Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture

Introduction

Deborah Ross

LANGUAGE AND CONCEPTS

PILGRIMAGE IS A UNIVERSAL phenomenon, its practice both ancient and contemporary. Pilgrimages, or journeys to sacred sites, were important in classical times, pre-Columbian America, and in pagan religions in Britain and Ireland. The monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and the Eastern religions all have pilgrimage traditions. Pilgrimage has also long been an area of literary interest: from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, to Paulo Coelho’s more contemporary Pilgrimage, pilgrimage narratives fascinate readers.¹ Across the centuries, pilgrimage has continued to be of significance in its personal, social, and spiritual aspects.

Every year millions of people embark on pilgrimages to myriad sites around the world. The many aspects of contemporary pilgrimage are intriguing: What are the personal motivations behind traveling long distances on pilgrimage? Are these mandatory or voluntary journeys? How does going on pilgrimage induce a sense of spiritual and personal satisfaction? What is the story of each pilgrimage shrine, its particular focus on a saint or holy person? What are the historical, economic, and political backgrounds to particular pilgrimage sites? These are among the questions that fascinate scholars. Academic study of pilgrimage has received attention from many fields including anthropology, archaeology, art, history, geography, the sociology of religion, and theology. Pilgrimage is a field of cross-disciplinary interest and focus, and each academic discipline brings unique questions to bear on the topic.

In Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, first published in 1978,² Victor and Edith Turner highlighted a dimension of religious experience that had scarcely received attention in the field of anthropology.³ The work presented a unique anthropological contribution to the field of pilgrimage studies, providing a hermeneutical lens for interpreting pilgrimage experience through the concepts of liminality and communitas.⁴ In brief, liminality concerns being in-between within a rite of passage, as a person moves from one social state to another. During a rite of passage a person enters a phase of separation from a previous group, which is followed by an in-between, or liminal, phase during which many aspects of life are likely to go through a process of change or distortion. Finally, there is a phase of reintegration into the community and entrance into a new social state.⁵ Edith Turner describes liminality as having a strange out of this ordinary world character.⁶ It is a place where the normal does not apply. It is a kind of crack between the worlds, like the looking glass world of Alice, where animals and chessmen speak—and reprimand the visitor. By now the liminal is being recognized, even though it is hard to put into logical terms.⁷

Victor Turner recognized communitas as an experience of oneness or unity felt by those sharing a rite-of-passage experience. He compared it with Martin Buber’s I-thou concept: a sacred experience of mutuality with another.⁸ Communitas therefore describes a model of sociality and a way of experiencing unanimity with other human beings that exists beyond the rite-of-passage experience. Another aspect of communitas, the experience of antistructure, contrasts with the usual norms of society, or structure. Within the realm of antistructure, commonplace social distinctions disappear and individuals relate to each other as equals. Victor Turner saw the structure/antistructure cultural dynamic as central to the organization of human society; human beings flourish by engaging in a communitas experience and then return to everyday structure renewed and rejuvenated.⁹ As Edith Turner states, communitas has not always received recognition in academic circles: Communitas is a very simple thing but an enormously important part of social life. It does not often find its way into the social sciences because scholars do not know what to do with it. I now see it as unconditional love, outside any differentiated respect for rank, moral status and social structures. It flourishes best in those precious in-between times when stress about status is low and nobody bothers about rank.¹⁰

During their early research in Africa in the 1950s, the Turners observed liminality and communitas within an indigenous rite-of-passage context. In seeking to find a liminal phenomenon that they could research in modern Western society, the Turners turned their attention to pilgrimage. They recognized how pilgrimage provided a liminal experience for the pilgrim, and that through pilgrimage Christianity had developed its own mode of liminality. As modern pilgrimage in complex postindustrial societies is voluntary, they described it as a liminoid experience, rather than a liminal one in the rite-of-passage sense.¹¹ Image and Pilgrimage therefore exists within the broader continuum of the Turners’ work. It builds upon the seminal text The Ritual Process in further developing the theory of liminality and communitas.

Image and Pilgrimage explores pilgrimages to Catholic shrines in England, France, Ireland, and Mexico, and identifies four distinct types of pilgrimage: archaic, prototypical, medieval, and modern.¹² The research has yielded a resourceful and versatile model that transcends time and faith traditions. The paradigm extends from the Catholic Christian context, in which the Turners first observed it, to all major world religions and smaller religions. It has been applied to pilgrimage experiences across history, and in more contemporary terms to both the sacred and the secular. It even provides the language and concepts to understand and interpret secular forms of pilgrimage like the annual Burning Man Festival in Nevada and consumerist shopping rituals.¹³

ANTHROPOLOGIST AS PILGRIM

Throughout their fieldwork, the Turners sought out a deeper understanding of the dynamics of pilgrimage. As Edith Turner describes in her autobiography, Heart of Lightness, this involved following an undefined pressure on us.¹⁴ After Image and Pilgrimage, their work included visiting Buddhists in Sri Lanka, worshippers of the monkey god Hanuman in India, shrines and temples in Japan, Sufi Muslims and Orthodox Jews in Israel, and experiencing the Deer Dancers ritual in the southwestern United States. They researched pilgrimage in these contexts while still maintaining their original interpretative framework and applying it across various pilgrimage experiences.

The Turners’ fieldwork also enriched their personal lives. Their stay in Africa transformed them on a spiritual level and inspired them—so much so that on their return to England they began experimenting with different places of worship. On finding a Catholic Church they were struck by the nature of worship, which resonated with their African ritual experience, and felt immediately at home. The Turners left Marxism and became Catholics. This was much to the chagrin of their academic colleagues in Manchester, and their conversion was frowned upon.¹⁵ Not only did the Turners’ conversion meet with criticism, the inclusion of religious experience within anthropology at that time was contentious. Douglas Ezzy comments that this was the result of the constraining power of atheistic beliefs of key anthropologists, rather than a product of the irrelevance of religious experience to the cultures that anthropologists have studied.¹⁶ Based on the African fieldwork, Victor Turner developed his processual theory of ritual, and from this theory Edith Turner was to develop her understanding of religious experience (Ezzy, 134).

Given the Turners’ extended commitment to the study of pilgrimage, their unique journey together, and their distinctive experiential approach, it is appropriate to view their life’s work through the metaphor of pilgrimage, and to therefore describe their anthropological research itself as a form of pilgrimage.

TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE

Once the Turners moved to the United States, they studied pilgrimage within their own faith community. In Image and Pilgrimage they set out to transition from previous work on social drama and the social process of ritual—instead wanting to focus on the institutional structures and ‘implications of meanings’ [Hanson 1975:10] of pilgrimage behavior. They hoped to approach pilgrimage work with objectivity, especially given the observation skills they had honed in Africa.¹⁷ Over time, however, the Turners fostered and encouraged the anthropology of experience, the idea that the anthropologist must exist fully inside the experience of those being studied.¹⁸ This approach would encourage the anthropologist’s own reflexive awareness as part of the fieldwork process: "Thus experience is a journey, a test (of self, of suppositions about others) a ritual passage, an exposure to peril, and an exposure to fear. Does this not sum up something akin to fieldwork, even to pilgrimage, which is, again etymologically, a journey ‘through fields’ (per agros), a kind of peregrination? Anthropological fieldwork surely deserves its very own kind of experiential theory, its own edifice of practical, yet poetical knowledge."¹⁹

This emphasis on experience is demonstrated in Edith’s continuing work after Victor’s untimely death in 1983. With humility, Edith describes how she finally got the Marian Irish pilgrimage site in Knock, Ireland, after twenty-nine years. This was as much a result of her own personal faith experiences while there, the living moment as she would term it, as of her observing or studying the pilgrimage site.²⁰

Edith navigates the delicate task of engaging in research within one’s own faith community with sensitivity and perspicacity, observing while also being open to personal transformation and change. Pilgrimage, viewed through the lens of the anthropology of experience, became an integral part of Edith’s own anthropological narrative. Reflection on her and her husband’s work on pilgrimage led Edith to recognize that it was often a quest for spirit consciousness although at the time we thought we were researching ritual.²¹ Spirit consciousness, or exploration of human experience of the divine, has been a continuing theme in her work. A seminal moment in her anthropological career and a further initiation into spirit consciousness occurred when she saw the Ihamba spirit in the Ndembu ritual on her return to Africa after Victor’s death. Edith has continued to write about beyond words phenomena. The topic of healing, which includes her work with the Iñupiat Eskimo people, and her interest in the phenomenon of near-death experiences provide a few examples.²²

In the context of pilgrimage and the anthropology of experience, readers are invited to consider their own experiences of pilgrimage, be they religious or secular. My own experiences of pilgrimage yield many memories of communitas. My familiarity with pilgrimage began at the Carmelite shrine of St. Simon Stock, Aylesford, in the United Kingdom, where my family would join our parish for an annual diocesan pilgrimage.²³ In later years I went on several pilgrimages to Lourdes with HCPT—The Pilgrimage Trust,²⁴ an annual pilgrimage for sick children from the United Kingdom—where thousands of pilgrims celebrated the liturgy at the main Trust Mass. This mass had an eschatological feel, an anticipation of the heavenly banquet to come, and communitas abounded regardless of the pilgrims’ ages, abilities, or backgrounds. Visits to sites like this one often imparted a sense of deep peace beyond words.

I also experienced communitas on undergraduate religious studies field trips to places of worship. Communitas was manifest in the hospitality shown in Sikh gurdwaras in Birmingham, United Kingdom, where we were greeted with Indian sweets called jalebis and laddoos, as well as hot sweet tea.²⁵ It was also evident in the welcome given by the cloistered nuns of Tyburn Convent, London, a pilgrimage shrine where 350 Catholic martyrs from the Reformation are honored. During our visit the nuns invited us to join them for prayer. On an undergraduate trip to the Holy Land, I felt communitas across the religious divide while meeting various religious leaders and visiting places of worship and sacred shrines in the Old City of Jerusalem, as well as in Bethlehem and Nazareth.

RESPONSES TO IMAGE AND PILGRIMAGE

The Turners have been referred to as the founders of pilgrimage studies,²⁶ and Image and Pilgrimage has sparked lively debate within the field. The current anthropological literature on pilgrimage is vast, including both positive affirmations of the Turnerian paradigm and critical assessments.²⁷ Responses to Image and Pilgrimage may be categorized as critiques of aspects of the model (including rejoinders in light of new historical evidence) and as academic scholarship on pilgrimage in part catalyzed by the reaction to the Turners’ work. A brief review of the literature provides various examples of these responses.

In their work on Muslim pilgrimage, Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori challenge the Turners’ idea that pilgrimage is an extraordinary experience in contrast to the pilgrim’s usual routine.²⁸ Some scholars dispute the structure/antistructure dialectic within pilgrimage, observing that roles and social hierarchies, rather than being dissolved, are still very much in existence at the pilgrimage site.²⁹ Others have suggested modifications to the Turners’ analysis of medieval pilgrimage in light of historical advances made since Image and Pilgrimage was first published.³⁰ New ideas and expressions have also emerged that build upon the Turners’ work on pilgrimage.³¹ For example, Simon Coleman and John Elsner³² have researched narrative and authorship in relation to pilgrimage, and Simon Coleman and John Eade have explored pilgrimage through different understandings of movement.³³ Anna-Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen, and Catrien Notermans, adherents of the Turnerian theory, have built upon Coleman and Eade’s work on movement by applying it to Marian pilgrimage.³⁴

At present only one major critique exists in the work of John Eade and Michael Sallnow.³⁵ In their 1991 edition of Contesting the Sacred, they argue that pilgrimages reveal contested or discordant experiences (such as conflict between groups and competing secular and religious discourses) rather than harmonious experiences of unmediated communitas. Eade and Sallnow also observe that religious authorities at pilgrimage sites have influence over the pilgrimage experience, resulting in the maintenance of power structures within society. The Turnerian model has been criticized for being too generic and deterministic, and Eade and Sallnow disagree with the interpretation of pilgrimage as a homogenous experience.³⁶ They also question whether pilgrimage can have a common meaning or definition given the dissimilar experiences associated with it.³⁷

The Turners were no strangers to the vicissitudes of human behavior both on pilgrimage journeys and at pilgrimage sites. Examples of this are referenced in Image and Pilgrimage³⁸ and in their later pilgrimage writing, for example, concerning Knock in Ireland.³⁹ The Turners recognized the social and political complexities of various pilgrimage sites.⁴⁰ They experienced how communitas within pilgrimage has the capacity to break through and transform human behavior, liberating participants to reach out to others. On a Jewish pilgrimage to Bar Yohai’s shrine at Meron in Israel, in the midst of a hectic and yet vibrant event where hospitality and kindness were evident, Edith Turner and her companions recognized that the communitas paradigm reigned.⁴¹ The Turners experienced communitas, or the spiritual I-thou connection, in the midst of the strange liminal nature of pilgrimage. The cathartic nature of communitas is therefore encountered alongside the often more demanding aspects of pilgrimage. Experiencing discomfort on the pilgrimage journey and at the pilgrimage site is part of the liminal nature of pilgrimage. Communitas within the pilgrimage experience needs to be understood through this mindset; it has an ephemeral quality in the midst of the inevitable challenges of pilgrimage. Although Victor Turner’s vision of communitas did see it as residing in the poor and inferior, a gift coming up from below,⁴² it is without bounds and may be experienced by all.⁴³

In a new introduction to Contesting the Sacred in 2000, Eade summarizes reactions to the Turners’ work during the 1990s. One of his main observations concerns the universal or grand narrative model to which the Turnerian model subscribes. He states: Pilgrimage is an unruly process whose regularities cannot be contained within the universalist structures of integrative analysis…. The continuing influence of the Turnerian approach towards pilgrimage can be partly explained in terms of its engagement with the ghosts of Marx and Durkheim.⁴⁴

Another reason Image and Pilgrimage remains influential is that it involves a major religious framework, the Christian narrative. Pilgrimage touches on something deeply spiritual that Image and Pilgrimage captures in its observations concerning popular piety and spiritual searching. Mysticism was an undercurrent in the Turners’ thinking, and their wider work on pilgrimage embraced the anthropology of experience. The emphasis on the importance of sacred, mutual, communitas experience, both that of the pilgrim and the anthropologist, contrasts with Eade and Sallow’s deconstructionist views of pilgrimage (i.e., that there can be no shared meaning or narrative concerning pilgrimage).

Simon Coleman quite rightly states that particular models should not limit research on pilgrimage. He demonstrates that the Turners’ work and that of Eade and Sallnow are not necessarily that far apart, that there are areas of overlap, and that it is perhaps useful to move away from an overemphasis on models.⁴⁵ That the Turners themselves would have described Image and Pilgrimage as the definitive word on pilgrimage seems to contradict their creative and increasingly experiential approach to their work. Indeed, the Turners set out to explore the potentiality of the pilgrimage experience itself.⁴⁶ It is to a perhaps neglected dimension of the Turners’ work on pilgrimage, its spiritual potential, that we now turn our attention.

THE POTENTIALITY OF PILGRIMAGE

Mysticism in pilgrimage, the theme of death, and apophatic awareness (encounters with God through the via negativa) all demonstrate spiritual potentiality. These themes reveal further spiritual dimensions of liminality and communitas, and contribute to an understanding of why pilgrimage appeals to the human psyche. Mysticism and the theme of death are mentioned in Image and Pilgrimage and receive explicit attention in the Turners’ broader corpus. The apophatic is an implicit theme within their work and is not mentioned by them directly. All three themes merit further exploration and additional research.

Mysticism

One of the gems of Image and Pilgrimage is an observation concerning the mystical nature of pilgrimage: Pilgrimage may be thought of as extroverted mysticism, just as mysticism is introverted pilgrimage. The pilgrim traverses a mystical way; the mystic sets forth on an interior spiritual pilgrimage. For the former, concreteness and historicity dominate; for the latter, a phased interior process leads to a goal beyond conceptualization.⁴⁷ The Turners’ gestalt insight is important, as it encourages further investigation of the potential spiritual dimensions of pilgrimage. Mysticism has been and remains integral to spiritual practice within various religions. Karl Rahner, arguably one of the greatest Christian theologians of the last century, predicted that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all. If by mysticism we mean … a genuine experience of God emerging from the very heart of our existence.⁴⁸ Recognizing the extroverted mystical nature of pilgrimage perhaps reveals why the concept of pilgrimage appeals to humanity on such a global level; pilgrimage expresses an existential spiritual search for the divine.

The Turners were familiar with the Christian mystical tradition. Edith Turner describes how as a child Victor was inspired by a padre who introduced him to the Christian mystics, including St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, William Blake, and St. Francis of Assisi, plus Islamic writers and aspects of Buddhism and Zen. Familiarity with mystical writing helped Victor Turner begin to make sense of the African ritual he had experienced in Zambia.⁴⁹ This mystical understanding adds a further dimension to the Turners’ own anthropological pilgrimage journey.

Exploration of the pilgrimage-mysticism dynamic draws attention to the inner spiritual journey. John Welch applies the Turners’ observations on mysticism and pilgrimage to the writings of the great spiritual Christian mystic Teresa of Avila. In The Interior Castle, written in 1577, Teresa describes the inner journey of faith through seven stages, which she compares to moving through seven different mansions in a castle. The journey culminates when the traveler meets God in the seventh mansion, within the deepest part of him or herself. Welch observes that interior footwork is necessary for all pilgrimage, and this is what Teresa asks her community and other participants to do when they move through the seven different stages.⁵⁰ Significant for the present discussion is Welch’s observation of the structure/antistructure dynamic in Teresa’s writing: Teresa has created an internal anti-structure, a free space away from the enclosures of the body and mind. Her invitation is to a pilgrimage. Her language is the symbolic language of pilgrimage. She invites a wandering, a playing among the images.⁵¹ Pilgrimage therefore helps the pilgrim access his or her interior landscape and journey deeper within that space. Whereas pilgrimage occurs within specific historical and societal circumstances, personal reflection on one’s faith involves, as the Turners suggest, a phased interior process that leads to a spiritual goal beyond conceptualization.⁵²

The link between mysticism and pilgrimage is a topic for comparative dialogue across religious traditions. It is also a meeting point for secular and religious dialogue, as exploration of the mystical dimensions of pilgrimage may expose the unrecognized spiritual dimensions of alternative forms of pilgrimage. This is especially apt given existing and ongoing research into pilgrimage and tourism.⁵³

Death

In an article written three years before Image and Pilgrimage was published, Victor Turner explored the theme of death in the context of pilgrimage in the salvation religions, describing pilgrimages as full of symbols and metaphors for death.⁵⁴ For Victor Turner, this firstly manifests itself through a connection with a dead founder, saint, or martyr associated with the pilgrimage site. Secondly, embarking on pilgrimage involves passing into a liminal or threshold time that involves metaphoric death on several levels. This passage occurs through separation from normal social existence, with the dissolving of social rank between fellow pilgrims, and through the liminal nature of pilgrimage, which involves an in-between state of life-in-death (Turner, Death and the Dead, 30, 47). Such death, comparable to mystical death, is viewed positively as a form of regeneration, and is equivalent to experiences of metaphorical death in indigenous rituals (32–33).

These aspects are very much evident within contemporary pilgrimage practice, as expressed by the veneration of saints and the pilgrimage-like tradition of remembering the dead. For example, the relics of the Catholic saint and mystic Therese of Lisieux were brought to the United Kingdom for the first time in 2009, prompting huge crowds to venerate her.⁵⁵ Revering the dead may invoke a sense of communitas. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., attracts many visitors each year, some in pilgrimlike fashion as they remember their loved ones; the same may be said of those visiting Ground Zero in New York, the site of the former World Trade Center.⁵⁶ Victor Turner described pilgrimage as a rehearsal of the pilgrim’s death.⁵⁷ The need to revere the dead in pilgrimage activity perhaps stems from a need to confront and accept human mortality.

The theme of death in pilgrimage is an area for further comparative research across religious traditions. Awareness of death and connection with deceased friends, relatives, and community members is common to many faiths. Barbara Myerhoff, in her research with a Jewish community center for the elderly in California in the 1970s, poignantly describes how one participant connected with her dead ancestors through the ritual act of remembering them as she ate a meal, much in the same way the Catholic Communion of Saints links the living with the dead.⁵⁸ Religions sometimes emphasize making a good death at a pilgrimage site; for example, the Hindu pilgrimage to Kashi, India.⁵⁹ Particular sites are favorable for a final resting place. Some Jews seek out burial places on the Mount of Olives, East Jerusalem, as it is expected to be the place of resurrection when the Messiah comes.⁶⁰ Tibetan Buddhism provides specific focus on how to prepare for death, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead explains how a dying person may approach the end.⁶¹

The Apophatic Nature of Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage involves a process of dying to oneself in order to find oneself.⁶² This mystical dimension of pilgrimage, whether experienced on pilgrimage to particular sites or through a personal inner journey, involves confronting the self at a deeper level, often through an experience of the apophatic. The apophatic concerns a spiritual dimension accessed through what medieval Christian thinkers such as Bonaventure called the spiritual senses.⁶³ God is found in negative experience—darkness, or the via negativa. This contrasts with cataphatic experience, which refers to an encounter with God through positive experience. Death within the pilgrimage context may potentially reveal encounters with God through negative experience.

The apophatic is an implicit theme in the Turners’ work. In her autobiography, Edith Turner describes in-between experiences during her ongoing life pilgrimage that may be interpreted as apophatic. Ronald Frankenberg also refers to the Turners’ dark-night-of-the-soul experiences.⁶⁴ Such dark places, perhaps comparable to the notion of thin places within Celtic spirituality where two worlds meet, are places of learning; indeed, the in-between state of the pilgrim’s journey is a place where liminal wisdom is communicated.⁶⁵ Edith observed that Victor’s dark moods, which would last for days, often prefigured moments of deep insight.⁶⁶ She equates this with the poet Keats’s notion of negative capability, of embracing uncertainty: It is when one is most in the dark that one is coming to it—which is how negative capability works.⁶⁷ Edith’s conversion to Catholicism followed an in-between experience after leaving Marxism, and was accompanied by an apodictic sense of knowing: I knew I had to accept the gift [Catholicism] and follow its implications.⁶⁸ This personal mystical experience reveals the prophetic, revelatory nature of the liminal state, and emphasizes how liminality and communitas involve a different way of seeing. Edith refers to communitas as imparting the gift of vision: The benefits of communitas are joy, healing, the gift of ‘seeing,’ mutual help, religious experience, the gift of knowledge, long-term ties with others, a humanistic conscience, and the human rights ideal.⁶⁹ That communitas involves a different way of seeing is also emphasized by John Eric Killinger: "Despite the recent critique of communitas with regard to pilgrimage, it should be understood that communitas as anti-structure really means it is an inversion of the normal. In this respect, we are open to the play and fascination of mirrors as apophatic third eyes. Communitas thus extends our gaze, including our backward gaze or regard. We are negatively defined—not contradicted—as neti … neti: neither this nor that. We are thus opened up to new experience and meaning-making such that we can work and play well with Others as we see ourselves as Others, too."⁷⁰

The themes of mysticism, death, and the apophatic contribute further to the Turners’ interpretation not only of the periodic undertaking of pilgrimage but also of the spiritual dimensions of one’s life journey as a whole. These themes accentuate the spiritual dimensions of pilgrimage and enable a more nuanced understanding of liminality and communitas. In addition, they are relevant to the contemporary social complexities that impinge on pilgrimage.

THE CHANGING FACE OF PILGRIMAGE

Pilgrimage exists within a rapidly changing society, and it embraces both tradition and change. On the one hand, pilgrimage is an ancient practice, mandatory in some major world religions and voluntary in others. On the other hand, it is subject to economic, political, social, and religious forces of global change. How can the Turnerian pilgrimage paradigm be utilized given some of the inherent complexities resulting from changes in religious patterns, the interplay between pilgrimage and tourism, and economic and social changes?

Changing Religious Patterns

The religious landscape has changed since Image and Pilgrimage was first published in 1978. Pilgrimage exists within a shifting religious, social, and economic world. Patterns of religious practice vary across nations. At present the religious practice of Europe is distinct from the rest of the world, and within Europe there are variations between countries. A change within religious practice from a culture of obligation or duty to a culture of consumption has been observed.⁷¹ No longer are religious practices obligatory; they have become choices among many others. The Turners’ concepts of the liminal and the liminoid arose from distinctions between obligatory indigenous religious practices and optional Western religious practices, respectively. The liminal-liminoid distinction anticipated the present religious mood in parts of Europe, and it parallels the culture of obligation-culture of consumption difference. The term liminal seems to have had more currency than the term liminoid, both within academic work and general parlance. Given changing religious practices, the concept of the liminoid may gain increasing relevance.

While a complex global religious picture exists, the impact of the secularization process has been most notably felt in contemporary Europe.⁷² Daniele Hervieu-Leger, a French sociologist of religion, views contemporary patterns of faith in Europe through two terms: pilgrim and convert. The pilgrim follows an individual, self-defined spiritual path that involves a series of phases. By contrast, the convert follows a more obligatory, traditional religious path and chooses a religious community—either a new one or the one he or she was born into.⁷³ This somewhat reverses the traditional motif: pilgrimage, once a metaphor for traditional faith journeys, is instead used by Hervieu-Leger to depict the secular pilgrim or describe secular patterns of personal journeying. Interpreted in the light of Turnerian theory, the term pilgrim suggests the liminoid, whereas the term convert has a more obligatory, liminal emphasis. The pilgrim searches for identity; the convert has already found identity within a traditional religious setting.

Christian theological reflection on the identity of the pilgrim (in the traditional use of the term) helps uncover distinctions between religious and secular forms of pilgrimage. As Anthony Carroll and James Hanvey demonstrate in responding to Hervieu-Leger, in the Christian tradition pilgrimage involves a journey of transformation within a given faith identity structure. In this context, the pilgrim is not deracinated: It is precisely because of a stable sense of ultimate value and origin that the pilgrim takes the risk of mobility. Freedom is constructed in a different way; it is an obedience call or a charge rather than an act of self-stylisation. Pilgrimage has the capacity to reinforce religious identity and link pilgrims with their cultural memory and religious history. In a more secular societal context, Christian pilgrimage may therefore act as a spiritual anchor.⁷⁴ Secular pilgrimage—with its emphasis on choice and the search for personal self-definition and its lack of defined traditional structure—is more liminoid than liminal.

What are the convergences and divergences of sacred and secular pilgrimage experiences? Does secular pilgrimage as a search for self-identity offer the same sense of arrival, recognition, and access to cultural memory as religious pilgrimage? Does the secular pilgrimage dynamic flourish as it helps create shared memories and meaning? Given the resurgence of the spiritual in contemporary Western culture, what can these experiences, both sacred and secular, tell us about humanity’s need to go on sacred journeys? Do these various experiences point to a sharp division between the sacred and the secular, or do they represent a spectrum of experience? Research on religious and secular types of pilgrimage, and further comparative research on world faith pilgrimage, will reveal interesting findings concerning the notion of the pilgrim’s identity.

Pilgrimages and Spiritual Quests in Japan explores spiritual quests in the form of pilgrimage, and includes comparative research of pilgrimage in Spain and Japan.⁷⁵ The book echoes the questions raised in this section in the Japanese context: What do people nowadays make of the quest they have inherited? How far are the elements of the sacred retained in present-day quests in Japan? How should we nowadays assess the delineation between sacred and profane? Does such delineation altogether make sense?⁷⁶ The study, which in places draws on the work of the Turners, covers what now appear to be generic themes in pilgrimage studies: pilgrimage and tourism, the sacred-secular divide, the expedition in search of the transcendental. The study is, however, unique in its comparative work concerning, for example, pilgrimage at Santiago de Compostela and Japanese pilgrimages. It also highlights a new dimension relating to the quest for vocational fulfillment through pilgrimage in the lives of Japanese civil servants, traveling ethnographers, and artists.⁷⁷

Pilgrimage maintains an important presence across the shifting boundaries of the sacred and the secular. Traditional pilgrimage has a cohesive dimension as it integrates past and present and encourages the telling of one’s personal story within these changing contexts. Secular pilgrimage also embodies some of these dimensions. The Turners’ theory of liminality, the liminoid, and communitas provides concepts that will continue to help scholars read and interpret pilgrimage in the midst of changing cultural phenomena.

Pilgrimage or Tourism?

The distinction between pilgrimage and tourism is often blurred, and the Turners highlight this continuing tension: A tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist.⁷⁸ This is an area of ongoing research.⁷⁹ How may the distinction between tourism and pilgrimage be defined? What are its boundaries? Is there a creative liminal space between the two? The pilgrimage-tourism distinction raises interesting issues concerning recognition of the sacred within the secular context.

Linda Davidson and David Gitiliz outline three types of secular pilgrimage: pilgrimages that exist to secure identity; political pilgrimage, such as pilgrimage to war memorial sites; and popular pilgrimage, including trips to the shrine of a famous person—for instance, Elvis in Graceland, Tennessee. Davidson and Gitilitz maintain that from the outside a secular pilgrimage may appear to be a mere tourist jaunt, such as a visit to the home of a famous poet, for example, to Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts. Yet the visitor knows when the experience passes from the realm of tourism to that of pilgrimage.⁸⁰ This suggests a personal self-reflexive appropriation of the pilgrimage-tourism distinction. It would follow that pilgrimage, including secular pilgrimage, involves an inner knowing of the spiritual. What does such knowing involve? What makes a demarcation between tourism and pilgrimage possible? Does the moment of communitas itself mark self-revelatory experience? (Or in Christian theological terms, the moment of grace?) For some, the liminal/ liminoid nature of the journey or site will encourage potentially transformative experience; for others, their cultural and religious roots may determine the shift in perception from tourism to pilgrimage.

Places of worship often straddle the pilgrimage-tourism tension. One may visit a Christian cathedral or a Buddhist shrine on a tourist trip, and depending upon one’s subjective interpretation, an initial tourist day out may become a pilgrimage-like experience. Grace Davie highlights how Europe’s cathedrals may be viewed as museums, but they carry deeper religious significance for church members since they embody and carry religious memory. She highlights this tension as an underresearched area and asks, So where, exactly, does the cathedral end and the museum begin? It is almost impossible to say.⁸¹

An example of practice in this area is the mission and outreach of Westminster Abbey in London. Part of the mission of the abbey is to welcome tourists and pilgrims, and this provides a working example of how a historical place of worship manages the pilgrim-tourist dynamic with great creativity. The abbey has a heritage based in the Benedictine tradition and has been a site of worship for a thousand years. It was the medieval pilgrimage site for Edward the Confessor, whose shrine is still visited today. It is also the site of coronations for English and British monarchs and a burial place for royalty including Elizabeth I, Mary I, and Mary Queen of Scots. Other famous figures buried at the abbey include Geoffrey Chaucer and Charles Dickens. The abbey’s Poet’s Corner includes memorials to the poets Wordsworth, Keats, and Blake. The abbey was the place of Princess Diana’s funeral.

In this place of worship, pilgrims, tourists, and visitors all converge. The dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey strive to turn tourists into visitors and visitors into pilgrims.⁸² Tourists are encouraged to become visitors through a ministry of hospitality and welcome, guided tours, and information distribution; visitors are encouraged to become pilgrims through a series