In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage by Hillary Kaell
  • Jas’ Elsner
Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage. By Hillary Kaell. (New York: New York University Press. 2014. Pp. xiv, 267. $79.00 clothbound, ISBN 978-0-8147-3836-8; $28.00 paperback, ISBN: 978-1-4798-3184-5.)

This book is a lively and densely textured ethnography, with a relatively light theoretical frame, of a number of trips to the Holy Land by pilgrim groups from the United States between 2007 and 2012—both Catholic and Protestant. Clearly its strengths lie not in generalization or the sociological big picture, but in the personal accounts, richly presented, empathetically caught, and traced over several years with a number of individuals, which form its substance. The result is a revealing, sometimes moving portrait of confronting the “other” and making sense of the events of life in relation to that. Mainly lower- or lower middle-class religious Americans conducted this quest; about two-thirds of them were women, with many who had seldom left their country until their pilgrimage to Palestine. Hillary Kaell is consistently sympathetic to the subjectivities of the subjects of this book—writing revealingly about the ways in which a majority tends to block out questions of conflict and to espouse a kind of estrangement from politics (which emulates an estrangement for their local American politics also, but is striking in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). At the same time the text makes space for these issues and for other approaches or responses (both Zionist and pro-Palestinian) among the pilgrims it follows. That the anthropologist is Jewish, with a specific personal take on such issues, is an interesting irony.

The book is structured through six chapters framed by an introduction and conclusion. Chapter 1, “Knowing the Holy Land,” sets out some of the frames and limitations underpinning American attitudes over the last century—not least the rise of the State of Israel and its closeness to some Evangelical Christians and the changes in Roman Catholicism (including in attitudes to the Jews) in the aftermath of World War II and the Second Vatican Council. Chapter 2, “Soul Searching,” explores some of the reasons given by American pilgrims for making the choice to travel to the Holy Land. Chapter 3, “Feeling the Gospel: Evangelicals, Place and Presence,” and chapter 4, “The Middle Generation: Catholics, Scripture and Tradition,” map some specificities and differences of response in Catholic and Protestant groups. Chapter 5, “God and Mammon, God and Caesar,” examines responses to the local commercialism of pilgrimage sites. Chapter 6, “The Long Voyage Home,” picks on rituals of return, memory, show and tell, and souvenirs.

For an author keen to reveal many personal elements so as to clarify potential biases in approach such as Canadian origins and Jewish background, Kaell is strikingly reticent (and perhaps not consciously so) about one thing: his or her gender. This is not made explicit until page 24, when Kaell is cast by pilgrims “as idealized granddaughter or daughter” who shares a room with Dorothy on Pastor Jim’s trip (p. 27). This makes for slightly uncomfortable reading until readers have a sense of the author’s voice but is powerfully in tune with the oral-history element and the ethnographic informality of the text (in which the speaker’s presence in person [End Page 204] would, of course, define issues of gender and age instantly). This is an intelligent and thoughtful book, as well as an excellent ethnography—well worth reading by anyone with an interest in pilgrimage and modernity or in the role of the Holy Land in the contemporary American imagination.

Jas’ Elsner
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
The Divinity School, University of Chicago
...

pdf

Share