Pilgrimage

Abstract

The multifaceted nature of contemporary pilgrimage cannot be understood from one particular discipline and, as a consequence, its study has become increasingly multidisciplinary and global in approach. Anthropologists have made a major contribution to pilgrimage studies but significant research has also been produced by those based in history, religious studies, tourism studies, geography, ethnology and folklore studies, for example, and by those undertaking research outside Europe and North America, including in the Near East, northern and southern Africa, the Asia Pacific region, Oceania, and Latin America. The contemporary practice of pilgrimage is also not restricted to institutional religion. Visits to nonreligious sites have become increasingly popular, reflecting historical change. Large numbers of people are attracted to sites of suffering, such as the First World War battlefields in France, Belgium, and Turkey; the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland and the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, and places associated with icons of popular culture, e.g., Elvis Presley’s grave in Memphis, Tennessee (see Reader and Walter 1993, cited under Development of the Anthropological Study of Pilgrimage). Furthermore, those journeying to and from religious pilgrimage sites have often little or no interest in institutional religion. Moreover, pilgrimage cannot be studied in isolation from wider contexts. Hence, as detailed in various sections in this article, close attention has been paid to the intimate relationship between pilgrimage and tourism, while increasing interest is being shown in the role played by political and economic processes in the development of pilgrimage. Evgenia Mesaritou’s Fellowship has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 752103.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.