TRANSPLANTING PILGRIMAGE TRADITIONS IN THE AMERICAS

ABSTRACT. Transplanting pilgrimage traditions, or the process of remaking the collective self in sacred places, requires new sacred places as worthy destinations. As people migrate from the lands where sacred places developed to those where such places may become only a distant memory, many communities attempt to recover their pilgrimage tradition by co‐opting sacred sites of host communities, maintaining links to their homeland, or re‐creating sacred sites in the lands of resettlement through replication, (re)recognition, creating movable rituals, celebrating sites of sacred embodiment, and ritual historicizing. Examples taken primarily from Catholic and Hindu experiences in the Western Hemisphere illustrate this preliminary typology. Transplanting pilgrimage traditions may be viewed as anchoring our individual, existential quests to fleeting ships of “collective selfhood.”     

Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Management: An International Perspective

This article explores the conceptual and empirical relationships among connectivity, employment, and specialization in advanced business services (ABS) in major cities in the United States. Correlation and regression analysis produces three chief empirical conclusions: First, the distribution of employment predicts and explains the level of connectivity; second, specialization does not predict connectivity; and, closer examination shows that these results vary by sector, which might relate to the informational characteristics of different types of ABS agglomerations. These conclusions demonstrate the continued relevance of agglomerative dynamics as they influence the networks and hierarchies of the ABS and corporate spatial structures.     

Cartographic Methods for Determining the Qibla

Abstract

Islam is an important topic in human and regional geography instruction, and major textbooks include maps showing Islam's core and rapid expansion diffusion, along with the number of pilgrims to Mecca from different countries. Determining the qibla, the sacred direction for daily prayer, and the distance to Mecca are additional topics that link human geography, Islamic mathematical geography, and modern geographic information science. Recently discovered Persian instruments used a retro-azimuthal map projection devised by medieval Muslim mathematicians to compute the qibla and distance to Mecca from anywhere within the seventeenth century realm of Islam. Modern global maps that allow the qibla and distance to Mecca to be determined from all populated areas on earth are added to the Persian instruments.     

Pilgrimage tourism in the Holy Land: The behavioural characteristics of Christian pilgrims

The purpose of this paper is to describe, characterise and analyse the behavioural characteristics of Christian pilgrims to holy sites in the Holy Land at the present time. The method of research used in this study was based on one hundred questionnaires, which the pilgrims themselves were asked to complete. The conclusion is that a scale exists upon which the tourist-behavioural features characterising present-day Christian pilgrims can be rated. This scale covers their world-view which ranks the importance of holy sites and the pilgrims' lack of interest in tourism per se. It was found that behavioural factors are related to the pilgrims' perception of holy sites in general and those in Israel in particular. The scale can be described as secularism versus sacredness and tourism versus pilgrimage. The typology is important because it allows us to classify and create other typologies and also to analyse the subject for practical purposes. Additionally, the survey highlights the increasing convergence of old-fashioned pilgrimage and tourism, which have much in common.     

Encountering God: personal reflections on 'geographer as pilgrim'

The geography of religion can be explored from a number of different perspectives. This paper takes an autobiographical approach to explore the numinous experience of God from the point of view of a practising Christian geographer. Such geographical aspects of faith experience remain an under-researched area. The context for the exploration is an academic conference in the city of Bologna, which became, in turn, an experience of religious tourism, a pilgrimage and an unexpected encounter with God. It is contextualized in terms of debates on identity, the nature of pilgrimage, memorials of death, and time–space continuums and fractures.     

明清江南观音香汛的地域系统

普陀山作为观音道场从五代时期兴起后,对江南民间产生了极为重要的影响。明清时期,观音香汛成为江南香汛的主流。不同尺度的香汛空间形成了明显的互补结构。其中,层级最高的朝香圣地是普陀山和杭州的天竺山,香汛范围可覆盖整个江南,影响广及全国。其次,是一些区域性的名山,如苏州支硎山、扬州功德山,其影响可及于数府。再次就是各地的一些小范围的观音道场。这些不同空间尺度的佛教圣地,形成了一个立体的层级结构。普陀山的香汛空间主要受区位、交通制约。天竺香汛受到、却不完全受空间距离影响,宁、绍的天竺香汛远不如嘉、湖,甚至不及苏、松,其中有着基于历史文化传统的地缘观念的影响。     

SPIRITUAL PILGRIMS AT MOUNT SHASTA,CALIFORNIA*

ABSTRACT. Even the casual visitor cannot fail to notice unusual activity on the slopes of Northern California's Mount Shasta. Prayer flags, altars, and crystals are found in the meadows; drumming, chanting, and meditation are commonplace. Non‐indigenous spiritual pilgrims have found Mount Shasta a sacred place. An amorphous group of spiritual seekers, these are sometimes referred to as “New Age” adherents or “Crystal People.” Within the Shasta‐Trinity National Forest, the situation of this sacred site exemplifies the difficulties of reconciling nonsecular claims to public lands with secular management mandates. Spiritual activism at Mount Shasta includes recently successful opposition to development of a Forest Service‐endorsed ski area. Using a questionnaire survey and interviews, we compare the characteristics, activities, and attitudes toward resource management of spiritual pilgrims and others who visit Mount Shasta's meadows. Conclusions are drawn about the environmental values and concerns of all visitors and of spiritual pilgrims in particular, including some that bear on pilgrim activities and ecological restoration efforts.     

HINDU VARANASI

ABSTRACT. Representations of Hindu faith in the built environment and pilgrim activities in the city of Varanasi, India, are explored through an analysis of the sacred geography of the place, of pilgrim travel to the city and activities within it, and of the act of crossing over from life to death through cremation. The roles of reconciling what seem to be paradoxes or contradictions and of the transcendence of geographical scale in reinforcing faith are also examined.     

Paying homage to the ‘Heavenly Mother’: Cultural-geopolitics of the Mazu pilgrimage and its implications on rapprochement between China and Taiwan

Much has been researched on tourism across (former) borders of conflict and on pilgrimage as a socio-cultural activity, but the relationship between the two remains poorly understood. Pilgrimage-tours carried out by Taiwanese devotees to the birthplace of Mazu (or Tianshang Shengmu – the Heavenly Mother) in Putian, China offer a significant platform to further our understanding of how religion can play a part in the rapprochement between China and Taiwan. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper goes beyond the conventional state-level analysis to discuss interactions and encounters forged at the levels of the temple organisations and the individual. It utilises Victor Turner’s concept of ‘communitas’ to understand how spiritual spaces are being performed through the pilgrimage rather than already existing before the pilgrimage. Importantly, the Mazu pilgrimage-tour is conceptualised not as a tourism product, but as both a social activity and a socialising one, producing opportunities for different forms of interactions between the Chinese and Taiwanese devotees. These ‘interactions along the side’ as opposed to state-level diplomatic exchanges offer insights into the ‘more-than-state’ and ‘more-than-human’ relationships that bind/divide devotees on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.