jews were ordered to undress, and then forced towards a room further down the building and told they would take a shower” (transcript of episode 4 at http:// www.pbs.org/auschwitz/about/transcripts_4.html; accessed 7 February 2006; in the section of the book that accompanies the series, the coverage of these events is more detailed and descriptive [Rees 2005: 229–30]). In episodes 2 and 3, the viewer enters a gas chamber used earlier, also virtually recreated. In episode 3, the tour is accompanied by the following words: “The children from France were transported just under two miles from the ramp up to the camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau and onto one of two cottages in the far corner of the complex. Here the Nazis had improvised gas chambers. The children were locked in a room and crystals of the poisonous insecticide, Zyklon B, thrown in through a hatch high in the wall” (http://www.pbs.org/auschwitz/about/transcripts_3.html; accessed 7 February 2006).
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Frey, Nancy L. 1998. Pilgrim Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gabriel, Yiannis and Tim Lang. 1995. The Unmanageable Consumer. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gieryn, Thomas F. 2000. “A Space for Place in Sociology.” Annual Review of Sociology 26: 464–96. ———. 2002a. “Three Truth-Spots.” Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences 38: 113–32. ———. 2002b. “Give Place a Chance.” City and Community 1: 341–343. Gitelman, Zvi. 1994. “The Soviet Politics of the Holocaust.” Pp. 139–48 in The Art of Memory, edited by James E. Young. New York: Prestel. Gmelch, Sharon B., ed. 2004. Tourists and Tourism. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Gottdiener, Mark. 2001. The Theming of America. 2d ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Hamburg Institute for Social Research. 2002. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht [Crimes of the German Armed Forces in WWII], 2d ed. Hamburg: Hamburg Edition. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Hawkins, Peter S. 1999. “American Heritage.” Pp. 258–79 in One Nation Under God?, edited by Marjorie Garber and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. London: Routledge. Hollander, Paul. 1997. “Durable Significance of Political Pilgrimage.” Society 25: 45–55. Hetherington, Kevin. 1996. “Identity Formation, Space and Social Centrality.” Theory, Culture and Society 13: 33–52. Ivakhiv, Adrian J. 2001. Claiming Sacred Ground. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jackowski, Antoni. 2000. “Religious Tourism: Problems with Terminology.” Peregrinus Cracoviensis 10: 63–74. Jacobs, Janet. 2004. “From the Profane to the Sacred: Ritual and Mourning at Sites of Terror and Violence.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43: 311–15. Jameson, Fredric. 1992. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jensen, Bert. 1997. “The Fascination of Stalinism: Scandinavian Political Pilgrims to Stalin’s Russia.” Culture and History 14: 114–28. Judd, Dennis R. 1999. “Constructing the Tourist Bubble.” Pp. 35–53 in The Tourist City, edited by Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kaelber, Lutz. 2001. “The Virtual Gaze: Religious Tourism and the Consumption of Postmodern Religion in Cyberspace.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Columbus, Ohio. ———. 2002. “The Sociology of Medieval Pilgrimage: Contested Views and Shifting Boundaries.” Pp. 51–74 in From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism, edited by William H. Swatos, Jr. and Luigi Tomasi. Westport, CT: Praeger. ———. 2006. “Paradigms of Travel: From Religious Pilgrimage to Postmodern Tourism.” Pp. 49–63 in Tourism, Religion, and Spiritual Journeys, edited by Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen. London: Routledge. Kaufmann, Suzanne K. 2005. Consuming Visions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1998. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Koshar, Rudy. 2000. From Monuments to Traces. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kugelmass, Jack. 1994. “Why We Go to Poland: Holocaust Tourism as Secular Ritual.” Pp. 175–84 in The Art of Memory, edited by James E. Young. New York: Prestel. Langenheim, Henning. 1999. Polia Smerti [Killing Fields]. Berlin: Elefanten Press. Lane, Belden C. 2001. Landscapes of the Sacred, 2d ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Lennon, John and Malcolm Foley. 2000. Dark Tourism. London: Continuum. Lloyd, David W. 1998. Battlefield Tourism. Oxford: Berg. Lyon, David. 2000. Jesus in Disneyland. Oxford: Blackwell. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. MacCannell. 1999. The Tourist, 3d ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2001. “Tourist Agency.” Tourist Studies 1: 23–37. Maclean’s. “Titanic Tourism: With History to Book, Halifax is a Sightseer’s Mecca.” June 1, 1998: 70–71. MacWilliams, Mark W. 2002. “Virtual Pilgrimage on the Internet.” Religion 32: 315–35. Miles, Steven. 1998. Consumerism as a Way of Life. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Miles, William F.S. 2002. “Auschwitz: Museum Interpretation and Darker Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 29: 1175–78. Morgan, David. 2005. The Sacred Gaze. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nolan, Mary Lee and Sidney Nolan. 1989. Christian Pilgrimage in Modern Western Europe. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. O’Guinn, Thomas C. and Russell W. Belk. 1989. “Heaven on Earth: Consumption in Heritage Village, USA.” Journal of Consumer Research 16: 227–38. Orsi, Robert Anthony. 1985. The Madonna of 115th Street. New Haven: Yale University Press. Phipps, Peter. 2004. “Tourism and Terrorism: An Intimate Equivalence.” Pp. 71–90 in Tourists and Tourism, edited by S.B. Gmelch. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Post, Paul. 2003. Disaster Ritual. Leuven: Peeters. Post, Paul, Jos Pieper and Marinus van Uden. 1998. The Modern Pilgrim. Leuven: Peeters. Rees, Laurence. 2005. Auschwitz. New York: PublicAffairs. Rinschede, Gisbert. 1992. “Forms of Religious Tourism.” Annals of Tourism Research 19: 51–67. ———. 1999. Religionsgeographie [Religious Geography]. Braunschweig: Westermann. Ritzer, George. 2004. The McDonaldization of Society, revised new century edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. ———. 2005. Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 2d ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. ——— and Allen Liska. 1997. “ ‘McDisneyization’ and ‘Post-Tourism’: Contemporary Perspectives on Contemporary Tourism.” Pp. 96–109 in Touring Cultures, edited by Chris Rojek and John Urry. London: Routledge. Rojek, Chris. 1994. Ways of Escape. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Rurüp, Reinhard, ed. 2002. Topographie des Terrors [Topography of Terror], 14th ed. Berlin: Wilhelm Arenhövel Verlag. Schwibbe, Gudrun and Ira Spieker. 1999. “Virtuelle Friedhöfe” [ Virtual Cemeteries]. Zeitschrift Für Volkskunde 95: 220–45. ———. 2001. “Virtuelle Friedhöfe Als Orte der Erinnerung” [ Virtual Cemeteries as Sites for Commemoration]. Konturen 2. Available at http://www.konturen.net/public_html/heftzwei/b/bd.html (accessed in the summer of 2003). Seaton, A. V. 1996. “Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 2: 234–44. Slade, Peter. 2003. “Gallipoli Thanatourism: The Meaning of ANZAC.” Annals of Tourism Research 30: 779–94. Smith, Philip. 1999. “The Elementary Forms of Place and Their Transformation: A Durkheimian Model.” Qualitative Sociology 22: 13–36. Soyer, Daniel. 2000. “Back to the Future: American Jews Visit the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s.” Jewish Social Studies 62: 124–45.
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Strange, Carolyn and Michael Kempa. 2003. “Shades of Dark Tourism: Alcatraz and Robben Island.” Annals of Tourism Research 30: 386–405. Swatos, William H., Jr., and Luigi Tomasi, eds. 2002. From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism. Westport, CT: Praeger. Till, Karen E. 2005. The New Berlin. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Timothy, Dallen J. and Daniel H. Olsen, eds. 2006. Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys. London: Routledge. Trotter, Robin. 2001. “Heritage Tourism.” Pp. 140–64 in Special Interest Tourism, edited by Normal Douglas, Ngaire Douglas, and Ros Derrett. Brisbane: Wiley. Ueberschär, Gerd R., ed. 2003. Orte des Grauens [Places of Atrocity]. Darmstadt: Primus Verlag. Urry, John. 2002. The Tourist Gaze, 2d ed. London: Sage. VukoniÆ, Boris. 1996. Tourism and Religion. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Walter, Tony. 1993. “War Grave Pilgrimage.” Pp. 63–91 in Pilgrimage in Popular Culture, edited by Ian Reader and Tony Walter. London: Macmillan. Wearing, Stephen. 1999. Volunteer Tourism. New York: CABI Publishing. Weber, Max. 1958. From Max Weber, edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1978. Economy and Society, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press. Westwood, Jennifer. 1997. Sacred Journeys. New York: Harry Holt. Zelinsky, Wilbur. 1990. “Nationalistic Pilgrimages in the United States.” Pp. 253–67 in Pilgrimage in the United States, edited by Gisbert Rinschede and Surinder M. Bhardwaj. Berlin: Reimer. Zepp, Ira G. 1997. The New Religious Image of Urban America, 2d ed. Niwot, CO: University of Colorado Press.
CHAPTER TWELVE
PILGRIMS, SEEKERS AND HISTORY BUFFS: IDENTITY CREATION THROUGH RELIGIOUS TOURISM Sarah Bill Schott The sign for the Miller Farm and Homestead off Highway 4 in New York is so small one wonders how people find the place. In some Seventh-day Adventist literature the directions actually say, “turn at the silo.” However, find it people do: Boy Scout troops, day trippers, church members and even The History Channel have turned at the silo to find a nineteenth-century farm rich in history and religious enthusiasm. The Miller Farm is one example of the continuing development of religious tourism in the United States. The concept of what ‘religious tourism’ is continues to evolve. Some scholars define religious tourism in a more traditional way as having participants who are “motivated either in part or exclusively by religious reasons” (Rinschede 1992: 52), but this definition is informed by traditional places of religious tourism such as Canterbury, Rome, and Jerusalem which have hosted visitors for hundreds of years. However, religious tourist sites are more varied than this and serve more purposes than just pilgrimage. St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, Holy Hill in Wisconsin, and the mission churches of San Antonio are not just pilgrimage sites but are summer vacation sightseeing destinations and homes to American history. These sites have commercialized religious tourism and have appealed not only to the general visitor’s interest in learning about history, culture, architecture, religion and spirituality, but also their desire to have enjoyable and memorable experiences with family and friends. However, for church members, these are places to reconnect with their history and theology as well as to interact with other members of the religious group. These spaces also perform an important role for the religious group that manages the site; they are a chance to educate the public about their beliefs and practices. It is also a place for members to present their identities to nonmembers—and potentially to evangelize nonmembers. There are many identities and
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motivations at work at religious tourist sites. A successful site will manage the many needs of the visitors and balance those needs with the desires of the religious organization. It used to be said that scholars studied tourism in order to take a vacation and call it research. However, now we acknowledge that tourism, especially religious tourism, is important to study because it is identity-creating behavior. For most people, their time is dictated by work and family obligations: leisure activities take a backseat to everyday duties. Therefore, when people have the freedom to choose how to spend their time, they participate in activities that have meaning or are enjoyable to them. Whether this means watching television, attending religious services, reading a book, or playing with the kids: each of these activities says something about what is important to the participants. This is particularly true of tourist activities because they generally take more time, forethought, and potentially money than other leisure activities. By choosing the vacations that people do, they use tourism as a vehicle for demonstrating and creating self-identity (Wang 1999). People may feel constrained in their everyday lives, hence cannot be their ‘true selves,’ so tourism is an opportunity for new experiences that challenge the self. In the case of religious tourism, visitors are experiencing the history and ritual of sites that are different from their general routine. Both members and nonmembers take this experience back to their everyday lives and it helps define who they are. Religious tourism, in particular, demonstrates identity because it is more of a commitment than visiting a museum or historical site. It has the added ‘stigma’ of being associated with a potentially controversial religious organization. Nonmembers risk meeting people who hold different beliefs, and they must be willing to answer questions about their own religious ideas. For members of a religious organization and volunteers who work at these sites, religious tourism represents a commitment to their faith and the importance of religion in their lives. Therefore, visitors risk personally offending workers if they do not show the proper respect. Despite the potential risks, nonmembers join members daily at religious sites. Both groups are creating and maintaining their identity by these visits. This chapter focuses on identity creation specifically at two sites: the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Heritage Site known as the William Miller Farm and Homestead and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ (LDS) Hill Cumorah Pageant. At both places there
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are two aspects of identity creation: the visitors and the volunteers. What are visitors saying about themselves by spending their time and money at these sites? How are their needs being fulfilled at religious tourist sites? To understand fully the workings of a site, one must also consider the volunteers because the kind of experiences the visitors have is highly influenced by those who work at these sites. The volunteers are charged with both meeting the needs of the visitors as well as managing the organizational identity. How do the volunteers present the church’s message and identity? Further, how does the organizational identity conflict with the individual identity of members and nonmembers? These two sites are not necessarily known to those without connections to upstate New York or these religious organizations. The Miller Farm is literally off the beaten path, located in rural Low Hampton, New York, across the state line from Fair Haven, Vermont. The property was given to the Advent Christian Church in 1952 by a descendent of William Miller and includes his original home and church (William Miller Chapel. Brochure distributed at site). Down the road, one can also visit the small cemetery that houses the remains of Miller and his family. The property is also home to Ascension Rock where Miller’s followers waited for the Second Coming of Christ on October 22, 1844 and where they suffered the Great Disappointment when Christ did not return (Glimpses of 1844 brochure distributed at site; Rowe 1985). Miller is considered the forefather of two surviving American denominations, the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the much smaller Advent Christian Church. They jointly manage the chapel and both denominations occasionally hold services there. The tourism aspects of the site are handled exclusively by SDA volunteers. A few hours west of the Miller Farm, the Hill Cumorah Pageant is presented every summer near Palmyra, New York. The pageant draws LDS members from across the country to watch the play, visit the printing shop where the first Book of Mormon was published, pray in the Sacred Grove—location of Joseph Smith’s visions about the Book of Mormon—and walk through the replica of Smith’s house (Hill Cumorah and Other Historic New York Sites brochure distributed at site; Holzapfel and Cottle 1991). Although these sites are free and open all year, most of the visitors come during the pageant season. The volunteers perform the pageant for seven nights in the second weekend and third week in July; the show begins at sunset. They
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perform the same show every night. According to some of the volunteers, the exact content of the play changes from year to year but it always summarizes the stories found in the Book of Mormon. The pageant is staffed and performed by 700 LDS volunteers. Some of these have been called there by the church to do their obligatory missionary work; others choose to spend their summers in Palmyra. Both of these sites receive thousands of visitors every year and must determine how best to meet their needs. The Relationship between Religion and Tourism The idea that there is a relationship between religion and tourism is not a new one. Researchers have noted that in recent times tourism has taken on religious characteristics. They have used religion as a metaphor for tourism, and they have realized that tourism can help create a personal identity much in the same way religion does. These arguments stem from the Durkheimian thesis that even as the world is becoming more secularized, people need mythology; so people sacralize and mythologize activities that would normally be considered profane, such as tourism. As the world becomes more secular, the group activities associated with religion are reduced. Therefore, in the same way religious beliefs and practices have been privatized, so has tourist experience (Allcock 1988). Individuals have turned the religious into an individual, rather than a group, experience; hence when society sacralizes the secular it will do that in an individualized manner as well. Both secular and sacred practices have become more individualized in response to the changes in modern culture. Tourism, religion, and other nonobligatory activities all have something to contribute to understanding the people who participate in those activities. On one hand, the metaphor of religion for tourism may represent the attempted intensification of previously secular activities in everyday life; on the other hand, it may demonstrate the opposition to everyday existence. Tourism can be seen as a “secular ritual” that is special and different from day-to-day existence: a chance to be better than one is or a time for renewal. Tourists hope the change in surroundings and activities will make their lives at home different. For instance, people who attend Star Trek conventions want to
Photo 12.1. The Hill Cumorah Pageant Site from the air. Photo: Sarah Bill Schott.
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commune with the like-minded and then take their revived sense of community and communal values home (Porter 2004). Trekkies, like other people, appreciate themselves more on vacation than they do at home and want to bring that vacation personality home. However, like rituals in the religious world, this change is often not permanent; people rarely make life-altering changes on vacation. “Most tourists on their seasonal and annual vacations want to enjoy their own chosen pursuits and come back refreshed as better versions of their same old selves” (Graburn 2004: 33). Tourism can be seen as an individual, privatized practice which people use to attempt selfimprovement. Consequently, we can use tourism to understand the individual better by understanding how people want to better themselves. If tourism is a sacred journey or a secular ritual, then tourists must be (or become) pilgrims. On a McDonald’s sponsored trip to Africa, Paulla Ebron states that they were told over and over again by their guides, “You are on a pilgrimage, not a safari” (1999: 917). They were told this in order to influence their behavior and attitudes. They were not to act like tourists or expect “touristy” things. The African Americans were traveling to Africa to learn about their culture, their people and their ‘home.’ However, this often did not change the attitudes or expectations of the group. Although this trip did have sacred aspects to it like visiting where the slaves were held after being sold, the travelers still expected the accommodations and activities of tourists. These travelers held both pilgrim identity and tourist identity simultaneously; being a pilgrim did not preclude them from also being tourists. These dual identities are reinforced by tourists and pilgrims using the same travel infrastructure. They use the same transportation, stay in the same hotels, and eat at the same restaurants (Smith 1992). As this example demonstrates, pilgrims and tourists share similar characteristics but they are also significantly different. These differences can be distinguished when looking at sites that attract both people that are religiously motivated (pilgrims) and those who are not (tourists). However, they are not always immediately apparent. In Sri Lanka for instance, there are people who visit temples and religious sites because they are interested in culture, history or architecture; Westerners may label these people ‘tourists.’ However, Bryan Pfaffenberger states that calling them tourists does not take into consideration the history of this type of travel in Buddhism and Hinduism.
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Pfaffenberger concludes that it is the language used by the visitors of these Sri Lankan sites which distinguishes the two groups. A pilgrim’s language includes, “a language of miracles, of faith, of wholesome encounters with divinity and the ecstasy” (1983: 72). Tourists speak of recreation, leisure and outdoor appreciation. Therefore, for him it is not the motivation for visiting or their behavior while they are there that determines whether they are pilgrims or tourists, but how they use their narratives to describe their experience and expectations. For Pfaffenberger, visitors fall into one of two categories (pilgrim and tourist) with language being the distinguishing factor. However, if we look at identity as fluid and not concrete, visitors could be both pilgrims and tourists. These identities could be recognized not only by language but also behavior and stated motivation. Another distinction made between pilgrims and tourists is the direction of their travel. According to Erik Cohen, “within this socially constructed space, two prototypical, non-instrumental movements can be distinguished: pilgrimage, a movement toward the Center, and travel, a movement in the opposite direction, toward the Other, located beyond the boundaries of the cosmos, in the surrounding chaos” (1992: 50). In other words, pilgrims are traveling toward the sacred, where they believe the sacred to manifest within the world; they are moving toward the center or sacred to be with the sacred and to be with people who believe the same things they do. Tourists are traveling toward the other or something different from themselves. They want to see new things and be with different people. They are not looking for the center but rather the margins. However, the line between pilgrims and tourists often becomes blurred due to secularization. It has destroyed the symbolic value and the spiritual power of pilgrimage sites by turning them into tourist attractions. Like Pfaffenberger, Cohen is oversimplifying religious tourism by creating only two categories. We need a more complicated model to understand the variety of identity creation that occurs at religious tourism sites. Focusing on only these two categories excludes the many other dynamic motivations that are present. Tourism at the Miller Farm and the Hill Cumorah Pageant Based on the literature, I expected to see both pilgrims and tourists at the Miller Farm and the Hill Cumorah Pageant, and I did. But
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I saw many others as well. To address the questions I had about religion and tourism I did three weeks of field research at these sites which entailed both participant observation as well as 50 interviews with visitors and volunteers. I chose these sites because the SDA and the LDS are two of the most successful religions that have been created in the United States. The SDA has 918,882 members in the United States and 12 million worldwide. The LDS is even larger in the United States with 5,410,544 and 11 million worldwide (Lindner 2004). These groups’ success in the United States was important to my research for two reasons. First, I needed established sites that managed hundreds of visitors a year in order to ensure enough interviews. Second, I wanted sites that claimed particular events occurred there. Both the SDA and LDS churches have been successful in reclaiming important church land. Whether or not actual events happened there affects how they create, incorporate and display authenticity. Sites that are primarily based on replication or take their significance from happenings in Europe must create authenticity in a different way or focus on something else. Those that claim particular events can promote the continued sacred nature of the place itself. The SDA and LDS also share historical commonalities, including both beginning in upstate New York in the early nineteenth century. This was convenient for me as a researcher, but more important, their physical proximity led them both to be affected by one of the most exciting times in American religious history, that of the Burned Over District. During this religious revival both groups experienced persecution but managed to survive. Further, the religious fervor left a distinctively American stamp on their birth and growth. Other groups eventually died out, like the Shakers, or mainstreamed, like the Baptists; but both the LDS and the SDA managed to keep their distinctive brand of religiosity. This unusual history is what interests many of the visitors and what inspires the volunteers, and therefore, makes it an integral part of the site’s function. Because my interviews were not planned on the part of the interviewees, they were often short, around 20 minutes. The response to my presence at the sites was varied. The Miller Farm is a small site, and I secured permission to do my research in the spring before my summer arrival. The volunteers were very welcoming and helpful. They would often ask the visitors to do the interviews with me,
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which often meant I began the interviews by reminding the interviewees that I was not associated with the site. All of the volunteers allowed me to conduct the interviews privately; even when I was interviewing in the house because of the heat and bugs, they would consciously move to another room. Most of the visitors were obliging, and those who did not participate stated they were in a hurry and had only stopped by for a moment. This site had a mix of both members and nonmembers, so I was able to discuss motivations with a variety of people. Alternatively, the Hill Cumorah Pageant, I discovered, is mostly visited by members. Volunteers repeatedly told me that they had many non-LDS visitors, but this was not my experience. The Hill Cumorah Pageant is located in the heart of New York state wine country and a recreational destination, the Finger Lakes region. Considering the LDS frowns on alcohol, perhaps it would be difficult to do a wine tour and then attend the pageant. Also, the church’s reputation as highly conversion-focused perhaps scares some nonLDS away from the pageant. One of the winery workers told me, however, that all of the locals attended the pageant at least once in their lives. The pageant grounds and visitors’ center are much larger than the Miller Farm. I interviewed visitors as they held their seats for the performance, wandered the grounds, or finished touring the visitors’ center. Because the site has had trouble with anti-LDS protestors, some of the older members I interviewed were a bit leery at first about participating in the interview after I told them I was not LDS. However, after explaining how I would use the information, with whom I was affiliated, and hearing the questions, they usually let me proceed. These interviews tended to take longer than the SDA site interviews because since I am not an LDS member, it was the LDS members’ obligation to make sure that I had read the Book of Mormon. I was asked if I had read the Book of Mormon in the majority of my interviews with church members. One married couple who did not ask seemed to have a different perspective on their religious beliefs. They agreed with each other that they were modern Mormons. The wife told me she did not believe in being “Molly Mormon.” She said, “A Molly Mormon is a woman who stays at home barefoot and pregnant, who never has a job and raises ten kids. I am not that kind of Mormon. I work and only have one son.”
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sarah bill schott Pilgrims, Insiders, and Religious Seekers: Tourism and Spiritual Motivation
According to Rinschede’s definition of religious tourism, visitors should be motivated by an interest in religion, and many of them are. Pilgrims, church members and religious seekers all visit the Hill Cumorah Pageant and Miller Farm. However, not all of the visitors with religious motivations are necessarily pilgrims. The focus of the members’ trip is not the journey, but the destination; they are pilgrims in terms of the motivation of their insider religious beliefs. Both pilgrims and members come to these sites to commune with other members, reinforce religious beliefs, and teach their children about their religious history. There are also outsiders with religious motivations; the religious seekers are looking for something new, a new spiritual path. They may not know for what they are looking or what they will find. Consequently, all of these groups are religiously motivated, but they have different needs. Family, Community and Religious Tourism All insiders at these sites are motivated by religious commitment to family and community. The Miller Farm and Hill Cumorah are places where they can bring their families with expectations of what they will learn there and that they will meet other people like themselves. A major part of SDA and LDS theology is the promotion of ‘traditional’ or Christian families. In the summer of 2004, the LDS president wrote an ‘open letter’ to the country detailing what he saw as the problems of gay marriage and parenting. These sites are safe places for members to participate in the church’s ideas of family. At these sites, there is a strong connection between religion and family. According to Wang, tourism is often used as an opportunity for families to be together in a way that they are unable to be generally. Tourism allows families, “to achieve or reinforce a sense of authentic togetherness and an authentic ‘we-relationship’” (1999: 364). For instance, one Saturday at the Miller Farm, half-a-dozen cars streamed up the short driveway to the house. Several generations in their church clothes set up for a picnic on the tables provided. This group, it turned out, was an African American family that lived up and down the East Coast from Florida to Canada. They were having a family reunion at nearby Lake George, and
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after Sabbath service this SDA family wanted to share together the experience of visiting the Miller Farm. After lunch they broke into two smaller groups so the two volunteers could better handle their numbers. One group stayed at the house while the other went to the chapel. Although there was not room for them all to see the house and chapel as one large group, this family still appreciated being at the site together. One of the family members said, “As a group we had an opportunity to talk about the faith in relationship to Miller. We received insight from the guides about the relationship of Miller to the faith.” Also, on this day a Massachusetts family with extended family from South America wanted to visit together. “We decided to bring them [those from Panama] to this place to know our roots before going back so that they can really believe what we believe is going to happen” (the Second Coming of Christ). The African American family and the South American family sang SDA hymns together in the chapel. The South American family also sang in Spanish, which the volunteers and the other family appreciated. As these examples demonstrate, these families had religiously motivated reasons for their visits that were connected to their identity as members and as families. The next day another family brought relatives from Puerto Rico. Both families had small children, and one of the parents said, “We have decided to take our children to places like this to instruct them on church history. They will know through first-hand experience. We wish we would have had it.” For all of these families it was important to learn about Miller, but it was also important to learn about him together as a religious family. This site was seen as a family-friendly destination, and this coincides with the SDA theology. One of the volunteer couples working that day, Frank and Jane Jones,1 were excited with their interaction with these families. “They seemed very sincere in their response to being here. They were inspired. I loved hearing them sing in the church,” Jane said. “It was an inspiration to talk to them, to see their response to this entity [the farm]. They were SDA, like us and they know about Miller. It was a renewal of commitment to Miller and to the Second Coming . . . I liked hearing them sing and express their commitment,” Frank added. 1
Pseudonyms are being used for all interviewees.
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Family was clearly a priority at the Hill Cumorah Pageant as well. The cast and crew of the pageant were all volunteers and they often volunteered as families. The Clarks had been participating in the pageant for three years. Their teenaged daughters were a destruction victim and a battle banner carrier in the play, and Mrs. Clark had been in the cast in the past but was now working in the beards and wigs department. Volunteerism is a large part of the LDS church but one does not always choose how one volunteers. Apparently, there was a need for people to work behind the scenes and Mrs. Clark was “called” by the church to volunteer in that way. Mr. Clark had recently taken a new job where he was unable to take the vacation time necessary to be fully involved. “This is my third year and I am just over here when I have free time doing odd jobs, construction, repairs and those kinds of things. I want to be back on cast. I feel like a lost sheep out here,” he said. The family unit is just one part of a larger religious community that is also important to membership identity. Pam and Roger Martin were from Toronto and appreciated knowing that they could meet and talk with LDS members from across the continent. When asked about the best part of the pageant Roger said, “The influence it has on the community. It brings us together.” Pam added, “Being with so many members really feels good.” This friendliness and assumption that you were a member was apparent all over the pageant grounds, the visitor center, Palmyra and the other sites. People who were on the grounds before the pageant introduced themselves to one another; all the volunteers wore nametags and were eager to help. Because of this openness, people did not find it strange when I came up to them and introduced myself, although some were reticent to talk once they found out that I was not a member. However, just because a visitor was a member did not mean he or she was always displaying member or pilgrim identity. As suggested by Pfaffenberger, pilgrim behavior is being challenged at religious tourism sites. In his study young pilgrims were playing cassette records, wearing western clothes and hairstyles, and dancing in nontraditional ways (Pfaffenberger 1983). This has led many observers to classify them as tourists, despite the young people’s use of pilgrim language. This also occurred at the Miller Farm when families not only prayed and sang together but also picnicked and played their car stereos. While the adults laughed loudly and told stories, the teenagers and children chased each other around the big, green lawn.
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Similar behavior was witnessed before the pageant at Hill Cumorah where families gathered together in the few places sheltered from the sun. Some laughed, talked, listened to music, and read popular fiction, while others tossed around balls or Frisbees. This sightseeing behavior was subdued compared to other tourist sites but these church members were clearly on vacation and enjoying this leisure time together. The reason it is difficult to discriminate tourists from pilgrims or members at these sites are because some of them are both. This is where the pilgrim identity breaks down because these are not pilgrim behaviors. A more fluid model that considers changes in motivation and identity would more completely explain the visitors at these sites. This problem stems from classifying the people rather than expressed identities. Religious Seekers There were other visitors with religious motivation for visiting these sites who were not members of the religious organization. They were religious seekers or those interested in learning more about religion or spirituality in general. John had attended the Hill Cumorah Pageant twice when he lived in New York, but was not a LDS member. The first time, John went because he was curious; he knew a little bit about the Book of Mormon and he had LDS friends who invited him. He enjoyed himself so much that he attended again a couple years later. He said, I am not a person who goes to church. I consider myself agnostic, but I have a curiosity. I am bewildered as to why I don’t have faith. I view myself as too critical. I attended services at college but I haven’t had communion in 30 years. The LDS impressed on me that they, at least in Western culture, they live their faith more.
Rick was visiting the pageant with LDS friends as well. Growing up Catholic, he had visited many Catholic churches and cathedrals, and more recently practiced Zen Buddhism and visited Buddhist temples in North America. He enjoyed visiting religious sites and learning more about the religions in that way. “It is a goal of mine to visit as many religious sites as possible. I am still trying to find that path,” he stated. Religion was important to Rick and he was willing to be a religious seeker until he found one that best suited him. For Christine, it was not the LDS theology per se that she found attractive as much as their teachings on family. “I was interested in their
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sense that it was working for their families. I was thinking about starting our family and so was interested in children and the family.” She was seeking a religiously informed way of raising a family and this brought her to the pageant. The religious seeker is an important visitor at these sites because ‘seekers’ do not fit the pilgrim-tourist model; they are neither pilgrims nor tourists. According to Cohen, visitors to religious sites should either be attracted to the religious center or the sacred (pilgrims) or to the other or margins (tourists). Seekers are drawn to the sacred nature of the site, but they are also interested because it is part of the other. It is a spiritual situation different from their religious background. They want to know more about the sacred but not in the same way as a member. Additionally, people in this group are attracted to different combinations of the sacred and the other, and even they might not be able to communicate their motivations for visiting. Some visitors may be actively searching for a new religious tradition; others may just have a general interest in the religious—academic or personal. “I saw the sign” There is a miscellaneous category of visitors about whom it is difficult to decide who they are and what their motivations are for visiting the site. They said they “saw the sign” on the road, they were brought by friends, or they just stopped by. One woman visited the Miller Farm because they saw the sign on the road and her father’s name was William Miller. The Adventist Heritage Bulletin mentioned a Mr. and Mrs. William Miller from Virginia who traveled north for a ski trip. They stopped because they were curious to learn more about Mr. Miller’s namesake (Voorheis 2002). Those who just “saw the sign” did not often have a lot to say about why they were there. One visitor to the Hill Cumorah Pageant said he was there by recommendation of a friend. “He said that I should see it. It’s a good show.” Chad, the history teacher, once brought a friend to the Miller Farm who was a Congregational minister. “I wanted to see what his reaction would be . . . He was impressed. He had lots of questions for the couple [the volunteers].” This category of tourists has been neglected in the literature. Not all visitors come with anything particular in mind, or at least anything that they can articulate. Deciding to visit these sites seems
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almost like flipping the channel on the television. These drop-by tourists would not likely be an issue for any site that has admission, but other free sites (like the Baha’i House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois or other popular houses of worship) would likely have a similar miscellaneous category. The Importance of History The sites are not only similar because of their religious affiliations but also because of their claims to history. Both of these sites celebrate a sacred past that occurred in these particular places. This makes them different from those whose primary claims are contemporary; the focus on history affects the experiences that visitors have there. It also influences who chooses to visit these spaces. History as a Blessing Overwhelmingly, both members and nonmembers stated they were visiting these sites to learn about history. But if one could easily pick up a book, watch a documentary or even visit a museum to learn about Miller and the SDA or Smith and the LDS, why visit these sites? For members, learning the history of these sites is connected to their membership goals. They learn about the religious narrative and it becomes a part of the collective intuition that informs their behavior and their religious framework (Lindbeck 1984). One member said of Miller, “The opposition in his life is an example for the opposition in our own lives. We should stay focused.” In this way, these religious sites are not just the individualized experience discussed by Allcock (1988) and Graburn (2004) but also a collective religious experience. All those who visit learn the same narrative, and both the visit and the narrative reinforce their group identity. Although members talked about learning the church history, it was much more about being a part of it and the moral lessons derived from learning it. It is not the learning that is important but the being at the site to learn. According to Douglas Davies, Mormon “mythical geography was superimposed upon an actual physical geography within Mormon spirituality and experience. Self and group identity were grounded in these Biblical motifs pregnant as they were with ideas of divine wrath and blessing” (1991: 313). Insiders are interested in being near the sacred objects, the objects Miller and
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Smith actually touched, because of the sacredness instilled on those objects and in those places. At one store in Palmyra they sold wooden nickels with, “I walked in the footsteps of the prophet, Joseph Smith,” stamped on one side and “Palmyra, NY” on the other. These types of souvenirs commemorate the physical visit and the access to the sacred history at these sites. The volunteers at the Hill Cumorah Pageant and the other LDS sites encourage visitors to put themselves in the times of Smith and the LDS pioneers, to imagine their lives. These are the types of experiences one does not have when reading a history book. Barb, one of the volunteers at the Miller Farm put it this way, “Knowing your history is a blessing . . . They’ve read the books already but they want to hear it.” For members, it is a ritual. They are listening to the recitation of history in a particular way by particular people. There are parts of that history that only insiders will understand and believe. As the members are learning their history, they respond to this ritual by being emotionally fortified and confident of their place in the sacred history. They learn how their ancestors lived and how they can live that way as well. History Seekers For many nonmembers to come to these sites was like visiting a museum or a historical site such as Colonial Williamsburg or Old Fort William in Ontario. Some of the visitors at Miller Farm were also visiting other local historical sites. Skene Manor is a Victorian home in nearby Whitehall, New York that is now a museum and restaurant which displays information about local history. One couple said that they had set out for Skene Manor that day, but it was closed so they decided to stop at the Miller Farm instead. They were interested in learning something new about the area and history, and it did not seem to be an issue if they did that at Skene Manor or at the Miller Farm. Their focus was history not religion. Chad, a local middle-school history teacher used the Miller Farm as a teaching tool. His students visited the farm for extra credit in his class, and he tied it into units he did on local history and on the nineteenth century. In one of the books used in the eighth grade English classes, there was a character who believed the world was going to end. In the book, the family moved to a nearby Vermont town to be near the Millerites. “I thought that since we live so close to the site, let’s look at who they are referring to. Who is Miller?
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What does he believe? It is a local interest. It happened in our backyard,” Chad said. During my time at the Miller Farm, probably the largest and most influential of all things historical overwhelmed the farm with its presence: The History Channel. A producer from The History Channel came with his crew to film background shots for a television special on millennial movements. According to David, the producer, We will look at Augustine, Luther, Miller, Darby and in the US, the Puritans, Schofield, Moody and the evangelical fundamentalists of today. I am going to look at both sides. Is Revelation this mysterious book? Is it symbols? Codes? Or is it like the fundamentalists believe? They believe every word is literally true.2
David lived in upstate New York and had heard about Miller and the site through local word-of-mouth. He thought the place could use some advertising; one local historian he spoke with had never been to the site and was not really sure where it was. Having The History Channel at any small, historical site would be disruptive, but especially at a site with concerns about theological accuracy. Were the SDA concerned about how the site would be portrayed on national television? They did not seem to be. David said he had little trouble securing permission from the SDA leadership when he told them that he would be presenting both sides of the issue. The volunteers were excited that the crew was there and they answered all the questions asked of them. They watched the filming more out of curiosity than concern. They even granted permission for “movie smoke” to be used in the chapel and a 150-yearold Bible to be taken out of the house to be used in filming the chapel. (The Bible in the chapel had a broken spine and did not film as well). The volunteers were not worried about the crew drawing a crowd or dissuading people from stopping. A couple who visited when they were filming was unable to see the inside of the house because the cameras and equipment filled the rooms, but nobody seemed to mind this. In fact, they made a point of telling the crew how much they enjoyed their network. Having The History Channel film at the Miller Farm confirms the interest in this history, this theology and this place. Those who 2
Originally the program was scheduled to air on The History Channel on 24 December 2004, but nothing has been posted on their Website.
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will watch this program will likely be attracted to the marginal nature of the millennial belief system. They will want to know, how could people have such strange beliefs? How does the history of these beliefs shape millennialism today? There may be members who also watch. They will want to see if The History Channel ‘got it right.’ They will not watch it for the same reason that members would visit the Miller Farm. Watching a television program and visiting a tourist site may serve the same function for a tourist (education, entertainment, etc.), but for a member it does not. However, both members and history seekers have higher aspirations than tourists. Both are seeking more than just entertainment; they are interested in adding their visit and their experience into who they are. Those who have visited a site are more personally tied to the religious group than those who have watched a documentary. For members and seekers, these visits demonstrate commitment to an identity based on knowledge or experience. These visitors are not passive participants in the learning of the history of this particular religion, but actively searching for knowledge. Volunteers and the Production of Site Identity Visitors are only part of the equation at a religious tourist site. Religious sites in particular have their own message and identity that they are trying to present to the visitors. Religious tourist sites are in effect an advertisement for the religious beliefs and practices of the religious organization; it is an opportunity to reach a population that might not attend a religious service. In fact, most of the nonmembers I talked with had never been to a religious service of the organization and did not plan on attending one. However, it is a balancing act for the organization because they must decide how much time they should spend meeting the needs of the nonmembers, and how much time with the concerns of the larger group, the members. At both sites the volunteers were on the frontlines of how the church identity was portrayed and how the visitors’ needs were being met. The volunteers at the Miller Farm handled visitors on a more individual level whereas the Hill Cumorah Pageant visitors were managed in larger groups. Therefore, the Miller volunteers could assess within the initial exchange whether or not visitors were mem-
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bers and had any particular concerns. Membership affected what the members said and how they focused the visitors’ tours. The Hill Cumorah Pageant volunteers addressed everyone as if this was the first time they had heard the information they presented about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. At first it was unclear why they did this when the majority of the visitors were LDS members. However, one visitor explained it well, “It is just like if you were with Moses and for generations the story was told of how he talked with God. You all would want to hear about talking to God. If you have a strong belief in something, it refreshes your thoughts and feeling in that.” The volunteers knew that for the members, coming to the pageant was like listening to the gospels at church, or being a part of a ritual. Members hear the stories all the time; they are not listening to hear a new story, but to refresh their memories on stories they already know. Mormons in particular have a “ ‘narrative theology’ which sets the believer within the contemporary group of God’s people and then sets that group within the historical flow of the chosen people down the ages” (Davies 1991: 324). Nancy Ammerman (2003) states that the narrative must be repeated over and over to beat out the competing narrative heard everyday. For the nonmembers it was new information, information that needed presentation in as straightforward a way as possible. Therefore, the volunteers meet the needs of both groups by presenting the information at this basic level. How the volunteers met the needs of the members and the nonmembers reflected on the church. If the volunteers focused only on the needs of the members they would never have the opportunity to create new members at these sites. On the other hand, members are often the site’s main visitors and also the ones who financially and otherwise support the sites. Teaching members is seen as a primary mission that also must be fulfilled. How successful the site is at meeting both goals of serving members and nonmembers informs the site’s reputation and identity. The Miller Farm seems to have a more diverse crowd especially considering its remote location and have created an identity as both a religious and historical site that welcomes all visitors. The low nonmember visitor count at the Hill Cumorah Pageant reinforces the dominance of the religious, LDS focused identity. Their evangelism likely contributes to this particular identity and lack of nonmember visitors.
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Because of the varying needs of the visitors and the different needs of the sites, religious sites have more difficulty with an issue that many cultural and historical sites must consider: authenticity. In the tourism literature, authenticity has been tied to the “search for authentic cultural experiences—for the unspoiled, pristine, genuine, untouched and traditional” (Handler 1986: 2). Almost immediately, this idea of the authentic was questioned. Is it important to the tourists that the place or displayed items are ‘real,’ or are tourists looking for what they consider an authentic experience—an exploration of self (Redfoot 1984; Wang 1999)? Additionally, is authenticity a stable entity or one that changes over time by commodification and other influences (Cohen 1988)? If this is the case, even defining the authentic could be difficult. At religious tourist sites all of these issues come into play with the additional problem of how historical accuracy and theological authenticity are created and balanced. Members want to recognize what they have learned as their church history, but nonmembers may be more interested in what they perceive as ‘accurate’ American history. The religious organizations are trying to present historical accuracy in terms of their traditional theology. Most of the volunteers did not particularly see this as a conflict because as members, they subscribed to the church history. Therefore, this was not presented as alternative history but the authentic narrative. This often means a balance between history and theology. Dan, a retired college professor who worked as a Miller Farm volunteer, said, “Miller’s focus was on the Second Coming of our Lord. It is a vital part of his history and the history of this place. He never stopped looking for the Lord to come. So to tell about the history we must talk about his faith.” However, much of his tours focused on historical aspects of the farm. The house is set up like a historical site; the furniture in the rooms is roped off from where the visitors stand indicating its significance.3 The volunteers discussed how many of the pieces belonged to the Miller family or were from the early nineteenth century. The visitors could see how the bed must be tightened with a bed key before sleeping, and where Miller sat 3 According to Dean MacCannell, this is part of “sight sacralization”: Creating a boundary around something frames that item for the audience and lets them know that these items are important and should be viewed (2004: 59–63).
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to study the Bible. The house also contains a small museum of nineteenth century artifacts including a wooden washing machine, an old gun, and some of Miller’s old papers. In the chapel, there is no electricity, so the volunteers showed how to pull down the gas lamps and light them. They also climbed behind the pulpit and emphasized how this was where Miller really preached. Both religious and historical authenticities have been successfully conveyed at this site, and visitors commented on how it was really Miller’s home and not a replica. One visitor said, “I can touch places and things important to our religion.” Another said, “It is not the same thing to read about it as to see it in person.” One nonmember compared the Miller Farm to another local religious site, the birthplace of Joseph Smith in Sharon, Vermont. He said, “The Sharon site is more contrived. They have a welcome center, but it is a modern building. It is not the same thing as going to where Miller actually lived.” Although members and nonmembers may have a different perspective on authenticity, most of the volunteers said that they approached them in the same way. Ellen, a long time volunteer said, “We tell them about Miller’s dedication to Jesus and that he had some plans to start a church.” Bill, her husband added, “Miller was dedicated to the Lord. Any church can recognize his commitment.” The volunteers assumed that most who visited the farm had a religious identity, if not an Adventist one, and therefore would respect Miller’s religious rigor and his dedication to his convictions. At the Hill Cumorah Pageant authenticity was also an issue. From the pageant itself to the Sacred Grove to the town of Palmyra one could see the LDS depiction of history and how they produced ‘authenticity’ for their guests. In the pageant, scenes from the Book of Mormon are portrayed, specifically those where Jesus preached to the American Indians. Therefore, the costumes for the play are based on native costumes and include obvious Aztec and ancient Egyptian and Roman influences. One of the cast members said the costumes were ‘authentic’ meaning that this is what people wore on the east coast of what is now North America 2000 years ago. She also said they change the costumes when necessary to correct anything that could be considered inauthentic. This commitment to authenticity has spread from the Hill Cumorah Pageant to the surrounding LDS sites including the town of Palmyra— the most complex LDS development of authenticity because it is
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actually a fully functioning town. However, the downtown seems to have changed very little over the years. Palmyra is what one would expect from a nineteenth century town in that there are brick storefronts, wide streets, big trees, old street lamps, and benches on the sidewalk. It is on the verge of being a themed ‘small town USA’ (see Gottdiener 2001). However, in some ways it looks depressed and, after pageant season, most likely somewhat desolate. Here people can visit the printing press that produced the first copies of the Book of Mormon, and on the tour they hear both about how books were printed in the nineteenth century as well as the particulars of the Book of Mormon. Displayed under glass is the first Book of Mormon, and on the walls are original paintings of scenes from the sacred text. Once in the building, it becomes clear that much of the museum is actually in the building next to the printing press. Apparently the original building was too small and did not efficiently move people through the exhibit. From the outside, however, it still looks like two separate buildings with brick nineteenth century fronts. Despite the replicas and the alterations from mainstream American history, members accept this version of authenticity because it does not conflict with their worldview. This is what they expect to see and hear. The nonmembers seem to respect the strongly held LDS beliefs, and some visitors are searching for something similar for themselves. It would not be surprising if this authenticity is occasionally challenged by nonmembers, but I did not witness any challenging questions by the visitors and the volunteers did not mention any such incidents. Instilling a Religious Narrative According to Ammerman, one of the ways people create religious identity is by incorporating ‘regular’ people into the religious narrative. Important religious myths explain who the characters are and the meaning of the events. Further, they answer the question, ‘how does this affect and inform my life?’ This is what these religious sites are doing for these visitors. Through the ‘creation’ of the authentic religious story, evangelism and spreading the message through tours, questioning, and in other ways visitors find their place within the narrative. Placing members inside the narrative is most apparent in the activities provided for the young SDA members. The Adventist Heritage Bulletin often relays stories of SDA student groups as it is a
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relevant place to teach church history and values. No doubt it is important to instill the narrative at an early age, but also children will do things their parents will not. One bulletin says of a youth group from Hastings, Michigan, “Some of the braver ones slept in their sleeping bags on Ascension Rock and watched the night sky with a determination to be ready when Jesus comes” (Voorheis 2004b). Now these students are a part of the tradition of active waiting for the Second Coming of Christ by doing what their religious ancestors did. They have come as close as they can right now to experiencing what the wait was like and can see their connection to those who have come before them. Another way volunteers put members in the narrative is by hosting vesper services in the Miller chapel for groups who make this request. SDA members can pray and sing where Miller and his family worshipped, which continues the tradition and connects the members with the original millennialists. Ammerman states that these types of interactions become religious when the participant invokes the sacred, as was mentioned in the bulletin. Like Pfaffenberger, Ammerman thinks language has much to do with demonstrating religious motivation. Both a tourist and a member can participate in the recitation of the same narrative but a tourist will not explain that narrative in terms of actualizing the sacred and a member will. The LDS and SDA churches establish their religious stories like other religious organizations through roles, myths and rituals, but they have the added benefit of the more public, tourist site. Here the volunteers can “encourage participants to perceive Sacred Others as the co-participants in life” (Ammerman 2003). This happens when the volunteers help the members identify with the religious ancestors and is evident in their own explanations of their experiences at the sites. Identity Conflict With all of these different participants, identities and narratives, there is a high probability of conflict which groups often do not want to admit. This was the case at the Miller Farm. The volunteers had no examples of disagreements or arguments between visitors or visitors and volunteers, or the site and the larger community. The volunteers are important in mediating any type of conflict that occurs at the sites, and how they do this reflects the site’s identity. For instance, at the Miller Farm I was witness to one small conflict
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regarding how strictly the rules of the Sabbath needed to be observed. The Miller Farm does not open the bookshop on Saturday—the SDA worship day—because they strictly follow rules about not working or exchanging money on the Sabbath. One SDA member who was visiting pushed the volunteer to sell her some books. He finally told her he would not but she could send a check and he would mail the books. This story illustrates the issues generated by having commerce take place at religious sites. The religious organizations have to decide what is appropriate to sell and for how much to sell it. Visitors expect to be able to purchase souvenirs at tourist sites, and even members often want something to commemorate their visit. However, the volunteers and the religious organization do not want commerce to interfere with the mission of the site or the rules of their religion. The LDS have dealt with this issue by removing commerce from their sites. At Hill Cumorah food is sold only by service organizations such as the Lions Club and the Rotary Club with the funds helping local charities. In order to meet the commemorative aspect of souvenirs, the LDS gave away quite a few brochures and cards depicting Jesus or scenes from the Book of Mormon. The cast members distributed programs for the show that included a coupon to redeem at the end of the show for an 8 × 12 picture of Jesus with children dressed like those in the play. By giving away these types of items, visitors could still have a souvenir without the problems associated with commerce. Additionally, when visitors drove to Palmyra to tour the printing shop, they could purchase t-shirts, Book of Mormon action figures, replicas of the tablets from which the Book of Mormon was translated, CDs, DVDs, books and many other traditional souvenir items at the Cumorah Mercantile or the Harvest Bookstore. This is part of maintaining a ‘sacred zone’ in which people are not contaminated by worldly things. The LDS church does this at all of their sites including Temple Square in Salt Lake City. There are no gift shops or restaurants in Temple Square but souvenirs can be purchased across the street at an LDS owned mall (Bremer 2001). Both the LDS and SDA are concerned about commodification of culture or religion through tourism. They want to be viewed as authentic religious sites and do not want their organizations or beliefs cheapened by tasteless souvenirs and other such commodities. The organizations have been able to stop this at the sites if not in the larger community.
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For the LDS, the conflict between the sacred and the secular was an internal problem that they could solve. However, the LDS had another conflict with outside forces that was very visible during the pageant. As the pageant starting time approached, men with signs began to line the road to the pageant site. The signs had slogans with Bible verses about monotheism and idol worship. No one seemed to know exactly who these picketers were. Some interviewees suggested they were not locals but people who came in especially for the occasion. I heard stories that in past years the protestors stood in the parking lot handing out programs. They told people that they were giving them away for free whereas inside the gates they were charging. When the visitors looked at the brochure, it was really anti-LDS propaganda. At the end of this performance, the protestors were still there yelling at the crowd through bullhorns that the LDS members were going to hell and that they were idol worshippers. As we all approached our cars, it became clear the protestors were more bark than bite. There were only about a half-dozen of them, and they were obeying the local police by keeping their distance. In response, some young LDS men joined arms and began to sing hymns. I also overheard comments such as, “I believe in freedom of speech, but this is not the place.” There may not have been much that the LDS could do about the protestors, but perhaps they may not have wanted to do much more. This type of conflict could be seen as helping to reinforce member identity. Throughout LDS history, there are stories of persecution, hence these protectors tie modern LDS members to this religious narrative. As R. Laurence Moore suggests, the LDS have always been successful in using their outsider standing to their benefit (1984). In this case, the police were present (mostly to direct traffic), and the protestors were so greatly outnumbered by LDS members that it was unlikely that they would start anything. The cast members also saw the protestors in a positive light, but for a different reason. “I think they do us more good than harm. The tales they tell about the church are so outlandish that people have to look into it to see if it is really true. We want them to look into the faith and check it out for themselves,” one volunteer said. The volunteers try to frame this conflict as an opportunity to convert the nonbeliever.
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sarah bill schott Members/Insiders, Seekers, and Sightseers: An Alternative
This research indicates that there are a variety of motivations for visiting religious sites, but contrary to the tourist-pilgrim model, very few of the visitors are actually pilgrims. Being a pilgrim means something more than having a religious motivation for travel; pilgrims are conscious of the journey as well as the destination, and they travel with the like-minded. “Pilgrimage can be defined as a journey undertaken for religious purposes that culminates in a visit to a place considered to be the site or manifestation of the supernatural— a place where it is easier to obtain divine help” (Tomasi 2002: 3). According to Tomasi, traditional pilgrimage reached its height in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and today it is impossible to tell the difference between many of the pilgrims and cultural tourists. Those who visit these sites as the culmination of summer vacation, those who come with church groups, and those who take bus tours to these sites all fit into this category of pilgrim. However, church members on a weekend drive or those who make a stop on their way to their ultimate vacation destination do not as neatly meet these pilgrim characteristics. There does not appear to be a clear contemplation of journey or sense of reaching a goal in the destination. They may be traveling with family who share their beliefs, but not a group of strangers with whom they can share their life stories. However, pilgrims or not, church members are church members and display a particular type of identity specific to them. As my research illustrates, religious seekers may fit into either the pilgrim or tourist category but neither of them clearly. A seeker could come to these sites with the explicit goal of sharing in the sacred nature of the site. Both John and Rick, mentioned earlier, traveled with LDS members to the pageant. They were able to share stories and the members could tell them their experience and what they should expect. However, despite their religious interests, they would not likely see themselves as pilgrims. There are also seekers who have come to the site to learn about the beliefs and practices, but not to look for manifestations of the supernatural. They certainly would not be pilgrims. Another reason why the pilgrim-tourist dichotomy does not work is because of a person’s changing motivations and multiple identities. Members who come for a religious experience may also take pictures or buy souvenirs. Those who primarily see themselves as
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tourists could nevertheless be moved to prayer at a particularly meaningful part of the site. Religious tourist sites could also witness the ultimate in identity modification, religious conversion. One could begin the journey as tourist or seeker and in the course of a visit transform to pilgrim or member.4 Because of the fluid nature of identities, perhaps it would be more effective to identify visitors by the types of identity behaviors they seem to be displaying rather than classifying the tourists themselves. In other words, in what kinds of identity speech and action are they participating? At these two sites I found three categories of identity: member/insider, seeker (both religious and otherwise), and sightseer. Both member and pilgrim identities demonstrate a religious motivation for visiting the site, but member identity is not narrowed by the specific nature of pilgrimage. It is displayed through participation in the sacred rituals of the site, using insider language, and knowledge of what it is in which they are participating. This knowledge is expressed when members explain what is happening at the site to others. Seeker behavior is manifested through active learning at the site. Seekers at religious sites are often searching for a new religious practice, but the seeker identity includes anyone who wants to learn something new; anyone who is searching for more than entertainment. The sightseer identity is exhibited through participation in activities that also occur at a secular tourist site such as picture taking, souvenir buying, and general leisure activities. Swatos calls this ‘purely secular’ tourism where people are strongly interested in have their picture taken at the site or to take the picture of those with them (2002: 91). These identities are brought by the visitors but also influenced by the tourist site and the volunteers who work there. For instance, at both sites visitors are met by volunteers upon arrival. By a few questions, the volunteers assess membership status and this then affects how they treat the visitors. As Ammerman mentioned, language is also important, and the visitors can demonstrate their insider identity by their dialogue with the volunteers. Members of both the SDA and LDS often call each other “brother” and “sister,” and they talk
4
Badone and Roseman (2004) discuss further the changing interaction between pilgrims and tourists and where the distinction between the two lies. They demonstrate how new theories have been developed to better explain the dynamics at religious sites.
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about what these sites mean to their faith. When volunteers know that they are speaking to a member, they can speak freely about the faith without concern for confrontation or conflict. With members, volunteers at both sites talked about the promises kept by the prophets and the meaning of the site to the church. This language leads to particular behavioral patterns. After determining membership status, the SDA volunteers then encourage the members to pray at Ascension Rock or sing SDA songs in the chapel to reinforce this membership identity. They encourage reflection on William Miller’s message and the importance of that message today. Alternatively, tours for nonmembers focus primarily on the historical aspects of the nineteenthcentury farm, as when a local Cub Scout troop was shown how to shuck corn (Voorheis 2002). As a nonmember at the Hill Cumorah Pageant, volunteers would tell me about the building of the Erie Canal and how it opened immigration to the area with jobs. All of this is member/inside identity creation and is promoted and helped along by the site and the volunteers. However, members are not always participating in membership identity; they also act like sightseers. At the Miller Farm the visitors take pictures of the farm, the chapel, and the view from Ascension Rock. They purchase paintings of the farm on pieces of slate and blankets that depict the places important to the SDA to commemorate their visit. This behavior is similar to sightseers at national parks, historical sites and other places of leisure activity. The families who picnicked, let their children run the grounds, and listened to their car stereos were also displaying a casual, sightseer identity. They are on vacation and want to act in the carefree way people act when they are on vacation. As mentioned previously, those at the Hill Cumorah Pageant also participated in such activities, but they were somewhat limited by the church’s policies that set up boundaries that decreased the financial dimension of sightseeing by allowing only food to be sold at the pageant grounds, not religious merchandise or souvenirs. However, the volunteers did not seem to be opposed to sightseeing activity, particularly away from the grounds. They distributed brochures on the historical sites in the area with their literature on the LDS activities. Palmyra was touted as a historical town that had churches representing all of the major Christian traditions within a one-block radius of the main street intersection. In Palmyra one can continue to tour LDS sites, eat lunch and buy souvenirs including LDS-themed
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t-shirts and postcards of past performances. However, not all of the sightseer identity was removed from the pageant. The cast members distributed a pamphlet on the performance and talked to every family before the show began. At this time, many people took pictures of the cast members. The six foot tall actor/church member who portrayed Joseph Smith was particularly popular, and many of the children wanted their picture taken with him. Although I did not witness any movement from seeker or sightseer identity to insider identity, I did observe those who had spoken primarily of leisure motives for visiting also have religious moments at the sites. For instance, Charles and Sue stopped at the Miller Farm on their way home to see what it was. Miller’s chapel and the volunteers’ story of how he built it after the misinterpretation of his prediction inspired Charles. He appreciated, “that he built a chapel on his own land to preach. That is a lot of commitment right there, and the fact that somebody can be agnostic and have a complete turn around in life.” Charles continued, “About that rock out there. That there is a place that they thought the Lord would come and even though it didn’t happen, he didn’t turn away from God.” Many people spoke of the beauty of Ascension Rock and how it seemed like a spiritual place. One young woman who brought friends to the rock to see the view said she often came there by herself to meditate. The volunteers at the Miller Farm also told stories of visitors greatly moved by the story of Miller. For instance, in The Adventist Heritage Bulletin, Alice Voorheis, vice-president of the Adventist Heritage Ministry (AHM) said, “Tears flow freely down the faces of tourists who visit our AHM sites and the experience touches hearts and changes lives. Commitments are made to be ready to meet Jesus when He comes” (2004a). Volunteers at both sites mentioned nonmembers guided to the site by spiritual forces. One LDS volunteer said, People have seen the Christus [a large, white stone statue of Jesus with open arms] from the window, and they stop their cars and come in. They say, “We don’t know anything about your religion or your message but can we just sit next to the Jesus?” There are many people who are looking for so long. They are seekers. Since Christ was crucified people have been looking.
It is clear that religious tourism creates and maintains identity for the visitors but it is a complicated issue. Pfaffenberger and Ammerman discuss the importance of language, but behavior is also important.
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Classifying identity creating language and behavior as member/insider, seeker, or sightseer even if the person performing the behavior has a different primary identity, more accurately describes the visitors to these sites. At the Miller Farm and the Hill Cumorah Pageant identity is reinforced by the environment and especially by the volunteers. This typology also acknowledges the importance of the volunteers reinforcing the visitors’ identities and realizes the variety of identities being created and maintained at religious tourist sites. This research adds to the discussion of what we mean by pilgrimage. It is not a catchall for everyone who visits a site with religious motivations and it is not the opposite of tourism. Additionally, the term ‘pilgrimage’ is more and more applied to journeys that have a more personal rather than religious significance, such as Star Trek conventions and Ground Zero. For this reason, we need to be more specific about what it means when looking at religious tourist sites. By deconstructing what we mean by pilgrim and tourist, we create a more accurate picture of what is happening at these religious tourist sites. Future research needs to continue to acknowledge the dynamic forces working at these sites and acknowledge the interchangeability of identities. Many previous studies seem to say that visitors fall into just one group, but they need not and do not fit into only one category. This makes discussion of the visitors more difficult but it also makes it more accurate. This study also lays the groundwork for identifying any major differences between sites like Hill Cumorah and the Miller Farm and more traditional sites like Lourdes and Rome. Do the differences in these sites lead to different types of visitors? How do these visitors move between the identities that have been proposed? Taking this typology to the international level would bring further questions of identity creation to the fore including issues of national and global identity, and class construction. These are all issues to be studied further. References Allcock, John B. 1988. “Tourism as a Sacred Journey,” Society and Leisure 11: 33–48. Ammerman, Nancy T. 2003. “Religious Identities and Religious Institutions.” Pp. 207–24 in Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, edited by Michele Dillon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Badone, Ellen and Sharon R. Roseman. 2004. Intersecting Journeys. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
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Bremer, Thomas S. 2001. “Tourists, Religion at Temple Square and Mission San Juan Capistrano,” Journal of American Folklore 113: 422–35. Cohen, Erik. 1988. “Authenticity and Commodification in Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 15: 371–86. ———. 1992. “Pilgrimage and Tourism: Convergence and Divergence.” Pp. 47–61 in Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Tourism, edited by Alan Morinis. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Davies, Douglas. 1991. “Pilgrimage in Mormon Culture.” Pp. 310–25 in Social Anthropology of Pilgrimage, edited by Makhan Jha. New Delhi: Inter-India Publications. Ebron, Paulla. 1999. “Tourists and Pilgrims: Commercial Fashioning of Transatlantic Politics,” American Ethnologist 26: 910–32. Gottdiener, Mark. 2001. The Theming of America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Graburn, Nelson. 2004 “Secular Ritual: A General Theory of Tourism.” Pp. 23–34 in Tourists and Tourism, edited by Sharon Bohn Gmelch. Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2004. Handler, Richard. 1986. “Authenticity,” Anthropology Today 2: 2–4. Holzapfel, Richard N. and T. Jeffery Cottle. 1991. Old Mormon Palmyra and New England. Santa Ana, CA: Fieldbrook Productions. Lindbeck, George. 1984. The Nature of Doctrine. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Lindner, Eileen W. ed. 2004. Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches 2004. Nashville: Abingdon Press. MacCannell, Dean. 2004. “Sightseeing and Social Structure.” Pp. 55–70 in Tourists and Tourism, edited by Sharon Bohn Gmelch. Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2004. Moore, R. Laurence. 1986. Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pfaffenberger, Bryan. 1983. “Serious Pilgrims and Frivolous Tourists,” Annals of Tourism Research 10: 57–94. Porter, Jennifer E. 2004. “Pilgrimage and the IDIC Ethic: Exploring Star Trek Convention Attendance as Pilgrimage.” Pp. 160–79 in Intersecting Journeys, edited by Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Redfoot, Donald L. 1984. “Touristic Authenticity, Touristic Angst, and Modern Reality,” Qualitative Sociology 7: 291–307. Rinschede, Gisbert. 1992. “Forms of Religious Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 19: 51–67. Rowe, David L. 1985, Thunder and Trumpets. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985. Smith, Valene L. 1992. “Introduction: The Quest in Guest,” Annals of Tourism Research 19: 1–17. Swatos, William H., Jr. 2002. “Our Lady of Clearwater: Postmodern Traditionalism.” Pp. 181–92 in From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism, edited by William H. Swatos, Jr. and Luigi Tomasi. Westport, CT: Praeger. Tomasi, Luigi. 2002. “Homo Viator: From Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism.” Pp. 1–24 in From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism, edited by William H. Swatos, Jr. and Luigi Tomasi. Westport, CT: Praeger. Voorheis, Alice. 2002 “From the Editor: As the Presses Roll . . .” Adventist Heritage Ministry Bulletin 15(1): 2. ———. 2004a. “Why We Do What We Do.” Adventist Heritage Ministry Bulletin 17(1): 1. ———. 2004b. “Students Visit the Birthplace of Adventism in America.” Adventist Heritage Ministry Bulletin 17(3): 2. Wang, Ning. 1999. “Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience.” Annals of Tourism Research 26: 349–70.
CONTRIBUTORS Lori G. Beaman holds a Canada Research Chair at the University of Ottawa, where she is a member of the faculty of the Department of Classics and Religious Studies. She is completing a double term as book review editor of the ASR’s journal, Sociology of Religion, and is on the editorial board of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. She has also published in Nova Religio and the Journal of Church and State. Her book Religion and Canadian Society: Traditions, Transitions and Innovations (Scholar’s Press) has been published this year. Roberto Cipriani is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of the Sciences of Education at the University of Rome 3. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of São Paulo, the University of Buenos Aires, Université Laval in Québec, and has conducted research in Greece and Mexico. He is currently president of the Italian Sociological Association, and has served as editor-inchief of International Sociology, the official journal of the International Sociological Association, as well as president of the ISA’s Research Committee for the Sociology of Religion. His publications include Sociology of Religion: An Historical Introduction (Aldine-de Gruyter 2000), The Sociology of Legitimation (a special issue of Current Sociology, 1987), and “Religions sans frontiers?”: Present and Future Trends of Migration, Culture, and Communication (Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri 1994). Martin Geoffroy is currently Assistant Professor in sociology at the Collège universitaire de Saint-Boniface of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. He has a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in sociology from the University of Montréal, and was also a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Fordham University in New York in 2003–2004. His work centers mainly on comparative studies of religion in Canada, the United States and France. He is the author of a number of academic articles and has edited three special issues of academic journals, notably the International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society. Lee Gilmore teaches at Chabot College in Hayward, California, and recently completed her doctorate at the Graduate Theological
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Union in Berkeley. With Mark Van Proyen she has co-edited AfterBurn: Reflections on the Burning Man Festival (University of New Mexico Press 2005). Her current research interests include ritual performances in ‘alternative’ venues, including street theater and political protest, as well as in on-line, virtual worlds. Lutz Kaelber received his Ph.D. from Indiana University and is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont. His research interests include Weberian studies, comparative historical sociology, and the boundaries between pilgrimage and tourism. He is the author of Schools of Asceticism (Penn State Press 1998) and the translator of Max Weber’s dissertation, The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages (Rowman & Littlefield 2003). His most recent book is The Protestant Ethic Turns 100 (Paradigm 2005), coedited with William H. Swatos, Jr. Elizabeth Weiss Ozorak received her B.A. with honors from Wesleyan University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University. She is Professor and Chair of Psychology at Allegheny College, where she also coordinates the Values, Ethics and Social Action (VESA) Program. She has published articles on various aspects of the psychology of religion in books and journals such as the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Handbook of the Psychology of Religion (Guilford 2005). Cristina Rocha is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney. She received her undergraduate and Master’s degrees from the University of São Paulo and her Ph.D. from the University of Western Sydney. Her writings include Zen in Brazil: The Quest for Cosmopolitan Modernity (University of Hawai’i Press 2006). She has published articles in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies and Linda Learman’s Buddhist Missionaries in the Era of Globalization. Michael K. Roemer holds an M.A. in Asian Cultures and Languages from the University of Texas at Austin, where he is presently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology. For his dissertation, he is analyzing the connection between religion and mental health in Japan based on a combination of survey datasets and face-to-face
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interviews he will conduct. He expects to graduate in May 2007 and continue researching how religiosity in contemporary Japan can impact individual well-being. Kathryn Rountree has a D.Phil. in Social Anthropology from the University of Waikato. She is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social and Cultural Studies at Massey University, teaching courses on the anthropology of ritual and belief, ethnographic research methods, and theory. Her areas of research include neo-Pagan spiritualities, feminism, and embodiment. She is the author of Embracing the Witch and the Goddess: Feminist Ritual-makers in New Zealand (Routledge 2004). Her work has been published in such international journals as Sociology of Religion, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Environmental Ethics, History and Anthropology, and the Journal of Contemporary Religion. Sarah Bill Schott holds an M.A. from the Divinity School at the University of Chicago and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. Her dissertation will focus on the role of identity at American religious tourist sites. Her other research interests include new religious movements and religion in the United States. Jennifer Selby is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University, having completed an M.A. at Queen’s University and her bachelor’s degree at the University of Winnipeg. Her doctoral research focuses on issues of immigration, secularism, gender, and Islam within a Maghrebian population outside of Paris. More specifically, she examines and deconstructs how secular French and Islamic religious discourses influence and challenge immigrant Muslim women’s construction of gendered identity. William H. Swatos, Jr., is completing his first decade as Executive Officer of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, prior to which he served for six years as editor of Sociology of Religion, the ASR’s official journal. He is also executive officer of the Religious Research Association, senior fellow of the Center for Religious Inquiry Across the Disciplines at Baylor University, managing editor of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, and an adjunct member of the sociology department at Augustana College (Illinois). He received his B.A. with honors from Transylvania University, his
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M.Div. summa cum laude from the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Kentucky, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky, with honors in social theory. He is author, co-author, editor, or coeditor of over twenty books including the Encyclopedia of Religion and Society (AltaMira 1998). His most recent book is The Protestant Ethic Turns 100 (Paradigm 2005), co-edited with Lutz Kaelber. Jean-Guy Vaillancourt obtained his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1975. He is Professor of Sociology at the University of Montréal, a department that he chaired twice, from 1984 to 1987 and again in 1998, where he teaches sociology of religion, sociology of the environment, and sociological theory. He has served as a visiting professor in four other Québec universities, at the University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and at the Architectural University in Hanoi, Vietnam. He has authored, co-authored, edited or co-edited thirty books and special issues of journals, and written articles and book reviews on environmental, sociological, and religious topics. He has been active on the boards of numerous peace, international solidarity, and environmental organizations and journals.
