Pilgrimage

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Pilgrimage

A pilgrimage is a round-trip journey to a site the traveler considers sacred, usually a shrine. At their destination, and along the way, pilgrims engage in religious practices that might include ritualized speech, dress, and gesture. Pilgrimage sites sometimes stand far from the follower's home, and sometimes the length and arduousness of the journey are themselves spiritually significant. Whether or not the destination is distant and the journey difficult, most pilgrims, who are temporarily or permanently changed by the experience, carry something home with them. For contemporary pilgrims that can mean a range of artifacts—from holy cards and T-shirts to postcards and photographs. Upon their return, devotees recall and extend the sacred journey by wearing (or carrying) mementos, giving them to loved ones, or placing them in the home, thereby sacralizing domestic space and linking it with the pilgrimage site.

Approaches to the Study of Pilgrimage

There have been five main approaches to the study of pilgrimage. First, highlighting change over time, the historical approach has emphasized the distinctiveness of each pilgrimage and its embeddedness in the cultural context and the sponsoring religion. Second, a sociological view, inspired by the writings of Émile Durkheim, presupposes that pilgrimages reflect broader social processes; for example, they bolster social status and construct collective identity. Guided by the writings of Mircea Eliade and other religion scholars, a phenomenological approach has identified pilgrimage's common features by theorizing across religions and cultures. Claiming to be more sympathetic to the participants' interpretations, these scholars have seen pilgrimage as an encounter with the sacred. In opposition to functionalist sociological theories, they also have highlighted religion's sui generis character, criticizing those who reduce the phenomenon to social, cultural, or economic impulses. A fourth approach, anthropological, has had the most scholarly influence, and Victor Turner and Edith Turner have produced the most influential anthropological theory. For them, pilgrimage is a rite of passage: The pilgrim begins in the social structure, departs from it during the ritual, and then returns (transformed) to society. During the pilgrimage, the Turners argue, devotees stand in a liminal state, where the usual social hierarchies are suspended and an egalitarian spirit of "communitas" temporarily holds. In the 1991 book Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, its editors, John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow, directly challenged the reigning Turnerian model. Eade and Sallnow saw contestation where the Turners found consensus. Pilgrimages, in this revisionist anthropological view, do not have a fixed meaning or produce a shared feeling of commonality. Rather, pilgrimage sites are social arenas where devotees negotiate meaning and power. A fifth approach to the study of pilgrimage comes from cultural geographers, who have drawn on the theories of Eliade, the Turners, and (more recently) Eade and Sallnow. S. M. Bhardwaj, C. Prorok, G. Rinschede, and other geographers have produced textured studies of contemporary pilgrimage sites, yet they have not offered a fully developed theory of religious travel. However, a greater sensitivity to the significance of space and place distinguishes the work of geographers, who have charted the flow of pilgrims and mapped the landscape of pilgrimage.

American Pilgrimage

Most scholars of pilgrimage have focused their attention on Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, although round-trip religious journeys also have been an important feature of religious life in the United States. The scholarly neglect is understandable, in part, since the relatively young nation has fewer ancient sacred sites, and the predominant faith of the British colonies, Protestantism, eschewed pilgrimage, which seemed tainted by Catholic overtones. Nonetheless, U.S. Protestants have venerated some sites at home and abroad as spiritually significant, and their journeys—for example, Methodists' travel to the British birthplace of John and Charles Wesley or to American churches where the founders preached—take on some features traditionally associated with pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage has been even more central in other American faiths, and there are as many kinds of pilgrimage as there are types of shrines. The most basic distinction is between foreign and domestic pilgrimage.

Some American pilgrims—those with sufficient time and money—have traveled abroad to sites they considered sacred. A very small proportion of these journeys led to quasi-religious sites, those with civil religious importance such as American war memorials in Europe or other foreign sites with historical connections. For example, Alfred T. Story's 1908 guidebook American Shrines in England introduced American travelers to civil religious sites such as George Washington's and Benjamin Franklin's ancestral homes. Much more commonly, American travelers have visited the traditional pilgrimage sites in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Fast and relatively inexpensive air travel allows thousands of contemporary American Catholics annually to take guided tours of the great pilgrimage centers in Europe, Lourdes and Fatima, as well as newer apparitional sites such as Medjugorje and Mount Melleray. And each year many Christians—Protestant and Catholic—travel to the Holy Land. Some U.S. Jews imagine a trip to Israel, and the sacred sites there, as decisive for identity, even as a rite of passage to Jewish adulthood. During the turbulent late nineteenth century and again during and after the restless 1960s, small numbers of elite American Buddhist and Hindu converts homaged sacred sites in India and Japan, while Asian-American followers who entered the United States after the new immigration act of 1965 also have returned to holy places in their homeland. Pilgrimage to Mecca is a duty for all able Muslims, and by the 1990s approximately five thousand American followers were fulfilling that religious obligation each year.

If some American pilgrims have crossed national borders, others have traveled to destinations in the United States. Some of those destinations, such as battlefields and monuments, are quasi-religious, sharing some of the features of traditional pilgrimage sites. Journeys to the Stonewall Jackson Shrine in Virginia or to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., can blur the lines between tourism and pilgrimage, since those sites have meaning for the celebration of America's civil religion. Visitors to some civil religious sites, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, closely simulate ritual practice at traditionally religious shrines. By the end of the 1990s millions of visitors had left tens of thousands of artifacts and letters at that civic monument, just as Catholic pilgrims leave notes or crutches at healing shrines. As several scholars have noted, similar practices emerge at other U.S. tourist sites that claim secular status, including Graceland, Elvis Presley's Memphis home, where fans from across the country leave messages, flowers, and gifts during candlelight vigils.

But pilgrimage in the United States usually has been explicitly associated with religious traditions. American Indian peoples have long venerated certain natural and historical sites and returned regularly to perform prescribed rituals. As Vine Deloria notes in God Is Red (1992), however, the state's power sometimes constrains Indian peoples' ability to practice their faith because many have been displaced from their traditional homelands or forbidden access to holy places on federal lands. Nonetheless, Indian peoples still make round-trip religious journeys. So do many Roman Catholics, who established their first pilgrimage site on lands that would become the United States in 1620, when Spanish missionaries dedicated a small chapel to Our Lady of La Leche at St. Augustine, Florida. Since then, and especially in the twentieth century, many other shrines to Mary and the saints have appeared. And in the 1990s, Catholic pilgrims continued to visit hundreds of sacred places across the nation, including pilgrimage centers that develop around reports of miracles or apparitions. Some new religious movements also have consecrated sites as holy. For example, Christian Scientists visit the residences of founder Mary Baker Eddy and the monumental Mother Church in Boston, while Latter-Day Saints make journeys to regional Mormon temples as well as key sites of historical significance in Missouri and Utah.

Although they claim many fewer traditional sacred sites in the United States than in their homeland, post-1965 immigrants, who have transplanted a variety of faiths, have constructed (or renovated) thousands of places of worship. Some larger Hindu temples, Sikh gurdwaras, and Muslim mosques have functioned as local, regional, or national pilgrimage sites for Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants and their relatives. Although American Buddhist shrines have not appeared—there are no revered relics or sacred sites on U.S. soil—some temples draw pilgrims, often from a single ethnic group and Buddhist sect. For example, in 1996 more than 110,000 devotees, many of them Chinese immigrants, took the guided tour at southern California's Hsi Lai Temple, the largest Buddhist temple in the Western Hemisphere. The Jain Society of Metropolitan Chicago, which was the largest Jain center in North America when it opened in 1993, attracts both local Asian Indian immigrants and devotees who travel greater distances. Hindu immigrants from India and elsewhere first dedicated two major temples (in Pittsburgh and Flushing, New York) in 1977, and Hindu devotees have been especially successful in transplanting the ancient and vigorous Indian pilgrimage tradition since then. The first two temples, and the dozens consecrated since the 1970s, have attracted American pilgrims; and, as at many other religious and quasi-religious sites, new pilgrimage routes are constantly emerging in the United States.