Geographies of Pilgrimage: Meaningful Movements and Embodied Mobilities

Abstract

This article argues for the importance of geographic engagements with pilgrimage and its analysis through the lenses, considerations and sympathies of the mobilities turn. Pilgrimage is being increasingly recognised as a multifaceted sociocultural spatial practice that plays a significant role in the lives of millions of people and in numerous sites across the world. The geographies of mobilities' emphasis on movement and practices in shaping the world enable the formation of new understandings of pilgrimage. This article builds on the links being forged between the study of pilgrimage and the mobility f ield, by showing how pilgrimage, as an activity that is focused on performances in specific places, can be analysed as an embodied mobility. Pilgrimage is explored as a meaningful journey in which the performance entwines the outer physical and inner spiritual/emotion journey in a process that defines and shapes the people and places involved.

Faith Manifest: Spiritual and Mindfulness Tourism in Chiang Mai, Thailand

“…Graburn (1983, p. 13) argues that "ritual does not have to pertain to religion," and what is held sacred by society as one's fundamental structure of beliefs about the world should matter more to people. Many pilgrimage sites also have become secularized through modern tourism (Di Giovine and Picard 2015), with increased visitation to pilgrimage sites such as Camino de Santiago by spiritual tourists (Scriven 2014;Timothy and Olsen 2006).…”

Journeying with: Qualitative methodological engagements with pilgrimage

“…Turner and Turner (1978) prominently argued that pilgrims enter a liminal phase by withdrawing from the normative and forging a communitas with fellow travellers. Analysis of the journey space is also informed by the larger "mobilities turn" in human geography which critically attends to the geographies of movement (Cresswell, 2010;Scriven, 2014). Research on pilgrimage needs to both conceptually and practically foreground the journey experiences as the very substance of this phenomenon.…”

The floating churches of Volgograd: River topologies and warped spatialities of faith

“…Thinking through the creative reuse imaginary, ongoing geographical explorations of religion cover an unprecedented host of sacred spaces, spanning place-bound and transient incarnations, varied scales and temporalities. These instances extend from the political dispositions cultivated by questions of identity (Ehrkamp & Nagel, 2012;Luz, 2008;Raivo, 2002), material culture and everyday life (Brace et al, 2006;Dwyer, Gilbert, & Shah, 2013;Woods, 2013), to the poetics of religious experience, understood through its affective and embodied dimensions (Finlayson, 2012;Holloway, 2003;Scriven, 2014). Petri Raivo's (2002) discussion of Finland's post-war landscapes reveals a particularly interesting instance of creative reuse, whereby the Orthodox Church rebuilt its religious infrastructure after the Karelian Borderlands were conceded to the Soviet Union.…”