Pilgrimage in all religions is pre-eminently a journey of the religious imagination. It obviously constitutes physical movement from one place to another, but at the same time involves spiritual or temporal movement. Pilgrimage may project the believer across lines of gender, ethnicity, language, class, and locality. Yet even as pilgrims believe that they are transcending the ‘imagined community’ of their immediate locality or group, pilgrimage creates new boundaries and distinctions. In the hope of creating new horizons or reaffirming contact with a spiritual centre, pilgrims set off from home, encounter ‘others’ and return with a sharpened awareness of difference and similarity. In sacred centres shared by pilgrims from different faiths, such as Jerusalem or the Tomb of Abraham in Hebron/ al-Khalil, the heightened sense of distinction can be particularly intense (Webber 1985). Pilgrimage may also create a different sense of ‘home’, so that some pilgrims come to identify it with some place other than their place of origin or departure.
The study of pilgrimage has challenged anthropology. Anthropologists have generally explored its impact in small-scale, face-to-face communities, but since the 1970s, like scholars in neighbouring disciplines such as the history of religion, they have increasingly taken its historical, doctrinal, political, and transnational dimensions into account (Eickelman and Pisca-tori 1990). Victor Turner (1973; 1974; Turner and Turner 1978) was one of the first modern anthropologists to explore systematically the translocal implications of pilgrimage, adapting the sociological concepts of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ and Van Gennep’s notions of rites of passage to conceive of pilgrimage as a process involving three stages: separation (from one’s ‘home’ or conventional surroundings); the ‘lim-inal’ stage of the journey itself, including an intensified sense of the sacred, a strong sense of communitas (‘community’) and temporary release from ordinary social bonds; and the reaggregation of ‘homecoming’.
Turner’s generalizations on the similarities of all pilgrimage movements did not go unchallenged. Thus Sallnow (1981) argues that pilgrimages to Andean shrines indeed temporarily abrogate existing patterns of social relations and create a supralocal arena in which novel social alignments may arise, but that these directly engender endemic competition and conflict. He argues that assuming communitas as the pilgrims’ goal is spurious, leading to a deterministic view of what is essentially a polymorphic phenomenon. Likewise Nissan (1988) argues that the major Buddhist pilgrimage centres in Sri Lanka reflect multiple collective historical representations rather than a unified tradition. Finally, the claim that pilgrimage is ‘initially unstructured and outside the bounds of religious orthodoxy’ (E. Turner 1987: 330) is belied by Islam, in which the pilgrimage to Mecca (the haajj) is a highly structured and ‘orthodox’ event, the rules for which are set out in the Qur’an.
It would be tempting to assume a fixed hierarchy of sacred space and sacred journeys in world religious traditions, but the sense of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ is in constant flux. What is ‘central’ to some believers in a given space and time may be peripheral to others. Thus the multiple belief systems within Hinduism preclude identifying any formal hierarchy among the hundreds of holy places which over twenty million pilgrims visit annually; in Islam, Shi’i Muslims — roughly 10 per cent of Muslims worldwide — consider Mecca only as one spiritual centre among others (such as Karbala and Najaf in Iraq and Qum in Iran); and for the Alevi Muslims of Turkey, the genuine pilgrimage is one of the heart and not one of physical movement.
In all religious traditions, pilgrimage is complex and multilayered. It can subvert local orthodoxy, but it can also link local and regional pilgrimage traditions — called ‘visits’ (ziyarat) in many parts of the Muslim Middle East — to more universal ones, embed universal religious practices in the local religious imagination, and sustain complementary gender roles. The creative tension between pilgrimage as envisioned by priests and the religious elite and popular practices can even contribute to a major reorientation in thought and practice — in late medieval Europe, the rise of long-distance pilgrimages facilitated shifting popular religious sensibility to assuming that God acted for saints rather than through them (Kieckhefer 1984: 10, 25). In Judaism, visitational dreams have encouraged Tunisian and Moroccan Jewish immigrants to Israel to ‘transplant’ shrines of saints and sages to their new home (Deshen and Shokeid 1974). Finally, in modern times, the lines between religious pilgrimage and reunions reaffirming ‘family values’ or other non-religious ones have increasingly blurred, as among American southerners of Scottish origin (Neville 1987).
