American Pilgrimage Landscapes

Abstract

In late-twentieth-century America, there is a surprisingly large and varied number of pilgrimage centers. This article organizes them into three groups (pilgrimages of organized religion, civil religion, and cultural religion) for comparative description. It includes descriptions of Catholic, Mormon, and Hindu pilgrimages, as well as the sites of Gettysburg, Mount Rushmore, and Graceland as pilgrimage centers. Modernity, rather than displacing pilgrimages, has actually been responsible for globalizing them, a process that involves their appropriation by expert systems, the fostering of diverse and sometimes contending interpretations of their significance, and the actual production of new pilgrimage landscapes. Drawing upon original fieldwork, published research, and resources on the World Wide Web, the author proposes that by placing pilgrimages in global perspective, we are better able to discern both the roles played by immigrant groups in the formation of American pilgrimage landscapes and the contours of American participation in pilgrimages abroad, such as the hajj to Mecca.

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