Apologia pro turismo: breaking inter- and intra-disciplinary boundaries in the anthropological study of tourism and pilgrimage.

Abstract

Introduction In the social sciences, tourism and pilgrimage are often strictly dichotomized, despite the tacit understanding that they represent similar processes of global mobility. tourist is half a pilgrim if a pilgrim is half a tourist, Victor and Edith Turner wrote about pilgrimage decades ago (1978:20), and Nelson Graburn, drawing on the work of his mentor Sir Edmund Leach, asserted that tourism is both a (1977) and ritual (2001; see also Gammon 2004). Indeed, while the study of pilgrimage has prominently factored into the social sciences, especially in the anthropology and sociology of religion, up until quite recently anthropology has held a notably ambivalent position with regards to tourism (Crick 1985:72). There is, furthermore, not only an intra-disciplinary divide, but also an inter-disciplinary divide; that is, in anthropology, pilgrimage and tourism studies often remain separate subfields but tourism studies in general are often held to be distinct from pilgrimage studies. In addition, practitioners--travelers, site managers, tour operators and promoters--themselves often distinguish between the two forms of travel; is pilgrimage, not tourism, I frequently hear devotees and their guides and spiritual advisors state when secular concerns threaten to subsume their travel experience (see Di Giovine 2013a). What accounts for such divides, when the processes and practices seem to be the same? What factors compel people academics and not--from distinguishing between the two? And how can we define and study these two forms of travel that can both accommodate their similarities while also emphasize their differences? Because inter--and intra-disciplinary divides can often hinder the academic process of building on scholarly findings, and because my research has indicated that the two are, in reality, closely linked, these questions are extremely salient when assessing the current state of tourism studies, particularly from the anthropological perspective as this special issue does. Based on long-term ethnographic research on both secular and sacred travel in Europe and Southeast Asia, and building on nearly a decade of work in the travel industry itself, (5) this article is intended to further a theoretical position on the shared phenomenological attributes of pilgrimage and tourism. It is argued that these divisions do not denote two separate phenomena, but rather are the product of historical and cultural conditions governing a Bourdieuian of touristic (Di Giovine, 2009a, pp.9, 42-48). The article begins by outlining the intellectual history of both tourism and pilgrimage, paying particular attention to the common assumptions inherent in each that have informed such divides. Invoking Pierre Bourdieu's model of a field of production (1993), I then argue that pilgrimage and tourism are structurally enmeshed; their significances, in fact, relationally dependent on one another. Last, I argue that pilgrimage could be more readily understood as a subset of tourism. This definition eschews the common understanding of tourism as a form of mobility for one that is perspectival--that is, it is an alternative way of viewing, and valuing, alterity (cf. Picard & Di Giovine, 2014). Understanding that pilgrimage is not always undertaken for religious reasons, and that travelers will call their secular voyages pilgrimages, I note that the term is often used to denote a value claim about the perceived hyper-meaningfulness of their travel practices, the destination, and the object of their journey (see Di Giovine, 2012b, p.117). The Current State of Tourism and Pilgrimage Studies: A Brief History The Development of the Field of Tomristic Production Forty years ago, in the wake of the first televised U.S. presidential debate, the debut of such cinematic thrillers as Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, the onset of the Space Race, a failed invasion of Cuba, and America's escalation in Vietnam, American literati took stock of their increasingly globalized and mass-mediated culture. …

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