Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism (review)

The authors of the essays in this volume contend that the categories that scholars use to separate differing types of travel are not substantial. The distinctions that seem to identify tourism, pilgrimage, and ethnography as distinct kinds of travel blur upon reconsideration. Pilgrims often engage in touristic acts on their journeys; tourists visit religious sites and seek self-transformation through their travels; both types of travelers ascribe meanings to their journeys; and ethnographers, long loathe to recognize the similarities of their type of travel with others, actually share contexts and motives with pilgrims and tourists. Where and how these different types of travel intersect provide rich insights into the travel continuum. The idea that the supposed distinctions between religious and touristic travel should be problematized and not reified serves as the framework for the ten essays that make up this excellent contribution to the expanding literature on religious travel.

After a fine introductory essay by the coeditors, which reviews the anthropology of pilgrimage and tourism, the volume opens with an experiential exploration of a grueling walking pilgrimage to the Santuario de Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas in Chimayo, New Mexico. Paula Elizabeth Holmes-Rodman constructs the essay from letters and fieldnotes, relating the journey she took from outside observer to fellow pilgrim during the 135-mile women’s walk from Albuquerque to the sacred earth of Chimayo. While relating the experience sensually, Holmes- Rodman also conducts a reflexive inquiry into what happens when the researcher is indistinguishable from the researched in terms of observable behaviors. Inner differences are silenced during the walk, both those of the ethnographer and those of the other participants. An imperfect but strong and emotionally sensitive unity, an example of Turnerian communitas, is created.

The closing essay also addresses the issue of the relationship between ethnographic travel and religious travel. Ellen Badone analyzes the topic, pithily examining ethnography, pilgrimage, and tourism from multiple perspectives, such as patterns of movement, quests for authenticity, and perceived encounters with alterity. Her goal is to break down “simplistic binary stereotypes about frivolous, materialistic tourists and serious, ascetic ethnographers and pilgrims, which . . . have their unexamined roots in the religious and philosophical structuring of Western thought” (pp. 186–7). Her exacting arguments accomplish that goal.

Rather than oppose tourists to pilgrims or ethnographers, Simon Coleman examines two types of pilgrims who journey to the premier pilgrimage site in Christian England, the Walsingham shrine in northern Norfolk. The oldest Marian shrine in Europe, Walsingham is known as “England’s Nazareth” because of the Holy House built there as a divinely inspired replica of Christ’s childhood home. Coleman employs a subject-centered approach to show how “parish pilgrims” and “heritage pilgrims” differentially interpret this rural setting as, respectively, “an unchanging symbol of continuity” or “a launching point for liturgical and interpretative creativity” (p. 65).

Two of the essays take the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela, a pilgrimage destination since medieval times, as their subject. Nancy Frey focuses on the pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago and discusses the aftermath of pilgrimage. She interrogates the outcomes of the journey for participants who, deeply affected by the pilgrimage, continue to experience its influence in their daily lives back home, including their self-perceptions of the status of pilgrim and tourist. Sharon Roseman examines the discourses used by city officials in their bid to have Santiago de Compostela named a European City of Culture. Their language exemplifies a tactical merging of religious pilgrimage with heritage tourism based on a postmodern, pluralistic understanding of culture.

The other essays in the volume explore further intersections. Mark Tate examines how local officials position the Holy Week procession in León, Spain, as beneficial to tourists for nonreligious reasons. Nelson Graburn illustrates the close relationship between Buddhism and tourism in Japan through the lens of the 1985 Kyoto tax strike. Wayne Fife presents British missionaries from the London Missionary Society as pilgrims in New...