Pilgrimage

• Published in: The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion pp. 371 - 381
• Main Author: Coleman, Simon
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Chichester, UK John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 05.02.2021
• Subjects: communitas; contestation; Kumbh Mela; liminal; liminoid; Lourdes; Mecca; migration; movement; place; religious motivation; rite of passage; sacred travel; sacrifice; temporality; tourism
• ISBN: 9780470656563; 0470656565
• DOI: 10.1002/9781119092797.ch26

Pilgrimage has become an increasingly popular object of study, and it continues to large numbers of participants. One way of providing comparative analysis – thinking across cultural and religious contexts – is to divide the topic up into a number of key components, such as “place,” “movement,” and “motivation.” However, the current growth of the sub‐field of pilgrimage studies faces a larger challenge: that of how to develop methodological and theoretical frames appropriate to current practices. It is important, for instance, to extend analysis beyond individual sites themselves to construct a much broader sense of what might be encompassed by pilgrimage as a field of ritual engagements and institutional forms. Indeed, we may need to reconsider what we understand as “sacred” if we are to do pilgrimage full justice as an object of study, just as we need to go beyond older models of it as a rite of passage that takes people away from worldly concerns.