Approaching Pilgrimage Methodological Issues Involved in Researching Routes, Sites and Practices 9780367682231, 9780367684853, 9781003137764

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Approaching Pilgrimage

This volume seeks to explore pilgrimage studies as a distinctive sub-field of research and to define its key methodological approaches and problems. Pilgrimage studies have long been influenced by academic disciplines such as anthropology, and this volume considers new insights that pilgrimage studies can offer to these disciplinary fields. Bringing together experienced pioneers and a younger generation of pilgrimage scholars, the chapters address the directions contemporary pilgrimage research is taking and how it is developing into future. Covering topics like digital pilgrimage, multi-site pilgrimages, and long-term ethnography, with examples from Europe, the Middle East, and Japan, this is an important resource for all researchers engaging with pilgrimage. Mario Katić is an Associate Professor at the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, University of Zadar. John Eade is Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Roehampton and Visiting Professor at Toronto University.

Routledge Studies in Pilgrimage, Religious Travel and Tourism Series Editors: Simon Coleman, Dee Dyas, John Eade, Jaś Elsner and Ian Reader

The public prominence of religion has increased globally in recent years, while places associated with religion, such as pilgrimage centers, and famous cathedrals, temples, and shrines have attracted growing numbers of visitors and media attention. Such developments are part of a global process where different forms of travel—physical movement such as labor and lifestyle migration, tourism of various forms, the cultural heritage industry and pilgrimage—have become a major feature of the modern world. These translocal and transnational processes involve flows of not just people but also material objects, ideas, information, images, and capital. This series provides a new forum for studies based around these themes, drawing together research on the relationships between religion, travel, and tourism from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, ranging from anthropology, sociology, geography, history, and religious studies to newly emergent areas such as tourism and migration studies. The Dynamics of Pilgrimage Christianity, Holy Places and Sensory Experience Dee Dyas Muslim Women’s Pilgrimage to Mecca and Beyond Reconfiguring Gender, Religion, and Mobility Edited by Marjo Buitelaar, Manja Stephan-Emmrich and Viola Thimm The Limits of Pilgrimage Place T. K. Rousseau Approaching Pilgrimage Methodological Issues Involved in Researching Routes, Sites and Practices Edited by Mario Katić and John Eade

For a full list of titles in this series, visit www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Pilgrimage-Religious-Travel-and-Tourism/book-series/RSRTT

Approaching Pilgrimage

Methodological Issues Involved in Researching Routes, Sites and Practices

Edited by Mario Katić and John Eade

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Mario Katić and John Eade; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Mario Katić and John Eade to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9780367682231 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367684853 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003137764 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003137764 Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures List of contributors   1 Approaching Pilgrimage: Introduction

vii ix 1

MARIO KATIĆ AND JOHN EADE

PART I

Time and Pilgrimage   2 The Method of Participant Observation, Communication and Changing Pilgrimage Practices

9 11

JOHN EADE

  3 Twists, Turns and Changing Directions: Reflections on Long-Term Studies on a Japanese Pilgrimage Path

23

IAN READER

PART II

Positionality and Experiencing Pilgrimage

41

  4 Displacing Religion in Greek Cypriot Pilgrimages to the Turkish-Occupied Monastery of Apostolos Andreas in Cyprus

43

EVGENIA MESARITOU

  5 Walking the Sutra: A Semiotic Theory of Pilgrimage TATSUMA PADOAN

59

vi Contents PART III

Multi-site and Multi-role Ethnography and Pilgrimage77   6 Researching the Baptism Sites along the Jordan River: A Multi-sited Ethnography of Adjacent Places

79

LIOR LEWIN-CHEN

  7 Multi-sited and Multi-role Research of Bosnian Croat Pilgrimages

96

MARIO KATIĆ

PART IV

Methodological Techniques and Tactics

111

  8 Epistemological and Ethical Challenges of Gathering and Interpreting Personal Prayers from the Archives

113

MIRELA HROVATIN

  9 The Visual Anthropology of Pilgrimages: Exploring the Making of Films and Photographs

126

MANOËL PÉNICAUD

10 The Ethnography of Hasidic Pilgrimage in the Digital Age

147

GABI ABRAMAC

11 Studying Mecca Elsewhere: Exploring the Meanings of the Hajj for Muslims in Morocco and the Netherlands

166

KHOLOUD AL-AJARMA AND MARJO BUITELAAR

12 Afterword: On Multiplying Methods and Expanding the Field

183

SIMON COLEMAN

Index195

Figures

5.1 Tracing action in pilgrimage: actants, or dynamic roles played by human and nonhuman actors 6.1 A map of the Jordan Valley marking the locations of the baptism sites 6.2 A senior Israeli officer accompanies the Greek Orthodox patriarch in a ceremony at Qasr El Yahud baptism site 9.1 Rachel’s Tomb, Library of Congress Print and photographs Division, Washington, c. 1920 9.2 Rachel’s Tomb, 2014 © Pénicaud 9.3 Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, 2015 © Pénicaud 9.4 Festive effervescence in the Ghriba Synagogue, 2014 © Pénicaud 9.5 Candles and tears in the Ghriba Synagogue, 2014 © Pénicaud 9.6 Greek Orthodox Nun kissing the Icon of the Dormition, Jerusalem, 2015 © Pénicaud

72 82 89 128 128 133 142 142 143

Contributors

Gabi Abramac is a sociolinguist and anthropologist. She runs a language institute in Zagreb, Croatia, and is a researcher at the Moshe David Gaon Center for Ladino Culture at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Kholoud Al-Ajarma is a Lecturer and teaches on the Globalised Muslim World at the University of Edinburgh. Marjo Buitelaar is full Professor of Contemporary Islam from an anthropological perspective at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Simon Coleman is Chancellor Jackman Professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. John Eade is Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Roehampton and Visiting Professor at Toronto University. Mirela Hrovatin is a Senior Expert Anthropologist in the Croatian Ministry of Culture and Media working in the field of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) safeguarding and an Assistant Professor at the Catholic University of Croatia. Mario Katić is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, University of Zadar. Lior Lewin-Chen is an anthropologist specializing in cultural and political aspects of sacred places. He is currently the director of social scientific research at the Nature Reserves and National Parks Authority in Israel. Evgenia Mesaritou holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge and teaches at the University of Cyprus. Tatsuma Padoan is Lecturer in East Asian Religions (Assistant Professor) at University College Cork (UCC) and a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London. He is co-director of SENSA Lab at UCC.

x Contributors Manoël Pénicaud is an anthropologist and a research fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is a member of the Institut d’ethnologie méditerranéenne européenne et comparative (IDEMEC, AixMarseille University). Ian Reader is Professor Emeritus at the University of Manchester, where he was previously Professor of Japanese Studies.

1

Approaching Pilgrimage Introduction Mario Katić and John Eade

Introduction Pilgrimage sites and practices are highly complex, multivocal and multi-layered. This diversity has produced literature that covers almost every aspect of the social and cultural contexts within which pilgrimage sites and practices exist and are created and (re)created, i.e. politics, tourism, migration, place-making, heritage, etc. (see, for example, Badone and Roseman 2004; Coleman and Eade 2004; CollinsKreiner and Gattrell 2006; Ross-Bryant 2013; Eade and Katić 2014; Katić et al. 2014; Maddrell et al. 2014; Reader 1993, 2013, 2015; Di Giovine and Garcia-­ Fuentes 2016; Pazos 2016; Eade and Katić 2018; Flaskerud and Natvig 2017; Coleman and Eade 2018; Coleman and Bowman 2019; Rousseau 2022). However, the anthropology of pilgrimage initially paid scant attention to the methodological issues involved in the study of contemporary pilgrimage. In their seminal work Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978), Victor and Edith Turner do mention personal experience as one of the important aspects of pilgrimage research, but they do not problematize their approach. At the same time, as Simon Coleman notes, their book does reveal an awareness of their intellectual and methodological shift in focus ‒ away from social context towards symbolic complex, from the village-bound Ndembu in central Africa towards the mobile pilgrim more globally and from intimate rivalries to anonymous encounters (Coleman 2021: 21). During the 1980s and early 1990s, a number of publications explored the limitations of the communitas model (see, for example, Sallnow 1981, 1987; Morinis 1984; Coleman and Elsner 1991; Eade and Sallnow 1991). For example, while Turners travelled internationally focussing on shrines as sacred centres, Michael Sallnow concentrated on intensive fieldwork over two years in one country ‒ Peru ‒ and followed the movement of pilgrims from their rural home in the High Andes to a particular mountain glacier and a shrine and their return as well as archival research. Through this deeply immersive approach, he was able to provide a deeper sense of the physical, social and economic contexts that shape pilgrimage and other aspects of life (Coleman 2021: 89). At the same time, in his magnum opus Pilgrims of the Andes (1987), the issue of method is largely taken for granted. It was only from the mid-1990s that pilgrimage researchers began to discuss their different approaches and the methodological issues related to experience and reflexivity DOI: 10.4324/9781003137764-1

2  Mario Katić and John Eade (Dubisch 1995; Frey 1998). Recent pilgrimage research has explored more deeply the sensorial and affective experience of pilgrimage (Reader 2005; Maddrell et al. 2014; Dyas 2020; Eade and Stadler 2022), but again the focus has not been on methodological techniques, even if methodology is there in the background. One of the advantages of long-term involvement with a particular site is the ability to explore backstage. Most studies are undertaken within a relatively short period of time – usually no longer than a year and often within a few months. The limitation of this approach is its inability to see how beliefs and practices can change over time. Although the continuing attraction of the Turnerian paradigm resides in its fit with the ways in which respondents usually present their involvement to outsiders, working with volunteer helpers at a shrine over time, for example, can reveal the tensions and power struggles which may be hidden from outsiders ‒ see Eade (1991), Katić and Eade (2022). About the Volume Studying pilgrimage involves methodological and conceptual challenges. As Simon Coleman emphasizes, there are many difficult questions we need to address even before we actually start the research: Where to draw the line in deciding what comes under the frame of pilgrimage activity? How to observe diffuse behaviours as well as firmly delineated ritual forms? How to make comparisons across both religions and cultures? What vocabulary to use in describing such a range of activities? (Coleman 2021: 11) We examined some of these questions at the first Pilgrimage Studies Network of EASA workshop held between 4 and 6 September 2019 in Zadar. The workshop brought together 15 pilgrimage scholars to discuss the key methodological issues they faced during their research. The papers selected for this volume in a sense represent the current methodological situation within pilgrimage studies. We have divided the volume into four sections, each focussing on a different issue and different methodological approaches, viz. time and pilgrimage, positionality and experiencing pilgrimage, multi-sited and multi-role ethnography and pilgrimage, and methodological techniques and tactics. Yet, at the same time, they are all interconnected, and all these issues are relevant and important for pilgrimage research. The chapters demonstrate the complexity of the pilgrimage sites and pilgrimage practices as well as the diversity of methodological approaches. Through this volume, we created a facilitative environment for exploring the different approaches towards pilgrimage but, more importantly, we also tried to set the stage for future pilgrimage research. By bringing together experienced pioneers and a younger generation of pilgrimage scholars, we seek to explore the directions that contemporary pilgrimage research is taking, how much they are still framed by the fundamental concepts of pilgrimage studies, what kind of development the sub-field is experiencing and what are the major drivers of that development. Our

Approaching Pilgrimage: Introduction  3 aim is to undertake this exploration through the different approaches that people are taking in their study of pilgrimage routes, sites and practices. Chapter Overview and Topics Covered Part I: Time and Pilgrimage

In this section, the most experienced pilgrimage researchers and pilgrims contributing to this volume, John Eade and Ian Reader, reflect on their research over the past four decades. Since they have witnessed and participated in the development of pilgrimage studies, we gain an insider view of both changes in pilgrimage research and the pilgrimage sites they have studied, as well as their own development as researchers/pilgrims. They show how these developments are related since their interpretations have taken different directions over time and pilgrimage contexts have also changed. This raises a more general question: After several decades, are we looking at the same sites or have the sites and practices become something quite different? Long-term observation and participation are still the foundations of ethnographic research, and this seems even more relevant in pilgrimage research since pilgrimages are a unique practice that are happening in a very dense time frame and involve the immersion of the researcher. It also takes time for researchers to get into a particular pilgrimage site and practice before they can truly understand what is going on and then perhaps realize that they have only started to ask the right questions. It also takes time to try to cover all the possible aspects pilgrimages offer us. Both John Eade and Ian Reader have been dealing with the same pilgrimages for decades, but every few years their published papers and books have focussed on some other aspects (for example, Eade 1991, 1992, 2020, 2022; Reader 2007, 2011). In their chapters in this volume, John Eade draws on his tangled engagement with religion and experience of journeying to and working at Lourdes between 1967 and 1992 and then again between 2013 and 2018, while Ian Reader explores the importance of long-term observation and research engagement as a vital research method and how such long-term research can change one’s views. This section provides us with a unique opportunity to look from an emic, insider viewpoint at how the role of the pilgrimage researcher changes as well as how pilgrimage sites and practices change, how time influences our interpretation of pilgrimages, and all that from the pens of two pioneers of pilgrimage research. Part II: Positionality and Experiencing Pilgrimage

In the introduction to the 2011 edition of Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture by Victor and Edith Turner, Deborah Ross emphasizes that they: fostered and encouraged the ’anthropology of experience’, the idea that the anthropologist must exist fully inside the experience of those being studied. This approach would encourage the anthropologist’s own reflexive awareness as part of the fieldwork process. (2011: xxxiii)

4  Mario Katić and John Eade However, in their book, the Turners do not actually write or use the experience perspective. Only in the conclusion of the book do they reference the importance of experience and they do so in the context of explaining one of their most important concepts connected to the pilgrimage experience – communitas − presenting it as ‘a feeling of endless power, and as a fact of everyone’s experience’ (Turner and Turner 1978: 251). It was actually Alan Morinis who first emphasized the methodological aspect of experience while researching pilgrimage: There are methodological difficulties in trying to understand the highly individualized world of sight, sound, and smell, but we cannot neglect what the pilgrim may view as of utmost importance, what might motivate his journey, and what, in the end, may leave the most lasting impression. (Morinis 1992: 17) Morinis also touched on the problem of framing the pilgrim’s experience: Many pilgrimages specify what a pilgrim must see, hear, touch, and taste. Austerities like fasting, self-mutilation, fire-walking, hook-swinging, and the like, which are common features of pilgrimage, also concern direct experience. It is valid to conceptualize pilgrimages as cultural channels along which individuals pass, carrying out actions (often specified) in pursuit of predictable experiences. (1992: 21) The advantages and disadvantages of the researcher’s positionality and experience in pilgrimage research were subsequently explored by Jill Dubisch (1995), Nancy Frey (1998), John Eade (2022) and Ian Reader (this volume) among others. Although for the contributors to this volume and for pilgrimage research in general, the aspect of experience and positionality is important, two chapters in this section are particularly concerned with these issues. Evgenia Mesaritou reflects on her positionality as a Greek Cypriot ethnographer conducting research in Cyprus, while Tatsuma Padoan draws on Taussig’s idea of ‘pilgrimage as method’ (1997), which is based on the principle of translation as signification, i.e. anthropologists are pilgrims who are translating and making sense of the ethnographic Other. Padoan also examines the role of the ethnographer as a translator by referring to his analysis of the flow of pilgrimage where he draws on his participant observation of ascetic practices and his bodily experience of the environment. Part III: Multi-sited and Multi-role Ethnography and Pilgrimage

Although multi-sited ethnography was designed over 20 years ago (Marcus 1995) and used by scholars researching pilgrimage (Coleman and von Hellermann 2013), not many studies of pilgrimage have discussed this methodological approach (Loustau and DeConinck 2019). It seems that pilgrimage scholars, who

Approaching Pilgrimage: Introduction  5 were using multi-local ethnography, did not feel the need to discuss it particularly (see, for example, Reader 2005). This lacuna may be due to the fact that while the pilgrims are mobile, pilgrimage sites are usually fixed and mostly consist of one location. According to Simon Coleman, one of the biggest theoretical and methodological temptations of pilgrimage studies is ‘singularism’, looking at one individual shrine within which we lose vibrant and ongoing articulations of pilgrimage landscape that operate transregionally and transnationally (Coleman 2021: 240). In a recently published special issue of the Journal of Global Catholicism, the editors and authors do address the multi-sited approach to pilgrimages by concentrating on pilgrims visiting more than one pilgrimage site, route or shrine over the course of their lifetimes (Loustau and DeConick 2019: 13). Loustau and DeConinck develop a useful framing metaphor – the ­palimpsest – to describe what happens when connections between separate sites and experiences are constructed through journeys, objects, narratives or memories (Coleman 2021: 48). Where pilgrimage sites are connected and people visit multiple sites, the focus of the researchers directs towards the sites rather than the pilgrims. Hence, Lior Chen in this volume discusses three baptism sites along the Jordan River which are linked through similar mythologies that led to their creation. Their geographical proximity ‘forced’ him to develop a ‘multi-sited ethnography of adjacent places’, which led him to compare the sites as well as closely study each one. In his chapter, Mario Katić adds another layer to this discussion of multi-sited ethnography ‒ the problem of the role played by the researcher during the research. By taking into consideration four different pilgrimage sites created by the same community – Bosnian Croats ‒ he explores the advantages of changing roles at these different sites. This approach raises the issue of how the context chosen by the researcher influences the interpretation of the particular pilgrimage. Through these two chapters, we go beyond the practice of edited collections adopted in pilgrimage studies where each chapter focusses only on one site (Loustau and DeConick 2019: 15). Part IV: Methodological Techniques and Tactics

After these very engaged and personally involved discussions, the chapters in this section approach pilgrimages from a more etic, outsider viewpoint. The authors are themselves very much involved in their selected topics, but their methodological approach differs from the earlier chapters since they demonstrate the use of different research techniques and tactics. In this sense, we consider techniques as tools for analysing different materials that pilgrimage research offers to us, while tactics are different ways through which researchers manage to bypass the obstacles they encounter. Technique, then, involves looking at pilgrims’ experience not only by using archive work but also through the ethnographic gaze and interpretation. In Mirela Hrovatin’s chapter on personal prayers, we see what a very rich source of data is provided by archives, which include old chronicle and miracle books connected to various Christian shrines.

6  Mario Katić and John Eade Images also constitute powerful resources for the study of pilgrimages, and in the following chapter, Manoël Pénicaud discusses his long-term experience and technique of visual approach towards pilgrimages. From the first appearance of the camera until today, pilgrimage sites and practices have always interested photographers and film-makers, but visual material, especially in today’s digital age, has always been a very useful tool for pilgrimage researchers. Whether it be for their personal collection or in presentations, lectures, papers and books, the visuality of pilgrimage has become a prime area of study. Pénicaud seek to answer the following questions: How can we truly use, in an interpretative sense, the visual material created during our research? Can such material be more helpful than our personal observation and experience of the pilgrimage? Their answers involve examining both methodological (writing, shooting and filming, ‘ritual script’, improvisation, editing, etc.) and epistemological (‘off-screen’, subjectivity, aesthetics, emotion, restitution, destination, dissemination, etc.) issues. In the last chapters, we turn to methodological challenges generated by gender. Gabi Abramac discusses the problem of being unable as a woman to study Hasidic pilgrimage and observe it in its ‘original’ context, while Kholoud Al-Ajarma and Marjo Buitelaar research hajj pilgrimage to Mecca by working with Muslims in Morocco and the Netherlands. This methodological question is rarely asked in pilgrimage research. While there has always been an awareness of gender issues in pilgrimage studies, very rarely has a female researcher tried to research pilgrimage where she is prevented from being a participant. Perhaps this is because only recently with the development of different applications in the digital era could researchers such as Gabi Abramac use them as a methodological tactic in order to try to study these pilgrimages. She has resorted to digital ethnography where she was a ‘vicarious’ pilgrim to the holy sites of Hasidic Jews in Ukraine. She uses a WhatsApp application to participate in the preparations for this exclusively male pilgrimage and to explore backstage events, demonstrating how it is possible to study places and practices that we cannot reach because of our gender, national and/or religious identity, economic situation, etc. On the other hand, Kholoud and Marjo conducted ethnographic research on the hajj without ever accompanying their interlocutors on the hajj. Kholoud studied the socio-cultural embeddedness of the hajj in Morocco, while Marjo investigated the significance of Mecca in the multiple senses of belonging for pilgrims with Moroccan or Turkish backgrounds in the Netherlands. These chapters correspond well with Coleman’s call for greater appreciation of the politics of attention surrounding the construction of knowledge about pilgrimage (Coleman 2021: 239). References Badone, E. & Roseman, S. (eds.). 2004. Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Coleman, S. 2021. Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement. New York: New York University Press.

Approaching Pilgrimage: Introduction  7 Coleman, S. & Bowman, M. 2019. Religion in Cathedrals: Pilgrimage, Heritage, Adjacency, and the Politics of Replication in Northern Europe. Religion, 49(1), 1–23. Coleman, S. & Eade, J. (eds.). 2004. Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion. London and New York: Routledge. Coleman, S. & Eade, J. (eds.). 2018. Pilgrimage and Political Economy. Oxford and New York: Berghahn. Coleman, S. & Elsner, J. 1991. Pilgrimage: Past and Present in the World Religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Collins-Kreiner & Gattrell, J. 2006. Tourism, Heritage and Pilgrimage: The Case of Haifa’s Coleman, S. & von Hellermann, P. 2013. Multi-Sited Ethnography Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods. London and New York: Routledge. Di Giovine, M. & Garcia-Fuentes, J.-M. 2016. Sites of Pilgrimage, Sites of Heritage: An Exploratory Introduction. International Journal of Tourism Anthropology, 5(1/2), 1–23. Dubisch, J. 1995. In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dyas, D. 2020. The Dynamics of Pilgrimage: Christianity, Holy Places, and Sensory Experience. London and New York: Routledge. Eade, J. 1991. Order and Power at Lourdes: Lay Helpers and the Organization of a Pilgrimage Shrine. In Eade, J. & Sallnow, M. (eds.), Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage. London and New York: Routledge. Eade, J. 1992. Pilgrimage and Tourism at Lourdes, France. Annals of Tourism Research, 19(1), 18–32. Eade, J. 2020. The Invention of Sacred Places and Rituals: A Comparative Study of Pilgrimage. Religions, 11(12), 649. Eade, J. 2022. Sacralising the Landscape: Water and the Development of a Pilgrimage Shrine. In Bielo, J. & Ron, A. (eds.), Landscapes of Christianity: Destination, Temporality, Transformation. London: Bloomsbury. Eade, J. & Katić, M. (eds.). 2014. Pilgrimage, Politics and Place-Making in Eastern Europe. Farnham: Ashgate. Eade, J. & Katić, M. 2018. Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism: Commemorating the Dead. London and New York: Routledge. Eade, J. & Sallnow, M. (eds.). 1991. Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage. London and New York: Routledge. Eade, J. & Stadler, N. 2022. An Introduction to Pilgrimage, Animism, and Agency: Putting Humans in their Place. Religion, State and Society, 50(2), 137–146. Flaskerud, I. & Natvig, R. (eds.). 2017. Muslim Pilgrimage in Europe. London and New York: Routledge. Frey, N. 1998. Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Katić, M., Klarin, T. & McDonald, M. (eds.). 2014. Pilgrimage and Sacred Places in Southeast Europe: History, Religious Tourism and Contemporary Trends. Zurich and Berlin: Lit Verlag. Katić, M. & Eade, J. 2022. The Role of Volunteers in Pilgrimage Studies: Autobiographic Reflections on Belief and the Performance of Multiple Roles. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 12(2), 580–593. Loustau, M. Roscoe & DeConinck, K. 2019. Editors’ Introduction. Journal of Global Catholicism, 3(1), 12–25.

8  Mario Katić and John Eade Maddrell, A., della Dora, V., Scafi, A. & Walton, H. 2014. Christian Pilgrimage, Landscape and Heritage: Journeying to the Sacred. London and New York: Routledge. Marcus, G. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117. Morinis, A. 1984. Pilgrimage in the Hindu Tradition: A Case Study of West Bengal. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Morinis, A. 1992. Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Publishing Group. Pazos, A. (ed.). 2016. Pilgrims and Pilgrimages as Peacemakers in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Farnham: Ashgate. Reader, I. 1993. Dead to the World: Pilgrims in Shikoku. In Reader, I. & Walter, T. (eds.), Pilgrimage in Popular Culture (pp. 107–136). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Reader, I. 2005. Making Pilgrimages: Meaning and Practice in Shikoku. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Reader, I. 2007. Pilgrimage Growth in the Modern World: Meanings and Implications. Religion, 37, 210–229. Reader, I. 2011. Secularisation, RIP? Nonsense! The “rush hour away from the gods” and THE Decline of Religion in Contemporary Japan. Journal of Religion in Japan, 1, 7–36. Reader, I. 2013. Pilgrimage in the Marketplace. London and New York: Routledge. Reader, I. 2015. Japanese Studies of Pilgrimage. In Albera, D. & Eade, J. (eds.), International Perspectives on Pilgrimage Studies. London and New York: Routledge. Ross-Bryant, L. 2013. Pilgrimage in the National Parks. London and New York: Routledge. Rousseau, T.K. 2022. The Limits of Pilgrimage Place. London and New York: Routledge. Sallnow, M. 1981. Communitas Reconsidered: The Sociology of Andean Pilgrimage. Man, 16, 163–182. Sallnow, M. 1987. Pilgrims of the Andes: Regional Cults in Cusco. Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Turner, V. and E. Turner. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

Part I

Time and Pilgrimage

2

The Method of Participant Observation, Communication and Changing Pilgrimage Practices John Eade

Introduction Since the early days of anthropological fieldwork, many researchers have returned over the years to the place(s) where they began their study despite such obstacles as limited opportunities to undertake further research, academic and personal commitments and post-colonial controls on visiting western scholars. Some scholars of religion and pilgrimage have studied the same pilgrimage location over a number of years (see, for example, Coleman 2000, 2004, 2016; Eck 1985, 1993/2003), and in my case, annual visits to Lourdes over many years have helped me to reflect on the manifold changes in place and practice. Had I pursued a typical research project lasting just a few years I could have undertaken a lot of interviews with a variety of people and observed what was happening in various locations within the sanctuary but I would have been unable to detect how long these practices had been established and whether they were replaced by new practices. I started visiting the Roman Catholic shrine of Lourdes, located in south-west France near the Pyrenees, in 1968 and returned each year until 1992. In 2013, I began again to go on pilgrimage to Lourdes and continued until 2019 so I was able to see the ways in which the shrine changed both physically and ritually. The shrine had emerged after a young local woman, Bernadette Soubirous, claimed in 1858 to have experienced visions of Mary, the mother of Jesus, at a grotto outside the small town and during one of the séances, which had attracted local people including state officials. Bernadette uncovered a spring whose waters became associated with claims of miraculous healing. The shrine became an internationally famous Marian pilgrimage centre, and after the Second World War, the number of people visiting Lourdes rapidly increased, reaching over ten million in 2010 when Pope John Paul 11 visited the shrine. The large number of pilgrims included diocesan and other groups, which brought those using wheelchairs or on stretchers, and these groups relied on volunteer helpers to provide assistance during the lengthy journeys and at the shrine. However, volunteers were also needed to assist during the various mass celebrations, at the baths where people could bathe in the water from the spring, as well as helping those staying in the hospitals or arriving and departing from the railway station and the airport. The work of these volunteers was coordinated by a confraternity, which had been founded during the 1880s and developed into a large, hierarchical organisation with military-style insignia, especially medals. DOI: 10.4324/9781003137764-3

12  John Eade During the 1950s, students at the University of Oxford began a pilgrimage to Lourdes through the Catholic Chaplaincy. It went to Lourdes for a week in late July when many British pilgrimages were visiting and members provided voluntary labour as members of the confraternity at various key locations within the shrine as well as the station and the airport. I joined the pilgrimage in 1968 when there were only around 24 members, but it rapidly expanded during the 1970s largely through the inspiring leadership of the university chaplains. By 1992, when I took a break of 21 years, I had gained considerable experience of helping at the shrine, the station and the airport, but working inside the baths was the most emotionally and physically demanding of all the jobs I volunteered to undertake. When I returned in 2013, I decided to concentrate on working inside the baths again so that by the time I stopped going to Lourdes seven years later I had been able to gain an extensive knowledge of how a particular pilgrimage location operated over a long period of time. Participant Observation and Changes Over Time: Working at the Baths My knowledge was largely based on participant observation, but I also talked to fellow helpers about their experience of working at the baths after each session and discussed the baths with other helpers I had come to know over the years. Although I mainly worked inside the baths, sometimes I also helped outside the baths so was able to notice important changes that challenged official rules and regulations. By the time I began working at Lourdes, the water from the spring, uncovered during the apparitions experienced by Bernadette Soubirous in 1858, had been piped to a long, one-storey building divided into male and female sections. The two sections contained small cubicles where groups of pilgrims undressed before being helped to bathe in a stone bath containing the chilling spring water. In the men’s baths, groups of helpers were allocated to each cubicle and a group leader was instructed to ensure that everyone took turns in helping the pilgrims undress, dress and bathe. When I returned in 2013, I was recognised by the supervisor of the baths so was often asked to lead a group, but when a new supervisor took over, he looked to others and I was happy to be free of the responsibility; I had more time to observe what was going on. It soon became clear that different methods and knowledge were involved in the bathing process. The older helpers assumed that they knew what to do, but in some cases, they were corrected by the group leader or the supervisor during his periodic checks on what was going on within each cubicle. For example, there were subtle changes in the bathing procedure that reflected ideological changes instigated by the religious officials. During the 1970s and 1980s, the procedure did not allow the bather much freedom of expression. Bathers were lined up and taken down into the bath where the helpers were very much in charge. The bather was asked to hold his arms against his chest and then held firmly by the helpers on either side of the bath, who lowered him backwards into the water and lifted him again. The bather was fully immersed unless he made it clear that he wanted to keep his head out of

Participant Observation, Communication and Pilgrimage Practices  13 the water. The procedure relied heavily on the helper’s strength and fitness and the bather’s readiness to trust in their expertise. After they had bathed, many pilgrims kissed a small metal statuette of the Madonna (Mary, Mother of Christ) standing close by, while some even drank the water. Twenty-one years later, the methods during the bathing process had changed to allow for greater individual choice, privacy and hygiene. The curtains, which separated the changing area from the bath section, were kept closed so that people could not watch what happened when each individual was ritually bathed. The shock of entering the very cold water was minimised to some extent by inviting each person to pray before going down the steps, and care was taken to keep the bather’s head out of the water so total immersion was dispensed with unless asked for. If anyone wanted to drink the water, they drank from a cup into which fresh water was poured from a beaker. The statuette of Our Lady was available, but again the bather had to ask for it, while the prayer cards had been disappeared. At the end of each bathing session, I joined other helpers in bathing and was able to experience physically and emotionally the impact of the ritual rather than observing the reactions of others. My participant observation was clearly shaped by the strict separation between male and female bathers (the issue of gender fluidity was not formally addressed at Lourdes). In the baths, the dominant assumption was that everyone was heterosexual. The only time homosexuality was discussed was during a bathing session where a fellow helper declared that homosexuals should not be allowed to work in the baths. Sexuality also became an issue when a pilgrim became uncomfortable about my looking at him (see Eade 2020b). In the baths, great care had to be taken when observing others, therefore, and this serves as a reminder that social interaction depends on both indirect and direct communication – an issue that I will return to later in this chapter. Photography and Place I also helped outside the baths, and my observation as a participant over many years provided me with many examples of how people’s practices changed. The most striking instance involved the growing use of photography to record what was going on. The sanctuary officials were opposed to any attempts to photograph those who were waiting to enter the baths, and attempts were made to prevent this practice through signposting and helpers telling people to desist. In the 1970s and 1980s, this prohibition was generally respected and covert photography was difficult since the use of cameras and video recorders was not easy to conceal. On my return, it became clear that many people had become accustomed to using their mobile phones to record the sanctuary’s ceremonies at various locations within the sanctuary, and they did not see why they should not also take pictures outside the baths despite the signs asking them not to do so. Helpers found it hard to enforce the prohibition since they were often busy helping those arriving on stretchers and wheelchairs to enter or leave the baths or showing people where to wait and queue. They could only try to prevent the most obvious flouting of the rules when people posed for a photograph either singly or in a group. Fortunately, I

14  John Eade was not asked to enforce the rules since I also took some photographs on my iPad and mobile phone, justifying the practice in terms of research! During conversations with other helpers, the issue of using mobile phones during ceremonies and outside the baths came up. Although most people accepted their use during ceremonies, some considered the baths to be off-limits, mainly on the grounds that people’s privacy should be respected while they prepared themselves to enter the bath. In retrospect, I realise the important role played by photography in disseminating knowledge about the shrine nationally and internationally. Bernadette was one of the first officially approved saints to be photographed while the mass reproduction of postcards spread images of the young woman, the shrine, the town and the nearby mountains far and wide. Growing affluence after the Second World War enabled the increasing numbers of visitors to record their time at Lourdes as well as their journey there and back. They could share their photographs and video recordings with their friends, keeping alive their memories of their visit and reminding them of the shrine’s continued existence. The global growth of virtual communications through the internet also helped people to maintain contact with Lourdes. The sanctuary’s officials took advantage of technological change by installing a camera at the grotto where Bernadette’s visions had taken place. People could access the website online and watch the daily ceremonies being performed, while the confraternity kept members in touch with the shrine through Facebook and regular newsletters sent by email. Those managing Facebook pages for particular groups of helpers within the confraternity, such as the Anglophone section, posted stories about events being held at the shrine and petitions for prayers of various kinds, as well as photographs of ceremonies. Pilgrimage groups, such as the one I belonged to, could also maintain contact with current and former members by Facebook and email through a similar format. Identity and Change Being involved in pilgrimage over such a long time raises the issue of how my involvement has changed. My decision to go on pilgrimage to Lourdes was linked to my determination to become a Roman Catholic while I was an undergraduate at the University of Oxford between 1965 and 1968 despite my parents’ opposition. I converted at a crucial time in the Catholic Church’s history since the Second Vatican Council, held between 1962 and 1965, had highlighted the Church’s internal divisions through intense debates between clerical and lay reformers and traditionalists. These debates shattered the widespread image of a monolithic, hierarchical institution dominated by the Vatican, and they reflected moral dilemmas concerning sex before marriage, contraception, abortion, divorce and sexual preference that transcended religious and other boundaries both nationally and internationally. For Roman Catholics, a crisis was reached when Pope Paul V1 issued the encyclical De Humanae Vitae which reaffirmed traditional teachings concerning procreation and prohibited the use of contraceptives including ‘the pill’. Many Catholics in Western Europe and North America decided to follow their own counsel with regard to birth control, although the moral dilemmas and divisions among Catholics

Participant Observation, Communication and Pilgrimage Practices  15 continued to be publicly aired through campaigns over abortion, sexual preference and clerical abuse of minors, for example. I was well aware of these debates and decided that I would forge my own path, particularly since I was involved in a relationship with a non-Catholic at the time. I felt comfortable as a member of the Oxford pilgrimage group since it was very inclusive and was led by Fr Michael Hollings, a highly charismatic priest well known for his publications on prayer, his liberal sympathies and inter-faith activities. Although members of the pilgrimage group sometimes discussed the current debates within the Church, the emphasis was on working hard as a helper at Lourdes and enjoying our time off in the evenings without engaging in divisive discussion. This emphasis tacitly accepted the deep divisions and conflicts among Roman Catholics and how these could easily disrupt relations between religious officials, helpers and others, including those providing hospitality to the visitors such as hoteliers, restaurant owners and waiters. During the 21-year break from visiting Lourdes, my religious involvement had changed considerably as had the pilgrimage group. I had become increasingly interested in other religious traditions and distanced from what I regarded as the Church’s conservative trajectory led by Pope John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI. I lost contact with the Oxford Chaplaincy pilgrimage to Lourdes, which rapidly declined during the 1990s and had to be rescued by members of the Cambridge University Chaplaincy, who recruited their own friends and relatives. When I rejoined in 2013, only a few members from the 1980s pilgrimage remained and I found that I had little in common with the younger generation. There was a similar situation when I worked once more in the baths since a younger generation had taken over and had formed strong ties and authority during the time I was away. In retrospect, some of the distance I sensed within the pilgrimage group may have also been a reaction to the reputation I had acquired as a social scientist, who had written about the pilgrimage in general and Lourdes in particular. I did not discuss my academic life with the members of the Oxford and Cambridge group, except briefly with a fellow professor, but some had heard about my work and could have been on their guard as a result. Yet, since I did not enquire directly, I was unable to put my assumptions to the test. Because nobody in the group asked me directly about my writing, I learned with surprise that one of the group leaders, whom I considered to be a conventional Catholic, had abandoned her career as a head teacher and had begun a PhD on pilgrimage where she was reading my work. Communication: Direct and Indirect Before I proceed on this reflection, I want to consider the issue of confession and my attitude towards it. When I became a Catholic, I had to decide whether I would conform to the traditional practice of confessing to a priest. I was highly resistant to confessing my errors/sins to a stranger, and while I did discuss my private life with Fr Michael Hollings, I did not observe the practice of anonymous confession in a church confessional box. The practice of confession extends beyond Roman Catholic tradition, of course, through the secular regimes of psychoanalysis and

16  John Eade psychotherapy as well as academic self-positioning through autoethnography. I had drawn on Michel Foucault’s explorations of the role played by confession in the relationship between power, knowledge and resistance during my research on Bangladeshi community politics in London (Eade 1989), but I had not used his approach to reflect on my own beliefs and practices. I kept my religious convictions to myself not only among other Catholics but also among my academic colleagues. One of the main reasons for keeping quiet in the academic arena was the hostility towards religion among most social scientists. Although religion became a ‘hot topic’ during the 1990s, the focus was directed largely at non-Christian traditions, especially Islam. Social scientists from white majoritarian backgrounds were generally unsympathetic and hostile towards Christian Churches, particularly Roman Catholicism. The idea that a researcher could be personally engaged with pilgrimage, rather than treating it as an object of study, was usually seen as very strange. Michel Foucault’s work revealed the ways in which top-down, hegemonic regimes of power and knowledge could be resisted through alternative regimes at the local level. This dynamic informed the approach I developed with Michael Sallnow in Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (1991) where we proposed that pilgrimage should be seen as a ‘realm of competing discourses’ (Eade and Sallnow 1991: 5, emphasis in the original). We suggested that analysis should concentrate on ‘how the practice of pilgrimage and the sacred powers of a shrine are constructed as varied and possible conflicting representations by the different sectors of the cultic constituency, and indeed by those outside it as well’ (Eade and Sallnow 1991: 5). In my substantive contribution to the volume, I drew on my observation of various tensions and sometimes outright conflict between volunteer helpers like myself and other pilgrims at various locations within the shrine (Eade 1991), but I realise now that tensions could be communicated indirectly as well as directly. Simmering discontent could lie beneath the surface of harmony and unity, and its existence could be communicated both directly and indirectly. People might adopt a strategy of avoidance or misinterpret the actions and motives of others. As we argued in challenging the model of communitas and anti-structure developed by Victor Turner in his highly influential publication The Ritual Process (1969) and the book he wrote with his wife, Edith, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978): [it] could be seen as representative of a particular discourse about pilgrimage rather than as an empirical description of it, one which might well co-exist or compete with alternative discourses. It is these varied discourses with their multiple meanings and understandings, brought to the shrine by different categories of pilgrims, by residents and be religious specialists, that are constitutive of the cult itself. Equally, a cult might be seen to be constituted by mutual misunderstandings, as each group attempts to interpret the actions and motives of the others in terms of its specific discourse. (Eade and Sallnow 1991: 5, italics in the original)

Participant Observation, Communication and Pilgrimage Practices  17 I still support our general critique of the Turnerian model and our focus on multiple discourses, meanings and understandings as well as misunderstandings. However, I would now emphasise more the role of individual agency, ambiguity and indirect communication rather than group membership and direct engagement between groups. Continuing Research and the Pandemic After 2018, I decided to take another break from going to Lourdes, mostly because I found working in the baths too tiring and felt increasingly detached from the pilgrimage group. I continued to be involved in writing about pilgrimage in general and Lourdes in particular and was adding to my stocks of knowledge by supervising or advising doctoral students, examining dissertations and reading submissions to the Routledge book series. However, I was keen to participate in pilgrimage activities and decided to join a one-day walk organised by the British Pilgrimage Trust (BPT). My decision to choose this kind of pilgrimage was due to a combination of factors. My reading had alerted me to an important development within pilgrimage studies as more and more research and publications were focussing on pilgrimage as a journey rather than what went on at the destination. The routes to Santiago de Compostela have attracted particular attention (see, for example, Frey 1998, 2004; Gonzalez 2013; Gemzoe 2014; Sánchez et al. 2016; Doi 2020), but pilgrimage journeys have been studied elsewhere (see Reader 2005; Singh 2013; Bowman and Sepp 2019; Jorgensen et al. 2020; Eade and Sepp, in process). The BPT had been founded in 2014 to ‘advance British pilgrimage as a form of cultural heritage that promotes holistic wellbeing, for the public benefit’.1 One of the BPT’s leading members was a colleague at my university, and he invited me to contribute to an appendix in his co-authored publication Britain’s Pilgrim Places (2020) where we described the emergence of non-Christian pilgrimage in the country due, in part, to Britain’s cultural diversity generated through global migration. Pilgrimage was defined by the BPT as a ‘journey with purpose on foot to holy/ wholesome/special places’. It encouraged those interested in joining its events that: To turn a walk into a pilgrimage, at the beginning set your private ‘intention’ – dedicate your journey to something that you want help with, or for which you want to give thanks. Pilgrimage is for everyone, promoting holistic wellbeing via pilgrim practices and connecting you with yourself, others, nature and everything beyond. (https://britishpilgrimage.org/, accessed 15/10/2021) In February 2020, just before the full impact of the pandemic struck and led to the first lockdown across the country, I participated in one of the BPT’s walks to a well-known Neolithic stone ring (‘henge’) at the village of Avebury, not far from the even more famous Stonehenge. The walk was led by a co-founder of the BPT, together with a druid and a ‘ritual facilitator’, and they took us to various Neolithic

18  John Eade sites as well as a spring on the way to the impressive ‘henge’. The BPT’s very different approach to pilgrimage made me think about Britain’s pre-Christian heritage and what attracted the 21 participants besides the three leaders and myself to walk across this rain-swept and wintry landscape. I saw the walk as an opportunity to learn about a very different approach towards pilgrimage. At the same time, in terms of method, I adopted the same practice as at Lourdes, i.e. learning through participating in various activities and observing what others were doing. Once again, I did not try to explore the walkers’ motives for undertaking the walk, although I did talk to a number of people where the issue of pilgrimage and how they defined it emerged. In terms of what they did rather than said, I can see now the extent to which communication between people was episodic and indirect. The participants usually walked along side by side with someone else, and this encouraged a lateral mode of communication which is reminiscent of the indirect, glancing nature of ritual practice observed by Simon Coleman among visitors to English cathedrals (Coleman 2019). He suggests that the concept of ‘laterality’ is more useful for analysing such behaviour rather than the long-established concepts of liminal and liminoid deployed by Victor and Edith Turner (1978) to describe the pilgrims’ freedom from structural divisions and the ritual celebration of their common humanity. This mode of indirect communication also characterised a great deal of what went on inside the baths as Lourdes. Social and cultural differences were certainly minimised as pilgrims stripped down to their pants while they waited to enter the bath, but this encouraged a great deal of indirect glancing and muted interaction rather than celebrations of universal brotherhood. Indirectness and limited group interaction were also features of the second BPT walk I went on in June 2021 after the second COVID-19 lockdown. The walk was invented to represent a section of the ‘Old Way’, a mediaeval pilgrimage route which was marked out in a fourteenth-century map and ran from the port of Southampton to the pilgrimage town of Canterbury. The one-day walk involved a tenmile walk in East Sussex, a county south of London. It began at a village church and used paths across fields and roads to the historic town of Winchelsea, where we stopped for lunch, and then down to a coastal area guarded by a sixteenth-century fort before walking up to Rye, another picturesque town and former port. This time I invited a friend to come along, and although we shared some activities such as walking together and sharing lunch and transport, we also spent a lot of the time walking on our own, chatting to other participants, listening quietly during the brief talks given by our guide and reflecting silently on what we were experiencing. There were very few occasions when we interacted as a group. The first occasion took place at the beginning of the event when the leader of the event and our guide asked us to form a circle outside the village church and introduce ourselves. Each person announced their first name and then went round the group looking at each person as they did so. Another group activity involved singing the pilgrimage song to nature that the BPT had devised when we came to a small bridge overlooking a stream. The song had been performed several times during the Avebury walk I went on in February 2020, but as only the BPT leaders of the

Participant Observation, Communication and Pilgrimage Practices  19 walk knew it, group involvement was minimal. However, on this walk, our guide had thoughtfully printed out the words on small slips of paper, handed them out when we came to the bridge and rehearsed the song before we all joined in. Given my 2020 experience, I was more prepared this time and, since I have been singing in choirs most of my life, I joined in lustily. Group participation in the ritual depends on the members knowing how to perform them. What linked the bathing at Lourdes and the ritual of singing devised by the BPT leaders was the participants’ lack of knowledge about what to expect. Those regularly worshipping in church come to know the order of service, and if they are uncertain when to stand or kneel, for example, they can watch other people. In the bath cubicles, however, curtaining off the bath section from the dressing/undressing area meant that people could not see what to expect, and they were not told by the helpers what was going to happen. When the bather entered the bathing section, they were guided through the process through a mixture of direct and indirect communication, often by gestures such as a helper putting their hands together in prayer. In the case of singing on the BPT pilgrimage walks, the muted involvement during the Avebury event was improved a year later by the words being printed out and by the rehearsal (see Gemzoe 2014 for an analysis of ritual creativity along the camino). Conclusion In this chapter, I have focused on my experience of participating in pilgrimage over time. Most studies of pilgrimage rely on research undertaken over a few years and have therefore been unable to show the ways in which destinations have changed over the years. My experience of working at Lourdes between 1968 and 1992 and then again from 2013 to 2018 enabled me to not only see the ways in which practices changed over time but also reflect on my role as a helper and my views about religion in general and Catholicism in particular. Although I have only participated in two pilgrimage walks organised by the BPT, there was a two-year gap between them, so it was possible to also see the extent to which they had changed. My participation was also bound up with my desire to experience a different kind of pilgrimage where I was an ‘ordinary’ pilgrim rather than a helper within a hierarchical confraternity. Participant observation has been criticised for sharply separating the role of the ‘objective’ observer from those being observed. Autoethnography has encouraged researchers to challenge this ‘objectivist’ approach and to both reflect on and utilise their own experience as interlocutors with others. We are observer participants rather than participant observers in other words, where we engage in dialogue with others and reflect on our various identities as we do this. The increasing use of the term ‘interlocutor’ emphasises the ways in which we communicate by talking. I treated my involvement in pilgrimage as a personal experience rather than a research project, so I did not use the standard method of collecting data, i.e. questionnaires and recorded interviews. In looking back at my involvement first at Lourdes and then on the BPT walks, I have realised how

20  John Eade much people have relied on communicating through looking and speaking. Looking involves a gaze which is shaped by changing forces (social, cultural, political, economic, material, etc.). The development of Lourdes as a pilgrimage shrine was intimately bound up with different forms of gazing as they changed from Bernadette’s séances onwards. Local people came to watch her gazing at an apparition they could not see. The water from the spring, which she uncovered during one of those séances, came to be associated with claims of miraculous healing where the bodies of those, who claimed to have been healed, were subject to the gaze of the medical profession, clergy and ‘ordinary’ pilgrims. The invention of photography meant that Bernadette could be photographed along with the developing shrine, and these photographs were used for the booming market of postcards sold in the expanding number of shops in the ‘pilgrim town’ that grew up outside the sanctuary gates. During the period I have been involved in pilgrimage to Lourdes, the practices involved in looking at bodies, either directly or through a camera lens, changed as did our reliance on talking to people. These changes affected the way I interacted with others and learned from them. When I started working as a helper, there was a very strict and authoritarian approach towards ‘helping’ pilgrims. By the time I returned in 2013, this approach had softened and we were encouraged to respect people’s individual wishes rather than telling them what to do. Inside the baths, this facilitative approach had its limitations since bathers were not sure what to do when, for example, they were invited to come behind the curtain separating the bath from the changing area. We were told by the senior officials to keep quiet and limit our communication with the bathers and with one another, so often people were unsure about what to expect. There was a greater reliance on picking up nonverbal cues by listening to the sounds of bathing behind the curtain and looking at those who emerged from behind the curtain after their bath. Both inside and outside the baths, respecting people’s individual wishes had its limitations, of course. The bathers were expected to observe standard procedures, such as waiting in line, stripping down to their pants and praying before entering the bath. Inside the baths, they were not allowed to take photographs of other bathers or ‘selfies’, while outside the baths there was an attempt to stop people taking photographs through signage and telling people directly to stop using their cameras and mobile phones. Looking at others was constrained by a variety of regulations at different locations within the shrine, therefore, with the interaction between people frequently taking an indirect rather than direct form of communication. The interaction between those participating in the BPT walks also relied heavily on indirect communication as the participants walked in small groups and communicated laterally rather than face to face. This mode of communication highlighted the lack of familiarity with what was going on among people who in many cases did not know one another. Ritual was the standard way of bringing strangers together, but in the baths and on the BPT walks, most people did not know what to expect. Turnerian communitas depends on sharing some common ground during group participation and ritual encourages this, whether in a religious setting or a secular context such as a cafe. My role as a helper during the 1970s and 1980s was

Participant Observation, Communication and Pilgrimage Practices  21 assisted by a standard format communicated through clear verbal instructions and cards in a number of languages. When I returned 21 years later, the cards were taken away and we were asked to respect the bathers’ agency as much as possible. Of course, there was still a standard format in operation, but our method of helping was less didactic and relied more on non-verbal communication such as gestures. Participant observation/observer participation over time is affected by the changing ways in which we view the world around us. My visits to Lourdes were coloured by my changing attitudes towards the Church and religion in general. Those attitudes were influenced by my growing knowledge about the different forms pilgrimage takes around the world, the complex relationship between pilgrimage and tourism, the growing interest in pilgrimage as a journey rather than what happens at the destination and my involvement with other pilgrimage researchers through conferences, networks such as the European Association of Social Anthropologist’s pilgrimage network (PilNet), supervising and helping other researchers and publications. I realised that my participation as a helper was increasingly influenced by my academic knowledge and my interaction with some people working at Lourdes was shaped by my growing reputation as a pilgrimage ‘expert’. Those whom I worked with in the baths and most of my fellow BPT walkers did not know about my academic expertise, so I was able to keep my observations and thoughts to myself. Note 1  See https://britishpilgrimage.org/the-bpt/

References Bowman, M. & Sepp, T. 2019. Caminoisation and Cathedrals: Replication, the Heritagisation of Religion, and the Spiritualisation of Heritage. Religion, 49(1), 74‒98. Coleman, S. 2000. Meanings of Movement, Place and Home at Walsingham. Culture and Religion, 1(2), 153–169. Coleman, S. 2004. Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth’: Landscapes of Myth and Memory at Walsingham. In Badone, E. & Roseman, S. (eds.), Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism (pp. 52‒67). Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Coleman, S. 2016. Purity as Danger: Seduction and sexuality at Walsingham. In Di Giovine, M. & Picard, D. (eds.), The Seductions of Pilgrimage: Sacred Journeys Afar and Astray in the Western Religious Tradition (pp. 53‒70). Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Coleman, S. 2019. From the Liminal to the Lateral: Urban Religion in English Cathedrals. Tourism Geographies, 21(3), 384–404. Doi, K. 2020. Ready-to-Hand and Out-of-reach Sensory Experiences of the Landscape on the Camino de Santiago. Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology, 21(1), 357–386. Eade, J. 1989. The Politics of Community: The Bangladeshi Community in East London. Aldershot: Ashgate. Eade, J. 1991. Order and Power at Lourdes: Lay Helpers and the Organization of a Pilgrimage Shrine. In Eade, J. & Sallnow, M. (eds.) 1991. Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (pp. 51‒76). London: Routledge.

22  John Eade Eade, J. 2020a. The Invention of Sacred Places and Rituals: A Comparative Study of Pilgrimage. Religions, 11(12), 649, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11120649. Eade, J. 2020b. ‘What is going on here?’ Gazing, Knowledge and the Body at a Pilgrimage Shrine. Journeys, 21(1), 19–40. Eade, J. & Sallnow, M. (eds.) 1991. Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage. London: Routledge. Eade, J., Mesaritou, E. & Coleman, S. 2020. Introduction. Knowledge, Ignorance, and Pilgrimage. Journeys, 21(1), 1–18. Eck, D. 1985. Banaras: Cosmos and Paradise in the Indian Imagination, Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.) 19(1), 41‒55. Eck, D. 1993/2003. Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Frey, N. 1998. Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago, Journeys Along an Ancient Way in Modern Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Frey, N. 2004. Stories of the Return: Pilgrimage and its Aftermaths. In Badone, E. & Roseman, S. (eds.), Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Gemzoe, L. 2014. Every Minute Out There: Creating Ritual among Swedish Pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela. Journal of Ritual Studies, 28(2), 65–75. Gonzalez, R. 2013. The Camino de Santiago and its Contemporary Renewal: Pilgrims, Tourists and Territorial Identities. Culture and Religion, 14(1), 8–22. Jorgensen, N., Ekeland, T.-J., Lorentzen, C., & Eade, J. 2020. The Motivations of Pilgrimage Walking the St. Olav Way in Norway. International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, 8(8), 110–126. Reader, I. 2005. Making Pilgrimages: Meaning and Practice in Shikoku. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i. Sánchez y Sánchez, S. & Hesp, A. (eds.), 2016. The Camino de Santiago in the 21st Century: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Global Views. New York and London: Routledge. Singh, R. 2013. Hindu Tradition of Pilgrimage: Sacred Space & System, New Delhi: Dev Publishers & Distributors. Sontag, S. 1977. On Photography. New York: Delta Books.

3

Twists, Turns and Changing Directions Reflections on Long-Term Studies on a Japanese Pilgrimage Path Ian Reader

“What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?”

(James 1963)

Introduction In their introduction, John Eade and Mario Katić refer to how some scholars (myself included) have been involved in studies of pilgrimage for several decades during which time they have been both witnesses to the field’s development and participants in this process, while also being observers and analysts of the longterm developments of specific pilgrimages that they study. After several decades of research, they ask, “are we looking at the same sites, or have the sites and practices become something quite different?”. They also raise an interesting issue when they allude to how researchers involved in the development of the field of studies of pilgrimage are engaging in an emic process of being insiders in the development of an academic field in which they are simultaneously participants. Given that as researchers we are supposedly (and like to think of ourselves as) objective observers, there is an interesting tension here. It is even more so when researchers have primarily focused on the study of a particular pilgrimage and have developed close affinities with it: something that raises questions about how much one can remain detached and objective, especially when one studies the same pilgrimage for many decades, makes numerous field visits to the site(s), enjoys being there and gets to know and develop affinities with numerous participants involved. In this essay, I attempt to deal with these questions while discussing the values of long-term research into a single pilgrimage and how it opens a multiple ranges of insights and potentialities while challenging the researcher’s views. I will also reflect on my own research trajectory, which centres around Japanese pilgrimages and especially the Shikoku pilgrimage and has been grounded as much in Japanese academic research traditions and contexts as in the field of pilgrimage studies as it has developed in Western academic contexts.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003137764-4

24  Ian Reader The Shikoku Pilgrimage in Personal Contexts First, let me briefly outline my research into the Shikoku pilgrimage. It is by no means the only pilgrimage I have carried out research on or the only long-term research study I have been involved in1 but the one I have published most about and that forms a core thread in my theoretical understandings and analyses of pilgrimage. The Shikoku henro (Shikoku pilgrimage) is a 1,400-kilometre route around Japan’s fourth largest island, Shikoku, that involves visiting 88 Buddhist temples. Each temple has a hondō (main hall) that enshrines the temple’s main Buddhist figure of worship and a daishidō, hall of worship to the Buddhist holy figure Kōbō Daishi. Kōbō Daishi is the posthumous title of Kūkai (774–835), one of the most prominent figures in Japanese Buddhism; born in Shikoku, Kūkai is revered as the founder of the Shingon Buddhist tradition in Japan. Awarded the posthumous title Kōbō Daishi by the Emperor in 921, he is claimed, in Shingon lore, to have entered eternal meditation and not died, but instead to have been transformed, in the guise of Kōbō Daishi, into a sacred figure who continually travels around the island of his birth dispensing benefits to all who revere him. As a figure of veneration, Kōbō Daishi has far transcended this initial Shingon Buddhist context and has become one of the most highly venerated figures in the Japanese religious tradition, with tales of his manifestations, miracles and deeds found throughout Japan and an extended cult of worship (known in Japanese as Daishi shinkō) focused on him. One of the most significant legends about him, and a core theme in Daishi shinkō, relates to the Shikoku pilgrimage, which circles the island of his birth; this legend says he founded it in 815 (something that is historically incorrect) and that in the guise of Kōbō Daishi, he continually walks the pilgrimage and travels with and guards over each pilgrim. Kōbō Daishi is thus central to the pilgrimage; not only are there halls of worship to him at each temple but also in pilgrimage lore he is present any and everywhere on the route, and over the centuries, multiple accounts by pilgrims indicate that for them, pilgrimage is a journey in his company. It takes around six weeks to walk the pilgrimage and a week or so to do it by bus or car. My wife and I, as students of Japanese first visited Japan in 1981, during which time we walked one short four-day pilgrimage (the Chichibu pilgrimage, focused on the Buddhist figure of mercy Kannon). I had previously also walked pilgrimage routes in India, and by the time we visited Japan, we had developed an interest in doing research on pilgrimage. In 1983, we moved to Japan and lived and worked there until early 1989, and during that time, we wanted to travel widely in the country, especially exploring less-well travelled areas. Since we were keen walkers, pilgrimages in general appealed, and especially Shikoku; it was by far the most taxing and arduous route we ever did. During the 40 days it took us to walk the pilgrimage, we averaged over 30 kilometres every day, often up steep ascents of mountain paths and down equally precipitous descents and for several days through snow because of an especially cold late winter flurry. Although physically demanding, it was also captivating because of the scenery, the engagement with a different culture and because of the kindness of people we met and who

Reflections on Long-term Studies on a Japanese Pilgrimage Path  25 encouraged us with kind words and with the Shikoku custom of settai, giving alms to pilgrims (see Reader 2005: 122–126, 200–208). Although walking and the sheer effort of it absorbed most of our energy, we tried to talk to as many people as possible there – priests at the temples, pilgrims we met, even the people whose lodges we stayed at overnight – in order to get an understanding of the pilgrimage.2 Nonetheless, we were primarily focused on the simple physical demands of the pilgrimage, and every day was a struggle on many levels, since not only was the walking arduous but much of the infrastructure now available, from numerous signs along the way to help walkers to guidebooks specifically for them, just did not exist. Moreover, there were few places to stay, and we were a rarity in that at that time very few people walked, while non-Japanese pilgrims were extremely rare. Indeed, we never met another non-Japanese person, whether pilgrim, visitor or resident, in the whole period we were in Shikoku. Everyone we encountered commented on this; if we had not been able to speak and read Japanese, it would have been impossible to get around the pilgrimage. Now, things are much changed and various aids exist to help even those who do not know a word of the language, and foreign pilgrims (often unable to speak Japanese) are seen frequently support while structures have developed to aid them.3 We also walked various other pilgrimages in Japan, notably some of the smallscale island pilgrimages that are modelled on Shikoku (see Reader 1988). I also made regular visits to Shikoku, gradually building up contacts and looking at the pilgrimage from a variety of angles. Over the next three decades, I have returned to Japan regularly and have made numerous field visits to Shikoku and its pilgrimage temples while as well as to various other pilgrimages around the country. I have since walked various sections of the Shikoku pilgrimage – some many times – travelled by bus on organised tours, driven around Shikoku several times by car doing research, spent periods at pilgrimage temples investigating their records and archives, interviewed countless priests and other temple officials and sat with them at the temples while observing pilgrims as they visited the temples. Beyond that, I have interviewed numerous people with interests in the pilgrimage, from the bus companies that run pilgrimage tours, to people who are involved in various activities related to the pilgrimage, such as running lodges where pilgrims stay and places where they eat, to civic and government officials who administer the areas through which the pilgrimage passes and who have some form of involvement with it, such as promoting it for tourist and other reasons and helping develop various facilities from road signs to roadside rest areas that help pilgrims in their journeys. Importantly, too, I have interviewed many pilgrims away from the Shikoku pilgrimage route after they have completed pilgrimages, either in their homes or in a mutually agreed setting, and have communicated by letter and other means with people I initially met when they were pilgrims. I have also read numerous pilgrim diaries, books and blogs; some of those I met in Shikoku sent me their handwritten accounts of their pilgrimages, while others have published books and blogs about their experiences, for there has, in recent decades, been a veritable industry of publications by pilgrims outlining their experiences (Shultz 2009, 2011).

26  Ian Reader In the period since 1984, I have published various items that either focus directly on the Shikoku pilgrimage or use it as a case study through which to discuss various issues related to pilgrimage. My first publication was a narrative account, in a 1984 Japanese magazine, about what it was like as a foreigner to walk the pilgrimage. Academic articles followed and then a book about the pilgrimage’s history and contemporary modes of practice. Other aspects of my writing over the years have included media representations of pilgrimage, the economic and marketing aspects of pilgrimage, and how a pilgrimage such as Shikoku can be reinterpreted in a modern secular age not as somehow a ‘religious’ activity but a manifestation of traditional culture, and how civic and regional secular government agencies have used the Shikoku pilgrimage as an agent of rural economic regeneration while trying to get it UNESCO World Heritage accreditation (Reader 2007, 2009, 2014, 2020). Most recently, I have co-authored a book with a colleague who did his PhD with me on the Shikoku pilgrimage and who has himself been researching it for over 15 years (Reader and Shultz 2021). This latest book focuses on people who do the Shikoku pilgrimage repeatedly, some of them living as permanent pilgrim itinerants and others spending decades doing it multiple times a year. In this study of what we call ‘permanent pilgrims’, we discuss the term Shikokubyō, which literally translates as ‘Shikoku illness’, and related terms such as henro chūdoku (‘pilgrimage addiction’). Many of the pilgrims we interviewed also did many other pilgrimages in Japan (and some overseas as well), but they mainly focused on Shikoku. They also repeatedly cited Shikokubyō as a reason why they who had done the pilgrimage dozens or more times kept doing it (‘until I die’ being a common refrain). However, they did not see Shikokubyō or henro chūdoku in negative terms; ‘illness’ and ‘addiction’ were, in the context of the Shikoku pilgrimage, highly positive things to be welcomed and enjoyed. As they spoke, they emphasised multiple aspects that made them hooked on this pilgrimage, from the island’s scenery, landscape and cultural ambience, to the kindness of local people, to a simple feeling that being in Shikoku made them feel released from the pressures of ordinary life, to issues of faith in and veneration of Kōbō Daishi. I mention the themes of that book here for two reasons. One is that our findings showed that for many people, doing the pilgrimage was not in any way a transient or singular experience but something embedded in their lives and associated with feelings of home; for some, home was veritably ‘on the road’, on the pilgrimage path, while for others they might have actual homes elsewhere but viewed the pilgrimage as a second, or sometimes a primary, home. As such, pilgrimage was not a break in their ordinary routines but very part of their normal life flows. Interviewee after interviewee talked about the pilgrimage as a part of their lives; it was in a real sense a normative, not extraordinary, event in their lives. The other is that Shikokubyō is not just a key theme in our study of why people do pilgrimages multiple times but something that can affect researchers as well. In our book, Shultz and I reflect that we had both researched the pilgrimage for decades, visited Shikoku multiple times, and found that every time we were there, we felt a sense of being somehow at home. As such, we felt in some ways similar to the pilgrims we interviewed, as being somehow addicted to and under the pilgrimage’s influence. This

Reflections on Long-term Studies on a Japanese Pilgrimage Path  27 is an issue and a challenge that faces researchers, of course. One has to be deeply fascinated and have a strong empathy to keep going to a place, to continue spending long periods on the pilgrimage route interviewing people and so on, and for me, Shikoku is a favourite region in a country, Japan, that was a home and workplace for many years and remains somewhere with emotional bonds and many friends, to which I go as often as possible. Hanging out at the pilgrimage temples; travelling along the route; and talking to Japanese pilgrims (especially older ones), priests and local people in the areas around the temples have become second nature. While feeling a strong empathy with the practice and subjects of one’s research may not be vital for doing research (as I found when studying a Japanese religious movement whose members committed mass murder), it certainly helps. Yet it also raises questions about the extent to which one can both do intensive research in areas that one feels a deep empathy with and retain the academic ideal of objectivity. Being, or trying to be, objective, remains an intrinsic aspect of our methodologies as well as of our attempts to present our research, analyses and the theories that are derived from our research findings. On one level, my approach to the Shikoku pilgrimage is clearly etic in that I am a researcher who is not Japanese and who lives, now, outside Japan (albeit with a career in which engagement in studies of Japan was important and that until retirement, also meant my academic engagement with studies of Japan and of pilgrimage were rewarded with a salary). Yet it would have been impossible for me to have done research in Shikoku at all without, to an extent, having a more ‘inside’ position, engaging with Japanese pilgrims, temple officials, priests and others in their language and trying to see from their perspective what meanings they ascribe to what they are doing. Even more so, to sustain research on one pilgrimage, place and practice for so long requires something more than academic objectivity. It requires empathy and passion or, perhaps, as the pilgrims I study would put it, Shikokubyō. As such, while objectivity and etic stances might be a desired methodological stance, passion and empathy for people, place and practice in a pilgrimage – something that can become akin to an emic angle- are also important. Changing Landscapes, Innovations and Discourses of the Vanishing Over the three and a half decades I have been visiting Shikoku, the pilgrimage has certainly changed, even if its basic structure- the 88 temples, the centrality of Kōbō Daishi, and the need to visit all the temples in order to complete the pilgrimage – remains the same. The physical, visual and informational terrain has changed since 1984. New roads and better waymarkers, along with plentiful information (guidebooks, maps and nowadays GPS systems, the internet and phone apps) have opened up the pilgrimage considerably but also at times changed the routes pilgrims take (there being no obligation to visit the temples in any specific order). Infrastructures have improved, with better facilities all round, such as more places to stay,4 coin laundries widely available to enable walkers to wash their clothes rather than, as we did, wear the same ones for 40 days, and so on. The pilgrimage even smells different as the old cesspit style mixed gender squat toilets that were commonplace in

28  Ian Reader 1984 and that emitted a pungent odour of urine have been replaced by ultra-high tech flush ones and taps with running water. Modes of travel, too, are different; in 1984, there were few walkers and most went by organised bus tours – itself a practice that developed in 1953 and became the main mode of travel by the 1960s. By the last years of the past and first years of the present century, walker numbers had increased, while gradually bus pilgrim numbers have subsided, with the bulk of contemporary pilgrims nowadays (reflecting social trends in Japan in general and contemporary patterns of social atomisation) travelling alone or in couples by car. The public positioning of the pilgrimage and the images related to it have also changed. At one time, the pilgrimage was regarded suspiciously by many people, especially by political and governing authorities, and seen as a potential source of social disruption, while pilgrims were viewed as potentially dangerous, as likely thieves, scroungers and carriers of disease.5 Since the 1950s, this image has been transformed in public, media and political discourse. Promotional materials produced by the temples, documentaries made by television companies and much else have changed the public image of the pilgrimage so that it is now widely seen as a manifestation of a Japan that has been largely lost through modernity (Reader 2007), one of those ‘discourses of the vanishing’ (Ivy 1995) that have been a feature of identity discussions in contemporary Japan. Two interviews at different stages of my Shikoku research brought into focus some of these changes. They also highlight the complex dynamics of the pilgrimage and helped alert me to the need, if I wanted to do comprehensive research on the pilgrimage, to look far beyond what for me, as probably for most researchers, appeared initially to be the main and most obvious focus of pilgrimage research, namely the pilgrims. The first interview was with a well-known priest in Tokyo in 1991. He had written several books on pilgrimage and often led organised bus pilgrimage parties around Shikoku. We talked about pilgrimage tours and how they provided older pilgrims with the means to do the pilgrimage safely and in some comfort and also about how the pilgrimage featured regularly in the Japanese media, which often portrayed it as a manifestation of Japanese traditional culture, part of the nation’s emotional hinterland and an enduring emblem of Japanese identity. The priest noted that this image (and the context in which bus tours offered the means for older people to do the pilgrimage safely) contrasted greatly with when he first did the pilgrimage and with its earlier history. Reiterating the point I made above, he said that this image of Shikoku pilgrimage as cultural heritage was explicitly modern and was not evident when he made his first pilgrimage there, in the early 1950s. At that time, it was definitely much more of an ‘outsider’ pilgrimage: the temples were in poor condition, pilgrims were scarce and many temple priests feared that the pilgrimage’s future was bleak. His comments reinforced other interviews I had conducted with others who remembered those times, of temples in disrepair, often without priests, and pilgrims scarce, marginalised, and even harried by local authorities including the police.6 That comment from 1991 illustrated how a pilgrimage can change significantly in relatively short periods of time, not just in terms of pilgrim numbers but in the whole way a pilgrimage can be thought of and portrayed in the public domain.

Reflections on Long-term Studies on a Japanese Pilgrimage Path  29 By the 1990s, civil and political authorities in Shikoku that had once seen the pilgrimage as something to be controlled and its pilgrims as unwelcome figures were viewing it as a social and economic resource beneficial to the Shikoku economy. Before long, too, as I have discussed elsewhere, the pilgrimage temples were being formally accredited by the national government with the title of Nihon isan (Japanese Heritage) and the pilgrimage was being promoted by Shikoku government authorities as a candidate for UNESCO World Heritage status (Reader 2020). Yet even as the pilgrimage was being heralded in this way, I was learning through observations and field interviews, as well as via a recent survey, that pilgrim numbers that had progressively risen since the 1950s were by 2015 going down again; the pilgrim community was ageing with few signs that a new generation was coming up to maintain the practice, and temple priests were – like in the early 1950s  – ­worrying about the pilgrimage’s future.7 The priest’s comment brought home clearly to me how sharply a pilgrimage can change not simply in terms of pilgrim flows, practices and modes of travel, but in public perception; the Shikoku pilgrimage is a good example of how a pilgrimage can, in relatively short spans of time, move from being highly marginal and barely practiced, to being hailed as culturally central and highly popular. The other interview was with a bus company official in Shikoku in April 2000, some 16 years after I first started research on the pilgrimage, and it again threw up an issue that I would never have thought of when I started my research. My aim in visiting the bus company, which was in the vanguard of developing the pilgrimage bus tours that revitalised the pilgrimage from the 1950s on, was to seek information on the pilgrim numbers and trends in the pilgrimage. As we talked, the official mentioned that it was only because of a change in Japanese transport law in 1951 that the company had been able to develop the tours that were to be so influential in transforming the pilgrimage and the ways it was done. Until the law change, bus companies could only run timetabled services along fixed point-to-point routes; afterwards, they were freed of such restrictions and could organise bus package tours at their own schedules and could take people on trips that included overnight stays. The company, foreseeing that future car ownership would threaten the long-term economic viability of their bus routes, saw this as an opportunity to diversify and to plan for its future through the medium of organised tours. Since the company was based in Shikoku, it decided to test this out by proposing a package bus tour around the Shikoku pilgrimage route, since it was in effect the local pilgrimage but also one that encompassed the whole island and offered an opportunity for participants to view the landscape and scenery of Shikoku. The venture was a success, and it attracted media attention that led to an explosion of interest in the pilgrimage. Other bus companies followed suit. As a result, the ambience of the pilgrimage changed significantly as bus tours made the pilgrimage accessible to a vastly expanded clientele, notably women and older pilgrims. It also helped give the pilgrimage its image of tradition that has coloured its media and public portrayals ever since. In order to encourage a community spirit among the pilgrims and to enable the tour guide to identify members of the party, the bus company running that very first tour asked all who took part in it to wear a white pilgrim’s shroud. This has rapidly

30  Ian Reader become assimilated into the culture of the pilgrimage and is now seen not simply as the ‘traditional’ garb of pilgrims but as evidence that the Shikoku pilgrimage had retained traditions rarely found elsewhere in Japan even if, as Mori Masato has shown, this is in reality a modern development (Mori 2005). There is a fascinating and direct line from that legal decision in 1951 and the ways the Shikoku pilgrimage has become transformed in Japanese perceptions from a marginal practice frowned on historically by regional authorities as a potentially dangerous activity, into a venerated national icon that is viewed as emblematic of traditional Japanese culture and worthy of consideration for UNESCO World Heritage accreditation. Yet I would never have given any thought to the idea of looking into legal issues and changes in transport law in Japan when I started my research; I would have seen it as something that had absolutely no connection with pilgrimage, religion or any of the things that researchers such as myself would normally think of as somehow connected with pilgrimage studies. It was a reminder that when studying pilgrimage, we should never focus just on what appears to be the visible manifestations of pilgrimage (e.g. the pilgrims and sites) but pay attention to the contexts – including seemingly obscure law changes – that shape the environment in which pilgrimages take place. These interviews were not special but examples of how throughout my research new issues have come up, often through chance or side remarks, to show that understanding pilgrimages requires far more than studying pilgrims and their motives and practices. Initially, it all had seemed so simple. I was studying a pilgrimage and so would interview pilgrims. I had initially walked the pilgrimage and so my experience of it was of a transient phenomenon associated with motion. Transience and movement, of course, are evident in pilgrimages and they have been recurrent theoretical framing concepts in studies of pilgrimage. Initially these seemed to me to be key to any understanding and conceptualisation of pilgrimage because when I first wrote about the Shikoku pilgrimage, I had only done the pilgrimage on foot, had spent most of my fieldwork time engaging with walking pilgrims, and had read mostly historical accounts in Japanese of pre-modern pilgrimage times when the practice was primarily ascetic and pilgrims had to go on foot. As such, my initial orientation was to frame the pilgrimage in terms of what appeared to be ‘traditional’ and ‘authentic’ pilgrims – those who walked – compared to the majority of people whom I saw while in Shikoku and who went by bus; while I did not go as far as Oliver Statler, the American author who walked the pilgrimage and wrote a rather romanticised book about it in which he expressed the view that those going by bus were not really proper pilgrims (Statler 1984), I did portray those going around by bus primarily as pilgrims in a hurry constrained by the need to keep to schedules and more concerned about comfort than austerities (Reader 1987). It was not difficult, while walking the pilgrimage and just talking to walkers, to think like this. Yet as I began to observe how pilgrims behaved at the pilgrimage sites, a different picture emerged: those in groups and travelling by bus prayed a lot more than those on foot. Their perspectives were different from walkers; the latter often spent little time at the temples and saw the pilgrimage as being the route between them,

Reflections on Long-term Studies on a Japanese Pilgrimage Path  31 while the former saw the temples as key and spent much more time in acts of worship. Priests I talked to noted that I appeared to mainly privilege or view walkers as ‘real’ pilgrims and kindly hinted that I should look more closely at those who went by bus – noting, for example, that such pilgrims were mainly older people and predominantly female, for whom walking was really not possible and that bus tours had made it possible for them to become pilgrims – something that would have been difficult and fraught in earlier times.8 At one temple, during such a conversation, the priest called over to a party of pilgrims there and before I knew it, I found myself being welcomed aboard their bus to go with them to the next temple. It enabled me to observe that they chanted Buddhist prayers as they travelled and that they engaged in extended acts of worship when they reached the next site. That piqued my interest to learn more, to signing up for a pilgrimage tour myself and to hitching rides with other bus groups whenever possible. My prior thoughts about the ‘authenticity’ of walkers and my critical perceptions of bus pilgrims thus were pushed aside by new understandings based on a different field approach and led me to write about pilgrims in different ways. As Barbara Ambros (2014), in an overview study of Western language studies of pilgrimage in Japan has noted, my views have as a result changed over the years. They have continued to change, for one constant element in my thinking about pilgrimage has to always question what I have written in the past. That, I think, should always be a key methodological focus for any researcher. I have already referred to issues of transience and motion and how, when I first started research, I tended to focus on such issues by observing people in motion as pilgrims; I spent my time at the sites and on the pilgrimage route, seeing these as the places where I could talk to pilgrims and conduct interviews. They remain important sites for my research, but over the years, I realised that it could be equally or more valuable to talk to pilgrims away from Shikoku, when they were not in a state of transience and motion. One day, when out on the pilgrimage route doing interviews, a Japanese man in pilgrim’s clothing walking along the route said to me, politely, that no he did not want to talk to me about his pilgrimage. However, he added, he would be quite happy to do so later, when he had finished. How, he asked, could he know what he was doing or feeling midway through a pilgrimage? He took my phone number and went on his way, and I assumed I had just received a polite brush-off. Less than a month later, my phone rang; it was the pilgrim I had met, inviting me to visit his house and interview him, which I did. As he said during the interview, he felt he could not articulate his reasons for doing the pilgrimage while on the route and that he needed to get home and reflect on what he had done in order to try to understand his experiences as a pilgrim. It was an interview that more than any other brought home to me the importance of talking to people after they have finished their pilgrimages, and it is something I have done repeatedly ever since. Through such interviews, my understandings have developed about the extent to which pilgrimage, rather than being a transient phenomenon about movement and set apart from everyday life and home, is deeply associated with home and everyday normality and identity and that it is as much to do with being in a place as it is with motion.

32  Ian Reader It also helped me pay more attention to those who were involved in the pilgrimage while sedentary and to spread my focus beyond pilgrims in transit to those whose home lives were centred around the pilgrimage: priests at the temples, for example, and people who ran businesses catering for pilgrims and who played active roles in creating and maintaining the cultural frameworks within which the pilgrims travelled. For example, on our initial pilgrimage, the places we stayed – mostly pilgrim lodges – were simply places to stop overnight, eat, have a bath and recuperate from a hard day walking before setting out on the next leg. A few of those running these lodges shared their experiences of dealing with pilgrims and that in turn led me to think about the role of lodge keepers in the wider context of pilgrimage – thoughts that were amplified many years after my first visit when I was in Shikoku doing fieldwork and arrived at the lodge where I had arranged to stay one night. As I did so, the lodge owner was washing the pilgrim staffs of two pilgrims who had just arrived there and was explaining to them why he was washing the foot of their staffs: the staff symbolically represents Kōbō Daishi, and when one walks the staff, of course constantly hits the ground. When one reaches the place on stays overnight, it is customary to remove one’s shoes (so as not to bring outside dirt into the home or place of stay). One should take one’s staff in with one (after all, you should not leave Kōbō Daishi outside while you go in) and since one cannot remove its ‘shoes’, the foot of the staff is washed instead. This, the lodge owner told them, was a time-honoured pilgrimage custom in Shikoku. The lodge owner was not only preserving that custom but passing it on to the pilgrims (who were on the first full day of their pilgrimage) and ensuring that they henceforth followed it themselves. He later talked to me about his family history, and how they had run a pilgrim’s lodge for over a century and about how they viewed educating new pilgrims about pilgrimage customs so that they in turn could pass them on to others. As such, he illustrated and showed how pilgrimage practices and mindsets are not just performed or shaped by pilgrims, but by other actors and agencies that play significant parts in the pilgrimage and that need to be examined as part of any study of it. Besides lodge owners, others who joined that list included officials of bus companies that ran pilgrimage tours, the people who acted as bus guides on such tours, people who ran shops at or around the temples selling pilgrimage goods, officials of local and regional tourist offices that promoted the pilgrimage not for any religious reasons but in order to encourage more people to visit Shikoku and help boost the local economy, and so on. There were also regional government officials involved with publicising the pilgrimage (for similar reasons to tourist offices), people who ran shops and eating places along the pilgrimage route and a host of others. Basically, every time I visited Shikoku, I became aware of aspects and elements related to the pilgrimage that in some way or other contributed to its wider ambience or to people who might have a perspective on the pilgrimage and be able to present me with some new information and insights.

Reflections on Long-term Studies on a Japanese Pilgrimage Path  33 Methodologies and Pilgrimage Studies? Studying the Shikoku pilgrimage thus led me into numerous different yet interrelated areas and showed the importance of adopting multiple modes of research. To that extent, I would confess to having no set methodology other than to use whatever means are available to explore the subject and to always be aware that one can learn much from what appears to be of interest to scholars in a variety of academic areas. In particular, I have paid major attention to Japanese studies of pilgrimage – an area that, as I have shown elsewhere (Reader 2015), is highly developed but without the sort of emphasis on anthropology that is the case in Western academic contexts, where there has been a tendency to see anthropology as a, if not the, key disciplinary means of studying pilgrimage. This is implied by the editors of this volume in their comment that “Pilgrimage studies has always been influenced by developments within anthropology and related disciplines.” From Japanese perspectives, where folk ethnography, sociology, religious studies (especially Buddhist studies), history and notably social and economic history have been more dominant avenues through to examine pilgrimage, this may not be the case. Ethnographic and anthropological research approaches are important, and much of my research has involved such avenues, notably via engaging in ethnographic examinations of those involved in the Shikoku pilgrimage through field interviews and participant observation (for example, by taking part in pilgrimage tours with groups of Japanese pilgrims). However, these can only be understood if they are contextualised by developing theoretical understandings of the social, economic, historical, political, cultural and other contexts in which they are framed. That is where studies of Japanese pilgrimage – an area in which the Shikoku pilgrimage plays a significant role – have been valuable. The academic literature produced by Japanese scholars was initially important for me because there was virtually no information on pilgrimage in Japan when I first started my research, other than in Japanese. It was also interesting in that for the most part, Japanese studies of pilgrimage have developed in their own way, relatively uninfluenced by the theoretical discussions and positionings found in Western (and primarily Christian-centric) studies. (To be more cynical about it, Japanese scholars have not got bogged down in talking about Turner). For example, a significant strand within Japanese studies of pilgrimage has focused on the socio-economic aspects of and factors related to travel (including pilgrimage) to shrines and temples in Japan in the pre-modern period before Japan opened up, in the mid-nineteenth century, to the outside world, developed modern nation-state structures and other trappings of modernity such as mechanised transport systems. Japanese economic historians were interested in examining Japan’s pre-modern infrastructure developments including travel routes, the movement of money and the ways products and ideas circulated in a pre-­modern economy, and this led them to depth studies of pilgrimage to distant shrines and temples, which was the only form of travel viable or permitted in Japan to all but the very elite prior to the mid-nineteenth century. They produced significant studies showing the importance of understanding the economic dimensions of religious travel such as pilgrimage and also showed how pilgrimage flows were influenced

34  Ian Reader by economic changes, while pilgrimage itself served as a mechanism for travel and the development of tourist infrastructures. Such insights opened up areas far less widely or analytically covered in pilgrimage studies elsewhere and helped me understand the commercial and economic aspects of pilgrimage development (see, for example, Reader 2014). Likewise, the major Japanese academic traditions of folk studies and local history, which are accorded high academic regard in Japan and are highly developed academic disciples there (see, for example, Christy 2012), offered important avenues through which to understand the topic, to gain new perspectives and to understand that although pilgrimage is often treated as something associated with travels to distant places, it is also a highly local and localised phenomenon as well. I also learnt how different scholars could ‘see’ pilgrimages from different angles – something that was illustrated for me when I spent some days with a Japanese Buddhist priest who was a historian of the pilgrimage and whose speciality was epigraphy and the study of henro ishi, pilgrimage stones. Some of the earliest historical evidence of the Shikoku pilgrimage is found in stone markers put up by pilgrims from around the seventeenth century onwards. These stones were intended to provide information to and guide pilgrims, but they were also often commemorations of the pilgrims who erected them, and they form an important strand in the history of Shikoku. The priest-historian drove me around parts of northern Shikoku stopping frequently to point out various henro ishi and explain to me who put them up, when and so on. His research was not simply valuable for me in historical terms, since he focused on pilgrims who spent their lives as ascetics and who put up stones but in showing me how one could see a pilgrimage from multiple angles.9 His eyeline, as it were, was very much angled towards those stones found along the route. In travelling with him and observing how he saw the pilgrimage through those stones, which were significant markers and pieces of information that enabled him to contribute to our understanding of the historical development of the pilgrimage in an era with relatively few written documentary sources, I was briefly able myself to see a different angle to the pilgrimage. Although I remain unskilled in identifying and reading Japanese epigraphy from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I nonetheless gained a great deal of insight into the role of individual shapers and makers of pilgrimage and learned much about the epigraphical history of pilgrimage. Because I spent a lot of time in Japan and focused on Japanese pilgrimages, my earlier engagements with wider studies of pilgrimage beyond Japan, apart from some of the commonly cited studies (the Turners, Eade and Sallnow), were relatively limited. Nor did I take part in any of the normal types of meetings – conferences, workshops and seminars – that bring academics together in the field. It was not until 2009 that I first attended a workshop or conference about pilgrimage – and that was a conference in Japan, in Japanese, on the Shikoku pilgrimage (Reader 2009). My first ever conference or workshop on pilgrimage in English was not until 2010. Perhaps that in itself has been fortunate because it spared me too many encounters with a tendency I have found frustrating in the field: its implicit and at times

Reflections on Long-term Studies on a Japanese Pilgrimage Path  35 explicit Western Christian and anthropological orientations. Whether because of geographical, religious or even linguistic orientations, the field to me has appeared to be located far too much within a narrow enclave that, among other things, even shaped mental images of what ‘pilgrimage’ should be like. The idea of a pilgrimage as a journey to a sacred goal ‘out there’ that forms a goal – and of pilgrimage thus as a linear process – for instance occurs frequently in literature about pilgrimage and appears to have become embedded in studies of (Western) pilgrimage, but this does not mean that pilgrimage is necessarily linear or that it is focused on physical places as goals. This is a point I have made before but it has been reiterated well by Mark MacWilliams, an expert in Japanese religious traditions and pilgrimages. As MacWilliams (2020) notes, Japanese has many different terms that can only be translated in English as ‘pilgrimage’, but these terminologies do not neatly map onto normative Western understandings. The Japanese term junrei, for example, is the most commonly used term for doing what we would see as pilgrimages (travelling to, visiting and paying homage to religious sites such as Buddhist temples) in Japan. Junrei implicitly means a form of travel and worship that involves a form of circuit, to multiple sites. It thus presents a different shape of pilgrimage than is found in normative linear and goal-centred understandings of pilgrimage common in contexts dominated by Christian pilgrimage studies. He further notes how other linguistic contexts (the Hindu notion of pilgrimage as to do with crossings and in which travel and worship are integral) also can enrich understandings and broaden the horizons of how we talk about pilgrimage. What Would I Know About Pilgrimage, If I Only Studied the Shikoku Pilgrimage? The above comments do not mean that conceptualisations that think primarily in terms of pilgrimage as a linear and goal-centred process are misleading because they do not take account of other structures such as multiple site and circuit-like practices, as is common in Japan, or that these types of pilgrimage found commonly in Japan are outliers that do not fit into the wider study of pilgrimages. Rather, they point to the need for the field to be highly catholic and encompassing, recognising that pilgrimage can take multiple forms and modes, in which different religious, cultural and regional examples can add to our understanding not just of the wider field but also of the specific pilgrimages we are studying. This leads me to the relevance of the quotation at the start of this chapter. It comes from the autobiography of the great West Indian Marxist commentator and cricket writer C.L.R. James. James was a widely read intellectual and political analyst as well as (like me) being a lover of the great sport of cricket, which has been crucial to the cultural life, identity and politics of the West Indies. James wove a story of his life together with his love for cricket, showing how the social, political and racial dimensions of the sport (which was in earlier times riven with class and race divisions in the West Indies) influenced his political views. The underlying meaning of his famous question is the proposition that one cannot understand any activity or phenomenon solely in its own terms; it not only needs contextualising but the ramifications of

36  Ian Reader such contextualisation themselves can tell us more about the phenomenon itself. If I were to extrapolate James’s saying to my own research context, it would be: what would I know about the Shikoku pilgrimage, if only the Shikoku pilgrimage I knew? And in answer to that, I say that I need to know not just the social, religious, economic, political and cultural contexts within which the pilgrimage operates in Shikoku and, beyond that, Japan but also how other pilgrimages operate. Just as one needs to look at pilgrimage sites across a multiplicity of areas and religious traditions in order to be able to make any comments about pilgrimage in universal terms, so, too, does one need to look at numerous sites elsewhere in order to make real sense of Shikoku or any other pilgrimage. In an earlier publication, I referred to the comment by James Lochtefeld (2010: 19) who, having done intensive studies of pilgrimage in India, and notably the north Indian site of Hardwar, visited Assisi in Italy. He had never been there before and wondered why it immediately felt familiar to him. The answer, he soon realised, was that it was, like Hardwar, a pilgrimage site and many of the things he was familiar with at Hindu sites were evident also at Assisi. Pilgrimage sites, he realised, contained multiple similarities and aspects no matter where one was; an Italian Catholic pilgrimage place could convey reminders of an Indian site because both shared a similar phenomenon and practice, namely pilgrimage. Indeed, when I visited Hardwar in 2019 (partly as a result of reading his book), I felt I had in some way been there before, even though I had not. It was, after all, a pilgrimage site. This is something I consider a critical element in research approaches to any pilgrimage. In Japan, Shikoku was not the first pilgrimage I did or studied, and I have continued to visit, study and do fieldwork at other pilgrimages in that country, even if I have hardly written about them. They have helped me know more about Shikoku: what it shares with other pilgrimages in the Japanese context, what aspects stand out as different and what aspects are flagged up in the depictions and publicity materials put out by the temples and by those organising pilgrimage tours, that seek to mark it out as somehow special within the Japanese context. Yet knowing about other Japanese pilgrimages did not in itself provide adequate context to answer underlying questions about the Shikoku pilgrimage. What, after all, could I know of Japanese pilgrimages, if I only knew Japanese pilgrimages? As I have already noted, my own experiences of pilgrimage started in India before being developed in Japan, while, as I long ago wrote, in my first book, my understandings of religion in Japan developed in part because I had previously travelled widely in Africa and India and studied the religious cultures of those regions, which had in turn informed my perspectives on religion in Japan. Similarly, my understandings of pilgrimage, given initial impetus by my interests in travel, have been developed by wherever possible visiting pilgrimage sites in a variety of countries and religious contexts thereafter, including Ireland, France, Italy, Rwanda and Ethiopia. Thus, while my knowledge and interpretations of the Shikoku pilgrimage have informed and shaped my analysis of pilgrimage more generally, my knowledge

Reflections on Long-term Studies on a Japanese Pilgrimage Path  37 of pilgrimage in Shikoku has in turn been informed by looking at pilgrimages elsewhere – something that shows similarities and differences, making us think about why some differences occur, and for what reason, as well as why some similarities. When I am on the high street in Knock, visiting a famed pilgrimage temple in India or observing priests and pilgrims at Lalibela in Ethiopia, I get insights into pilgrimage in Shikoku – just as being in Shikoku can make me reflect on what I have seen at a pilgrimage site in France or India. The point here is simply that while focusing on a particular pilgrimage is important to develop a serious research depth that can engage with the multidimensional complexity of any pilgrimage, taking time to examine others in situ can enhance and deepen that understanding greatly. Pilgrimage as a Gateway Thus far I have talked primarily about pilgrimage in an inward way. By that, I mean that I have talked about how through a variety of disciplinary and methodological means, one can develop an understanding of a specific pilgrimage, and how through that one can develop understandings and theoretical perspectives on pilgrimage in general. There are other important dimensions to the study of pilgrimage that also need to be emphasised, and that (I believe) Simon Coleman is flagging up in his closing remarks to this volume. They relate to how studies of pilgrimage can be used to address topics and inform studies in other areas. This point has been made in various contexts. Jonathan Sumption, for instance, in his study of pilgrimage in medieval Europe, states that pilgrimage “affords a unique reflection of medieval religion at every stage of its complicated development” (1975: 307), while Retlief Müller frames his study of the Zion Christian Church of South Africa around pilgrimage, arguing that this is the church’s most distinguishing characteristic and the best avenue through which to explore the wider dynamics and nature of the church (2011: 7). In writing about pilgrimage in Japan, too, I am conscious that I am also writing about religion, secularity and tourism more broadly (see, for example, Reader 1991, 1996) and that studies of pilgrimages in Japan offer a means of talking about and exploring wider issues. As recent studies have shown (e.g. Rots and Teeuwen 2020), conceptualisations of sacred heritage in Japan feed into numerous discussions about religion, the state, politics, cultural history and nationalism, and pilgrimage plays an important part in this context too (Reader 2020). This again is something that is found in Japanese academic studies of pilgrimage; the studies I referred to earlier that discussed the relationship between pilgrimage and economic development not only examined pilgrimage through the lens of socioeconomic history but also used pilgrimage as a means to interrogate and explore economic history in Japan (see, for example, Shinjō 1982). Studying pilgrimage, in other words, is or can be a way of examining wider topics, and pilgrimage studies should not be just about the inward examination and theoretical analysis of pilgrimage, but about what examining pilgrimage can say about wider issues, from religion and politics to economics and cultural heritage.

38  Ian Reader Concluding Comments My research on pilgrimage, and Shikoku in particular, has spanned over three decades. Partly, that is because I simply like travel and being in Shikoku and can admit that one of the areas, I have done research on – Shikokubyō – is relevant to me. It is also because, as I have indicated above, there is always something new to understand, some new phenomena within the wider rubric of pilgrimage to delve into and some new aspects that have not been evident before. This does not, of course, mean that one should not write about pilgrimages until one has done long-term studies. My perceptions and stances have changed over time and probably will continue to do so as long as I continue to write about pilgrimage, and if I waited until I had come to a final, definitive position and understanding of the topic, I would never write anything. Being self-critical and always ready (and keen) to interrogate one’s own work is a vital research tool. What I am saying is that one should not see the study of pilgrimage to be a finite or simple process but one that is also cumulative and accretive with multiple layers and aspects enriched via a variety of research methods. Publishing something should never be seen as an endpoint or final statement but a point along the way and to argue with or against later on. Studies have shown that pilgrimages are constantly being made and remade by their participants (a category that, as I have indicated, goes far beyond pilgrims themselves) and by external circumstances; changing economic and technological developments, for example, may have significant influences on how pilgrimages develop and who does them, as might broader sociological changes. As such, pilgrimages, and pilgrimage sites, are never finished (Rousseau 2016); they are always places in motion (Kinnard 2014). So are the ways they are analysed. In order to better understand the Shikoku pilgrimage, I need to keep reading what others have written, not just about Shikoku or other Japanese pilgrimages, and not just in Japanese, but on pilgrimages elsewhere. And to better understand Shikoku, I need to keep reminding myself of its particular dynamics. On every occasion that I have been to Shikoku, something new crops up, some change or development that plays a part in the continuing unending story of the pilgrimage, that enhances my knowledge, challenges my conceptions and suggests new paths to go down. Nor do I ever know where that will lead. That’s the beauty, the unsettling nature of researching a forever-changing entity. Right now, although I cannot visit Japan because of Covid restrictions, I know that the pandemic has had a significant impact at a time when pilgrim numbers have been falling significantly. That of course is why I need to go to Shikoku again. Notes 1 I have worked also on pilgrimages on small islands in Japan’s Inland Sea, notably the pilgrimage on the island of Shōdoshima for almost as long as I have studied Shikoku, and with a colleague, have also done a 30-plus year longitudinal study of a Japanese new religion (Baffelli and Reader 2019). 2 As I noted in my 2005 book on the Shikoku pilgrimage, my wife Dorothy was an invaluable companion on this journey and in supporting my research ever since.

Reflections on Long-term Studies on a Japanese Pilgrimage Path  39 3 In Reader and Shultz 2021, we provide some data on foreign pilgrims, while John Shultz (2018) and David Moreton have studied foreign pilgrims in Shikoku; see https://henro. co/author/davidm/ 4 A number of wayside free huts have been erected along the route in recent times to assist foot pilgrims, for example. 5 For a fuller discussion of these issues see Reader 2005, esp. pp. 122–143, 150–186. 6 For more on this earlier perception of the pilgrimage and on the way, pilgrims could be treated as outsiders, see Reader 2005: 123–135, 150–151). 7 A recent survey conducted in 2019 by the Shikoku Araiansu Chiiki Keizai Kenkyū Bunkakai (2019) shows pilgrim numbers have fallen 40% since 2010. My field observations and interviews in 2018–2019 also indicated a clear fall in numbers and especially organised bus tours. In Reader 2020, I indicate that a reason why the pilgrimage temples have participated in the campaign for UNESCO accreditation relates to the long-term concerns about pilgrim numbers. 8 In earlier times, many pilgrims died on the route, and it was seen as a very dangerous activity for anyone who was in any way vulnerable. Female pilgrims were scarce and even in the early twentieth century were often subject to harassment (see Takamure 1983; Reader 2005). 9 See Kiyoyoshi 1984 for more on henro ishi and their historical significance.

References Ambros, B. 2014. Pilgrimage in Japan. OUP Oxford Bibliographies (online) Available at: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195393521/obo9780195393521-0195.xml Baffelli, E., & Reader, I. 2019. Dynamics and the Ageing of a Japanese ‘New’ Religion: Transformations and the Founder. London: Bloomsbury. Christy, A. 2012. A Discipline on Foot: Inventing Japanese Native Ethnography 1910–1945. Lanham, MD and New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Ivy, M. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. James, C.L.R. 1963. Beyond a Boundary. London: Stanley Paul. Kinnard, J. 2014. Places in Motion: The Fluid Identities of Temples, Images, and Pilgrims. New York: Oxford University Press. Kiyoyoshi, E. 1984. Michi Shirube - Tsuke Nakatsuka Mohei Nikki. Shin Niihama: Kaiōsha. Lochtefeld, J.G. 2010. God’s Gateway: Identity and Meaning in a Hindu Pilgrimage Place. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. MacWilliams, M. 2020. Narrating Religion (Review Article). Religious Studies Review, 46(1), March 2020, 21–26. Mori, M. 2005. Shikoku Henro No Kindaika: Modan Henro Kara Iyashi No Tabi Made. Osaka: Sōgensha. Müller, R. 2011. African Pilgrimage: Ritual Travel in South Africa’s Christianity of Zion Farnham: Ashgate. Reader, I. 1987. From Asceticism to the Package Tour: The Pilgrim’s Progress in Japan. Religion, 17(2), 133–148. Reader, I. 1988. Miniaturisation and Proliferation: A Study of Small-scale Pilgrimages in Japan Studies in Central and East Asian Religions, 1(1), 50–66. Reader, I. 1991. Religion in Contemporary Japan. Basingstoke: Macmillans. Reader, I. 1996. Pilgrimage as Cult: The Shikoku Pilgrimage as a Window on Japanese Religion. In Kornicki, P.F. & McMullen, I.J. (eds.), Religion in Japan: Arrows to Heaven and Earth (pp. 267–286). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

40  Ian Reader Reader, I. 2005. Making Pilgrimages: Meaning and Practice in Shikoku. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Reader, I. 2007. Positively Promoting Pilgrimages: Media Representations of Pilgrimage in Japan Nova Religio, 10(3), 13–31. Reader, I. 2009. Hikaku Junrei Kenkyū No Kanten Kara Mita Shikoku Henro: Sono Shisa Suru Mono to Kongō No Yukue. In Ehime Daigaku Shikoku Henro to Sekai no Junrei’ Kenkyūkai (ed.), Shikoku Henro to Sekai no Junrei (pp. 5–15). Matsuyama, Japan: Ehime Daigaku. Reader, I. 2014. Pilgrimage in the Marketplace. New York and London: Routledge. Reader, I. 2015. Japanese Studies of Pilgrimage. In Albera, D. & Eade, J. (eds.), International Perspectives on Pilgrimage: Itineraries, Gaps and Obstacles (pp. 23–46). New York and London: Routledge. Reader, I. 2020. Omissions, Stratagems and Dissent: The Shikoku Pilgrimage and the Problems of Applying for World Heritage Status. In Rots, A. & Teeuwen, M. (eds.), Sacred Heritage in Japan (pp. 182–206). Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Reader, I., & Shultz, J. 2021. Pilgrims Until We Die: Unending Pilgrimage in Shikoku. New York: Oxford University Press. Rots, A., & Teeuwen, M. (eds) 2020. Sacred Heritage in Japan. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Rousseau, K. 2016. Pilgrimage, Spatial Interactions and Memory at Three Marfian Sites. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Denver. 2017 Shikoku Araiansu Chiiki Keizai Kenkyū Bunkakai. 2019. Shinjidai ni okeru Henro Ukeiri Taisei No Arikata: Henro Shukuhakusetsubi No Genjō. kadaitō Chōsa. Takamatsu, Kagawa: Shikoku Keizai Rengōkai. Shinjō, T. 1982. Shaji Sankei No Shakai Keizaishiteki Kenkyū. Tokyo: Hanawa Shobō. Shultz, John A. 2009. Characters on a Page, Characters on a Pilgrimage: Contemporary Memoirs of the Shikoku Henro. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Manchester. Shultz, John A. 2011. Pilgrim Leadership Rendered in HTML: Bloggers and the Shikoku Henro. In Baffelli, E., Reader, I. & Staemmler, B. (eds.), Japanese Religions on the Internet: Innovation, Representation, and Authority (pp. 101–117). New York: Routledge. Shultz, John A. 2018. The Gaijin Henro: Outliers, Discrimination, and Time Variability with Pilgrimage in Shikoku. Kenkyū Ronshū (Kansai University of Foreign Studies), 107, 1–12. Statler, O. 1984. Japanese Pilgrimage. London: Picador. Sumption, J. 1975. Pilgrimage: An Image of Medieval Religion. London: Faber and Faber. Takamure, I. 1983. Musume Junrei. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha.

Part II

Positionality and Experiencing Pilgrimage

4

Displacing Religion in Greek Cypriot Pilgrimages to the Turkish-Occupied Monastery of Apostolos Andreas in Cyprus Evgenia Mesaritou

Introduction I don’t quite remember what year it was. It may have been 1998 or 1999. I was a university student on summer vacations and I was driving off a musical festival I had been attending for the last few years. The festival was held in the old part of town, within the Venetian walls of Nicosia, ‘the last divided capital of Europe,’ after the fall of the Berlin wall.1 The city is cut right through by what came to be known as the Green line along which there are barricades and stop signs. Infamous for my lack of orientation skills, I found myself driving a road that was suddenly closed off by barrels preventing me from going any further. Secretly relieved I didn’t accidentally cross into the Turkish-occupied areas, a concern my generation would often joke about when driving around Nicosia, I turned around and headed off to a traditional coffee shop I had just driven by. The very few old men sitting there wondered how I had ended up there (quite the opposite way than the one I should have taken) from where I was and instructed me on how to get home. Almost 20 years later (17 after the opening of the checkpoints), in what must have been 2020, I found myself sitting on the veranda of a friend’s apartment, talking over wine. My friend’s veranda overlooks the mountain of Pentadaktylos which is inscribed by a huge flag of ‘TRNC,’ the unilaterally declared ‘state’ that has been illegally instituted in the north after the 1974 Turkish invasion and the subsequent occupation of almost one third of the island. The flag—a part of the ‘practical work and effort […] geared to Turkey-fying the geography and the material and physical surroundings’ (Navaro-Yashin 2012: 45) of the occupied part of Cyprus—lights up at night, becoming visible from kilometers away. The friend whose veranda I was sitting on is not a Nicosian. In fact, she is a second-generation refugee on her father’s side, who grew up in a different town, one that is nowhere near the Green Line or the occupied areas.2 After many years abroad, she settled in Nicosia. To her, seeing the flag for the first time was shocking. What my friend had also found shocking when she started driving around Nicosia was that the roads would suddenly be cut off. This, as well as being able to listen to the Hodja calling from the occupied areas, created an unprecedented feeling of proximity, making the irrationality of not being able ‘to cross, to co-exist, to talk with the guy on the other side,’ palpable. DOI: 10.4324/9781003137764-6

44  Evgenia Mesaritou For a Nicosian like me, the flag, although a hurtful form of symbolic violence, is an almost banal part of the mental representation of the capital’s urban landscape. Cut-off roads are also an integral part of the city’s spatial and everyday experience to the degree of almost going unnoticed; not being able to go further is, in short, ‘normal.’ My friend and I were living in the same country but not in the same urban landscape of conflict. Although this shaped the ways in which we lived and experienced the division and the occupation, it would probably be safe to say that for both of us, as for most, the fact that we could and would never cross was given. As the reader can therefore imagine, the opening of the checkpoints in 2003 was extremely surprising for Cypriots from both sides of the divide who queued for hours to visit their villages, homes and sacred spaces (Dikomitis 2005; c.f. Demetriou 2007). One of these sacred spaces that Greek Cypriots crossed to visit was the Christian Orthodox Apostolos Andreas monastery which constitutes the focus of my investigation.3 The monastery is located in the Turkish-occupied Karpass peninsula. An established pancyprian, mainly but not exclusively Christian pilgrimage site before the war of 1974, it had mainly been inaccessible to the Greek Cypriots who have been living in the southern part of the island ever since. The phrase ‘mainly inaccessible’ is not coincidental. Apart from the enclaved Greek Cypriot population living in the area4, in the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, several Greek Cypriot pilgrimages to Apostolos Andreas were conducted with the involvement of the United Nations as part of an agreement that was reached between “the Government and the Turkish Cypriot authorities […] to allow reciprocal visits […] on certain religious holidays.”5 Even though I was one of the more than 6,000 Greek-Cypriots who crossed to visit the site, I do not remember much; only that my father wanted me and my brother to go and see and that he was moved, deeply moved, even though the particular trip was not his first post-war trip to the occupied areas. Although I was to travel to Apostolos Andreas several times after that first visit for the purposes of my research, I have never crossed the occupied areas for any other reason. Like my friend, who has never crossed to any other place apart from Nicosia and her father’s hometown, I feel uncomfortable to cross. We both want to go and see but something is holding us back. For my friend, discomfort becomes frustration when non-Cypriot friends from abroad come to visit and want to cross; she cannot go ‘as a tourist’ and they cannot understand how a pro-solution person like her does not feel like going. My friend does not mind taking someone to the other part of Nicosia as this is the other side of the walls, but she does not feel like taking someone else to places that form part of a collective memory that has been formed in the family and at school. At least not before she goes there herself; this is something that is your own, something that you want to experience yourself first before taking someone else, a tourist. The feelings I have just described show the complexity and impact of crossing the checkpoints into the occupied areas on the Greek Cypriots. Attitudes towards crossing vary with Dikomitis (2005) registering three main stances. There are those who refuse to cross as ‘tourists in their own country,’ those who cross for ‘everyday activities’ like shopping, and those whom she characterizes as ‘pilgrims,’ in the

Religion in Greek Cypriot Pilgrimages and the Apostolos Andreas  45 sense that they engage in familiar activities that have acquired a ritualistic character. Such activities are re-invented and re-adjusted to the current conditions. For many of those who do cross, having to demonstrate an ID card at the checkpoints is a source of dismay and frustration. Such feelings are also to be found among pilgrims to the monastery of Apostolos Andreas and I was also to experience them myself once I began my research. In the first part of the paper, I reflect on the ways in which I originally designed the research project problematizing my ‘insider’ status as a Greek Cypriot studying a Christian Orthodox pilgrimage in Cyprus. Drawing on Simon Coleman’s suggestion to look beyond the obvious ritual performances in our exploration of pilgrimage (2014, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c), I argue in favor of an approach that widens our scope beyond religion into other domains of social activity that relate to pilgrimage, co-constituting its practice and experience (see Coleman 2021). In the second part of the paper, I illustrate the usefulness of such an approach, by presenting an interview conducted within the framework of the project. The interview illustrates how a less exclusive focus on religion allows for different constructions of pilgrimage to emerge. In Search of Religion As a Greek Cypriot who has spent most of her life in Cyprus, where the impact of a protracted conflict can be felt on everything, I knew from the onset of the general attitudes held within the Greek Cypriot community in regard to the crossings, of the stakes involved in the pilgrimages and restorations of sites in the occupied areas, as well as of the different ways in which the particular site I was studying was framed (i.e., as a symbol of occupation and/or return, a common cultural heritage, a sign of inter-communal collaboration etc.). Although this preliminary knowledge and local understanding gave me a sense of confidence in researching Apostolos Andreas, it did not necessarily make me more comfortable with it. On the contrary, it initially made the idea intimidating and overwhelming. So much in fact that I contemplated it for a few years before actually pursuing it. Feelings of insecurity caused by the fact that my research would be taking me into an occupied area that the government did not control, fear of touching upon such a delicate and sensitive issue for Cypriots, an issue furthermore with political implications and dimensions, concern over the ethical dilemmas I would be facing as a Greek Cypriot travelling in an occupied area of my country, all made me aware that my ‘insider’ status as a Cypriot studying a Cypriot pilgrimage site was relative; the pilgrimages take me to a part of Cyprus I had only been to once before I started thinking of doing this research. While my preliminary insider knowledge of the context did not make my decision to undertake the project easy, it did affect the ways in which I set the project up. The project, part of which is the interview I analyze below, looks at the revival of the Apostolos Andreas pilgrimage, as well as the restoration of the monastery, exploring how religion, politics and heritage intersect in societies of conflict. Religion per se was not therefore the only and even most important category of

46  Evgenia Mesaritou thinking and as a result, the project draws upon explanatory frames that include but go beyond it. This may have had to do with the fact that even though as a child I was baptized Christian-Orthodox, a religious tradition I have some but not much familiarity with, I am not religious myself. More than anything, however, it had to do with my knowledge of the complex ways in which various interrelated socio-political processes come to bear on the site and practice of pilgrimage. This knowledge displaced religion from the center of my inquiries even if this was not immediately obvious to me. And as I will later show, it also at times displaces religion from the center of my interlocutors’ concerns. The peripherality of religion in my exploration had not really occurred to me before I was asked where ‘religion’ was in what I was presenting. Retrospectively, I think I had simply assumed that what I was exploring was ‘religion’. People were travelling to a church, and many of them talked of their journey in terms of a pilgrimage, although some also gave this term their own meaning. Furthermore, while at the church, many people would ritually engage with the site in ways that are commonly at least seen as religious; they would, for example, light candles, kiss the icons, dip pieces of cotton into the oil lantern to take home with them and would also go to the ayiasma (source of water considered as holy) (cf. Dubisch 1995: 82), where they would wash their hands and faces and fill bottles they most commonly took with them from home. Some people were furthermore going to the monastery in fulfilment of a vow or because they were devoted to the saint to which the church was dedicated. These were actually the things I came up with when I started thinking of the question ‘where religion was’ in what I was studying. What I have just described, however, did not seem to capture what the pilgrimages or the site were about. Many people also went because the pilgrimage was an opportunity to see places they remembered or had heard about. Some were going because of the monastery’s location at the island’s edge and because of the beauty of the untouched natural environment traversed. These reasons were at times cited side by side to the religious reason of the proskynima, a term I will come back to shortly. The time spent at the actual monastery is furthermore usually very short in relation to the time one needs to travel in order to reach it. In the buses I have travelled with there was rarely, if anything ‘religious’ going on; people were not reciting prayers, jokes were at times being said along the route and on one occasion there were even songs. Contrary to common representations of pilgrimage as a spiritually elevating and rejuvenating journey, for many of my interlocutors the experience was also painful and even traumatic (Mesaritou 2021). In addition to these, there were those who made it clear that the reasons they were going to the monastery were not religious. So, were the pilgrimages I was studying religious? Were they even pilgrimages? Thinking of why the question was raised in the first place and what it meant, I also started thinking of what my initial approach in answering it revealed about the assumptions I was operating on in regard to what ‘religion’ and ‘pilgrimage’ were. To put it in the form of a question, why was I answering the question ‘where religion was?’ in relation to the particular observations I noted above and why weren’t these enough for me to say that what I was observing was indeed religion? Put

Religion in Greek Cypriot Pilgrimages and the Apostolos Andreas  47 slightly differently, ‘what type of construction of pilgrimage and in fact of religion was I using and how did this predispose me to search for certain things that would make this trip into a pilgrimage while concealing others?’. A related question is why I translated the question of whether what I was observing was religion to whether it was a pilgrimage? I obviously translated the question of whether my pilgrims were religious into whether they were pilgrims because I was assuming pilgrimage to be religious in certain ways that were not readily observable in my case; I was looking for more ‘extreme’ ritual forms (see Coleman 2018b). These assumptions reflect a Western perception of pilgrimage as a journey associated with penance (Turner and Turner 2011[1978]: 7). Such a perception derives from a Catholic bias in Anglophone pilgrimage studies. Anglophone anthropological studies of Christian pilgrimage in particular, have been dominated by studies of the phenomenon’s manifestation in Roman Catholicism (cf. Coleman 2014: S282, S283, Albera and Eade 2015: 11) with relatively few studies of Eastern Christian pilgrimages, for example (i.e. Dubisch 1995; Kormina 2010; Rahkala 2010; Rock 2015). This neglect needs to be situated within a more general neglect of Eastern forms of Christianity by Anglophone anthropologists (Hann and Goltz 2010; Coleman 2014: S281, S283; for an exposition of the reasons for such a neglect see Hann and Goltz 2010: 8), who have often orientalized and stereotyped Eastern Christians (Hann and Goltz 2010: 2, 3, 11). The very term ‘pilgrimage’ is itself intimately bound with European Christianity6 (Reader 2014: 19; Eade and Albera 2017: 7) and in many languages, there is no ‘precise equivalent’ (Eade and Albera 2017: 9). As Dubisch (1995) has noted, the Greek word proskynema for example, denotes what is referred to by the English term ‘pilgrimage’ but also refers to the devotions performed in the church (Håland 2009: 98; Rahkala 2010: 80). Proskynema, therefore, does not necessarily connote a journey in the way that ‘pilgrimage’ does (Dubisch 1995; Rahkala 2010). At the same time, as Rahkala (2010) rightly notes in her study of Greek pilgrims, ‘excursion’ is used for monastery or convent visits, which are ‘usually seen as some kind of religious tourism involving a devout visit to a monastery’ (ibid.: 81). The linguistic variety of Western and non-Western terms that are usually ‘associated with’ the English term ‘pilgrimage,’ of which the Greek word proskynema is but one, ‘point[s] to a complex array of modes of travel and practice related to religious institutions’ (Reader 2014: 19–20) which should be closely examined instead of inferred. At the same time, our ethnographies should be more sensitive to the ways in which our interlocutors may be constructing pilgrimage in ways that lead us away from religion per se to other domains of their lives such as family and kinship (cf. Coleman 2014: 288, 289). What I have in mind here, is an approach mapped out by Simon Coleman in a number of his publications (2014, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c, 2021). Looking at the ‘“margins” of religious cores’ (2018c: 44), in these works, Coleman turns our attention away from the obvious ritual performers and the more formal, identifiable and ‘extreme’ features and forms of ritual engagement which social scientists have tended to focus upon, towards the less obvious ritual

48  Evgenia Mesaritou performers, the ‘surrounding publics’ (2018b) and the less visible, more informal, trivial, fleeting, fragmented and ambiguous ways in which many people engage with religion. Pilgrimage may encompass both of these forms of expression; the ‘institutionalized and the more invisible forms’ (2014: 289) and this is in fact often allowed by the spatial configuration of pilgrimage sites (see 2018b). By ignoring the less obvious ritual performers and religious expressions, we fail to understand how pilgrimage sites may suggest ‘liturgical pathways and articulations’ between the obviously religious and ‘supposedly nonreligious […] life’ (2014: 289). Coleman’s approach allows us to follow the links between those places where overtly ritual practices are taking place—places we normally think of as settings of religious and ritual activity i.e., pilgrimage sites—and other places into which these settings of ritual activity extend but which we do not normally see as ‘religious’ i.e. refugee associations and occupied municipalities. It, therefore, allows us to connect practices such as pilgrimages, which have become metonymic of certain forms of religiosity and practices which we do not tend to think of as religious such as those related to the sustaining of social networks, to politics and memory formation. Widening the lens through which to look at pilgrimage beyond religion, allows us to observe the subtle ways in which the practice, depending on the context in which it is manifested, refracts and disperses into other domains of people’s lives which help constitute pilgrimage sites and practices as ‘sacred’ in ways that are not immediately obvious to the observer.7 To illustrate this, in the next section of the chapter, I will present an extended interview with a Greek Cypriot female in her forties who has travelled to the monastery twice after the opening of the checkpoints. The interview illustrates the ways in which pilgrimages to Apostolos Andreas get entangled in processes related to the unresolved Cyprus conflict, therefore, acquiring different resonances than the ones pilgrimage has in the Catholic, as well as the Orthodox context. While in the first case, pilgrimage is usually linked to penance (Turner and Turner 1978: 7), transformation (11), deepening of ‘religious participation’ (15) and the ‘revivification of faith,’ (6), in the Greek Orthodox context pilgrimages to monasteries are often likened to excursions where devotion and religious tourism mix (Rahkala 2010: 81). In the pilgrimages to Apostolos Andreas, an excursion like behaviors (which the pre-war pilgrimages were associated with) such as spending money in the form of shopping and eating at restaurants are sometimes avoided or at least reluctantly engaged with by some, especially in privately organized pilgrimages. At the same time, practices related to the Cyprus conflict which actually enable the pilgrimage such as crossing the checkpoints and demonstrating IDs are equally, if not more important than the expression of devotion in shaping the practice’s meaning and in constructing pilgrimage as one type of journey instead of another. What I am arguing is not that the performance of devotion is not important; it is and this is especially so when the pilgrimage is related to vows, the completion of which may make the pilgrimage moving and fulfilling. For some, vows and devotions may also provide the necessary justification for the crossing which thereby

Religion in Greek Cypriot Pilgrimages and the Apostolos Andreas  49 becomes ‘acceptable’ even for those who would otherwise not cross; by being designated as religious and devotional the pilgrimage-crossing can take place. At the same time, however, non-religious practices which pilgrims may (involuntarily) engage in or (voluntarily) refrain from are telling of the kind of experience that pilgrims have or aim to have. They are further illustrative of the ambivalent character of many shrine visitations which defy easy characterization as ‘religious pilgrimages,’ since they point to ways in which pilgrimage practices, ‘regular forms of ritual’ (Coleman 2018a: 6), and ‘mundane forms of behaviour’ (ibid: 5) ‘co-exist, […] and even blend with’ one another (ibid). A ‘Pilgrimage’ to One’s Place of Origin My interlocutor’s parents are both refugees from the same Turkish-occupied town, which my interlocutor also feels as her own even though she was not born or raised there. In fact, my interlocutor grew up in the same city as the friend I opened this chapter with. The feeling of her parents’ town as her own was consciously cultivated within her family; her parents instructed her, as a child, to name the occupied town they had to flee from as her place of origin instead of the place where she was born. They would also very often take her and her siblings to see their occupied town from afar; after becoming a refugee, an uncle of hers settled at a close distance to the town so that he would be in proximity to the place where he was born. Her uncle ‘felt the need to go and see his town every day, even if from afar,’ and when she and her family would visit they would all go ‘to see, at a specific point, we were going down, to get the binoculars to see the town even if from afar. It was like, you know, a ritual for the family.’ Apart from such family rituals, religious rituals and traditions relating to the town’s saint were also kept both before and after the opening of the checkpoints. My interlocutor said that before the checkpoints opened, ‘there were liturgies but these weren’t organized by the Municipality, they were spontaneous’. Later, because of the opening of the checkpoints and of this initiative that the Municipality took, 8 I think that the memory of the saint and of the fair is strong now, and it has become more known and people that are not from […] [names the occupied town] also come to the liturgy of the […] [names the saint’s church]. My interlocutor sees these liturgies as a form of resistance in the sense that a village tradition has been revived after so many years. The people from the town, Feel that a piece of their town comes back [to life] in the form that it used to be before the [Turkish] invasion even if under these conditions and if you ask […] they will tell you that ‘every year we will be there,’ there is this sense of ‘duty’? Ηow to say, that we have to preserve it because this memory must not be lost? Ιt is this sense that it is something that needs to be preserved like a tradition, like an activity that has to do with the people from the [names the

50  Evgenia Mesaritou town] and it is also intense the feeling of their reunion because they will all get together from all the places in Cyprus [interviewer: as a community] as a community yes, it is this that reminds them of the old days because they will all get together, in the same yard where they used to, even for that time period of two to three hours that they will […] walk in the town, […] remember the old days and go back to their place [of origin]. Practices such as the one described by my interlocutor made for a strong ‘experiential element’ of the town and created a connection to her parent’s place of origin which makes her want to visit it often; ‘I feel like going home’ she said, attributing this feeling to what she would hear about the town from her wider family.9 Within this context, it was therefore natural that when the checkpoints opened, her first crossing would be to her parents’ town. Talking about this first journey, my interlocutor said, It was the sense of a ‘pilgrimage’ […] my parents were […] intensely moved because after so many years, they were seeing for the first time the place where they were born. And together with them we also got carried away in this emotion because we felt that on the one hand they were saddened because they saw them [the places] and on the other they were happy that they were seeing them [the places] again […] and memories[…] returned. They remembered, and it was like they were guides [ξεναγοί] and they were guiding us to our village […]. That which they were telling us for so many years to see it in front of us […] for the first time [interviewer: how did you experience this?] […] I greatly anticipated to see the place where [it is not clear if what she was going to say was ‘they were’, as in her parents, or ‘I was,’ as in herself] born, where my parents’ and my roots are; where I came from. And I felt that connection, […] with the space. The quote is revealing in the characterization of the trip as a ‘pilgrimage.’10 This was a pilgrimage back to the roots (see Basu 2004). As my interlocutors explained, she felt that she was going to a place that was her own, That used to be my home […] but where I cannot stay, I cannot freely go […] and it was like a proskynisis of something sacred, like entering a church. This was the feeling on the part of my parents when they saw their house for the first time. As I will show, the kind of ‘guiding’ through personal memories which my interlocutor describes in relation to her visit to her parents’ place of origin, is also one of the things that impressed her during her first pilgrimage to Apostolos Andreas. This took place around 2013–2014 and one of the reasons she cited for going was that her family had talked to her about the monastery and that her parents had gone when they were young. What is interesting here is that it was not only what she had

Religion in Greek Cypriot Pilgrimages and the Apostolos Andreas  51 heard about the monastery that made her want to go but also what the monastery held for her; a piece of family history. Both of these made her curious to go and see the monastery for herself. The reasons were therefore not related to what can conventionally at least be seen as religious. ‘A Pilgrimage that Is Different from the Rest’ My interlocutor characterized her relationship with religion as very personal. She believes in God and Jesus but she said that she has a particular way of believing and worshipping. Her way of expressing her religious sentiment is not by going to church every Sunday or by praying every morning— things she characterized as formalities— but is, as she characterized it, simpler such as lighting a candle in a space that inspires in her religious awe. The Apostolos Andreas monastery which she has travelled to twice after the opening of the checkpoints is for her one of these awe-inspiring places. The reasons she gave for making the trips were various. Other than the familial connection to the place as this was noted above, she talked of her historical interest in the space, her interest to see the monastery’s location, and her desire to visit the occupied areas more generally. These multiple, nonreligious reasons for visiting are also illustrated by the fact that the second time she went, around 2017, she did not feel it necessary to go for proskynisis to the icon because she had done so the previous time and didn’t want to stand in line.11 She preferred instead to do other things that related to getting to know the place better and seeing the changes that had occurred since her previous visit. Asked to compare the route to and the route from the monastery, my interlocutor differentiated both between the occupied monastery and the village church and between the pilgrimages to it and other pilgrimages. It is this feeling that you have visited a space that is sacred, for most anyway, you have made a pilgrimage that is different from the rest [interviewer: different in what way?] Because the space is also particular. It is also the monastery, because of the history it has it creates in you this feeling that […] you go for proskynhsis to something completely different than the church of your village. It is this entire route, this process that you put yourself into. That you start in the morning and you will cross the checkpoint […]. The reasons my interlocutor distinguished the local church (cf. Dubisch 1995) from the monastery and the pilgrimages to it ‘from the rest,’ are not only related to the performance of religious devotion— the site’s sacred character for most, its history, its location, the process one has to go through in order to reach it, as well as the route, are the things that made the experience extraordinary. The particular pilgrimage’s extraordinariness, therefore, links to the conflict and its related processes and concerns.12 Even though at another part of the interview, she commented on a non-occupied monastery saying that it causes her the feeling that what happens in its space is different than what happens in other monasteries and churches,13 when

52  Evgenia Mesaritou asked to compare this monastery to Apostolos Andreas she said that the feeling is different and more majestic at the latter. She attributed this to Apostolos Andreas’ location at Cyprus’ edge, to the prohibitions surrounding it and to the process one has to go through in order to reach it. The noting of such a process, namely the checkpoint crossing, illustrates that in the case of the Apostolos Andreas pilgrimages, the ‘threshold’ to be crossed is represented not so much by the pilgrimage center as per Turner’s formulation (1973: 214) but by the checkpoints, the demonstration of IDs at which my interlocutor characterized as soul-consuming (also see Dikomitis 2012: 101). [I]t felt weird [interviewer: why?] because of the regime more than anything, of the control […] the sense [interviewer: it causes you] ‘these [places] are ours and we let you enter and see them’. Not so much that I have to show my ID but this process of, it gave you the impression […] that it is a regime that imposes itself and you have to obey […] that those areas were once Greek Cypriot or, that the people that lived there did not have these issues […] and it gives you the impression that they want problems to be caused between the two communities while in essence there is no substantive issue between the two. As the quote illustrates, the control at the checkpoints and the need for one to be granted permission to go and visit the occupied areas makes the whole process not only extraordinary but also emotionally difficult. The view of pilgrimage as an extraordinary activity was accompanied by a feeling of communitas − defined by Turner (1973: 216) as ‘a spontaneously generated relationship between levelled and equal total and individuated human beings, stripped of structural attributes’ − which my interlocutor described as ‘group atmosphere.’ This atmosphere was formed on the bus, as older generation of pilgrims attempted to integrate the youth by explaining and showing them things along the route. Despite intra-generational hierarchies that may form as older people assume guiding roles in relation to younger generations of pilgrims, this type of guiding created the sense of a group, a sense that was further reinforced by songs that were sung on the bus. Feelings of belonging to a group may also be thought to be generated by the enclaved nature of the bus pilgrimage14 (see Feldman 2002), which insulates travellers from influences exerted by their surroundings, limiting their interactions with the landscape and the people who inhabit it to gazing. The insulation of pilgrims is nevertheless penetrable by the visual markers of conflict such as flags, statues, ruins and ‘development’ that are imprinted on the landscape. Such markers give rise to feelings of estrangement, alienation and disappointment that may be shared and circulated among pilgrims. These feelings are further reinforced by practices which pilgrims may choose to refrain from such as money spending. Although often constructed in opposition to pilgrimage, activities such as consuming here take upon them additional meanings as political acts contesting the occupation. The particular interviewee, for example, did not feel like paying any money for entry

Religion in Greek Cypriot Pilgrimages and the Apostolos Andreas  53 into occupied sites such as Bella Pais, Soloi and the castle of Kyrenia for political and ethical reasons, although she is now reconsidering her stance, And I think that if I go again, this time I will pay to see these places, at least once [interviewer: why didn’t you enter the first time?] I felt that I was giving my money to a regime that will use it, I do not know, for a purpose which I do not want [interviewer: and now? Why are you reconsidering?] because […] seeing what is happening, I may not be able to see these places again, the opportunity may not be given to me in the future. Illustrative of her reconsideration is that when asked about whether she would pay to enter Apostolos Andreas if there was a fee she said that she would pay; ‘I mean as an organized group I imagine they would tell us […] before we went, although to most archaeological spaces in the occupied areas I did not pay.’ Even though she hadn’t paid to enter sites which she visited as part of her trips to the occupied areas, she nevertheless said that she didn’t mind sitting at a restaurant to eat even if this was not managed by a Greek Cypriot. This may be because the money spent at a restaurant would not be collected by the regime as entry fees to archaeological sites would be. While she didn’t mind sitting and eating at a restaurant that was not run by an enclaved Greek Cypriot, my interlocutor acknowledged that others, older people in particular, may have had an issue with this. She, therefore, showed an awareness of the various stances that Greek Cypriots hold in regard to the issue of spending money in the occupied areas. The latter is at times limited to the absolutely necessary or even avoided altogether. Some people may also devise complex explanatory schemes as to when money spending is ‘ethical’ and appropriate (i.e., depending on who manages the restaurant they will eat— if it is a Greek Cypriot enclaved or a Turkish Cypriot refugee). Although it has become less common recently, at least in organized pilgrimage groups which often stop and eat at restaurants, when practiced, the refraining from consumption becomes an ‘on the ground’, active construction of the pilgrimage as a distinct activity on the part of the people who undertake it— not doing something can be equally powerful in marking a distinction as doing it. Refraining from consumption can therefore be seen as a consciously cultivated liminality in the event of entering a space which is itself liminal. Victor Turner talks of liminality as the ‘betwixt and between’ (1995 [1969]: 95) and sees the liminality of pilgrimage ‘as an interval between two distinct periods of intensive involvement in structural social existence out of which one opts to do one’s duties as a pilgrim’ (1973: 199). In this case, however, liminality retains an ‘intensive involvement in [a] structural social existence’ which is dominated by the conflict; the devotional and non-religious acts (as well as the latter’s avoidance) which form part of the pilgrimage experience are structured by the wider socio-political conditions of the Cyprus conflict in which the pilgrimage take place. This is not only visible in the justification people give for not engaging in certain practices but also in the ways in which vows are sometimes linked to wishes of ‘return.’ One only needs to hear pilgrims’ statements on television each year on

54  Evgenia Mesaritou the thirtieth of November, Apostolos Andreas’s feast day, in order to understand the ways in which pilgrimage is embedded in the structural conditions created by the Cyprus conflict. These statements often refer to ‘returning,’ ‘liberation,’ and the end of Cyprus’ occupation. The integration of pilgrimages to Apostolos Andreas within the Cyprus conflict is what gives them different resonances than the ones Orthodox monastery visits usually have. These pilgrimages are not ‘excursions’ but politicized if not political acts. Contrary to the spiritually rejuvenating feelings that pilgrimage is usually associated with in the Catholic mode (see Turner and Turner 2011 [1978]: 7l), pilgrimages to Apostolos Andreas provoke multiple and often ambivalent emotions. As my interlocutor explained, the journey is characterized by increases and decreases in the intensity of the emotions experienced. Feeling bad or at least weird to cross, feeling anger for the situation when looking at places that were once full of life, feeling anger, Why to get into this process to show my ID for a place (enan topo) that is mine […] and no be able to live with this people peacefully because some others want war […] and want us to be, you know, divided and you say ‘it is a shame, this place is my place […], why can’t I live freely and move freely […]?’ Such feelings provoked by the pilgrimage are again unrelated to religion and they illustrate that despite the religious aspects of the journey, this cannot simply be seen as penitential. As I have already noted above, the particular pilgrimage’s extraordinariness is not related to the expression of piety, penance and devotion as much as it is connected to political processes, attitudes and concerns which relate to the extraordinary and yet very much mundane situation of the Cyprus conflict. This is also reflected in the reasons why my interlocutor characterized her trip to the monastery as a pilgrimage, In its totality […] in the sense that you see a place that is yours and you want to get to know […] you feel respect towards the place that endured all these tests that it has gone through […]. This is a different and wider definition of a pilgrimage than that of a distant journey to and from a sacred center or at least a wider definition of what a sacred center is. Pilgrimage is here a politically loaded journey of ‘return’ to an enduring place that is felt as one’s own. Beyond Religion: Pilgrimage Refractions and Dispersions Following Simon Coleman in looking at the less obvious ritual performances, in the first part of the chapter I reflected on my positionality and the ways in which I designed my research in order to suggest an approach to pilgrimage that does not necessarily and exclusively focus on religion and its practice. In the second part

Religion in Greek Cypriot Pilgrimages and the Apostolos Andreas  55 of the chapter, I illustrated the benefits of widening our approach by presenting a particular interview which I conducted in the framework of my research project on the monastery of Apostolos Andreas in Turkish-occupied Cyprus. Read with an ethnographic sensibility, the interview shows how the Cyprus conflict has shaped the pilgrimage in ways that divert from both the Catholic model of pious journeys and the Orthodox model of monastery pilgrimage-excursions. It, therefore, illustrates constructions of pilgrimage that an exclusive focus on religion could obscure; my interlocutor constructs pilgrimages to Apostolos Andreas as different from the rest in reference to the particular conditions of conflict in which they are taking place and to the monastery’s location in place as well as collective memory and imagination. The interview therefore presents us with a wider definition of pilgrimage than the one usually adopted in pilgrimage studies, one which accommodates sacred, as well as non-religious elements. By showing how the latter can sometimes become as important to the pilgrimage experience as the expression of devotion, the interview highlights the importance of going beyond religion, in exploring how things such as politics, family and memory help constitute the pilgrimage practice. Such a broadening of perspective allows us to remain open to the possibility that the study of pilgrimage may lead us to conclusions that aren’t to do with religion per se (Coleman 2014: S288); in this case conclusions about how conflicts, homes and displacements are experienced and enacted, how families and social networks shape identities, motivations and aspirations and how memory is formed, maintained and practiced. Acknowledgments Parts of this chapter were presented at PILNET’s 2019 Workshop Approaching Pilgrimage: Methodological Issues Involved In Researching Routes, Sites and Practices, which took place in Zadar (Croatia) and in Simon Coleman’s class Constructing Religion (RLG406H1/RLG2064H, 2018, Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto). I would like to thank the editors of the volume for their comments, as well as Simon Coleman for the opportunity he gave me to present to his class, and his useful comments on the presentation. Any weaknesses are solely my own. Notes 1 Nicosia is the capital of Cyprus. Cyprus has been de facto divided along ethnic and geographical lines ever since the Turkish invasion in 1974. It’s two main communities, the Greek and the Turkish Cypriots, have almost exclusively resided in the geographically south and north of Cyprus respectively. In 2003 the checkpoints opened allowing people to cross. 2 ‘“[R]efugee” [...] is uniformly used in Greek Cypriot discourse’ even though ‘according to the 1951 Geneva Convention and the 1967 Protocol, those not forced to leave their country are internally displaced people and not refugees’ (Roudometof and Christou 2016: 169). 3 The monastery was an established pan-Cyprian, mainly Christian Orthodox pilgrimage destination up until 1974 when it was rendered largely inaccessible to the majority of the Greek Cypriots.

56  Evgenia Mesaritou 4 ‘Enclaved’ (‘Εγκλωβισμένοι’/‘englovismenoi’) is the word used for the Greek Cypriots ‘who did not leave their houses to move to the southern part of the island’ but remained and are still living in the occupied areas (Roudometof and Christou 2016: 168). 5 U.S. Department of State Country Report on Human Rights Practices 2003 - Cyprus, February 25, 2004. 6 For the Western genealogy of the English term pilgrimage see Eade and Albera (2017: 7–9). 7 For an interesting use of ‘refraction’ see Bandak and Jørgensen (2012). 8 Here she refers to the liturgies held at the church of the saint of her occupied town. These are organized on the initiative of the Municipality and the Church. The nine occupied municipalities of Cyprus ‘maintain their legal identity although the Mayors and Municipal Councils are temporarily displaced […] along with the majority of their voters. When municipal elections are held in Cyprus, the displaced residents vote both for their occupied Municipality of origin and for their new Municipality of residence.’ (http://ucm.org.cy/en/the-union/occupied-municipalities/). 9 This is also the reason she herself participates in her occupied town’s youth together with which she has visited the town on an organized trip. On this trip young people originating from the town were accompanied by older people who went along in order to show them central places of the town which they remembered from memory and to talk to them about activities that used to take place there. 10 The way in which homes can acquire sacred-like qualities for those who have lost them, prompting behaviours usually observed at pilgrimage sites, is also illustrated by the words of a woman whom Hadjiyanni (2002) quotes in The Making of a Refugee: Children Adopting Refugee Identity in Cyprus; ‘I want to cry now. I want to go and find the place [where] I was born. I would go there on my knees’ (Hadjiyanni 2002: 164). This is a practice found in Greek Orthodox pilgrimage centres such as Tinos in Greece (see Dubisch 1995) and it blurs the sacred-secular and home-shrine distinctions. Hadjiyanni did the research for her book before the opening of the checkpoints which is probably why there is so much emphasis placed by her interlocutors on the desire to see their homes again. 11 People had to que because the monastery was being restored and the icon was therefore housed not in the church but in a small space near it. 12 Asked to describe her experience of attending a liturgy to the church of her occupied town she said that ‘it is the same feeling as in Apostolos Andreas, that it causes awe to you, that the space has this history.’ This reinforces the point that what distinguishes the experiences is (apart from its location) the occupied character of the site. 13 She attributed the uniqueness of the particular monastery to the fact that it is said to have a relic (allegedly rope from Jesus’s cross). Even if this is not true she said the mere thought that it could be true causes a peculiar feeling and a feeling that the space is very sacred. 14 During her first pilgrimage, my interlocutor said that folk and traditional songs were being sung. When passing by Kyrenia, among the songs sung was Evagoras Karagiorgis’s ‘The dream.’ The song refers to a dream during which the singer re-visits Kyrenia and it is very well known among Cypriots. Such songs made the pilgrimage experience moving and expressed according to my interlocutor her fellow travellers’ longing ‘that these places were not ours [anymore].’ At the end of the trip, happier songs were sung while songs were also sung during her second bus pilgrimage in during which things were, as she said, more spontaneous and relaxed.

References Albera, D., & Eade, J. 2015. International Perspectives on Pilgrimage Studies: Putting the Anglophone Contribution in Its Place. In Eade, J. & Dionigi, A. (eds.), International Perspectives on Pilgrimage Studies: Itineraries, Gaps and Obstacles (pp. 1–23). London: Routledge.

Religion in Greek Cypriot Pilgrimages and the Apostolos Andreas  57 Bandak, A., & Jonas, A. Jørgensen. 2012. Foregrounds and Backgrounds – Ventures in the Anthropology of Christianity. Ethnos, 77(4), 447–458. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844 .2011.619662 Basu, P. 2004. Route Metaphors of “Roots-Tourism” in the Scottish Highland Diaspora. In Coleman, S. & John, E. (eds.), Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion (pp. 150–174). London: Routledge. Coleman, S. 2014. Pilgrimage as Trope for an Anthropology of Christianity. Current Anthropology, 55(S10), S281–S291. Coleman, S. 2018a. From the Liminal to the Lateral: Urban Religion in English Cathedrals. Tourism Geographies, 21(3), 384–404. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2018. 1449236 Coleman, S. 2018b. Laterality: A Sideways Look at Ritual. London: Henry Myers lecture delivered at the Royal Anthropological Institute. Coleman, S. 2018c. Great Expectations?: Between Boredom and Sincerity in Jewish Ritual “Attendance”. In Bandak, A. & Janeja, Manpreet K. (eds.), Ethnographies of Waiting: Doubt, Hope and Uncertainty (pp. 41–65). London: Bloomsbury. Coleman, S. 2021. Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement. New York: New York University Press. Demetriou, O. 2007. To Cross or Not to Cross? Subjectivization and the Absent State in Cyprus. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13(4), 987–1006. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2007.00468.x Dikomitis, L. 2005. ‘Three Readings of a Border: Greek Cypriots Crossing the Green Line in Cyprus.’ Anthropology Today, 21(5), 7–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0268540X.2005.00380.x Dikomitis, L. 2012. Cyprus and Its Places of Desire: Cultures of Displacement Among Greek and Turkish Cypriot Refugees. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd. Dubisch, J. 1995. In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eade, J., & Dionigi, A. 2017. ‘Pilgrimage Studies in Global Perspective.’ In Dionigi, A. & Eade, J. (eds.), New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies: Global Perspectives (pp. 1–18). London: Routledge. Feldman, J. 2002. Making the Boundaries of the Enclave: Defining the Israeli Collective Through the Poland ‘Experience’. Israel Studies, 7(2), 84–114. Hadjiyanni, T. 2002. The Making of a Refugee: Children Adopting Refugee Identity in Cyprus. Westport, CT and London: Praeger. Håland, Evy J. 2009. 15 August on the Aegean Island of Tinos. Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SANU, 2, 95–110. https://doi.org/10.2298/GEI0902095H Hann, C., & Goltz, H. 2010. Introduction: The Other Christianity? In Hann, C. & Goltz, H. (eds.), Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective (pp. 1–33). Berkeley: University of California Press. Kormina, J. 2010. Avtobusniki: Russian Orthodox Pilgrims’ Longing for Authenticity. In Hann, C. & Goltz, H. (eds.), Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective (pp. 267–289). Berkeley: University of California Press. Mesaritou, E. 2021. When Pilgrimage Does Not Heal: Memory and loss in Greek Cypriots’ Pilgrimages to Apostolos Andreas. History and Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1080/02 757206.2021.1914028 Navaro-Yashin, Y. 2012. The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

58  Evgenia Mesaritou Rahkala, M.-J. 2010. In the Sphere of the Holy: Pilgrimage to a Contemporary Greek Convent. In Gothóni, R. (ed.), Pilgrims and Travellers in Search of the Holy (pp. 69–95). Oxford: Peter Lang. Reader, I. 2014. Pilgrimage in the Marketplace. London: Routledge. Rock, S. 2015. Touching the Holy: Orthodox Christian Pilgrimage Within Russia. In Eade, J. & Dionigi, A. (eds.), International Perspectives on Pilgrimage Studies: Itineraries, Gaps and Obstacles (pp. 47–69). London: Routledge. Roudometof, V., & Christou, M. 2016. 1974 and Greek Cypriot Identity: The Division of Cyprus as Cultural Trauma. In Eyerman, R., Alexander, Jeffrey C. & Elizabeth Butler, B. (eds.), Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering (pp. 163–187). New York: Routledge. Turner, V. 1973. The Centre out There: Pilgrim’s Goal. History of Religions, 12(3), 191–230. Turner, V. 1995 [1969]. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Turner, V., & Turner, E. 2011 [1978]. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press. Union of Cyprus Municipalities. See http://ucm.org.cy/en/the-union/occupiedmunicipalities/. US Department of State Country Report on Human Rights Practices 2003- Cyprus (February 25, 2004).

5

Walking the Sutra A Semiotic Theory of Pilgrimage Tatsuma Padoan

Introduction: The Method of Pilgrimage Michael Taussig, in his thought-provoking book The Magic of the State (1997), concerning the construction and circulation of political power through death and its encounters in spirit possession, 1 concludes his analysis by explicitly invoking the idea of ‘pilgrimage as method’ in anthropology. He sees pilgrimage as analogous to translation: translation between home and shrine, profane and sacred, and official and unofficial voices. Pilgrimage provides a model of ‘explanation-as-translation’ which could be useful for anthropology: a mode of signification that does not erase images, events, or objects but maintains ‘the ghost of the translated within the translation, allowing us to witness the presence of the other’ (197). Taussig comes to the conclusion that anthropologists are also pilgrims since they engage in ‘an act of transposition’ between different domains ‒ the world of their readers and the ethnographic other (198–199). Although we could criticise Taussig’s notion of pilgrimage as a journey across pre-existing profane and sacred domains, his idea of ‘pilgrimage as method’ based on a principle of translation that connects and transposes, rather than divides, is quite intriguing. His debt to Walter Benjamin’s (1969) ideas concerning ‘the task of the translator’ is here rather evident. According to Taussig, making sense of an ethnographic experience does not just consist in transmitting information and data collected in the field. It requires ethnographers first and foremost to translate their data into another language that of anthropological discourse, by producing in such discourse ‘the echo of the original’ (Benjamin 1969: 76). This task involves evoking the presence of the ethnographic subjects encountered in the field and their own way of being in the world. As Benjamin puts it: ‘A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully’ (1969: 79). As we will see, the notion of meaning is what might underlie this specific connection between ethnography, translation, and pilgrimage. On the one hand, the idea that meaning can only be grasped through some form of translation is quite old in anthropology and social sciences. Already in Myth and Meaning, Claude

DOI: 10.4324/9781003137764-7

60  Tatsuma Padoan Lévi-Strauss ([1978] 2001) had extended the notion of translation to include that of signification itself, when he stated: ‘“to mean” means the ability of any kind of data to be translated in a different language’ (2001: 4). Therefore, Taussig’s idea, also shared by Asad (1986), Hanks (2014), and others (see also Viveiros de Castro 2004; Swift 2022), that anthropologists should think about their own task in terms of ‘explanation-as-translation’, is more encompassing than one would expect because, as semioticians say, meaning, or better signification, is itself an act of translation (Fabbri 2005: 104–105; Lotman 2009: 6). The only way we have to explain something is, in fact, to translate it or paraphrase it into other words, languages, and media (Jakobson 1959). Pilgrims can be also considered as translators insofar as they too make sense of their own life and experience through an ongoing work of translation, as will be clear from the ethnographic case I will present below. Yet, the relation between pilgrimage and the problem of meaning does not end with the notion of translation. One of the definitions of meaning provided in semiotics – especially in the works of semioticians from the Paris School like Algirdas J. Greimas (1990), Paolo Fabbri (2005), Eric Landowski (2004), and Jacques Fontanille (2007) – is expressed through the term sense. In contrast to the English term ‘meaning’, etymologically related to the Old Saxon mēnian or ‘to have in mind’ (Klein 1971), the word ‘sense’ derives via the French sens from the Latin sensus, i.e. ‘perceiving’, ‘going in a certain direction’, and ‘finding out’ (cf. Italian senso). Although radically transformed during the Enlightenment through the English expression ‘common sense’, referring to some rational assumption or ‘sturdy good judgement’ about the world (Blackburn 1996: 70), ‘sense’ still evokes the link to both perception (cf. Lat sensus communis) and the idea of direction, movement, and orientation. In semiotic usage, ‘sense’ expresses the phenomenological quality of meaning through its link to perception, feeling, and direction as ‘oriented intentionality’ (Greimas and Courtés 1982: 240; cf. Deleuze 1990; Fontanille 2007: 2), before its articulation as signification and, thus, before we start to explain it, translate it, or interpret it. Therefore, next to the idea of meaning as translation or signification, we also have the idea of meaning as oriented intentionality or sense, and these two conceptions are intertwined as two dimensions of the same phenomenon, in a constant interplay. This second definition of meaning as sense also seems to correspond to another important aspect of pilgrimage, not mentioned by Taussig, which is precisely its quality of ‘perceiving’, ‘going in a certain direction’, and ‘finding out’. Over the last two decades, the topic of movement and mobility has indeed captured increasing attention in the anthropology of pilgrimage (Frey 1998; Michalowski and Dubisch 2001; Coleman and Eade 2004). This development has been accompanied by a reorientation of pilgrimage research towards large-scale issues such as globalisation (Han and Graburn 2010), travel and tourism (Swatos and Tomasi 2002; Badone and Roseman 2004), the politics of memory and heritage (Eade and Katić 2018), media (Seaton et al. 2017), migration (Yamba 1995), and the economic marketplace (Reader 2014; Padoan 2019).

A Semiotic Theory of Pilgrimage  61 However, given the centrality of mobility in pilgrimage, we also need a careful theorisation of this notion (Urry 2000, 2002), as indicated by Coleman and Eade (2004: 16–17) during their discussion of four different dimensions of movement – as performative, embodied, semantic, and metaphoric action. I would like here to suggest that besides these possible dimensions, pilgrimage is first of all an oriented action that is never isolated and independent, whatever the stress or emphasis might be. Even when the journey is valued more than the destination (as documented in the case of the Camino, e.g. by Frey 1998), pilgrimage follows a certain direction and course, where every movement is inserted in chains of actions and passions: every movement exists in view of an action to be performed elsewhere, or following an action occurred somewhere else, and such actions are affectively modulated and qualified by semiotic modalities, namely volitions, obligations, abilities, and knowledge (Greimas 1987a: 121–139). As Cheryl Mattingly (2010: 137) has pointed out, ‘action, too, demands that we plot’, and ‘we act because we intend to get something done, to begin something, which we hope will lead us along a desirable route’. We tend to create sense out of situations by constantly reorganising our narratives according to new or pre-existing plans. In pilgrimage such plotting activity involves desirable targets, forms of subjectivity that pilgrims emotionally identify with, sources of legitimation they evoke, and, finally, both interpretations and evaluations of the actions performed. In order to understand the quality of movement, we need in other words a theory of action. In this chapter, I will offer my contribution to an outline of this theory through a semiotic analysis of pilgrimage.2 Movement will be explored by an analysis of different spheres of action played out by pilgrims, places, institutions, deities, and other entities involved, what semioticians call actants or dynamic positions carried out by human and nonhuman actors (Greimas 1987a: 106–120; Latour 2005).3 We will see the emergence and mutual interaction in pilgrimage of at least four different actants or spheres of action: targets, subjects, sources, and evaluators, although these roles will be further multiplied according to the circumstances. I hope that, through a translation and semiotic mapping of pilgrims’ experience, we will be in the position to better describe what I have called the sense of p­ ilgrimage – namely the qualified movement and oriented intentionality of pilgrimage as a social p­ ractice – by tracing its articulation of values and flow of meanings. As a specific case study, I will focus on my ethnographic research concerning a Shugen revivalist community of ascetic practice in Japan, the Tsukasakō lay group affiliated to the Shingon esoteric Buddhist temple Tenpōrinji on Mt Kongō, which I have been studying since 2008.4 This group of ascetics is connected to the current revival of a premodern mountain pilgrimage route, the 28 Lotus Sutra mounds in Katsuragi (Katsuragi no nijūhasshuku kyōzuka). I could study their efforts to revitalise this pilgrimage route over the years, by conducting interviews and participant observation during ritual performances, pilgrimages, communal gatherings and celebratory events, business meetings, as well as cleaning activities at their main temple. This long-term ethnographic engagement with a revivalist group has provided an opportunity to reflect on Taussig’s idea of pilgrimage as method.

62  Tatsuma Padoan Coincidentally, the semantic trail suggested by the term ‘methodology’ itself may pave the way to our reflections on the sense/orientation of pilgrimage. If we follow its etymology from meta-hodos (’method’) – with the Greek term hodos signifying ‘path’, ‘journey’, or ‘itinerary’ – we can define methodology as a discourse (logos) over (meta) the itinerary itself (hodos). The Targets of Action It’s about 1:30 pm on a very hot day at the end of August when, after having walked for more than four hours through woods and steep paths on the Katsuragi mountains, I line up with the group of 12 ascetics I have been following, in order to perform a ritual in front of a giant rock in the middle of a clearing. The rock is about three metres in diameter and marks the place where, until the Meiji period (1868–1912), stood a large temple called Ishidera or ‘rock-temple’, once part of a complex of Seven Diamond Temple Lodgings (Kongō shichibō), located at the foot of Mt Kongō within a range of two kilometres. At the centre of this complex was the Ōshukubō (Great Temple Lodgings) of the Tenpōrinji, the main temple on top of the mountain ruled by the Katsuragi family, and now a descendant of this very family, the Buddhist reverend Katsuragi Kōryū (b. 1972), is there with us, leading the group of ascetics. Coming from an ancient aristocratic family, which has been running the Tenpōrinji at least since the fourteenth century, Kōryū decided in 2005 to emulate his grandfather, Katsuragi Mitsugu (1905–1997), in a renewed effort to resurrect the premodern pilgrimage tradition of the ‘sutra mounds of the 28 lodges of Katsuragi’ (nijūhasshuku kyōzuka). He did so by founding a group of lay ascetics called Tsukasakō, which is part of a larger Shugen mountain ascetic revivalist trend that started after the Second World War. Shugendō, literally meaning ‘The way to master/acquire ascetic powers’, may be described as a Japanese form of mountain asceticism which, according to current views, started being established around the late thirteenth century in major sacred mountain areas (Blair 2015: 272), combining Buddhist Esoteric, Daoist, and shamanic elements with the worship of kami, the local deities.5 This Shugen pilgrimage route was abolished in 1868 and 1872 by the Meiji government precisely because of its syncretic Shinto-Buddhist character, strongly condemned by the modern nationalistic State Shinto – the official state ideology of the emperor system in the Meiji period. The pilgrimage follows an ancient route across a mountain range for more than a hundred kilometres, where the 28 Chapters of the prominent Mahāyāna Buddhist scripture Lotus Sutra were allegedly buried in 28 different stations or ‘sutra mounds’ by the founder of the movement, the semi-legendary ascetic, En no Gyōja (late seventh century). So what the ascetics were actually worshipping during that very hot August afternoon was not the giant rock standing in the middle of the clearing but the Chapter 20 of the Lotus Sutra, called ‘Jōfukyō bosatsu bon’ (Chapter ‘Bodhisattva Sadāparibhūta’), supposedly buried deep under the rock. One of the narratives that

A Semiotic Theory of Pilgrimage  63 contemporary ascetics often mention, when discussing the origin of the pilgrimage route, is the Shozan engi (late twelfth century) which states: Ritual procedure of the mansions: under the steps walked by En no Gyōja there are 69.384 characters. (NST 20: 117, transl. is mine) These narratives, first written down in medieval times to enhance the role of the Katsuragi mountains as places of asceticism and to attract funding (kanjin) from other religious institutions and aristocratic families (Kawasaki 2007), are continuously brought back to memory today, both orally and through a re-enactment of the mythical founder’s ritual actions. Furthermore, this specific passage establishes a precise correspondence between the number of Chinese characters contained in the Lotus Sutra (69.384) and the number of steps that En no Gyōja undertook to complete the pilgrimage. In other words, in this case, the written text translates into the mountain and the mountain becomes a spatial text not to be ‘read’ but to be walked by the ascetics, following the steps of their legendary founder. This may be considered an example of intersemiotic translation – defined by Roman Jakobson (1959) as a translation from one semiotic system to another – from the written language of the sutra to a semiotics of the natural world (Greimas and Courtés 1982: 374–375), namely the spatial landscape of the mountains. According to Jakobson, while intralingual translation would concern rewordings and metalinguistic operations within the same verbal language, and interlingual translation would characterise ‘translation proper’ from one verbal language to another, intersemiotic translation is ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems’ (Jakobson 1959: 233), e.g. ‘from verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting’ (238).6 Space too could be considered as one of such semiotic systems, i.e. a ‘spatial language’ (Lotman 1990: 177, 189), but we could also conceive the natural world itself as a vast ‘place for the elaboration and practice of multiple semiotic systems’ (Greimas and Courtés 1982: 375) that produce significations of different kinds. Greimas and Courtés distinguish such significations in ‘signifying points of view’ (the way in which specific human and nonhuman collectives perceive the world and its spatial semiotics) and ‘signifying practices’ (conventional behaviour of human and nonhuman actors), to be analysed as ‘discourses of the natural world’ (1982: 374–375). Pilgrims are thus here also intersemiotic translators. And by using the term translation, I wish to emphasise that the content of the verbal text of the sutra is not ‘read’ in the mountain. It is rather ‘walked’ and perceived through the landscape’s phenomenological and ‘sensible qualities’ (1982: 375). In other words, the sutra is experienced through the mediation of the mountain’s natural elements and the perceiving body of the practitioner who walks through it. In the same way, as we do not read but rather ‘watch’ the translation of a book into a movie, semiotic systems are perceived and interpreted in ways that are not necessarily the same

64  Tatsuma Padoan as written texts. Therefore, in order to interpret the landscape as a translation of the Lotus Sutra, ascetics need to learn how to walk it, through the performance of rituals, chanting of mantras, fasting, and other bodily techniques. By performing such ascetic practices, pilgrims gradually learn to master their thoughts, bodies, affective dispositions (kimochi), and courses of action. And they do it in interaction with the material environment, with local kami gods and Buddhist deities who inhabit the landscape, and with the sutra mounds where the 28 Chapters of the Lotus Sutra are worshipped as physical relics (shari) and living presence of the Buddha. What we have been approaching so far is the problem of describing a certain sphere of action, one that both pilgrims and institutions are closely involved in pursuing, cherishing, and worshipping, but also constructing, promoting, and inventing. I will call this sphere the targets of action. In other words: what are the aims and purposes towards which pilgrims orientate themselves? The sutra mounds are an example of such focal points of action. As material spots on the mountain landscape towards which the ascetics walk and stop in order to pray, they become Objects of Value (Greimas 1989, 1987a: 84–105), i.e. objects actively constructed by pilgrims, on which they may invest their values, prayers, and emotional dispositions. As one of the practitioners once told me: It is by praying that the place becomes important (taisetsu de) […] It does not matter that the place is exactly the authentic one, what matters is the disposition to pray (ogamu kimochi), it is the actual recitation of prayers that makes the place significant. The term kimochi (‘feeling/affective disposition’) is often used by ascetics in Katsuragi, not only in relation to places of worship and the right attitude or ritual stance they should keep but also concerning the effect that the act of praying has on their own bodies and minds. Shinryū, before getting recently retired, used to work in a local coffee bean roasting factory, alternating ascetic activity on weekends with his work as a company employee during the week. When asked about the reasons that motivated him to participate in the pilgrimage, he affirmed that by performing ascetic practice at the pilgrimage sites he could change his feelings/ state of mind (kimochi wo kirikaeru). He further explained to me that, because he had to face at work many hardships negatively affecting his own emotional disposition, it was through this ascetic practice that he could renovate his state of mind/emotional well-being. Such an emotional renewal can thus be understood as care of the self (Foucault 1997), where the self and kimochi become the target of an action reflexively reoriented towards the practitioner. However, the target of action can also become something other than the self, coinciding with different places along the pilgrimage route. For instance, even on that Sunday afternoon at the end of August 2017, before praying in front of the sutra mound, we cleaned up the place from weeds and twigs, which had completely covered the area around that giant rock thus making the access more difficult. In a similar way, pilgrims could also orientate their actions towards the forest, making sure that paths were

A Semiotic Theory of Pilgrimage  65 kept open, and signalling with ribbons the itineraries to choose in order not to get lost. Whatever the target of action might be (the self or the environment), it always needs constant care and attention. The Subjects of Action During the ritual performed nowadays at the 28 sutra mounds, Katsuragi ascetics chant a series of mantras and sutra, accompanied by the rhythmic shaking of shakujō (short Buddhist staff provided with six metal rings on top). The whole ceremony, lasting for about eight minutes, is temporally marked by the sound of horagai conch shells at the beginning and at the end. The main prayer ‘offered’ is the Heart Wisdom Sutra (Hannya shingyō). Rhythmic intensification, use of tools, and positions in space play a crucial role during the ritual when the practitioners face the mound where the Lotus Sutra chapter is located. We must then interrogate a different sphere of action, arising in connection to the first one: how do participants become subjects of action? In other words, who is carrying out this particular type of movement we call pilgrimage? Who are the actors involved? And how do they emerge? Forms of ritual apprenticeship become very important here because ascetics are constant learners who construct themselves as ascetic subjects through practice. Besides the pilgrimage to the 28 sutra mounds, they organise once a month a smaller training session called ‘monthly gathering’ (tsuki ichi kai), in which, over half a day, they visit 15 spots located on different sides of Mt Kongō, performing rituals without the leader, and taking turns in heading the procession. During this session mistakes and oversights are not uncommon among less experienced practitioners; these mistakes are pointed out by elder ascetics who supervise the others. While trying to remember long mantras, performing ritual gestures mudrā, and leading the rest of the group through the woods, sometimes taking the wrong path, practitioners make continuous adjustments according to the situation. Such situated ritual apprenticeship (Lave and Wenger 1991) within the group constitutes a means to gradually become part of a collective identity, the ascetic community, by ‘learning through their bodies’ (mi ni tsukeru in Japanese). And this learning process associated with the pilgrimage continues even in the daily life of the practitioners, at home or at their workplaces. When he is not climbing the mountains as a pilgrim, Kōyō usually works as a truck driver. He has been doing the same job for 27 years. As he explained to me, during his long drives across the highways all over Japan, he often recites sutras and mantras by heart. In the beginning, he found this was a good way to learn the prayers and magical formulas. But then he realised that through this practice he became more focused on his driving and also coped better (norikireru) with the hard work. He considered this practice outside the pilgrimage as the continuation of the mental and bodily training (shinshin or ‘mind-body’) experienced during the pilgrimage. For Kōyō and for many other participants, ascetic practice (shugyō) continues in their everyday life, again translating values – including ethical values like ‘helping each other’, as another practitioner pointed out – from pilgrimage to their family or work environment.

66  Tatsuma Padoan However, places and sutra mounds may also become subjects during the ritual interaction. Values invested on the sutra chapters, in fact, enable the semiotic construction of sutra mounds not as inert things but as bodies. The Lotus Sutra itself provides justification for this interpretation, by stating: Whatever place a roll of this scripture may occupy, in all those places one is to erect a stupa of seven jewels […] There is no need to even lodge a śarīra [corporal relic of the Buddha] in it. What is the reason? Within it there is already a whole body of the Thus Come One [i.e. the Buddha himself]. (T 9.262.31b; Hurvitz 1976: 178) In this and other passages, the Lotus Sutra presents itself as the corporal relic of the Buddha. It is striking that in well-documented Buddhist practices across Asia, relics and religious icons have been envisaged for centuries, in a clear nonrepresentational and immanentist move, as the concrete, material presence of the Buddha’s body on earth, rather than as symbols or representations of the sacred (Faure 1998; Sharf and Sharf 2001).7 A similar devotional attitude is shared by ascetic practitioners in Katsuragi, who ritually engage with the sutra mounds, in the same intersubjective way in which they perform prayers, chants, and mantric powerful ritual formulas in front of other Buddhist icons. Sources of Action In the summer of 2014, I was sitting at the table of a busy restaurant in Kitanoda, in the Osaka prefecture. The abbot of the temple and his elder assistant were sitting next to me, and in front of me, a young man wearing glasses was taking notes on the ongoing conversation. Next to him, two elderly people were partaking in the dinner. The young man and these two older people were representatives of the Nankai private transport company, active in the southern Osaka prefecture. They had been invited to a meeting over dinner, as often happens in Japan when people need to discuss business, in order to negotiate a deal with the group of ascetics. As Mt Kongō was one of the destinations connected by the Nankai bus service, the religious group was asking the transport company to organise a special coach for pilgrims, with discounted fares and sutra chanting played on board. The agreement was eventually not stipulated, but my presence at the dinner was framed as a sort of ‘academic authority’, in order to show how a foreign researcher from Europe had been travelling all the way from London to southern Osaka to study their group of pilgrims. Yet my role in the negotiations was certainly a minor one, my position being evoked from time to time when the pilgrims asked me to confirm historical details about the Katsuragi pilgrimage. This episode reveals the importance of a third sphere, which we may call the sources of action. What is the starting point of pilgrimage as an oriented movement? What are the motivations? And who are the actors triggering this process? What forms of authority are evoked, and who are the stakeholders? This sphere may include a wide range of different actors, from religious leaders and institutions to tutelary deities

A Semiotic Theory of Pilgrimage  67 and mythical ancestors, such as the legendary figure of the ascetic, En no Gyōja, who founded the practice and whose steps the shugen ascetics claim to follow during the pilgrimage. Even my presence, as explained in the example above, could be sometimes used as a means of legitimation for the pilgrimage. However, although I was invoked as a source of academic authority, this did not mean that I was able to exercise any power on the group. Quite the contrary; whenever I was called in front of other external people – during meetings with other secular or religious institutions, during public lectures at local libraries, and so on – it was me who was acted upon by the group members. Such an inversion of the source of agency brings us to question the traditional role of the analyst as a neutral observer of social phenomena, thus blurring any supposed separation between emic and ethic dimensions. Most of the time my ethnographic subjects were, in fact, the ones observing me, the ones who made me do things, by giving me different hierarchical roles in the context of the pilgrimage practice. I was thus sometimes defined as an ascetic apprentice, sometimes as a pilgrim, sometimes as an academic legitimation, and sometimes as a cleaner at the temple. In other words, on several occasions the pilgrims themselves became the very source of my actions, they became the ones who motivated or triggered my actions precisely by giving me a certain role within the group. But in order to get deeper into questions of power and authority, we need to describe one last sphere of action. The Evaluation of Action While considering this last sphere of action which I call evaluation, we need to ask: what is the process through which pilgrimage is interpreted, judged, or reflected upon? This question emerged spontaneously when I discovered that, with the banishment of the Katsuragi pilgrimage in modern times, memory about the exact location of the sutra chapters had been partly lost. This generated a conflict of interpretations when different competing groups emerged after the Second World War, each claiming to have found the original pilgrimage trail. The fact is that these mountains had been the site for sutra burial since ancient times, and they are thus disseminated by mounds that might become potential candidates for pilgrimage stations. There are, therefore, three possible sutra mounds for the twenty-first station, and multiple alternatives for the lodge number two, three, four, six, and twenty-seven. If the sutra has been translated into a spatial landscape, this has also produced a conflict over its correct interpretation between different revivalist groups and their leaders, who claim to have discovered the right sutra mounds. Sometimes this has also generated disagreements within the group itself, because some of the practitioners, who wished to include different or multiple spots into the pilgrimage, then left the community, while at the same time, the leader tried to re-establish his hierarchical position through his own interpretation of the spatial text. All translations involve, to a certain extent, a negotiation of power and knowledge through an adaptation of cultural values. Translations may thus become

68  Tatsuma Padoan potential sites of conflict (Hanks 2014). Such conflicts may arise from different disagreements over, for example, the most acceptable interpretations, the right to authorise or impose certain interpretive practices, and over the act of translation itself, which may not be accepted by a certain community. The disputes concerning the correct location of the Lotus Sutra chapters in Katsuragi, which significantly focus on the correct translation of this spatial text, thus show that different evaluators can sanction and interpret the actions related to pilgrimage in different ways. Such a diversity of interpretations could eventually generate conflicting understandings of pilgrimage practice, some of which may try to impose themselves, therefore challenging other religious authorities. The evaluation of action thus becomes a process through which leaderships and hierarchies are confirmed or disputed, ritual behaviours are justified or challenged, and communities of pilgrims are constituted or broken apart. Translating the Bodily Experience There is another crucial dimension of pilgrimage that we have not discussed yet, and which once again brings into play the relation between researcher and ethnographic subjects: the role played by the body in the construction of subjectivities. The ascetic practice carried out by the group of pilgrims, whom I followed during my participant observation, seeks to radically reconfigure everyday life, thanks to the intervention of the body. Long walks through difficult and scarcely frequented mountain trails, often fasting or with minimum supplies, while donning the white clothes and equipment of yamabushi ascetics; exhausting night vigils and extended hours spent while singing mantras and Buddhist chants; fearsome ordeals by fire, walking barefoot on burning coals (hiwatari), with flames reaching up to the knees, etc. All these activities constitute the ascetic core of this specific pilgrimage practice, and they are part of a path of apprenticeship towards the construction of new selves and new worlds. To what extent can ethnographers describe and translate these modes of experience, so deeply seated within their own body when participating in these kinds of practices (Fernandez and Herzfeld 2015: 74–75)? André Leroi-Gourhan (1993) has pointed out that the suspension of everyday bodily values and rhythms, occurring in religious discourse – for example, the inversion of the day- and night-time, fasting, sexual abstinence, variations of ­temperature – may be used to enact processes of resignification and production of new symbolic discourses. The body and its sensory equipment then appear as ‘a marvellous apparatus for transforming sensations into symbols’ (281). It is through such networks of symbols that religious individuals constitute themselves as new subjects. Referring to religious traditions he defines as ‘mystic’, Leroi-Gourhan (1993: 281–297) interestingly suggests that physiological and perceptive modifications may also bring about a symbolic reconstruction of the time and space experienced by practitioners. A new subject would emerge from such a discourse, a subject characterised by a new role in society and in the universe of values through

A Semiotic Theory of Pilgrimage  69 processes we might define as somatic, or more precisely aesthesic,8 i.e. rooted in perception (Greimas 1987b). In order to clarify this point, I will draw on a specific ethnographic episode. During our long pilgrimage walks, inside the forests across the Katsuragi mountain range, it often happened that, after a few hours of journeying through closepressing trees, we would find ourselves in an open space. Here we would usually have a short rest. Sometimes we would find a small shrine or statue, in front of which practitioners would pray together. Some other times, however, a wonderful view of a valley, the abundant vegetation of the nearby peaks, or mountain cherry blossoms, could also unexpectedly open below us. On such occasions, we used to stop and contemplate the landscape together, certainly exhausted, and short of breath, but not short of admiration for the spectacular nature surrounding us from every side. The long mountain chain running almost seamlessly from the Wakayama coast in the south-west, up north to the Osaka and Nara prefectures, is characterised by low slopes, rounded tops, thick vegetation, frequent watercourses, small waterfalls, and considerable fauna (birds, wild boars, badgers, weasels, rabbits, snakes, foxes, squirrels, etc.). On one of these occasions, during the summer of 2017, after a difficult climb, when our energies were about to fade out, we finally reached a natural spring. Following the leader’s instructions, we used our tokin – small black caps worn on the forehead, embodying the five wisdoms of the cosmic Buddha Dainichi nyorai – soaked with sweat dripping from our foreheads, to quench our thirst with the freshwater which was generously gushing out from the side of the mountain. After drinking, we all agreed that it really seemed the most delicious water we had ever tasted! Rarely had I drunk such fresh and clean water, capable of swiftly providing strength and relief. We fully gathered the water with our bare hands, pouring it on our heads and shoulders to refresh ourselves, soaking the towel bands (hachimaki) tied around our foreheads, and filling our bottles, while a strange sense of excitement started to affect all participants. One of the ascetics noticed that the energising effect of the spring could be related to the mineral salts of our sweat that, drinking from the tokin, we had indeed mixed with the water! However, this remark did not diminish the euphoric mood of that moment, which, once we returned to the city, we did not hesitate to recall and comment upon, while sipping a pint of beer to celebrate the completion of the pilgrimage. At that point, the religious leader of the group explained that the sensation we felt could only arise after the long climb, a mode of ascetic practice that naturally led us to perceive differently, and to fully appreciate, the beauty of the mountain. Such an aesthesic experience of communality – produced by the sensible pleasure we felt, the taste of water, and the landscape view – disclosed an entire semiotics of perception, in which affective qualities, perceived as immanent in the world, act on the subjects through the mediation of the body. But this could only happen after a somatic and social process of learning had occurred, consisting of intense

70  Tatsuma Padoan apprenticeship and ascetic practice. Recalling the words of Greimas from his book De l’imperfection (Greimas 1987b; Segre 1989): The smell of carnation and the smell of rose are certainly, at once, recognisable as metonymies of the carnation and the rose: with regard to their mode of formation, they are not different from the visual Gestalten ‘read’ by someone who knows a bit about flowers. Yet, hidden under these original designations, perfumed harmonies must unveil their coalescences and correspondences and, through dreadful, exalting fascinations, guide the subject toward new significations produced by intimate and absorbing conjunction with the sacred, carnal, and spiritual. […] Therefore, figuration is not a simple ornament of things: it is that screen of appearance whose virtue consists in disclosing itself, letting others glimpse at itself as a possibility of further sense, thanks to, or because of, its imperfection. The subject’s temperament hence regains the immanence of the sensible. (Greimas 1987b: 78) The water, its taste, and the landscape perceived by the ascetics, then, while appearing as recognisable Gestalten of the world, i.e. as identifiable figures, they simultaneously presented themselves as ‘imperfect’ figures, i.e. open figures that are filled with further aesthesic and affective meanings arising precisely during the process of perception. It is for this reason that the water, its taste, and the landscape, could manifest themselves to the trained ascetics as elements that opened up further possibilities of signification. Water, for example, disclosed its refreshing property, its ability to generate pleasure and energising effects. It produced a ‘collective aesthesis’ (Landowski 2004) – an intersubjectively shared way of perceiving and feeling – thus presenting itself as much more than mere water. Everybody in the group could thus notice the shift that occurred when these figures ‘disclosed’ themselves, that is when they presented themselves as more than mere objects, revealing their nuanced properties and affecting the perceivers in various ways, to the point of inverting the initial relationship between subject and object altogether.9 During this process, defined by Greimas (1987b: 23) as aesthetic apprehension (saisie esthétique), when time seems to stop, the world overwhelms humans, merging with them. The influence of Merleau-Ponty, quoted by Greimas, is here rather evident, especially if we think about Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘intentional transgression’ in Signs (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 94). This notion precisely refers to the process through which the ordinary relation we have with objects is reversed, and the latter ones are given the status of ‘subjects’. This concept is further elaborated in Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous work The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty 1968) in which, when describing the chiasm10 and intertwining relation between body and world (a relation that he calls ‘flesh of the world’), the philosopher even states that ‘the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests’ (1968: 155) can itself be conceived as the language of a world that speaks to us. The somatic and sensible dimension of doing ethnography within a community of ascetic pilgrims, may thus potentially lead to a radical reversal of bodily values

A Semiotic Theory of Pilgrimage  71 and rhythms of the ethnographers – who gradually learn to experience different ways of conceiving both the world and themselves. Such an analysis highlights the role played by the body in the construction of subjectivities, and how bodily limits and potentialities may be constantly pushed forward in ascetic pilgrimages. In light of these considerations, we have examined a particular example of semiotic reconfiguration of times, spaces, and actors through ascetic practice on the Katsuragi mountains, triggered by somatic perception and affectivity. We have seen in fact how the ‘taste of water’, intersubjectively shared by me and other practitioners during the ascetic practice through a collective form of aesthesis, produced an actantial inversion of the relation between subjects and objects, ascetics and the natural world. Figures started to disclose themselves, opening up to further possibilities of signification arising from the process of perception. This was by no means the only possible way of conceiving the mountain and its environment since this entity rather appears as a multi-layered semiotics of the natural world, produced by multiple enunciations, including ritual, mythological, historical, hikers,’ and tourist enunciations. However, this form of experience, which occurred during an ascetic pilgrimage, reminded all participants of the need to translate (i.e. to make sense of) our differential relations with the mountain itself – a nonhuman actor whose sensory interaction with us, was so powerful on that and other occasions, as to renew both our bodily strengths and our perception of the world. The bodily experience of pilgrimage, chanting, attending night vigils, fasting, and walking on fire, deeply reconfigures the practitioners’ world, through the construction of new values and forms of subjectivity, based on an adjustment and reciprocal transformation between them and the environment. It was this process of adjustment to the ascetic dimension of this particular pilgrimage practice that forced me to reconsider the limits of my own bodily resilience and endurance. Without obviously arguing that such an ascetic dimension would be necessarily shared by other pilgrimage activities – and, in fact, this is not the case, as many forms of this practice do not actually involve much physical labour (Reader 2014: 125–128; Padoan 2019) – we should not underestimate the role played by the sensory and somatic experience while researching pilgrimage. Because of the overwhelming somatic component in my own fieldwork, I started focusing on my own body as a living, experiential laboratory of semiotic analysis, for an understanding of pilgrimage, and ethnographic practice, in general. What I have tried to describe here in semiotic terms is, therefore, the process of learning triggered by my own encounter with human and nonhuman ethnographic subjects, including the active role played by the natural environment (Ingold 2000). This process of apprenticeship unfolded through a series of translations situated at the microphysical level of experience, in the small adjustments through which I explored a particular form of life, related to the ascetic pilgrim. These adjustments had the effect of considerably reducing the significance given to a form of subjectivity conceived a priori as human. The ascetic pilgrim, in fact, renounces the self or, more precisely, he or she actually discovers that the self is a multitude (Simondon 1989); a network that connects rather than divides humans, gods, places, and discourses of the natural world.

72  Tatsuma Padoan Conclusion: Mapping the Flow I have sought here to combine two methodological approaches, ethnography and semiotics, in order to describe certain dynamics of action emerging in pilgrimage. Rather than looking at pilgrimage as a single course of action, I preferred to approach it as a set of complex networks and hierarchies involving various spheres of action. Following the Paris School semiotic approach, I described four different spheres of action or actants, populated by a multiplicity of human and nonhuman actors. These spheres are respectively called targets, subjects, sources, and evaluators of action, and we have seen how at every level all the four actants have been connecting and interacting with each other, forming different networks and hierarchical positions (Figure 5.1). I started my discussion by referring to Taussig’s (1997) idea of ‘pilgrimage as method’ ‒ a method based on the principle of translation as signification, according to which anthropologists too may be considered travelling pilgrims, translating and making sense of the ethnographic other. By examining the close connection between translation, the practice of pilgrimage and the notion of sense – as perceiving, going in a certain direction, and finding out (Fontanille 2007; Latour 2013: 237) – I explored the possibility of investigating pilgrimage from a semiotic point of view. By adopting such a perspective, I then examined this mode of practice we call ‘pilgrimage’ as a process of translation, involving body, space, materiality, sacred scriptures, and affective dispositions of pilgrims. Therefore, semiotics emerged here as a theory of action, connected to passions, body, and materiality: a theory based on actional spheres defining desirable targets of pilgrimage action, forms of subjectivity, sources of authority, and evaluators who interpret the actions performed. I explored these actional spheres – targets, subjects, sources, and evaluators of pilgrimage – in terms of dynamic positions or actants. These positions are taken up by human and nonhuman actors, namely pilgrims, places, institutions, deities, and other entities, in order to translate and articulate (signification) the oriented and perceptual flow of meaning (sense) of pilgrimage. By exploring the actional spheres concerning targets, subjects, sources, and evaluators of pilgrimage, we

Evaluators of action

Networks and Targets of action hierarchies

Sources of action

Subjects of action

Figure 5.1 Tracing action in pilgrimage: actants, or dynamic roles played by human and nonhuman actors.

A Semiotic Theory of Pilgrimage  73 were able to see how pilgrims translate a sutra into a landscape through ascetic practice. But we also managed to analyse the role of ethnographers as translators, who make sense of the flow of pilgrimage through participant observation. They are immersed in different practices which involve a bodily experience of the environment while learning how to perceive the semiotics of the natural world. To conclude, my aim was to use semiotics in order to map the articulation, but also the flows of meanings and values collected through my ethnography. Taussig’s idea of pilgrimage as method thus became useful in order to cast light on the key role played by translation in both pilgrimage and ethnographic work. As ethnographers, we try to make sense of the pilgrimage, to catch its oriented flow of meanings, by translating it into an analytical discourse. We thus try, as Greimas (1987a: 67) argued, to put sense in the conditions of signifying, that is to articulate the movement of meaning by translating it – thus moving from sense to signification. But pilgrims too translate and articulate the sense of practice. They do it incessantly. In my ethnographic case, they constantly translate a Buddhist scripture into a landscape by means of their ascetic practice, but they also translate the ascetic values they learnt and acquired in the mountains, into their everyday lives, at home and at work, in the private and public sphere. I suppose that both of us, researchers and ascetics, will do our best to keep on translating, so far as the flows of sense and pilgrimage will keep on moving, posing new challenging questions to us. Notes 1 The setting for Taussig’s book is an imaginary state of Latin America, modelled after his own fieldwork in Venezuela (Taussig 1997: ix). 2 I would like to thank John Eade, Mario Katić, Dionigi Albera, Ian Reader, Simon Coleman, and the other participants in the EASA Pilgrimage Studies Network workshop in Zadar (4th–6th September 2019) for their comments and observations which helped me to shape this chapter. This work also benefitted from comments received at the JRC Seminar, organised by Fabio Gygi at SOAS University of London (26th May 2022), and from a thorough discussion of the chapter during the Anthropology Research Seminar, organised by Atsuro Morita at Osaka University (23rd August 2022). I wish to thank the organisers, as well as the participants in these two seminars – in particular Philip Swift, Barbara Pizziconi, William Kelly, Gergely Mohacsi, and Asli Kemiksiz – for their feedback and helpful suggestions. 3 Although Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory borrowed the notion of actant from Greimas (Latour 2005: 54), what I will try to do here is to see how this concept has been further explored in Paris School semiotics. By doing so, I will also include in my discussion important dimensions, like hierarchical relations of power and phenomenological values, which did not receive enough attention in Latour’s understanding of actantial theory and semiotics. 4 The ethnographic material presented here in particular was collected in 2014, 2016, and more recently in 2017–2018, during a ten-month fieldwork project based at Osaka University, Anthropology Department, sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS grant PE16043). 5 For a detailed introduction to Shugen history, thought and practice, see Miyake (1999a, 1999b, 2001a), and Gorai (1980). In English, see Miyake (2001b, 2005), Faure, Moerman, and Sekimori (2009), Castiglioni, Rambelli, and Roth (2020), as well as Grapard (2016) for a site-specific study of Shugendō in north-eastern Kyushu.

74  Tatsuma Padoan 6 Yuri Lotman (1990: 60) further expanded this idea, showing how a translation may occur from theatre and pictorial arts to actual behaviour or vice versa – for example when Napoleon established a court ceremonial based on eighteenth-century French theatrical representations of the court of Roman Emperors, by promoting a translation of ballet into the field of military parades. 7 Cf. Henare et al. (2007) for other nonrepresentational approaches to materiality. 8 Reverting to the classical etymological root ‘aesthesis’ of the term aesthetics (from Greek aisthēsis, or ‘pertaining to sensual perception’, cf. the English word ‘synaesthesia’), Greimas (1987b) redefined the latter as the affective and sensible component of everyday experience. Further explaining this concept, Fontanille (2007: 179) writes: ‘in order to better understand the organizing role of perception, we must come back to aesthesis. I define aesthesis as the mode of appearance of things, the singular matter in which they reveal themselves to us, independently of any prior codification’. 9 For other recent discussions of affect from a non-anthropocentric perspective, which consider the affective capacity of nonhuman bodies and the world, and are thus in line with the semiotic approach used in this paper, see Mattozzi and Parolin (2021), and Morita and Suzuki (2019). 10 When defining the ‘chiasm’ between subjects and world, Merleau-Ponty (1968) writes: ‘we situate ourselves in ourselves and in the things, in ourselves and in the other, at the point where, by a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become world’ (1968: 160). Also, ‘the chiasm is not only a me other exchange (the messages he receives reach me, the messages I receive reach him), it is also an exchange between me and the world, between the phenomenal body and the “objective” body, between the perceiving and the perceived: what begins as a thing ends as consciousness of the thing, what begins as a “state of consciousness” ends as a thing’ (1968: 215).

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A Semiotic Theory of Pilgrimage  75 Foucault, M. 1997. On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress. In Rabinow, P. (ed.), Essential Works of Michel Foucault. Vol. I. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (pp. 253–280). New York: The New Press. Frey, N. 1998. Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gorai, S. 1980. Shugendō nyūmon. Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten. Grapard, A. 2016. Mountain Mandalas: Shugendō in Kyushu. London: Bloomsbury. Greimas, A.J. 1987a. On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. London: Frances Pinter. Greimas, A.J. 1987b. De L’imperfection. Périgueux: Fanlac. Greimas, A.J. 1989. Basil Soup or the Construction of an Object of Value. In Perron, P. & Collins, F. (eds.), Paris School Semiotics, vol. II: Practice (pp. 1–12). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Greimas, A.J. 1990. The Social Sciences: A Semiotic View. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Greimas, A.J., & Courtés, J. 1982. Semiotics and Language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Han, M., & Graburn, N. (eds.). 2010. Tourism and Globalization. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology. Hanks, W. 2014. The Space of Translation. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(2), 17–39. Henare, A., Holbraad, M., & Wastell, S. (eds.). 2007. Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge. Hurvitz, L. (trans.). 1976. Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma. New York: Columbia University Press. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment. London: Routledge. Jakobson, R. 1959. On Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In Brower, R. (ed.), On Translation (pp. 232–239). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kawasaki, T. 2007. Nihon koku Kongōsan setsu no rufu. Denshō bungaku kenkyū, 56, 12–22. Klein, E. 1971. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Landowski, E. 2004. Passions sans nom: essais de socio-sémiotique III. Paris: PUF. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, B. 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. 1991. Situated Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leroi-Gourhan, A. 1993 Gesture and Speech. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. [1978] 2001. Myth and Meaning. London: Routledge. Lotman, Y. 1990. Universe of the Mind. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lotman, Y. 2009. Culture and Explosion. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Mattingly, C. 2010. The Concept of Therapeutic ‘Emplotment’. In Good, B., Fischer, M., Willen, S. & DelVecchio Good, M.-J. (eds.), A Reader in Medical Anthropology (pp. 121–136). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Mattozzi, A., & Parolin, L. 2021. Bodies Translating Bodies: Tackling “Aesthetic Practices” from an Ant Perspective. Science & Technology Studies, 34(4), 2–29. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964. Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

76  Tatsuma Padoan Michalowski, R., & Dubisch, J. 2001. Run for the Wall. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Miyake, H. 1999a. Shugendō girei no kenkyū. Tokyo: Shunjūsha. Miyake, H. 1999b. Shugendō shisō no kenkyū. Tokyo: Shunjūsha. Miyake, H. 2001a. Shugendō: sono rekishi to shugyō. Tokyo: Kōdansha gakujutsu bunko. Miyake, H. 2001b. Shugendō: Essays on the Structure of Japanese Folk Religion. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan. Miyake, H. 2005. The Mandala of the Mountain. Tokyo: Keiō University Press. Morita, A., & Suzuki, W. 2019. Being Affected by Sinking Deltas: Changing Landscapes, Resilience, and Complex Adaptive Systems in the Scientific Story of the Anthropocene. Current Anthropology, 60(S20), S286–S295. NST. 1970–1982. Nihon shisō taikei, 67 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Padoan, T. 2019. Reassembling the Lucky Gods: Pilgrim Economies, Tourists, and Local Communities in Global Tokyo. Special issue on ‘Pilgrimages, Ontologies, and Subjectivities’. Journeys (Berghahn Books), 20(1), 75–97. Reader, I. 2014. Pilgrimage in the Marketplace. London: Routledge. Seaton, P., Yamamura, T., Sugawa-Shimada, A., & Jang, K. 2017. Contents Tourism in Japan: Pilgrimages to ‘Sacred Sites’ of Popular Culture. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press. Segre, C. 1989. The Style of Greimas and its Transformations. New Literary History, 20(3), 679–692. Sharf, R., & Sharf, E. (eds.). 2001. Living Images: Japanese Buddhist Images in Context. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Simondon, G. 1989. L’individuation psychique et collective. Paris: Aubier. Swatos, W.J., & Tomasi, L. (eds). 2002. From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism: The Social and Cultural Economics of Piety. Westport, CT: Praeger. Swift, P. 2022. Heathen Hermeneutics: Or, Radical “Radical Interpretation”. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 12(1), 235–255. Taussig, M. 1997. The Magic of the State. London: Routledge. T 1924–1932. Taishō shinshū daizōkyō, 100 vols. Tokyo: Issaikyō kankōkai and Daizō shuppan. Urry, J. 2000. Sociology Beyond Societies. London: Routledge. Urry, J. 2002. Mobility and Proximity. Sociology, 36(2), 255–274. Viveiros De Castro, E. 2004. Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation. Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 2(1), 1–22. Yamba, C.B. 1995. Permanent Pilgrims: The Idea of Pilgrimage in the Lives of West African Muslims in Sudan. London: Edinburgh University Press.

Part III

Multi-site and Multi-role Ethnography and Pilgrimage

6

Researching the Baptism Sites along the Jordan River A Multi-sited Ethnography of Adjacent Places Lior Lewin-Chen

Introduction It’s an ordinary morning at Yardenit, the baptism site at the source of the Jordan River from the Sea of Galilee. Visitors are arriving at the site as they do every day, disembarking from their tour bus in the spacious parking area, passing through the entrance, and hurrying to the river. I walk alongside a group of pilgrims as its members enter the site, change into robes, and choose one of the baptism basins onsite. Most of them are standing by the water, waiting for the clergyman to begin the religious ritual. A handful of group members are standing to one side, and are not wearing robes. I turn to one of them, and introduce myself. We chat and I gently pose the questions I always ask at all three baptism sites, but particularly at Yardenit, a young, 35-year-old site devoid of any Christian tradition: Why did you choose to get visit here? And do you know about the other baptism sites? Before she has the chance to respond, the Israeli tour guide leading her group leaps at me. She drags me away, and scolds me: “What are you asking her that for? She’s just a tourist!” I explain briefly about my study, but the tour guide remains agitated. At first, she requests that I avoid speaking to the group about the other baptism sites, but quickly changes her mind, and instructs me not to speak to them at all. (Observation log, 4 July 2016) This incident took place on an observation day while I was researching the three baptism sites located along the Jordan River and associated with Jesus’ baptism for my Ph.D. dissertation (Chen 2018). While it was happening, I did not understand its importance. It was only that evening, when I was writing the detailed field log, that I realized this event’s future impact on my research. It taught me (a) how central the role played by the Israeli sanctity agent was in the shaping of the visitor’s experience at the baptism sites and (b) how the possibility of obtaining knowledge about other existing baptism sites was explosive in this case, where three adjacent competing baptism sites exist. Following that incident, I decided to focus on the sanctity agents at the baptism sites located along the Jordan River (and on the rivalry between the three sites) instead of the pilgrims visiting them. DOI: 10.4324/9781003137764-9

80  Lior Lewin-Chen Although the tour guide was the main factor in this case (and throughout my research, I interviewed more than 25 of them), my focus on agents rather than pilgrims led me to pay particular attention to all site impresarios – namely, site managers and other staff responsible for the development of and activity in the baptism sites (Bilu 2009). This methodological choice runs contrary to most anthropological studies conducted on the pilgrimages and sacred sites, as the latter usually focus on pilgrims and their journeys to places of sanctity. My study, however, upon which the present paper is based, centers on these pilgrims’ destination – the sacred site – and especially the agents responsible for developing, building, and constructing it. Several other unique aspects found in this case of the baptism sites have affected my work. First, there are three adjacent sites, all linked to one historic event – the baptism of Jesus. Second, the “customers” of these sites, pilgrims and tourists alike, do not share the same religion as the site agents. Whereas the former are Christian pilgrims, the latter are Israeli Jews or Jordanian Muslims. Thus, sacred sites serving members of one religion are being shaped by members of another. Third, as a researcher focusing on Christian baptism sites, I come from a (secular) Jewish background. This last aspect has influenced my positioning in the field, as well as the methodological and theoretical choices I have made, which will be discussed along with the other aspects in this chapter. I will be exploring two methodological issues. The first involves a comparative study of three similar competing sacred sites, which will examine the similarities and differences between them as well as their mutual relations. I will start by asking how affiliated and adjacent sacred sites can be studied? I will then present the method I have developed in response to this question – a multi-sited ethnography of adjacent places. This method combines multi-sited ethnography with collective case study methods. In this section, I will also explain why the comparative step is crucial in this case, as the current formation processes undergone by the sites are interrelated. The second methodological issue concerns by choosing to focus on the nonChristian sanctity impresarios of these Christian baptism sites. The reason stems from my own positionality with regard to the field, coupled with the realization that the agents are chiefly responsible for the current look and operation of all three sacred sites. In this section, I will be explaining my choice, presenting the difficulties and tensions involved, as well as the solutions I devised in order to overcome these obstacles. The two issues involve a particular field of study and also echo my own personal background – a secular Jew living near one of the sites. However, I contend that they are relevant to many other studies that examine contemporary sacred sites and pilgrimage phenomena, not only in the “Holy Land” but also more generally. Context – From the New Testament to the Baptism Sites The baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist is a key event in Christianity that led to the establishment of the three baptism sites. It is similarly described in all the canonical gospels, namely, that Jesus reaches the area where John the Baptist is

A Multi-sited Ethnography of Adjacent Places  81 active and is subsequently baptized by him (Webb 2000). However, despite these similar depictions, some differences are also found between the various versions, leaving room for a range of interpretations regarding the exact location in which the event took place (see, for example, Riesner 1987; Nir 2011; Turnage 2016). Nevertheless, from the fourth century on, an area in the southern part of the Jordan River, not far from Jericho, became sacred, and from the late fifth century onward religious structures have been built there. Over the centuries, pilgrims would visit this point on both sides of the river as long as the political situation permitted such visits (Wilkinson 1977). Over the last century, the process of border delineation in the Middle East has affected this area (Havrelock 2011). During the British Mandate (1917–1948), several religious compounds were established west of the river. These new places, along with an ancient Orthodox monastery that underwent renovations some years earlier, revived the area. Between 1948 and 1967, the site was managed by Jordan, serving as one of the Hashemite Kingdom’s political tourist attractions. Following the 1967 war, the Jordan River became the border between Jordan and Israel, with the latter occupying its western side. Soon after the war, violent clashes between Palestinians and the Israeli army, which, at times, involved the Jordanian army as well, led to the closing of the entire area surrounding the site and it’s being declared a military exclusion zone. When the area at the southern end of the river was closed, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism initiated the establishment of a baptism site at the source of the river from the Sea of Galilee and named it Yardenit. This site was opened in 1981 and was the only one to operate until the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan was signed in 1994. Following the agreement, the site at the southern end of the river was gradually reopened and the two sites began to operate separately along both banks of the river: east of it, in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, Bethany Beyond the Jordan was opened in 2000, while west of the Jordan River, in the area occupied by Israel1 and demanded by Palestinians, Qasr el Yahud was opened in 2011. During the past decade, all three sites have operated simultaneously and, in recent years, have been visited by more than one million visitors each year.2 Qasr el Yahud and Yardenit each welcome approximately half a million tourists annually, whereas some 100,000 visit Bethany Beyond the Jordan (Figure 6.1).3 About the Methodology The topic of my study emerged almost by chance. During my advanced academic studies, I participated in a course entitled “Contested sacred sites in Israel”. For the final assignment, we were required to research one site out of a list provided by our course professor. Of the sites suggested, I chose “Jesus’ baptism site.” At the time, I was not sure which of the baptism sites my professor had meant. I was well-acquainted with Yardenit, having grown up in a nearby kibbutz. As a young boy, I would swim across the Jordan River to get close to it, until at some point a worker on the site would yell at me, saying it was a sacred site and I must not come near. To me and to many other locals, Yardenit was the site visited by

82  Lior Lewin-Chen

Figure 6.1  A map of the Jordan Valley marking the locations of the baptism sites.

Christian pilgrims and defined as “Jesus’ baptism site.” But I also knew of another called Qasr el Yahud, which was located by Jericho, on the Israeli-Jordanian border. I had heard of a special and colorful Christian holiday (the Epiphany) held once a year at this site, which was otherwise closed to visitors. My professor recommended that I visit and make observations about both. While at Qasr el Yahud, I soon discovered that some Christians visit the eastern side of the river too and that prominent religious structures could be found there. A quick online search revealed that there, on the eastern “Jordanian” side, was a site called Bethany Beyond the Jordan – another baptism site associated with the

A Multi-sited Ethnography of Adjacent Places  83 baptism of Christ. Its webpage announced that it was “the authentic site of Jesus’ baptism”. Shortly after I realized that there were three sites sharing a single underlying canonical tradition, my assignment grew into a doctoral dissertation. I soon decided that, although my research focused on three Christian pilgrimage sites, it should not examine the Christian pilgrim population or Christian theology. Instead, I chose to focus on the three sites’ key impresarios – Israeli Jews and Jordanian Muslims – who were ensuring that the sites for which they were responsible became part of the pilgrims’ “must-see” sacred site map of the “Holy Land,” all the while competing with two other similar sites. My insights led me to form the following research questions: (a) Which agents are currently responsible for forming the sacred Christian space in the Holy Land? (b) How do these agents facilitate the creation and formation of sacred spaces? and (c) What are the various strategies characteristic of the formation of contemporary sacred spaces in the “Holy Land”? These research questions (and arenas) dictated the choice of a comparative study and had a considerable impact on other methodological choices I made. In turn, the latter affected the theoretical portions of my study and the reciprocal relations between them will be discussed in the following section. Multi-Sited Ethnography of Adjacent Places In the introduction to his book The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz wrote: If you want to understand what a science is, you should look in the first instance not at its theories or its findings, and certainly not at what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do. In anthropology, or anyway social anthropology, what the practitioners do is ethnography. And it is in understanding what ethnography is, or more exactly what doing ethnography is, that a start can be made toward grasping what anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of knowledge. (Geertz 1973: 5) When I first began my research, I was influenced by the scholars whose work I had read throughout my studies, such as Geertz and Turner, and was intent on conducting an ethnographic study. Yet, once I decided that my research would focus on the site agents, not the pilgrims, I realized that I would not be conducting classic fieldwork. The more I read, the clearer it became that, while ethnography remained an important pillar of anthropological research, it was no longer being practiced quite the same way as it was when Geertz wrote the above quote (Marcus 1998). Hannerz explained these changes using the shift from research inspired by EvansPritchard’s4 notion of “being there” to research better described these days by the notion of “being there… and there… and there” (Hannerz 2003). Hannerz suggests that this shift was due to the changes in the global post-­colonial system, such as globalization, immigration, the internet, and enhanced tourism (including religious tourism). These changes led scholars to argue that research

84  Lior Lewin-Chen should adapt to global trends. Gupta and Ferguson (1997), for instance, called for the development of an ethnographic practice that accounted for the new characteristics of contemporaries’ lives, such as transition and liquidity. Anthropologists, who rose to the challenge proposed various new methods.5 One such scholar was Marcus (1995), who suggested a shift from ethnography at a single site to multi-sited ethnography. Both Marcus and Hannerz (2003), who expanded on this method, believed that the new world system required research to focus on several different sites. Following Marcus and Hannerz, I chose to see the formation of the baptism sites along the Jordan River through the prism of ethnographic work in three different arenas in a manner similar to multi-sited ethnography. It is, however, important to note the difference between the historical foundation of the multi-sited ethnography approach, which is anchored in a specific social perception – the global economic system – and focuses on areas that are distant from one another, and my ethnographic work. I therefore chose to call my study method “multi-sited ethnography of adjacent places.” It aims to offer a comparative view – one that is almost inevitable in this case, as all the sites are based on the same canonical story – while taking a direct, profound, and targeted look into each site. In other words, multi-sited ethnography was not fully employed in my study as a method but rather inspired me to develop the tools for which my own perception called. Alongside them, I combined emphases from the collective case study method, sometimes referred to as “multiple case study research” (Yin 2003). This method is a form of case study research associated with the psychology and sociology that aims to empirically study a contemporary phenomenon in its real context. Collective case study research delves deeply into several cases by employing various collection methods with the aim of drawing on similar cases to form a common insight through the similarities and dissimilarities between them (Stake 2005; Baxter and Jack 2008: 550). Overall, there are differences between the two methods, but they share a common aim – producing a rich understanding of the studied phenomenon as well as the various contexts within which it exists by examining it within several arenas and exploring the links between these arenas (Willis 2007: 240). In the case that I was researching, the three sites on which the study had centered were linked to and associated with one another due to the similar mythologies that led to their formation6, their geographical and thematic proximity, the historical and geopolitical events that led to their formation and contemporary reformation, as well as their reliance on a particular clientele – the pilgrims visiting the “Holy Land” and the touristic infrastructure that surrounds them. Moreover, the three sites are very similar. They are all located on the banks of the Jordan River, just several meters or some 100 kilometers away from each other. Yet, despite the connection and similarity between them, the three sites also differ from one another. They do not enjoy the same popularity among visitors, in general, and pilgrims from different denominations, in particular. The study method that I have developed – combining collective case study research and ethnography of multiple adjacent sites – attempts to trace these similarities and dissimilarities.

A Multi-sited Ethnography of Adjacent Places  85 It is noteworthy that a considerable number of classic comparative studies have been conducted on sacred sites. However, most have compared separate sites (Reader 2013; Katic 2018) or different sites sharing a similar metaphorical motif (Stadler and Luz 2015; Stadler 2020). Only a handful have chosen sites sharing a similar mythical-historical story (see, for example, Coleman 2004), but these too have focused more on how each site was developed in the context of broader historical and political circumstances than its relationship with adjacent sites. In the case of these three baptism sites, political and historical circumstances were among the factors that led to the changes that they underwent (as mentioned above), but more significant were each site’s links with the fundamental story they share, as well as the two other nearby sites. In other words, these sites are inseparable and, therefore, prompt the employment of a research methodology that is able to offer more than a classic comparison. Between Methodology, Fieldwork, and My Theoretical Explanation In this section, I will describe the connection between the research questions and the analytical and theoretical analysis. First, I will present the fieldwork conducted (the methodology); next, I will link the fieldwork to the analytical analysis conducted as a part of this study; and finally, I will explain how this methodology – the multi-sited ethnography of adjacent places – contributed to the answers to the research questions as well as to the development of both analytical and theoretical analysis. As a rule, a well-constructed study proposes a direct and logical line connecting all three parts. The following analysis suggests answers to the questions asked, while the method should enable the most accurate response. Hence, the following section will discuss the various parts as well as the theme connecting them. The fieldwork at all three sites was conducted between 2013 and 2017. It began with initial visits in late 2013. In 2015–2016, once my research proposal was approved, I expanded my fieldwork, rendering this period the most intense in terms of my fieldwork. In 2017, while writing the study, I continued to visit the sites, but less frequently. I combined various different qualitative data collection methods at each of the sites. Generally speaking, material was similarly collected on all of them, yet some differences between sites also emerged and stemmed from the unique character of each, as well as their locations and the theoretical directions followed in each section of my dissertation. The first source of data consisted of observations made at each of the sites. The second involved semi-structured, in-depth interviews conducted with various people engaged in on-site operation and activity – site managers and staff, tour guides, religious leaders, spiritual mentors, security and political consultants, and visitors to the sites. Physical artifacts collected during my visits to each site provided a third source of data, and the fourth consisted of material obtained from seven different archives. Online material of and about the sites published in online newspapers and tourist websites served as my fifth source of data. This rich volume of data collection methods allowed me to conduct a comprehensive ethnography of the three baptism sites.

86  Lior Lewin-Chen Some of the resources collected were relevant to more than one site and constitute a key component of the comparative research method. Among such data is most of the online material about the sites, which often discusses the matter of the “genuine” site of Jesus’ baptism and so on, referring to the rivalry between the different sites. Such articles were posted when one of the sites had made some headlines by being visited by an important person or due to some material change in its character or status (for instance, when the site in Jordan was declared a world heritage site by UNESCO in 2015). Even some of the interviews provided information on more than one site for instance, when I interviewed Christian religious leaders in the Middle East and discussed the official view of the Church on the sites. The same was true in 30 interviews conducted with tour guides, who took a wide range of religious and non-religious groups to two or all of the sites,7 subsequently providing me with a broader and more comparative snapshot of the sites as well as the way in which guides perceive visitors’ onsite experiences in each of the locations. I will return to the comparative material and analysis in due course. However, alongside these materials collected and as part of the attempt to offer a full ethnography of each site, unique material was also collected on each of the sites. Such are most of the materials obtained during site observations, and some of the archived ones. Moreover, during the data collection, I began to develop an explanation inductively derived from the initial research questions that continued to form throughout my fieldwork. This explanation ultimately led to some methodological choices and to a somewhat different method of collecting data at each site. It also introduced three keys, interrelated theoretical concepts into the discussion – ­appropriation, construction, and legitimization. The formation of any sacred site involves appropriating a space (Chidester and Linenthal 1995); constructing it (based on both physical building and the construction of a narrative) with the aim of transforming it into a sacred space; and using authoritative figures or the believers who frequent it to render it legitimate. The three baptism sites have been appropriated throughout history by various groups, particularly since 1967. In addition, a process of sanctity construction is underway at all three sites because those responsible for each of the three sites are trying to render their holy spaces legitimate pilgrimage sites identified with Jesus’ baptism. That being said, a particular concept was found to be more significant in relation to each of the sites. Yardenit was established at a spot devoid of any Christian tradition relating to Jesus. Its managers and other agents, therefore, had to actively build and construct it as an acceptable Christian site in the Holy Land. The Bethany Beyond the Jordan site in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan opened in 2000. 35 years earlier, prior to the 1967 War, the Jordanians had identified the location of Jesus’ baptism on the western side of the river. Consequently, most of their efforts have been directed at rendering the new, eastern site ‒ Bethany Beyond the Jordan ‒ scientifically, publicly, religiously, and internationally legitimate. As we have already seen, the third site, Qasr el Yahud, is located in an area that is in political dispute, so its construction is limited and the process of legitimizing it is almost covert for political reasons. At the same time, unlike the other sites, the ambiguity surrounding the site

A Multi-sited Ethnography of Adjacent Places  87 and the area in which it is located has led various different entities, most of them Jewish, to compete over its appropriation. My choice to focus on a particular concept at each site, following all that I had seen and heard while visiting them, led to some differences in data collection. At Yardenit, I paid special attention to collecting material that indicated the way in which the site was built and constructed during the various phases of its formation. At Bethany Beyond the Jordan, I focused on collecting materials pertaining to the negotiations between Jordan and various parties, who sought to ratify the site as Jesus’s genuine baptism site. And at Qasr el Yahud, I was especially interested in the various Jewish political and religious entities. Appropriation, construction, and legitimization were thus brought together through the term authentication, defined by the sociology and anthropology of tourism (Cohen and Cohen 2012) as “the social process by which something—a role, product, site, object or event—is confirmed as ‘original’, ‘genuine’, ‘real’ or ‘authentic’”. Authentication was used for two reasons. One was the use of the word “authenticity” by agents of all three sites. Be they Jewish or Muslim, site managers have been actively attributing authenticity to their sites in an ongoing process, which, to date, has left authenticity more of an aspiration than an accomplishment. The other, and more important reason, is that I believe authentication, as an ongoing process, encompasses the three concepts mentioned previously and also links the site agents’ attempts to control their respective sites and narrate them so as to connect them to Jesus and his baptism in what they believe to be the best, most “authentic” way possible (Cohen and Cohen 2012; Chen 2019). To conclude this section, separate fieldwork at each of the sites has enabled me to drill down into each one analytically and theoretically. At the same time, keeping the comparison between them constantly on my mind while collecting and analyzing materials pertaining to more than one site has allowed for a broader, more general view of the phenomenon, especially the meaningful role played by nonChristian sanctity impresarios in the current formation of spaces holy to Christians in the “Holy Land” in particular. Jewish and Muslim Sanctity Impresarios of Competing Christian Sacred Sites The three baptism sites are frequented by visitors from around the world, who speak different languages and observe different faiths through various means of worship. The varying beliefs and practices pertaining to baptism, as well as the significance pilgrims attribute to both pilgrimages, in general, and baptism, in particular, intrigued me. Yet this topic was left outside the main scope of my study, which focused on more socio-political issues and the subjects of which were not the pilgrims visiting the sites. These pilgrims were often unaware of the existence of three adjacent sites along the river and were rarely knowledgeable about the dynamics and rivalries between them. Thus, one might say that my study ends where the water of the Jordan River begins, for I did not touch upon the phenomenological understanding of the pilgrim’s experience.

88  Lior Lewin-Chen This choice, made while working on the study, was derived from empirical understandings on the ground (non-Christian agents of Christian sacred sites), reasons associated with my personal positionality and how information was being obtained,8 and finally, an ethical reason, the understanding of which culminated in the incident described at the beginning of this paper – my encounter with the tour guide who reprimanded me for ruining the experience of the pilgrim who had paid good money to come to the Holy Land. According to this tour guide, the pilgrim, much like others, was not aware that there were three separate sites, nor should she have discovered this “while at a site many perceive as merely a substitute” (observation log, 4 July 2016). This incident raised questions about the role played by the tour guide in concealing and disclosing “the truth” (Feldman 2007, 2014; Mesaritou et al. 2016) and, more importantly, led me to decide to leave the pilgrims out of my research concerning the rivalry between the different sites. In light of my methodological choice, I focused less on the pilgrims and their journey and shifted my attention instead to those responsible for the development, and even current invention, of the baptism sites. My ethnography outlined the social, economic, and political processes associated with their establishment. In it, the main actors on the ground, who do not affiliate themselves with the mythology or its worshipping implications, took center stage along with the key strategies they employed when they established the baptism sites. Thus, the ethnography continued a line of research that has grown in recent decades and calls for the broadening of perspectives toward sacred sites beyond the religious, hegemonic, or objecting voices involved in them (Coleman 2002; Knott 2005; Badone 2007; Reader 2013; Albera and Eade 2016; Coleman and Eade 2018; Katic 2018). Rather than addressing the sacred site as a distinct religious category, it should be analyzed through all the social contexts and processes incorporated into it (Coleman 2002: 357–359). This approach leads to the view that sacred places are dynamic and undergo numerous changes over time. For the most part, sacred site impresarios are responsible for those changes. They create, build, and construct the site for which they are responsible by choosing past discourses and physically implementing them in the present (Dubisch 1995; Coleman 2002). Their choice often expresses and reflects current interests. Lourdes in France (Eade 1991), San Giovanni Rotondo in Italy (Di Giovine 2012), Kerizinen in Brittany, France (Badone 2007), and Walsingham in England (Coleman 2004) are but four such examples. Walsingham is particularly relevant to this study since it was known as England’s Nazareth and its revival during the twentieth century was led by two different site impresarios.9 Hence, there are many examples of sacred spaces that underwent changes and shifted form (see also Katic 2018 for developments in Bosnia and Herzegovina). The cases differ due to various variables, but they all demonstrate the proactive involvement of religious officials, lay volunteers, and visitors. In other words, even when the stakeholders’ level of religiosity or authority varies, the key site agents are members of the same faith as those frequenting the site (Figure 6.2). The case of the baptism sites along the Jordan River in recent decades, however, is different. The role of Christians in the current formation of all three sites is less important than that played by Jewish Israeli or Muslim Jordanian stakeholders. In

A Multi-sited Ethnography of Adjacent Places  89

Figure 6.2 A senior Israeli officer accompanies the Greek Orthodox patriarch in a ceremony at Qasr El Yahud baptism site.

other words, those belonging to another religion were the ones to build and form the sacred space, loading it with new- or -old meanings. In addition, contrary to the tourism research literature (see, for example, Shackley 2001), these stakeholders not only serve as the sites’ managers or gatekeepers but also act as sanctity impresarios responsible for the sites’ reformation and design. Compared with the Christian sites mentioned above, the situation is far more complex since a sacred site serving members of one religion is being developed by members of another. Moreover, the impresarios have to present a convincing “religious” ethos and avoid being accused of being driven solely by cynical economic motivations. The situation is further complicated when three adjacent sites compete for the same audience. The sanctity impresarios, site managers, and other site agents must convince people that “their” site is the “right”, “genuine”, and “authentic” location of the baptism. A competition over the site’s “originality” versus the other two thus emerges. Methodologically, this led me to undertake a comparative study focusing on the sanctity agents and how they operate while knowing that there are two other similar sites nearby. In addition, I had to allay my respondents’ suspicions. I would now like to say more about my role as a researcher in the field. As I have already mentioned, my personal background had an impact on key aspects of this research. First, my familiarity with the baptism sites was acquired while growing up across the narrow Jordan River (just ten meters wide) from one of them. Second, my identity as an Israeli Jew whose mother tongue is Hebrew served as a catalyst,

90  Lior Lewin-Chen alongside the empirical reasons mentioned above, for my choice to focus on the site agents, since most of them are Israeli Jews, while the pilgrims spoke a plethora of languages that I do not know. Third, and perhaps most crucial with regard to my role as a researcher, is my interaction with the three baptism sites and, particularly, their managers. In all three study arenas, the site managers, who became key study subjects, welcomed me, agreed to be interviewed, and permitted me to conduct a study at their particular site. Most of the other actors at the sites, i.e., staff in charge of site development and management, tour guides, community leaders, Christian clergymen, pilgrims, and so on, also gladly agreed to speak to me. Nevertheless, at various stages of the study, some of the key actors displayed resentment toward me and my research and refused my request to participate in certain events. One of them explained that their suspicions about my project were associated with the competition between the sites. I explained at all the sites that I was conducting a comparative analysis of the three main baptism sites along the Jordan River. In some cases, this explanation helped me obtain materials since the site agents (as well as tourist guides and religious parties) were happy to meet with me, partly to hear about the other baptism sites. A dialogue thus emerged in which both the researcher and the respondents had different, albeit coinciding, interests. In other cases, the knowledge that I visited the other sites led agents to treat me with suspicion and try to deny me access to certain events or information. Their reaction stemmed from the question concerning the exact location of Jesus’ baptism. The site agents, particularly those at Yardenit and Bethany Beyond the Jordan, are extremely active with regard to their sites’ development. Those at Yardenit are keen to compensate for the absence of a tradition linking their location to Jesus’ life, while those at Bethany Beyond the Jordan want to support their claim that Jesus was baptized in their area. Both sometimes became angry when invited to “disclose the truth” about Yardenit’s lack of tradition or when the discussion concerned the lack of evidence about where Jesus was actually baptized. Hence, fears about “the truth being disclosed” led to anxieties being expressed during several interviews at Yardenit concerning my writing about the site.10 Furthermore, at the Bethany site, I was also received coolly during my third visit because I had mentioned in my e-mail correspondence with them prior to my visit that there were three Jesus baptism sites. The Jordanian site managers insisted that there was only one site where Jesus was baptized, i.e., the Bethany site, and that the other two were “merely” general baptism sites. During this visit, possibly due to their anger toward me, the managers limited me to observations of just three touring groups and did not allow me to interview the participants or tell them that I was conducting a study about the baptism sites. As the study progressed, I could not help but sense that my national affiliation as an Israeli had deepened the Jordanians’ suspicions toward me. Although the site manager and his assistant had introduced their site as the “fruit of the peace” agreement signed between Israel and Jordan and claimed that there was no competition between the baptism sites or the two countries, they kept mentioning throughout

A Multi-sited Ethnography of Adjacent Places  91 my interviews with them the location of Jesus’ baptism and the “false and misleading claim made by Israelis” that Jesus was baptized west of the river. On one occasion, the assistant site manager even mentioned that an educated Israeli group admitted that Jesus was baptized east of the river during their visit to the site. The suspicions displayed at all the sites further demonstrated the need for a study based on a multi-sited ethnography of adjacent sites that addressed the sites as a whole and their reciprocal relations. At least in the eyes of the sanctuary agents, who were members of a different faith, the activity and success of each site were shaped by the wider political-security situation, particularly the narrative associated with this situation and how it is accepted by prospective “clients” at the site. The sites need to be viewed, therefore, not as single sacred spaces but as connected to adjacent sites through their association with the same mythical source. On a practical level, I took several steps to allay my respondents’ suspicions. First, when I met them, I provided a detailed explanation about my study. I explained that I was not going to focus on the pilgrims and was not seeking to “prove” where Jesus was baptized. This explanation helped a lot11 since their main concern was that I might provide visitors with “historical” information about the site, which contradicted the way they sought to present it. Throughout my research, I stayed true to my important anthropological goal and did my best to remain continually aware of my position as a researcher and observe my relations with the actors in all three arenas and how they affected my research. As in every anthropological study, the information I acquired during my project is incomplete. In some respects, this is due to my limited skills, but I was also constrained by the suspicions described above. Nevertheless, the fact that I had acquired as much information as possible using various collection methods, my awareness of my position as a researcher and the suspicions I invoked, as well as the resentment experienced at all sites, proved that I approached each one in the same way and did not discriminate between them. Conclusion The sites presented in this chapter are linked and intertwined through the shared mythologies that led to their formation, their geographical and thematic proximity, as well as the historical and geopolitical events that spurred their current reformation. Regional wars, land occupation, and peace agreements have brought about changes at the baptism sites and led to the current situation in which three of them operate along the Jordan River. The three sites are similar but also dissimilar. They differ in their levels of popularity among visitors in general and particularly among pilgrims associated with different denominations. Their level of commercial development varies, as do those who run them and control the territory where they are located. In many other aspects, one could find differences between them. The methodology I developed, which combines a collective case study with multi-sited ethnography, attempts to trace these similarities and differences in order to produce a rich analysis concerning the reciprocal relations between these sites as they constantly compete with one another. Thus, while individual fieldwork was conducted in each of them, they were also constantly compared and thought of as a whole.

92  Lior Lewin-Chen This approach is the main difference between the method pursued here and the classic comparative research methodologies used to study pilgrimage sites (see, for example, Coleman 2004; Reader 2013; Stadler and Luz 2015; Katić 2018). In my study, the connection between particular sites is much more central, or at least equally central, to the actual comparison between the different, separate arenas. The close proximity of the three sites has led me to name this new approach a multi-sited ethnography of adjacent places. The methodology I developed was particularly suitable for my unique case studies, but I believe that it may be also relevant to a wide range of sacred spaces. The power and sanctity of the sacred site are forever social, contextual, material, multifaceted, and diverse (see, for example, Eade and Sallnow 1991; Coleman 2002; Stadler 2020). One of the key aspects impacting the formation and operation of a sacred site is the existence or absence of adjacent sacred places. These may form a “sacred network”, and render a certain area pilgrimage-worthy, or alternatively, they may create competition between nearby sacred sites and impede the development of some of them (Shackley 2001; Reader 2013). In either case, the sacred space is not detached from its geographical surroundings and must be seen as part of a greater whole alongside its idiosyncratic understanding. This aspect is particularly prominent in the “Holy Land” – a space packed full of sacred sites. In the Christian context, many of them are associated with the life of Jesus and are based on the New Testament, leaving some room for varying interpretations concerning their location. The brief period of time, often between seven and ten days, dedicated to visits to Israel does not allow pilgrims or religiously oriented visitors to see all these sites. The sites selected are linked to each Christian denomination’s perceptions and traditions, but they are also increasingly affected by the way site managers speak of and construct their sites, position them in relation to Christian tradition, and seek to differentiate them from adjacent, more or less similar, options. My decision to conduct a comparative and adjacent site study was not usual within the field of sacred space research, but it is not entirely unique either. However, my focus on the establishment of a sacred site by sanctity agents from another religion is more unique. Although my study stemmed, first and foremost, from my personal experience of growing up in the area, I believe it has wider relevance ‒ not only in the “Holy Land” which, since 1948, has been in the hands of either Jews or Muslims, but also in other spaces where several different religious, national-religious, and secular groups are simultaneously active and when, maybe more than ever before, sacred places are being deeply influenced by political, economic, and touristic processes. The Jewish and Muslim initiatives at these baptism sites provide the first clear contemporary illustrations of how members of one religion “create and develop” a sacred site that caters to members of another religion. However, following Yardenit’s success, several other initiatives have emerged. Various kibbutzim, for instance, have also set up baptism sites along the sources of the Jordan River and at Aenon near Salem Spring, mentioned in St. John’s Gospel. In another, more recent, case, Israeli Jewish developers have been establishing competing paths that link Nazareth to Capernaum. These paths are inspired by the Camino de Santiago and aim to allow visitors to “follow Jesus’ footsteps” in practice.

A Multi-sited Ethnography of Adjacent Places  93 My methodological choice to study the sanctity agents, who are members of another faith, stemmed not only from my own personal background but also from my initial fieldwork findings and researcher positioning. It was further influenced by the call from various anthropologists to look beyond dominant approaches toward sacred places. Hence my decision to focus on the Jewish and Muslim sanctity agents rather than the pilgrims and other Christian parties. Other studies that draw on this methodological approach could focus on the relationship between the role of sanctity impresarios, who are members of another religion (or the same religion), and the “site consumers”, as well as how the latter perceive and understand the role of these agents. Notes 1 The site is located in an area defined by the Israeli Supreme Court as “under belligerent occupation” which most of the international community views as illegal (Dinstein 2009). 2 These figures were true up until the COVID-19 pandemic. Since March 2020, there has been almost no incoming tourist traffic to Israel to date (November 2020). 3 The number of visitors was derived from information distributed by the Jordanian Ministry of Tourism and the Israel Nature & Parks Authority, as well as conversations held with the Yardenit site managers. 4 Who claimed that proper anthropological research required staying long in a single remote study field. 5 Or perhaps old-new ones, for Malinowski had already conducted a multi-sited anthropological study on the Kula Ring (Hannerz 2003). 6 Jesus’ baptism as well as various other mythical events linked to this location. See footnote 13. 7 In Jordan, tours are usually provided by in-house guides. I interviewed the person who trained them, and spoke to three of the tour guides. 8 For instance, the need to have extended knowledge in multiple languages in order to research the experience of pilgrims arriving from a host of different countries. 9 Another example is Rachel’s Tomb and Our Lady of the Wall in the Bethlehem area. There are many differences between the two sites, requiring individual work on each. However, both were affected by geopolitical developments, and in fact, the formation of Our Lady of the Wall cannot be understood without understanding the developments in Rachel’s Tomb in recent decades (Stadler and Luz 2015). 10 In one incident, when I was not present, one of the doctoral dissertation committee members was visiting the site with his students as part of a course he was giving. During his visit, a senior staff member at the site approached him and ensured that he was not telling his students that the site was “invented”. 11 Even though they were not clear to them, since they were more familiar with archaeological and historical research than with anthropological research.

References Albera, D., & Eade, J. (eds.). 2016. New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies: Global Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Badone, E. 2007. Echoes from Kerizinen: Pilgrimage, Narrative, and the Construction of Sacred History at a Marian Shrine in Northwestern France. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13(2), 453–470. Baxter, P., & Jack, S. 2008. Qualitative Case Study Methodology: Study Design and Implementation for Novice Researchers. The Qualitative Report, 13(4), 544–559.

94  Lior Lewin-Chen Bilu, Y. 2009. The Saints’ Impresarios: Dreamers, Healers, and Holy Men in Israel’s Urban Periphery. Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press. Chen, L. 2018. “A River Runs Through Them” - The (Re)creation of Three Baptism Sites Along the Jordan River. PhD Dissertation. Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2018. (Hebrew). Chen, L. 2019. Authentication and Competition at Sacred Sites. The Reflective Practitioner, 4, 23–36. Chidester, D., & Linenthal, E.T. (eds.). 1995. American Sacred Spaces. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cohen, E., & Cohen, S.A. 2012. Authentication: Hot and Cool. Annals of Tourism Research, 39(3), 1295–1314. Coleman, S. 2002. Do You Believe in Pilgrimage? Communitas, Contestation and Beyond. Anthropological Theory, 2(3), 355–368. Coleman, S. 2004. Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman(eds). Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth’: Landscapes of Myth and Memory at Walsingham. Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, 52–67. University of Illinois Press (Urbana and Chicago). Coleman, S., & Eade, J. (eds.). 2018. Pilgrimage and Political Economy: Translating the Sacred. New York: Berghahn Books. Dinstein, Y. 2009. The International Law of Belligerent Occupation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dubisch, J. 1995. In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eade, J. 1991. Order and Power at Lourdes. In Eade, J. & Sallnow, J. M. (eds.), Contesting the Sacred, the Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (pp. 51–76). London: Routledge. Eade, J., & Sallnow, J.M. (eds.). 1991. Introduction. In Contesting the Sacred, the Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (pp. 1–29). London: Routledge. Feldman, J. 2007. Constructing a Shared Bible Land: Jewish-Israeli Guiding Performances for Protestant Pilgrims. American Ethnologist, 34(2), 349–372. Feldman, J. 2014. Introduction: Contested Narratives of Storied Places—the Holy Lands. Religion and Society, 5(1), 106–127. Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures (Vol. 5019). New York: Basic Books, Inc. Giovine, M.A.D. 2012. A Tale of Two Cities: Padre Pio and the Reimagining of Pietrelcina and San Giovanni Rotondo. Textus, 25(1), 157–169. Gupta, A., & Ferguson, J. (eds.). 1997. Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hannerz, U. 2003. Being There... and There... and there! Reflections on multi-site ethnography. Ethnography, 4(2), 201–216. Havrelock, R. 2011. River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Katić, M. 2018. “Pilgrimage Capital”, Bosnian Croat Pilgrimage Places, and Transnational Ties through Time and Space. In Coleman, S. & Eade, J. (eds.), Pilgrimage and Political Economy: Translating the Sacred (pp. 93–111). London and New York: Berghahn Books. Knott, K. 2005. The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis. London: Equinox Publishing Ltd. Marcus, G.E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24(1), 95–117. Marcus, G.E. 1998. Ethnography Through Thick and Thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

A Multi-sited Ethnography of Adjacent Places  95 Mesaritou, E., Coleman, S., & Eade, J. 2016. Introduction: Guiding the Pilgrim. Tourist Studies, 16(1), 3–22. Nir, R. 2011. The scene of action of John the Baptist - History and Theology. In Yitzhak Hen and Iris Shagrir (ed.), Ut Loca Videant et Contingant: Studies in Pilgrimage and Sacred Space (pp. 101–124). The Open University, Ra’anana (Hebrew). Reader, I. 2013. Pilgrimage in the Marketplace. New York: Routledge. Riesner, K. 1987. Bethany Beyond the Jordan (John 1:28): Topography, Theology and History in the Fourth Gospel. TynBul, 38, 32–34. Shackley, M. 2001. Managing Sacred Sites: Service Provision and Visitor Experience. London and New York: Cengage Learning EMEA. Stadler, N. 2020. Voices of the Ritual: Devotion to Female Saints and Shrines in the Holy Land. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stadler, N., & Luz N. 2015. Two Venerated Mothers Separated by a Wall: Iconic Spaces, Territoriality, and Borders in Israel-Palestine. Religion and Society, 6(1), 127–141. Stake, R.E. 2005. Case Studies. In Denzin, Norman K. & Lincoln, Yvonna S. (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (3rd ed., pp. 443–466). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Turnage, M. 2016. Windows into the Bible: Cultural and Historical Insights from the Bible for Modern Readers. Springfield: Logion Press. Webb, R.L. 2000. Jesus’ Baptism: Its Historicity and Implications. Bulletin for Biblical Research, 10, 261–309. Wilkinson, J. 1977. Jerusalem Pilgrims before the Crusades. Jerusalem: Ariel Pub. House. Willis, J.W. 2007. Foundations of Qualitative Research: Interpretive and Critical Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Yin, R.K. 2003. Case Study Research: Design and Methods, Applied Social Research Methods Series. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

7

Multi-sited and Multi-role Research of Bosnian Croat Pilgrimages Mario Katić

Introduction I have always been fascinated by the complexity of a pilgrimage site or route. As John Eade and Michael Sallnow emphasize, pilgrimage sites provide a space for the expression of a diversity of perceptions and meanings (1991: 10); they function as religious voids capable of accommodating diverse meanings and practices (1991: 15), and vessel into which pilgrims pour their hopes, prayers and aspirations (1991: 15), but as Simon Coleman has pointed out they also depend on such material characteristics such as paths, signs and landscape (Coleman 2021: 126). Of course, it is even more complex since every pilgrimage site has different layers of meaning even before we add our own. However, the fact remains that from whatever perspective and motive we approach some pilgrimage site we will find some aspect of it that fills our needs and expectations. This is what makes pilgrimages, even in contemporary times and secularised contexts, so attractive. Recently, in countries where religious pilgrimage practices were marginalised or eliminated a long time ago, there has been a revival with pilgrimage sites and routes performing some new roles, as in Norway, Britain and the Baltic States (see Bowman and Sepp 2019; Eade 2019; Jorgensen et al. 2020). Of course, some pilgrimage routes have been having this role for decades like the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela (see Frey 1998). Even during the pandemic pilgrimage routes, combining hiking with natural and cultural sightseeing, showed their resistance to social changes and the multiple roles they can play. At the start of my research on Bosnian Croat pilgrimages, early on, I realised the complexity of just one pilgrimage site. During one of my first pilgrimage research experiences, sleeping in a sleeping bag on the church floor in Komušina, a small village in the Usora region, Bosnia and Herzegovina, I was thinking how there were at least three divided, but also in the same time, intermixed worlds at this pilgrimage site (Katić 2014). One of them involved pilgrims coming there to camp, enjoy family and friends meetings, sleepover in tents, etc. Another was constituted by pious pilgrims staying at the church through the night, praying and sleeping there close to the miraculous painting of the Madonna. The third was represented by the big tents around the village where people were enjoying food, being entertained by popular folk singers and behaving more like tourists than pilgrims (Katić DOI: 10.4324/9781003137764-10

Multi-sited and Multi-role Research of Bosnian Croat Pilgrimages  97 2014). From the start, then, I wondered how I was going to research these complex sites, routes and practices ethnographically. Limited by our roles, personal interests, physical limitation and time, we can play only some roles and we can do that for only a limited time. There will always be other aspects of the pilgrimage that somehow escaped our attention, observation and participation. In his latest book, Simon Coleman refers to this in “The questions” of pilgrimage studies: Where and How to focus one’s attention? (Coleman 2021: 42). During the years following this initial research experience, I changed my role at the Kondžilo pilgrimage site. From just a plain pilgrim I became a volunteer to organise the pilgrimage event. Starting my career on the parking lots and waiting for VIP guests to find a nice spot for their cars, I climbed up the volunteer ladder and became one of the guardians of the Miraculous painting, collected money during the mass and socialised with the other volunteers. There are some lines I did not cross, even though I could. For example, I could have been one of the carriers of the miraculous painting, but I felt this was a line I should not cross. This was a pilgrimage for local people and carrying the painting had enormous emotional, religious and symbolic meaning to local men, so I felt that I was on ethically slippery ground as a researcher. Although becoming one of the carriers could have opened up a new perspective and, definitely, a new research experience for me, I feel very happy with my decision, and I think it was the right one. Being a volunteer opened some doors that I could not pass through without performing that role. New insights raised fresh questions and draw my attention to aspects of this pilgrimage site that, consciously or unconsciously, I had neglected. Acting as a mediator, as John Eade and I have recently called this role (2022), raised issues regarding their missing voice in pilgrimage studies (one of many). Yet, it also showed me that I could no longer perform any other role at this pilgrimage site. Volunteers have a certain status. People recognise me, ask me different questions, approach me differently, expect me to behave in a different manner, etc. I was empowered but also trapped by this role. Since my research on the Kondžilo pilgrimage site became coloured with my role as a volunteer, I realised that my research was actually about volunteers at the Kondžilo pilgrimage site. However, during my research fieldwork among Bosnian Croat communities in other parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina I realised that focusing on one site would not be enough if I wanted to understand Bosnian Croat pilgrimage sites, more generally. I was confronted with a methodological issue where there were a lot of questions and not so many answers. If I wanted to research Bosnian Croat pilgrimage in general, I needed to cover at least the major pilgrimage sites. On the other hand, based on my research experience on the Kondžilo pilgrimage site, I knew that I could play only one role at any particular site, and this role will produce specific ethnographic knowledge that can only partially reflect the whole picture at that site. I decided, therefore, to study five different sites, playing different roles at each site and trying to understand the different layers of Bosnian Croat pilgrimage and the meanings it held for the Bosnian Croat community. At the same time, I sought to discover what can be learned about the Bosnian Croat community by looking at

98  Mario Katić one of their most important religious manifestations – pilgrimages. Keep in mind that in Bosnia and Herzegovina religious identity mostly corresponds with national identity, so Bosnian Croats are mostly Catholics, Bosniaks are mostly Muslim and Serbs are mostly Orthodox. In this paper, I will outline the journey I took through Bosnian Croat pilgrimage sites; I will link my research to other multi-sited ethnographies of pilgrimage and I will discuss what I gained by taking this approach. Multi-sited Research of Pilgrimage Although my research took a specific direction – namely, I approached every pilgrimage site with a different role in mind and a different perspective – it still involved multi-sited ethnography. Here I will focus only on the multi-sited ethnographies undertaken within pilgrimage studies. In a sense, every pilgrimage research is multi-sited research since it follows a concept and a practise and their manifestations in different contexts (Marcus 1995). Although Victor and Edith Turner in their seminal book Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978) did not call their approach multi-sited ethnography, what they did was actually multi-sited ethnography. Simon Coleman (2021: 66) rightfully emphasises that the Turners were aware of their intellectual and methodological move from social context to symbolic complex, from village-bound community to mobile pilgrims, intimate rivalries to anonymous encounters, in order “to expound the interrelations of symbols and meanings framing and motivating pilgrims behaviour in major world religions” (Turner and Turner 1978: xxiv). From our point of view, we could frame this approach as multi-sited and conclude that early on pilgrimage researchers realised the need for a different methodological approach towards pilgrimages. It is surprising that scant attention has been paid to the methodological issues involved in studying pilgrimage. The Turners, for example, do not discuss their methodological approach or their positionality. Reading between the lines, we can see that their conversion to Roman Catholicism played an important part in their decision to study pilgrimage and focus on Catholic pilgrimage sites, in particular. Looking at what they did, we can also speculate that the theoretical and interpretational concept of pilgrimage could not be designed by researching only one site. They needed a broader sample in order to offer some general conclusions and interpretations. They visited and made observations at several Catholic pilgrimage sites, therefore, i.e., Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of the Remedies, St. Patrick Purgatory, Walsingham, etc. Ian Reader and John Shultz refer to this as the problem of “specificity in the study or pilgrimage”. Pilgrimage researchers often see pilgrimage as something universal and extending across religious traditions and cultural spheres, but their research focuses on specific case studies that might produce characteristics that are highly particular (Reader and Shultz 2021: 234). As the field developed, stimulated especially by Eade and Sallnow’s critique of the communitas concept, more and more in-depth research of particular pilgrimage sites emerged. Even edited volumes involved a collection of studies at one particular site. Researchers produced fascinating and rich ethnographies that reflected paradigmatic discussions in the social sciences and humanities concerning

Multi-sited and Multi-role Research of Bosnian Croat Pilgrimages  99 (re)presentation, gender, positionality, multivocality, etc. However, there has recently been a significant turn towards approaching pilgrimage research through multi-sited ethnography and those using this approach have also addressed the role of their multi-sited approach (see, for example, Rousseau 2016; Agnew 2019; Buyskykh 2019; DeConick 2019; Loustau 2019). All the articles from the journal, Global Catholicism 2019 special issue, focus on multi-sited pilgrimage, investigating how modern-day pilgrims negotiate meaning in their lives through visits to multiple sites (DeConick 2019: 132). However, only few authors actually address the question of doing multi-sited ethnography while researching pilgrimage. For example, Katherine Rousseau has undertaken multi-local ethnography through an analysis of three Marian shrines but she does not discuss the fact that what she is doing is multi-local ethnography. She also does explore the methodological questions raised by researching multiple but different locations that are situated in completely different contexts, nor does she reflect on her positionality as a researcher (Rousseau 2016). Likewise, Nurit Stadler and Nimrod Luz analyse the construction and reconstruction of two sacred venues, Rachel’s Tomb and Our Lady of the Wall, in the context of the Israel-Palestine Separation Wall (2015), but they also do not address the methodological issues involved in their multi-sited research. An interesting variation on multi-sited ethnography can be found in multi-sited pilgrimages where pilgrims visit several pilgrimage sites and make connections between them through material objects and their personal experiences. Researchers, who have focused on these pilgrims and the connections they made, are clearly involved in multi-sited ethnography but, in most cases, they also do not address this issue nor how it influences their research and interpretations (see, for example, Loustau 2019; Reader and Shultz 2021). One of the few scholars, who has examined these issues, is Michael Agnew through his study of those who go on serial pilgrimages to Lourdes, Walsingham, Fatima and Međugorje. He realises that while approaching these pilgrims and pilgrimages might have logistical and methodological challenges, he also sees that fresh insights can be gained by such an approach (Agnew 2019: 53). Agnew highlights, in particular, what the approach reveals about the pilgrims’ values and motivations that underpin serial pilgrimage and multi-sited pilgrimage (Agnew 2019: 54). From an analytic perspective, the advantages of doing multi-sited ethnography were outlined by Ian Reader in his book on pilgrimages and the marketplace. He has undertaken classic, multi-sited ethnography through both ‘thick description’ at sites on the Japanese island of Shikoku and ’thin description’ at other sites such as Knock in Ireland or Lourdes in France (Reader 2013). Yet, although he draws on multi-sited research, he does not frame his research as such nor does he consider its methodological advantages. Simon Coleman has provided the most extensive discussion of the multiple connections between different sites. He emphasises the need to be aware of our status as multi-sited ethnographers when we study particular fieldwork sites. While each site is particular and distinctive, sites are also connected through implicit and explicit intellectual, biographical and social connections. He refers here to his own study of Pentecostalism, which made him realise how his ’separate’ fields were

100  Mario Katić united by underlying questions concerning mobility, materiality and religious pluralism (Coleman 2019: 4). He agrees with Marc Roscoe Loustau and Kate DeConinck (2019) that pilgrimage sites should be understood as interlinked, even if those links are surprising and implicit. Furthermore, they can contribute to more general realisations (Coleman 2019: 7). In their editorial introduction, Loustau and DeConinck raise the issue of the growing popularity around the world of pilgrims visiting more than one pilgrimage site, route or shrine over the course of their lifetime (2019: 13). They argue that what it means for both individuals and communities to encounter different pilgrimage sites has been largely unexamined. They define this lacuna in pilgrimage studies as ‘singularism’ ‒ the tendency of researchers to develop their reputation as an expert by studying a particular site over a long period of time (2019: 14). This approach is challenged by the development of multi-sited fieldwork, even if many researchers still continue to concentrate on a single site (2019: 16). Visiting multiple sites as a pilgrim is not just a contemporary phenomenon. Even in medieval times, there were pilgrims who visited several sites and routes such as Rome, Santiago de Compostela, Loreto, Holy Land, etc. In Bosnia and Herzegovina archives reveal that while pilgrims from the Vareš region mostly visited their local pilgrimage site at Olovo, they also went to St. John of Podmilačje, which is more than 150 kilometres away (Žuljić 2023). Moreover, talking with pilgrims from central Bosnia I realised that most of them had visited several sites during their lifetime, mostly by foot. However, in the case of Bosnian Croat pilgrimages the situation was very different. While in the past, they visited several sites hundreds of kilometres apart, in contemporary times, since most Bosnian Croats were displaced when they visit their original homeland they usually go on a pilgrimage to one site since it has become more than just a pilgrimage site ‒ it acts as a symbol of home. Although the question of multiple pilgrimages and perpetual pilgrimage is obviously relevant within the discussions of multi-sited ethnography of pilgrimages, in this chapter, and within this volume on methodological approaches towards pilgrimages, I will focus on the multiple roles a pilgrimage researcher has to play while studying the connections between sites and how these different roles influence our understanding and interpretation of pilgrimage sites and the research problem we are trying to address – in this particular case, the role played by Bosnian Croat pilgrimage in everyday life, identity and transnational ties. In order to approach this methodological question, I need to consider the broader interpretational framework and look at multi-sited ethnography in general. Although the multi-sited ethnography has been deeply influenced by the work of George Marcus (1995), some anthropologists contend that ethnographic research has always been multi-sited. Furthermore, it has pursued unusual objects of study by tracing and constructing connections between differently-sited people and things, thereby revealing important aspects of sociality and culture (Cornwall 2011: 90). James Ferguson also argues that we should follow relations rather than the objects of research. Relations are constitutive of the ethnographic ‘facts’ we

Multi-sited and Multi-role Research of Bosnian Croat Pilgrimages  101 seek to understand and in order to understand them we need to place them in a field of relations through contextualisation (Ferguson 2011: 198): The result is a form of understanding in which each of a host of different sorts of phenomena becomes intelligible via an understanding of context, a constructed (but never completed) making sense via relationship and interconnection. When we follow these kinds of relationship and inter-­connections across space, we are engaged in what we call multi-sited fieldwork. But we are, in fact, following the same fundamental method of constructing intelligible facts through contextualization, through building webs of relations. (Ferguson 2011: 198) In his discussion of the field and multi-sited ethnography, Simon Coleman refers to the temporal and spatial journey that most anthropologists undertake from one site to another during their careers and the ways in which fieldwork experiences may leach into each other (Coleman 2006: 35). He argues that locating and contextualising constructions of the field within autobiography enable us to see the life of anthropologists as an intermingled set of reflections and experiences that draw on different but linked contexts (Coleman 2006: 35, 2021: 13, 36). Summarising different but productive approaches to pilgrimage Simon Coleman highlights the work of several key authors such as Hillary Kaell, who studied American Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land (2014). She provides an example of how a focus on activities at a sacred site can benefit from tracking how a religious center relates to the domestic, everyday life of the pilgrim (Coleman 2021: 49). Coleman sees the study by Jill Dubisch (1995) as providing an alternative to this focus, since it blurs the boundaries between a shrine and its immediate context by taking into account the fact that some visitors may come from far away, while for others the shrine is a part of their home environment (Coleman 2021: 49). The next study singled out by Coleman is by Ann Gold (1988), who decided to take a single village as the foundation of her fieldwork and then follow pilgrims from their homes to different shrines (Coleman 2021: 50). The final approach selected by Coleman is that adopted by Loustau and DeConick (2019), who track the ways in which pilgrims create and imagine links between sites (Coleman 2021: 50). After this very extensive discussion of different approaches to pilgrimages, using only some of the authors and approaches, Coleman concludes that: None of these approaches on its own can fully cover the full potential of the pilgrimage field that expands beyond the classical model of moving to and from a sacred center, but taken together, they provide a powerful array of options. (Coleman 2021: 50) These approaches have tried to cover as many aspects of pilgrimage as possible and they all make a productive contribution but there are some aspects that have

102  Mario Katić escaped their attention. This could just be a result of the limited roles we play during a particular research project and our positionality as a result of those roles. Anthropologists cannot avoid personal involvement, positionality and autobiographical moments, therefore. By doing multi-local ethnography we make connections based on our experiences and already created knowledge. At the same time, we can play only one role and take one point of view at a particular pilgrimage site. While this brings many challenges for the ethnographer, it can also offer many advantages as long as we are aware of the limitations imposed by the different roles we have to play at particular sites. In the next section, I will present how I came to play different roles at each Bosnian Croat pilgrimage site and what kind of insight I gained by playing these roles. Bosnian Croat Pilgrimages Sites and My Roles My pilgrimage research began in 2010 when I started to study pilgrimage to Kondžilo. The Kondžilo pilgrimage site is located in northern Bosnia in the Usora region. The pilgrimage centres around the miraculous painting of the Madonna that, according to oral tradition, represents an interreligious interaction. It is believed that the painting of the Madonna of Kondžilo was found in a Muslim village and carried to the Roman Catholic village of Komušina. During the journey, the painting ‘decided’ to instruct the carriers that the mountain of Kondžilo, above the village of Komušina, should be a site of pilgrimage. The painting became unusually heavy so they could not carry it anymore and so the carriers vowed that they will transfer the painting to the mountain every year on August 15 (The Feast of Madonna’s Assumption into Heaven/Assumption Day). Nobody knows when this apparent event happened, but the painting has been carried up the hill in procession every year according to the oldest of the locals, who learned the story about the painting from their ancestors. The only time that the procession did not take place was during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and immediately afterward, i.e., between 1992 and 1999. Today this region is under the jurisdiction of the Republic of Srpska and is dominated by Serbian Orthodox elites. In the brief period just before and after the August 15th festival, the Roman Catholic Croat minority welcomes thousands of Croats who are now living throughout Europe but come back to their original homeland to keep their vow and carry the painting up the Kondžilo hill. So in the contemporary context, the pilgrimage has become a strong symbol of religious, national and local identity that keeps this community alive and vital. After my first visit when I was just a plain pilgrim, I realised how complex this site and practice was and concluded that I would have to concentrate on one aspect if I want to produce some research results. It seemed to me that the most important feature of this pilgrimage in the contemporary context was the role it played as a national symbol and a focus for the displaced Bosnian Croat community. Given the importance of the Bosnian Catholic Church and the lay organisers of the pilgrimage, I realised that I needed to be more involved in the organisation of the pilgrimage itself. My decision was reinforced by the process of the site’s

Multi-sited and Multi-role Research of Bosnian Croat Pilgrimages  103 transformation. The Bosnian Catholic Church, together with the local population, and everyone involved in the organisation of the pilgrimage, started to build a monumental shrine that would transform a small chapel on the hill, which had been built in 1956. In order to gain insight into this process I started to volunteer. In the beginning, I was a low-rank helper that worked in the parking lot, cleaned the trash and helped people get around. In other words, I did jobs that not too many people wanted to do. Over the years, I became accepted by others and recognised as trustworthy. I started to guard the painting, cleaned it after the pilgrims kissed it, helped the priests around the church, and even collected the alms during Mass. It took me five years of volunteering, doing all kinds of jobs, sleeping in my car or on the church floor, going through days of not showering and eating junk food, to gain their trust, find my role in the community, start getting the insiders’ point of view, even though in terms of family origin I was nearest to being a native than at any of the other pilgrimage sites I have researched. After enjoying some success and becoming more involved in the organisation of the pilgrimage, I had to draw some lines that I would not cross. After years of being a member of the volunteering team, I was invited to carry the miraculous painting ‒ the main event of the pilgrimage and the expression of this community’s vow. Since my motivation for participating in the organisation of this pilgrimage was primarily academic (although I must admit that on some occasions I was touched both emotionally and spiritually), I decided that it would not be ethical to exploit my hosts’ trust and join them in a practise that means so much to them on so many different levels: individual, family and communities. Looking back now, I still consider this to be one of the best decisions I have made during all of my time as a researcher. Eventually, I published several papers covering different aspects of this pilgrimage site and practise . Some of my colleagues criticised what they saw as an overemphasis on the nationalistic side of pilgrimage and the role of religion in national identity. They contended that Bosnia and Herzegovina was actually a country of ethnic co-existence and sharing that involved religion and that there was more to Bosnia and Herzegovina than just competition and conflict. There was co-existence in everyday life and good neighbourhood relations, for example, I was ready to accept their criticism but drawing on my life experience I was not prepared to accept their overemphasis on coexistence within Bosnia and Herzegovina. I had to acknowledge that my focus was mostly on the institutional perspective and my involvement in the organisation of the pilgrimage blinded me from other perspectives and possibly, those to which the other researchers were referring. Although my perspective was as legitimate as any other, I had to accept that it was not the only one. Troubled by this I started to search for a solution to this problem. I knew that if I want to look into different perspectives it could not be at Kondžilo. My hard-won position there prevented me from seeing other perspectives. Moreover, I also realised that in order to be able to talk about Bosnian Croat pilgrimages and not just the Kondžilo site, I had to broaden my research framework. So I decided to start researching another pilgrimage site – St. John of Podmilačje.

104  Mario Katić St. John of Podmilačje is one of the oldest and most important Bosnian Croat pilgrimage sites in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The stone church dates back to the medieval Bosnian kingdom and the cult’s origins appear to be Mithraic. More importantly, this site is one of the most famous sites of interreligious dialogue and sacred sharing, where even exorcism was performed by Franciscans, sometimes for members of different religious communities. It had all the elements I needed to widen my horizons and develop a different approach toward the Bosnian Croat pilgrimage. Since I was not a local here and knew very few people, my role was no different from any other pilgrim. However, I was surprised to see many people from the Kondžilo pilgrimage coming to the St. John pilgrimage. Pilgrims from central Bosnia, who walk to Kondžilo, also walk to Podmilačje. This started me thinking about the interconnections of Bosnian Croat pilgrimage sites and pushed me even more strongly in the direction of broadening my framework. After participating in the St. John pilgrimage for several years, I was surprised by many similar elements I found here that could be compared to Kondžilo ‒ a displaced community, transnational ties, a symbol of religious and national identity, economically important for the local community and physical change. The small, apparently medieval, chapel that was the location for the pilgrimage was considered to be insufficiently monumental so another church was constructed with a tower that was supposed to be the highest in the Balkans. Although my observations of pilgrimage at Podmilačje confirmed the research focus I had developed at Kondžilo, there were also a few moments that made me rethink my ideas. Unlike the Kondžilo pilgrimage, the Podmilačje festivities attracted Roma pilgrims. I am not sure what religious denomination they belonged to but in Bosnia, they are mostly Muslims. One day while walking towards the main road that is situated very close to the shrine and connects two major cities, Banja Luka and Sarajevo, I glanced at a passing truck and saw the driver crossing himself in an Orthodox way, i.e., showing his respect to the shrine and the pilgrimage. On another occasion, during the preparations for the Mass, there was a Franciscan praying at the altar and motivating people with his inspiring words. At first, I did not give too much attention until I realised that he was sending a message that criticised the nationalistic overtones of this pilgrimage and religion. I was shocked because I never heard something similar at Kondžilo. These experiences made me think about the complexity, multilayering and multivocality of the Roman Catholic Church in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The St. John shrine was directed by the Franciscans who were separate from diocesan priests. Later on, after the cardinal came and started his eulogy we were drawn back to issues concerning national identity and the survival of Bosnian Croats. I, as a plain pilgrim, like every other pilgrim there, was exposed to both of these perspectives and both influenced my pilgrimage experience and the formation of my ideas about it. This unusual Franciscan pushed me further in my thinking about pilgrimage and I decided to find other similar priests that are more into spiritual and religious rather than political and nationalist aspects of the pilgrimage and religion, in general. I assumed that I would find these kinds of people in monasteries and I found a perfect monastery to test this idea ‒ the Carmel of St Eliah on Buško Blato Lake

Multi-sited and Multi-role Research of Bosnian Croat Pilgrimages  105 near Tomislavgrad which used to be called Duvno. My colleague was a monk there and they had a very interesting pilgrimage site that I always wanted to visit and see – the tomb of Diva Grabovčeva. The monastery is located on an artificial lake and was established only recently by an order whose presence is very unusual in the Bosnian context – Carmelites. I went and stayed at the monastery for three consecutive years during the pilgrimage to Diva Grabovčeva. The two monks I met there, their way of life and their approach to religion, spirituality and pilgrimage took me back to my days in a seminary school in Zagreb and reminded me why I was there in the first place. The few days I spent there prior to the pilgrimage itself, praying with them and contemplating a lot of things in their newly designed garden, were a perfect preparation for the pilgrimage itself. My journey from the monastery to the pilgrimage site started early in the morning; we took the monastery’s car to go to the site which was a few dozen kilometres away on the mountain of Vrana. Before we started, my monk driver prayed for us and our journey (I had never done this before), turned on the CD made by the women’s choir about Diva Grabovčeva, and drove us along the curvy and sometimes very narrow roads to the site. Very soon after we started I realised why we prayed because my monk driver was driving like crazy. He was talking, explaining, laughing and driving like we were in a race. Talking to him, listening and observing, I realised that he put his life into God’s hands and he was not afraid of anything. When we arrived he started hearing the confessions of the pilgrims, who arrived in great numbers from the Dalmatian hinterland, Herzegovina and even Bosnia. I helped him carry necessities and guarded his bag while he listened to the pilgrims’ confessions patiently for hours. Since the pilgrimage was in July it was very hot and sunny and my monk guide took a huge umbrella with him where he could hide himself and the pilgrim, who was confessing. After hours of confessions, he joined the Mass, singing and praying, met up with his brother priests, friends and family, and then we went back to the monastery. It was very obvious that the role he performed during the pilgrimage means so much to him spiritually and as a person. He truly believes in Diva Grabovčeva. Yet, what is this pilgrimage about? Although Bosnia and Herzegovina has hundreds of cult graves (kultni grobovi, Fabijanić-Filipović 1979) of different Muslim and Catholic ‘good men,’ priests and ‘saints’ that mostly died heroic and tragic deaths and where people go on pilgrimage in order to get help for health or some other issues like infertility, the grave of Diva Grabovčeva may attract one of the biggest pilgrimage gatherings for a grave of a martyr. According to the oral tradition that was later written down and became part of the official narrative of this pilgrimage site and practice, there was a girl named Diva that was the only daughter of one catholic peasant who was respected in his community. She was one of the most beautiful girls in the region and she was noticed by the son of the local Muslim bey. He wanted to marry her, but she did not want to betray her religion, because marrying a Muslim implied that she would convert to Islam. She was hidden by her family, but the Muslim nobleman found her and tried to kidnap her, she resisted and he killed her (Truhelka 2011). Her

106  Mario Katić martyrdom attracted local women who started to visit her grave praying for health, but in recent times, especially after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, she became a symbol of resistance and struggle between Catholics and Muslims. Her grave started to be more institutionalized and soon obtained several new elements that became a part of the Diva pilgrimage landscape, such as a tombstone (actually a medieval stećak tombstone), a statue made by a sculpture that represents her, a wooden cross, etc. The Diva also became a recognized character in Bosnian Croat popular culture through songs by the famous singer, Marko Perković Thompson. A Diva anthem was also performed at her grave by a women’s choir called ‘The Guardians’ (Čuvarice), and she became the topic of the first Bosnian Croat national opera. Hence, as much as this site is spiritual and emotionally packed for pilgrims, especially the monks, it is clear that the pilgrimages perform a variety of roles. I was inspired and overwhelmed by the monks’ life and their approach to the pilgrimage to Diva Grabovčeva, but it was also evident that for all of them, consciously or not, the pilgrimage also represents the secular side of their lives. The site and the narrative that is being promoted are coloured by the idea of national identity. However, because of my role and perspective, I was more involved in the spirituality of this site rather than its nationalist potential. Although I was already participating and observing at three different pilgrimage sites I was still missing the perspective of the local community. I needed to gain an insider, emic perspective. I had the opportunity to do this while undertaking ethnographic research at Vareš, a small municipality in central Bosnia. In 2015, I started to take my students for local ethnographic studies in Vareš and the surrounding villages. I was motivated by a 110-year-old ethnographic manuscript written by a local school teacher, Mijo Žuljić, where he described the yearly life and customs of Vareš. I decided to prepare this manuscript for publication and together with my students, study contemporary everyday life in Vareš. After years of research, I became friends with most of my important interlocutors, the Vareš community accepted me openly and with respect and I started to emotionally connect with the people and the place. Near Vareš there is the historically very important medieval royal city of Bobovac, and near Bobovac is the Franciscan monastery of Kraljeva Sutjeska, which also goes back to medieval times. One of the most important figures in this region is the last Bosnian queen Katarina Kotromanić. The Bosnian cardinal, Vinko Puljić, established a prayer hike that later developed into a military pilgrimage to the altar of the fatherland at Bobovac organised by the Bosnian Catholic Church and the army. However, Queen Katarina plays a completely different role for the local population in Kraljeva Sutjeska and Vareš. Besides the Catholic Croats, the local Muslim community is also interested in Bobovac and they consider the medieval city and Katarina as part of their identity. This is, so far, the most complex pilgrimage site I have researched. Because of my ethnographic work in the region, I had an opportunity to participate and observe it from the ’first row’ without being directly involved in the organisation of the pilgrimage. The Catholic pilgrimage to Bobovac was established as a ‘prayer hike’

Multi-sited and Multi-role Research of Bosnian Croat Pilgrimages  107 to the altar of the fatherland in 2002, but eventually, it developed into an official military pilgrimage of the Armed forces of the Croatian part of Bosnian and Herzegovinian army inspired by a military pilgrimage to Lourdes (Eade 2018). This event started as a commemoration of the death of the last Bosnian medieval queen, Katarina Kotormanić, who died in exile in Rome in 1478 after her kingdom was occupied by Ottomans. Katarina played a significant role in the region’s local folklore and vernacular religion. The local population of Vareš and Kraljeva Sutjeska prayed to her at the Franciscan monastery of Kraljeva Sutjeska and made vows. However, after the initiation of the ‘prayer hike’ and ‘military pilgrimage’ her cult began to be nationally prominent and even became a political issue when Bosniak cultural and political elites questioned the Bosnian Croat claim concerning the queen and the medieval Bosnian kingdom. Bosnian Croat elites argued that based on the Catholic denomination of the last Bosnian kings and queens claim that they are Croatian by identity since contemporary Bosnian Croats are mostly Catholic. In this way, the Bosnian Croats feel that the Medieval Bosnian kingdom was actually Croatian. To oppose this, some members of the Bosniak elite organized a rival pilgrimage called ‘The Days of the Bosnian Kingdom’ while other members of this elite started to organize cultural events at Bobovac during the celebration of Bosnia and Herzegovina Independence Day. Within this research, I found myself in a position between discursive competition and contestation of the Bosnian Croat and Bosniak political, cultural, religious and military elites, but also local (Vareš) Bosnian Croat and Bosniak communities. By the time I started to participate in pilgrimage, I had established a strong rapport with both local communities and was able to talk to them openly about their view on these elites’ playgrounds on Bobovac. While both communities are strongly attached to the historical character of Queen Katarina and the city of Bobovac, they are very reserved about the top-down attempts to appropriate this location and queen. At the same time, they participate in the pilgrimage and cultural events since she has a significant role in their lives but in a different way from the elites. My role, after making strong connections with the locals, became that of the locals. I participated in the events but listened and witnessed the local’s scepticism towards the events organized and framed under a national label. During the military pilgrimage, the elites have their own itinerary that ends in a huge military tent located beneath the city of Bobovac where they have lunch. The pilgrimage is militarily organised , so everything is very professional and strictly done. As a participant within the local community, I only had limited insight into events, limited access to locations and no access to those parts of the pilgrimage and events where the elite is situated, the ones that are actually organizing this pilgrimage. This gave me an opportunity to realise how these top-down, institutional, events that in nature have more nationalistic character work on the local population, and how these narratives and messages are only partially realised in practice. Locals are very much aware that the elites and this event is once- a- year thing and that they have to continue living together for the rest of 364 days. They think and act very pragmatically, taking a role in these choreographies of the elites, but

108  Mario Katić at the same time in their everyday life and on the local political level, they are actually doing a subversion of these narratives and ideas. I would never be able to have this understanding of the local role in pilgrimage and beyond if I participated in some other role. What Did I Learn from Playing Different Roles on Different Pilgrimage Sites? Within the messiness of everyday life, pilgrimage sites and practices, all perspectives are equally relevant, but it is very hard to pursue all of them, even if we focus on one site. This is also the same when undertaking multi-sited and multi-role research, but we can at least develop a broader and more complex picture of the pilgrimage sites, routes and practices. However, I must be clear here that my research focus was on sites, and processes and practices happening on the sites ‒ I did not study journeys to and from the sites so my analysis is again only partial. This was also the case with the research undertaken by the Turners, Coleman and Reader. However, what they have not addressed is their positionality and the different roles they have played within their particular research contexts. Our perspective and research roles influence our interpretational framework and understanding of the research focus, therefore. This is a methodological question, which is inseparable from theoretical and interpretational discussions. Simon Coleman emphasises that “tracking the dynamic formation of pilgrimage landscapes beyond a single shrine is often done most effectively by subsequent comparative analysis” (Coleman 2021: 240), but he also concludes that “such a ramifying, multiscalar, multi-sited approach has been surprisingly rare in pilgrimage studies (Coleman 2021: 241). Recently, John Eade and I have used our in-depth ethnographic experience of performing roles of volunteers on two pilgrimage sites: Lourdes and Kondžilo (Katić and Eade 2022). Although we compare two sites in very different contexts, our similar methodological approaches made our comparison surprisingly easy and made us think about how experiences and research results can be quite similar. In my chapter on Bosnian Croat pilgrimage sites and pilgrimage capital (Katić 2018), however, I compared three different Bosnian Croat pilgrimage sites located in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although I played different roles at these sites, a comparison of the sites and the processes happening within and through them made me direct my interpretational framework toward pilgrimage capital. Here I have sought to explore how my different roles affected my research, understanding and interpretation of different Bosnian Croat pilgrimage sites. Although I could gain an insight into a particular site and its immediate context, a multi-sited, multi-role ethnography of Bosnian Croat pilgrimage sites enabled me to see similar processes happening at almost all sites. The performance of different roles at these different sites opened different interpretational niches but it also enabled me to find common ground and develop the idea of pilgrimage capital that goes beyond discussions of contestations and mixed pilgrimage sites (see Albera and Couroucli 2012; Bowman 2012; Hayden 2016). It helped me reflect on the links between messy,

Multi-sited and Multi-role Research of Bosnian Croat Pilgrimages  109 everyday life and pilgrimage sites and practices (see Reader and Shultz 2021: 235). I was also able to consider other agents involved in the pilgrimage creation and organisation and the complex intermingling of Bosnian Croat identity, transnational ties, economic benefits and place-making. Playing different roles at different sites directed me to what Simon Coleman calls, “lateral engagement”. This was not my plan, but sometimes I was confined to a location that was on the margins of the pilgrimage event and involved a “semidetached engagement” outside any potential “liminal or liminoid form of liturgy” or ritual (Coleman 2021: 165). While I cannot describe my approach to pilgrimage sites as “lateral engagement,” the fact remains that I have rarely focused on liminal ritual forms, preferring to concentrate on events and situations that were separate from the religious part of the pilgrimage. However, this was just one of the roles I played. References Albera, D., & Couroucli, M. (eds.). 2012. Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Christians, Muslims, and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Agnew, M. 2019 “This Is a Glimpse of Paradise”: Encountering Lourdes Through Serial and Multisited Pilgrimage. Journal of Global Catholicism, 3(1), 26–62. Bowman, G. (ed.). 2012. Sharing the Sacra: The Politics and Pragmatics of Intercommunal Relations around Holy Places. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Bowman, M., & Sepp, T. 2019. Caminoisation and Cathedrals: Replication, the Heritagisation of Religion, and the Spiritualisation of Heritage. Religion, 49(1), 74–98. Buyskykh, I. 2019. In Pursuit of Healing and Memories: Cross-Border Ukrainian Pilgrimage to a Polish Shrine. Journal of Global Catholicism, 3(1), 64–99. Coleman, S. 2006. The Multi-sited Ethnographer. In Geert De Neve and Maya UnnithanKumar (eds.), Critical Journeys: The Making of Anthropologists (pp. 31–46). London and New York: Routledge. Coleman, S. 2019. On the Productivity of Pilgrimage Palimpsests: Traces and Translocations in an Expanding Field. Journal of Global Catholicism, 3(1), 2–11. Coleman, S. 2021. Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement. New York: New York University Press. Cornwall, A. 2011. Part B Introduction. In Coleman, S. & Pauline von Hellermann (eds.), Multi-sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods (pp. 89–92). London and New York: Routledge. DeConinck, K. 2019. Traversing Mass Tragedies: Material Religion Between the 9/11 and Newtown Memorials. Journal of Global Catholicism, 3(1), 126–153. Dubisch, J. 1995. In a Different Place. Pilgrimage, Gender and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eade, J. 2018. John Eade and Mario Katić (eds), Healing Social and Physical Bodies: Lourdes and Military Pilgrimage. In Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism: Commemorating the Dead (pp. 15–34). London and New York: Routledge. Eade, J. 2019. The Invention of Sacred Places and Rituals: A Comparative Study of Pilgrimage. Religions, 11(12), 1–12.

110  Mario Katić Eade, J., & Sallnow, M. 1991. Introduction. In Eade, J. & Sallnow, M. (eds.), Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage (pp. 1–29). Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Filipović-Fabijanić, R. 1979. Verovanje u kurativnu Moć Kultnih Grobov–a Srba i Hrvata u Bosni i Hercegovini. Glasnik Zemaljskog Muzeja. Sarajevo, 34, 57–85. Ferguson, J. 2011. Novelty and Method: Reflections on Global Fieldwork. In Coleman, S. & Pauline von Hellermann (eds.), Multi-Sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods (pp. 194–209). London and New York: Routledge. Frey, N. 1998. Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago, Journeys Along an Ancient Way in Modern Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gold, A. 1988. Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hayden, et al. 2016. Antagonistic Tolerance Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites and Spaces. London and New York: Routledge. Jorgensen, N., Ekeland, T.-J., Lorentzen, C., & Eade, J. 2020. The Motivations of Pilgrimage Walking the St. Olav Way in Norway. International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, 8(8), 110–126. Katić, M. 2014. John Eade and Mario Katić (eds), From a Chapel on the Hill to National Shrine: Creating a Pilgrimage Home for Bosnian Croats. In Pilgrimage, Politics and Place-Making in Eastern Europe: Crossing the Borders (pp. 15–37). London and New York: Routledge. Katić, M. 2018. John Eade and Simon Coleman (eds), ‘Pilgrimage Capital’ and Bosnian Croat Pilgrimage Places: Bosnian Croat Pilgrimages and Transnational Ties through Time and Space. In Pilgrimage and Political Economy: Translating the Sacred (pp. 93–112). New York and Oxford: Berghahn books. Katić, M., & Eade, J. 2022. The Role of Volunteers in Pilgrimage Studies: Autobiographic Reflections on Belief and the Performance of Multiple Roles. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 12(2), 580–593. Loustau, M.R. 2019. Substituting Stories: Narrative Arcs and Pilgrimage Material Culture between Lourdes and Csiksomlyo. Journal of Global Catholicism, 3(1), 100–125. Loustau, M.R., & DeConinck, K. 2019. Editors Introduction. Journal of Global Catholicism, 3(1), 12–25. Marcus, G. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117. Reader, I. 2013. Pilgrimage in the Marketplace. London and New York: Routledge. Reader, I., & Shultz, J. 2021. Pilgrims Until We Die: Unending Pilgrimage in Shikoku. New York: Oxford University Press. Rousseau, K. 2016. Pilgrimage, Spatial Interaction, and Memory at Three Marian Sites. Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1129. University of Denver. Truhelka, Ć. 2011. Djevojači Grob. U: Diva Grabovica, ur. Zrinka Dragun, Lovorka Dragun Mirković, 9–109. Zagreb: Ognjište. Turner, V., & Turner, E. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Žuljić, M. 2023. Vareš: Život i Običaji. Zbornik za Narodni Život i Običaje. HAZU: Zagreb (in print).

Part IV

Methodological Techniques and Tactics

8

Epistemological and Ethical Challenges of Gathering and Interpreting Personal Prayers from the Archives Mirela Hrovatin

Introduction In their studies of pilgrimage and its complex practices, researchers have discussed, among other things, the personal aspects of these practices (see, for example, Coleman and Eade 2004; Jansen and Notermans 2011; Reader 2015; Albera and Eade 2017). Reflecting on the liminality that is sometimes present in pilgrimage as a religious practice (Turner and Turner 1978), Morinis notes that Van Gennep’s concept of liminality “paved the way for future studies of all processes of spatiotemporal social or individual change” involved with the personal experience of pilgrimage (Morinis 1992). Aziz (1987) has also pointed out that the study of pilgrimage should consider pilgrims not only as a group but as individuals and pay attention to their personal experiences in order to deepen the understanding of the processes taking place in pilgrimage. As for understanding pilgrims’ prayers ‒ the focus of this chapter ‒ it would not be possible to move beyond Christian’s (1989) idea of instrumental prayers towards Badone’s (1990) exploration of equity and divine punishment, Eade and Sallnow’s (1991) idea of non-transactional reciprocity, and the analysis by Hermkens et al. (2012) of polysemic practices and the systematic interaction with the sacred without delving deeply into individual prayers, expressions of thankfulness, and the personal stories of pilgrims, which can be obtained from interviews and various other sources, including the archives. Based on my own experience while conducting research on aspects of pilgrimage, which most of the time reflect people’s individual and most intimate moments in their lives, I believe that anthropologists should start by carefully considering the impact of their strenuous personal involvement with these intimacies, whether they consider themselves members of the religion which is being researched or not. If we start from the premise that pilgrimage activities, including personal prayers, are not fixed symbols but processes through which many cultural and social dimensions are reflected (Clifford 1986, 2–3), how can an insight into those processes and aspects be effectively achieved? During my doctorate and subsequent research, I have analyzed from an anthropological perspective more than 2000 personal prayers. This activity required the combination of several different methods: interviews, participant observation, and an analysis of broader cultural and historical contexts through not only official sources but also oral histories, DOI: 10.4324/9781003137764-12

114  Mirela Hrovatin frescoes, pictures, prayer books, sermons, newspaper accounts, bulletins, and tourist materials. Gathering and interpreting data from the archives of religious institutions, including the ones available to the public online, demands a special approach (cf. Punathil 2020), which will be discussed later in this chapter. As the shift at the end of the twentieth century in anthropological theory from observing “archive-as-source to archive-as-subject” (Stoler 2002, 93) has shown, the interpretation of archival data kept by religious institutions should not only include the collection of statistical data but also an analysis of the processes involved in constructing an archive. Although this shift has been inspired by those focusing on secular institutions (see, for example, Comaroff and Comaroff 1992; Derrida 1995; Stoler 2002; Dirks 2002; Zeitlyn 2012), its approach can be applied to religious institutions and their management of archival data. Pilgrimage researchers have mainly drawn on interviews and materials about the history of a certain sacred place, but archival data from a religious institution, if available, can provide a much deeper understanding of the role of religion and religious institutions in the lives of believers and other members of a specific society. As a researcher, I have always been aware that religious archives reflect specific historical periods and do not exist outside of a temporal cultural context (Stoler 2002, 102). Furthermore, prayer, pilgrimage, and other practices do not always have the same meaning for each person. Moreover, meanings can change during a person’s lifetime, while the experience that a person has at the shrine can extend to everyday life and vice versa. Therefore, prayers and pilgrimage activities as personal choices and expressions of belief, in most cases, present a part of an individual’s intimate life which requires a sensitive approach. The process of choosing what to reveal in publications emerging from such research is mostly subjective, like most anthropological work. However, there are some limitations which are determined by the very religion being studied, i.e., official regulations and the unofficial attitudes of institutional representatives. Moreover, the attitudes of religious believers themselves can make it harder for the researcher to decide what might cause misunderstanding between the religious and academic communities. It has been both my advantage and a drawback to know deeply how the religion I am a member of functions and what is considered appropriate to even be the subject of the research. The most difficult dilemma has been and still is, to decide what to write in the public text because often the issues that would be most valuable for scientific research tend to be the ones that might be problematic for the official religion or believers’ faith. So, the choice to research a religion and its workings brings a lot of challenges for the researcher. However, in some parts, it has provided me with a certain personal fulfillment in revealing some of the issues of which I have not been aware, and I have even changed some of my previous beliefs within the context of the religion I have been researching. In this chapter, I will focus on the National Shrine of Mother of God in Marija Bistrica, the Shrine of Our Lady of Zečevo Island in Nin, the Shrine of Our Lady in Trsat, the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with the tomb of Blessed Ivan Merz, and the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint

Epistemological and Ethical Challenges  115 Stephen in Zagreb with the tomb of Blessed Alojzije Stepinac, as well as several other shrines in Croatia. Archives and Textual Sources While interviews concerning pilgrimage and other religious practices include contacting people and a nuanced approach to interviewing and interpreting the data with the interviewees’ permission, a somewhat different approach needs to be taken when examining data in the archives of religious institutions. Most of this material is held in many shrines and churches, at least in Europe, where often chronicle and miracle books have been kept for centuries. Some data can also be found in libraries or larger official centers of a religious institution (e.g., in the Vatican for the Roman Catholic Church). For sources at shrines and churches, the researcher would have to first ask for permission from the religious authorities, who are managing those archives, to go through the archival material and explain to them the intent of the research. They then, at least generally, decide which information should be revealed and which should be left out from any future published work. It is somewhat easier to know what cannot be revealed if the researcher is an active member of that same religion. As Stoler claims, “one needs to understand the institutions that it (the archive) served” (2002, 107). Usually, there are no problems in achieving an agreement with most religious institutions or representatives concerning access to the archives and the selection of information to be published, as long as it does not harm the religion’s integrity. However, this poses a question about the role of the researcher and the need to interpret, the researcher’s subjective involvement, and the processes behind the making of religious archives in general or a particular archive. Religious archives challenge the academic possibility of reading into some less obvious religious and cultural processes that might explain human behavior. This is why the limitation on publishing certain data might sometimes hinder a more complex or contested insight into what is being researched. This relates to discussions about the power exercised by researchers towards the cultures they observe and those who read anthropological and ethnological texts. These texts contain only partial truths and have been written under certain constraints (cf. Clifford 1986, 25, 13). Not only do the archives contain the partial reality of things within a specific culture and a specific discourse within a specific archive (cf. Zeitlyn 2012, 464), but the researchers also have to choose what data they are allowed by powerful structures, including religious institutions, to represent in their research and what position they are going to take while interpreting the selected data. It actually depends on the purpose of the research, for example, whether it involves engaged anthropology or not, and consequently, which information will be revealed when studying religious practices, including pilgrimage. It would not be ethical to ask for access to the archives from the authorities of any religion without stating the real intent and then use it in a way that may have a negative effect upon the institution, belief system, pilgrims, believers, and so on. Revealing intimate aspects of pilgrims’ practices and thoughts is already questionable in the sense that it shows

116  Mirela Hrovatin some of the workings of religion. While the older testimonies clearly mention only Mary or a saint at their shrines, the more recent ones reflect the views of the Church hierarchy and address the sacred differently under the influence of the official attempt to change the believers’ old notions, as these two examples show: I thank Ivan Merz for him helping me in various difficulties and for him fulfilling me one great wish recently. 1974 (Answered Prayers after Petitions…) I asked sincerely blessed Ivan Merz, by a novena and a vow, to help us get out of trouble. – Thanks to the dear God and bl. Ivan […] our problem has been successfully solved. I was at the tomb of bl. Ivan Merz, thanked him for his intercession and help, and I recommend further my family to the intercession of Jesus dear and His Mother. 2005 (Answered Prayers after Petitions …) There are several different kinds of written data in the archives of shrines, and they need to be approached according to the archive’s specific context and the historical period involved (cf. Stoler 2009; Zeitlyn 2012; Punathil 2020). For example, Roman Catholic archives include books, mostly from the medieval period up until the twentieth century, that contain not only prayers and testimonies but also chronicles describing the historical and cultural circumstances in a certain geographical area where the shrine or church is situated. These sources are often written in Latin or the old vernacular. Therefore, the researcher either has to know how to read those different languages, dialects, and so on, or they can hire a professional translator. The way the stories are told in those records can reveal much about the position of the Church in society generally as well as towards popular piety that has always been on the verge of officially accepted practices (cf. Hrovatin 2020). It is maybe harder to extract what has been kept and what has been left out from the stories told by believers, but the researcher can read into the motivations and ways of thinking of believers as well as the attitudes of the clerics and priests during different historical periods. So-called miracle books, containing prayers and testimonies, are in most cases connected to the processes of beatification and canonization of saints, which is why it can be harder to obtain access to them, especially more recent ones. The information they contain usually consists of testimonies given by pilgrims to the shrine’s representatives about diseases that were miraculously healed after prayers were directed to a saint in the shrine or elsewhere. Sometimes they are transcripts of notes left by pilgrims at the altar (usually Marian shrines) or on the grave or catafalque of a saint. All these can be used mostly for statistical purposes in the research, but individual prayers and testimonies are less available since using them may harm the ongoing or any future canonization process. More recent archival materials are slightly different from those in the old miracle books, since they often contain just short notes about the event that took place and how the sacred (saint Mary) intervened, with the reasons that led to the prayer,

Epistemological and Ethical Challenges  117 the choice of saints, the author’s own thoughts and dilemmas concerning the sacred, and so on. Additionally, sometimes whole personal and family contexts can be extracted from those notes, especially at Marian shrines, and these notes help to show how believers participate in creating or confirming the importance of the sacred places. While testimonies about healing are important in building the image of most Marian shrines, other interventions by Mary in pilgrims’ lives contribute to both the official and popular aspects of her sacred image. As someone who studies these types of prayers, it is very difficult to retain a clear analytical focus while reading people’s life stories. I experienced a hard life crisis which, I believe, involved a sacred intervention and made me very emotionally engaged in the subject matter. It also brought me closer to the testimonies I was studying, changed the way I looked at life in general, and even deepened some of my personal religious beliefs. I came to understand why people have a need to testify about their experiences and why people’s testimonies have changed historically. It depends on the shrine authorities whether the testimonies are written down or transcribed from the notes people leave at the altar or from their letters to the shrine’s office, including electronic mail (usually printed out). Many of these notes and letters contain prayers directly addressed to the sacred, and these provide the researcher with a special insight into the way the prayer is formulated by the believer, something that can be rarely extracted from interview data. Through those materials, changes can be detected in the way the sacred place and sacred persons – self, body, historical events, identities, and so on – have been perceived both among believers and the official representatives of the religious institution which keeps those records. Here are two examples of notes from the archive at Marija Bistrica: A boy (name) from Zagreb, had paralysis in his legs, tuberculosis. The doctor’s help was weak. After making a vow to the Blessed Virgin Mary Mother of God of Bistrica he started walking and arrived at Marija Bistrica in 1957. The chaplain saw the boy and noted the mercy granted. (The Book of Answered Prayers…) To the Mother of God of Bistrica! Grateful to Mother of God of Bistrica for all the bestowed mercies, successes, health and accompaniment on the path of life. Enclosed is a gift to develop and renew the shrine of the Mother of God of Bistrica in Marija Bistrica. The giver is grateful to the Mother of God of Bistrica. 2000 (The Book of Answered Prayers…) Both types of notes are often accompanied by the signatures of witnesses, who provide their names as proof of true testimony. If observed more broadly, this practice of archival noting by the witnesses relates to the tradition of legitimating a statement and the influence of ancient legal oral traditions within Indo-European

118  Mirela Hrovatin culture (see Hrovatin 2020). These texts have a specific narrative structure and reflect various aspects of the believers’ attitudes as well as the ways in which the data is recorded and managed by the particular official institution. These texts also enable the researcher to trace historical changes in the concept of miracle by comparing older and more recent stories. In this sense, archives can be seen as “sites of knowledge production” and not only as sources of certain information (Stoler 2002, 90). Therefore, reading along the archival grain and at the same time against it (Stoler 2002, 109) can reveal both the workings behind the practices of the laity and the goals of the official religious institutions. After I had examined and written down on my computer the testimonies from the book of miracles at the shrine of Marija Bistrica in 2013, I offered an electronic version of it to the shrine, which the officials accepted. I made slight changes and left out some of the information, such as the names of the people, the exact addresses of those living, and so on, and the shrine’s authorities published it online. I also gave a copy of my thesis to the shrine’s library. In this way, I expressed my appreciation to the religious institution which provided access to the materials for my study, and my donation also accords with the general ethical approach in anthropology and ethnology. In the case of the older books, it can also be beneficial for a religious institution if the researcher digitizes them, since they can be available for future use if the authorities allow. The same could be done with audio-visual, newspaper, and other types of archival materials that are stored in the shrine or church but not open for public use. It would be especially useful because many private notes and recorded data made by anthropologists during archival research are unavailable due to a lack of archiving practice, the unwillingness of the researcher to make them available, or some other reason. Unlike interviewees with whom the researchers can decide on what information is going to be used in a scientific publication, people represented in the archival data cannot speak for themselves. Therefore, the researcher has a significant responsibility for choosing what to use and how to interpret the data from the archives, especially if it is also available online. Unlike the notes from the Marija Bistrica shrine, where names and even surnames are given, at the Blessed Ivan Merz shrine, testimonies about healing and his intervention rarely contain this kind of information. The testimonies are publicly available online and are going to be used for his canonization process in due course, so the Church authorities control the content and, in most cases, leave out detailed information. For a more in-depth analysis of those testimonies, the researcher would have to visit the official institution which keeps those records. Only a small portion of the testimonies address Blessed Ivan Merz directly. The notes are based on the personal testimonies given via phone, regular mail, and electronic mail, as well as letters sent by priests from parish churches where believers have asked them to send their testimonies, especially if they are unable to visit the shrine personally because of illness and so on. Many notes also request masses to be said on the author’s behalf, and this practice involving an intention, such as healing, getting a job, marrying, having a baby, and so on, has become in recent decades a kind of substitute for prayers (see Hrovatin 2020a). The notes also

Epistemological and Ethical Challenges  119 promise that the writer will come to the shrine if the petition is granted, and in some cases, they promise to bring a symbolic object representing a part of the body that is ill, such as a small wax figure of a leg. Pilgrims can perform many different practices during their visits to the shrine. At Croatian and some European Marian shrines (see Christian 1989; HerberichMarx 1989; Badone 1990), these practices mostly express the experience of the believer during and after praying to Mary for help, including direct prayers to Mary. In the letters to saints, more prominence is given to the role played by the relics or tomb of the saint in shaping their piety: Have mercy on me Mother of God of Bistrica, to my grandson – help him to get well and to come back to his company – those of his age. Thankfulness and Glory to You my Lady! Late 1990s (The Book of Answered Prayers…) By praying at the tomb of the blessed Ivan Merz she got well from more illnesses. Around the 1930s (Answered Prayers…) Until the beginning of the twentieth century, many Church officials at Croatian shrines would write down the testimonies exactly as told by the pilgrims visiting the shrine. Sometimes the officials would add their interpretation of these experiences or provide some further information about the context of the visit or the narrated event itself. However, as people became more literate during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they began to write their own testimonies either directly in the book or officials rewrite them from the pilgrims’ notes and letters. Hence, the researcher’s text constitutes a third level of interpretation of these testimonies. Among other things, the notes contain information about the pilgrim’s gender, age, and motives for praying, and these can be analyzed statistically. However, it is impossible to read all the notes equally on the same level, because some information about age, gender, and so on is missing. Pilgrims enjoy reading their notes and seeing their ex-voto gifts, often in the company of their families (cf. Herberich-Marx 1989, 182; Hermkens et al. 2012, 183), and, in this way, the testimonies extend beyond the text into the performative aspect of pilgrimage. One of the benefits of analyzing the notes from books of prayers is the possibility of observing differences in the various religious and non-religious notions that believers hold and how these change over time. In this sense, archives at sacred sites can be observed as places of memory, both personal and collective (cf. Stoler 2009, 16; Zeitlyn 2012, 463), bringing experience of the sacred and the sacred place into focus within a specific cultural and social context. However, there are often gaps in the archives since the frequency and regularity of recording testimonies depend mostly on the readiness of the officials at the shrine to note them down. For example, although the shrine in Marija Bistrica, from its beginnings in the fifteenth century, attracted those who brought oral stories of miraculous healings, it was

120  Mirela Hrovatin only after more than a century that those testimonies started to be written down, and they are mostly expressions of gratitude and explanations attached to promises of donating ex-votos or coming again on pilgrimage. In contrast to Marian shrines, the first and subsequent testimonies at saints’ tombs or shrines were usually carefully written down in order to support the canonization process by serving as proof of the person’s sanctity after their death. Because most of those testimonies were made under oath with witnesses confirming that the event took place and that there was an inexplicable, supernatural intervention (see Hrovatin 2020), it is probable that most of them were more or less written down as pilgrims told them to the officials. The practice of testifying and writing down those experiences in the shrines’ archives has been, and still is, an important way through which believers participated in the making of the sacred place, usually a larger shrine, and affirming the involvement of a holy person. It is the researcher’s role to uncover what can be read from all these testimonies and how these miracle books functioned in a particular cultural, historical, and religious context. At the same time, it is important to note that not all canonization processes have been successful. There have also been significant changes in the way that the books have been presented to various churches and other authorities on how believers were involved in the confirmation of these books and in the process of noting down their religious experience. These changes can reveal a great deal about the shrine being researched and the mechanisms lying behind the practices of the laity and the policies of the Church. Pilgrims’ diaries are also very important for gaining insight into the thoughts and beliefs of those visiting shrines (see Aziz 1987, 249). Some of my interviewees have been writing notes and keeping diaries not only about the pilgrimages they have made but also about their lifelong religious experience. However, they have been unwilling to show me all the contents of their diaries; they have only selected a few parts to share with me and refused to let their diaries be digitized in any format, i.e., by scanning or taking a photograph. During interviews, researchers need to remember that they must ask whether the interviewee or members of their family keep these kinds of notes and, if they do, whether they could access some of them. Internet Data Because the data about pilgrims’ experiences that can be found on the internet is very similar to offline archival data, the approaches described in the previous section can be applied to the anthropological analysis of online data (Zeitlyn 2012, 467; Haverinen 2015, 80). However, while interviewees decide together with researchers about what content may be used in published materials, for example, there is no possibility to ask people who have left online descriptions of their experience at a shrine for permission to publish all or parts of their text. Furthermore, the researcher can decide what to leave out from the archival data, e.g., names, etc., and this information is not easily accessible to the general public, but this is much harder to do with online data. Although permission to use online

Epistemological and Ethical Challenges  121 textual and visual materials (e.g., photographs) can be given by the institution, which is the holder of the internet page, the information provided on internet sites, including prayers, testimonies, expressions of thankfulness, and so on, contains a lot of personal information. The name and surname, places of origin or current residence, detailed descriptions of life stories, and other personal data can reveal the identity of a pilgrim or believer. So, even if we only use a couple of words or sentences, they can be traced by anyone later on through the search tool when visiting the cited internet page. Hence, it is necessary to be additionally careful not only when citing but also when interpreting this kind of internet data. Gratitude for employment of son and daughter I am a member of the parish (name of the parish). Looking at his (Blessed Ivan Merz) picture on the wall and his ’youth’ I thought he could help me with the Lord so that my children can find a job that would satisfy them. I started praying… I am very grateful to the blessed one … I will pray for this beatified person to receive sainthood which he certainly deserves. Zagreb, date, 2016, name and surname (Answered Prayers…) While we can do a statistical analysis, enumerate the most common motives for coming to the shrine are for praying, establish people’s gender and their profile (e.g., working people, widows, etc.), for other information such as ways of communicating with the sacred and insight into more intimate personal thoughts, we need to rely more on our own perception of all the prayers we have read. However, a particular example could be used if we think that it would not in any way harm the religious institution in charge of the records or the person whom we are quoting. Such an example would be an expression of religious feelings: Thank you, our dear Alojzije, for keeping us and pleading for us before the Lord. You are our saint and protector of our family and our people. 2019 (The Book of Answered Prayers…) We must be aware all the time that the examples taken from the internet will be visible to everyone after the work is published. Our ideas and insights might have a direct impact on the religion which is studied and on the people whose identities might be revealed through our research. Moreover, both online data and offline archives are not enough to explain the processes and complexity of any religious practice, including pilgrimage. Those studying religious practices need to be aware of ‘important contextualities’ and the connectedness of ‘online and offline’ environments (Haverinen 2015, 83). Some of the information from interviews helped me explain some of the statements in the records, such as how a person prays at the shrine and how this is different from praying at home: When I went to Lourdes, I felt joy. Something literally pushed me to go there. As if something was calling me. I felt peace, it was a blessed feeling. After

122  Mirela Hrovatin that I started participating in our local religious community, reading during the holy Mass and so on. (Interviewee 1, 2020) However, care needs to be taken about drawing general conclusions through combining different sources of data. The researcher’s conclusions depend on many factors, such as the purpose of the testimonies (does it concern a saint or Mary), location (is it a large or smaller shrine), period of time (which official and unofficial notions govern the attitudes expressed), and different levels of text (who is writing it, how it is written, is it first person or transmitted through retelling, etc.). So, this brings us back to the need to approach pilgrimage as a complex phenomenon which is inseparable from other aspects of people’s lives and cultures. Although there are more online sources available since people increasingly comment on their experiences through social networks and other places, it is only the sites managed by official Catholic institutions that are considered valid by the majority of believers. The Church warns against uncritically accepting testimonies and private experiences, particularly when they are not officially approved by being placed on official internet sites. In the past, it was through sermons during the Mass and preaching that the Church gave clear instructions to the faithful about how to interpret personal experience and connect it to the sacred, such as particular places (cf. Hrovatin 2020a). However, as people became more literate, the Church sought to shape people’s views about the sacred and the meaning of many religious practices through other sources, such as pilgrim guides and officially approved books about the history of shrines. As these kinds of materials proliferated, it became less necessary to manage testimonies via archives. Testimonies started to appear in public, including official Church materials such as newspapers, miracle bulletins, and, today, all kinds of material on the internet. People can now ask questions about what is missing in official Church criteria concerning personal or communal experience of the sacred (cf. Stoler 2002, 103). All this opens up new spaces for the study of official and other types of sources containing records of religious practices and beliefs, whether online or offline repositories, including personal diaries and notes. Conclusion It is fairly easy for cultural anthropologists to gather historical, cultural, and social data about certain pilgrimage places and practices, but delving deeply into personal aspects of religious behavior, which include intimate issues, can be challenging. Prayers and testimonies that pilgrims leave at a shrine are inspired by different motives than those recounted during interviews, and this determines the way in which these types of discourse are shaped. From both sources, many aspects of personal thoughts about the sacred and its role in the lives of a particular individual and whole societies during a particular period can be extracted. The ethnographic method of gathering stories from different sources has provided a deeper insight into the use of particular pilgrims’ practices and how they are connected to broader

Epistemological and Ethical Challenges  123 social, cultural, economic, historical, religious, and other contexts. Combining both inductive and deductive methods, moving from theoretical debates within pilgrimage studies to empirical data and back again, can reveal certain specific mechanisms governing many religious practices at pilgrimage sites and among believers at home. While written testimonies provide a lot of information about motives, ways of communicating with the sacred, pilgrims’ personal profiles (gender, age), geographical information, and so on, interviews provide a more in-depth view concerning the connections between pilgrims’ choices of practices and their cultural surroundings. In the case of the prayers and impressions people leave at the shrine or other places, including the internet, as well as descriptions of their religious experiences gathered through interviews, the identity of those researched should be protected by (a) not revealing any additional or personal information and (b) presenting a more general interpretation of the data so that there is no need to refer to specific examples. Beyond the data itself, there is much more that can be revealed from the archives of religious institutions. We can see how believers perceive their faith and religious affiliation, as well as how religious institutions manage their archives and influence believers over time. This is why moving towards “a more ethnographic” and less “extractive” approach could bring more complex research results (Stoler 2002, 109). The Church’s exercise of power through keeping records of testimonies lies in making it possible for laity to participate in the life of the Church, whether through canonization processes for saints, confirming the effectiveness of a Marian shrine or some other significant process. This exercise of power provides researchers with the opportunity to explore the ways in which archives have been used by the Church and believers, the details mentioned in the people’s stories, the manner in which the stories in the archives have been confirmed as true, and so on. Any cultural anthropological study of a particular religion influences the researcher themselves, just like any other research theme in this scientific discipline, because qualitative research involves detailed noting and analysis of the processes and activities that are taking place in the real time and space of a specific society (Bernard 2018, 451). Whether this type of research has a greater or lesser impact on the researcher as a person depends both on the researcher’s identity and what is being studied. Whether the researcher is a member or not of the religion being studied also plays a significant role in the way the processes are analyzed and revealed in later publications emerging from the project. I believe that with the right positioning of the researcher and an awareness of the subtle limitations imposed on a particular study, one can reveal many of the workings of not only a specific religion (changes within a given belief system, official and unofficial attitudes, etc.), but also of a specific society in general at a certain point in time (economic, political, ethnic, moral, etc.), including individual choices (family, loneliness, searching for the meaning of life). And not to be neglected, the researcher of personal and even other types of religious experiences has to prepare for the emotional side-effects of such a study, especially if they are members of the religion in question.

124  Mirela Hrovatin Religious institutions ‒ in this case, the Roman Catholic Church ‒ have been using personal testimonies for various purposes, and they still do. Be it confirmation of believers’ faith or legitimizing the experience of the sacred in everyday life and at sacred places, it is the institutions that still decide what information will be noted in their archives. However, the participation of the believers in the workings of such religious institutions is strong, since the process of archiving believers’ experiences is brought into the frame of official religious discourse. In some cases, the researchers should reconsider whether it is ethically acceptable to go through with their research, depending on the goals of the research itself. So, if the research is aimed at explaining religious and cultural processes, it usually takes into consideration the official attitudes of those in power in a religious system and the religious attitudes of believers, but if the research strives to explain more delicate issues of the impact of religion on society and vice versa, it might clash with both official authorities and believers, especially if the exact persons are identified in the research results. We can go as far as our capabilities as researchers of religious practices and notions allow us, taking into consideration general and anthropological ethical principles, including the protection of personal information. References Albera, D., & Eade, J. (eds.). 2017. New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies: Global Perspectives. London and New York: Routledge. Aziz, N.B. 1987. Personal Dimensions of the Sacred Journey: What Pilgrims Say. Religious Studies, 23/2, 247–261. Badone, E. 1990. Introduction. In Badone, E. (ed.), Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society (pp. 3–23). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bernard, R.H. 2018. Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Lanham, Boulder, New York and London: Rowman & Littlefield. Christian, William A., Jr. 1989. Person and God in a Spanish Valley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Clifford, J. 1986. Introduction: Partial Truths. In Clifford, J. & Marcus, George E. (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (pp. 1–26). Berkeley: University of California Press. Coleman, S., & Eade, J. 2004. Introduction. In Coleman, S. & Eade, J. (eds.), Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion (pp. 1–25). London: Routledge. Comaroff, J., & Comaroff, J. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Diacritics, 25(2), 9–63. Dirks, Nikolas B. 2002. Annals of the Archive: Ethnographic Notes on the Sources of History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Eade, J., & Sallnow, M.J. 1991. Introduction. In Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (pp. 1–29). London: Routledge. Haverinen, A. 2015. Internet Ethnography: The Past, the Present and the Future. Social Networks, Communication and the Internet, 42, 79–90. Herberich-Marx, G. 1989. Evolution d’une Sensibilité Religieuse: Témoignages Iconographiques et Scripturaires de Pélerinages Alsaciens. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg.

Epistemological and Ethical Challenges  125 Hermkens, A.-K., Jansen, W., & Notermans, C. 2012. Introduction: The Power of Marian Pilgrimage. In Hermkens, A.-K. Jansen, W. & Notermans, C. (ed.), Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World (pp. 2–13). Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Hrovatin, M. 2020a. Negotiating with the Sacred Other: The Ancient Mechanisms of the Personal Vow Practice. International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, 8(1), 10–23. Hrovatin, M. 2020b. Tracking Historical Changes in Personal Religious Practice on the Examples of Votive Prayers. Ethnologia Balkanica, 22, 131–152. Jansen, W., & Notermans, C. 2011. Ex-votos in Lourdes: Contested Materiality of Miraculous Healings. Material Religion, 7(2), 168–193. Morinis, A. 1992. Introduction. In Morinis, A. (ed.), Sacred Journeys. The Anthropology of Pilgrimage (pp. 1–28). London: Greenwood Press. Punathil, S. 2020. Archival Ethnography and Ethnography of Archiving: Towards an Anthropology of Riot Inquiry Commission Reports in Postcolonial India. History and Anthropology, 32(3), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2020.1854750 Reader, I. 2015. Pilgrimage: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP. Stoler, A.L. 2002. Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance. Archival Science, 2, 87–109. Stoler, A.L. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Turner, E., & Turner, V. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: CUP. Zeitlyn, D. 2012. Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41, 461–480.

Sources Answered Prayers after Petitions to the Blessed Ivan Merz and Gratitudes (Uslišanja po zagovoru blaženog Ivana Merza i zahvale) [s.a.]. Blaženi Ivan Merz, blaženik Katoličke crkve. Available at: http://ivanmerz.hr/staro/uslisanja/ (accessed on 23 November 2020). The Book of Answered Prayers, Graces, Vows and Miracles Granted by the Blessed Virgin Our Lady of Marija Bistrica (Knjiga uslišanja, milosti, zagovora i čudesa Bl. Dj. Marije Majke Božje Bistričke) [s.a.]. Hrvatsko nacionalno svetište Majke Božje Bistričke. Available at: https://www.svetiste-mbb.hr/stranica/zapisi-uslisanja-milosti-zagovori-i-cudesa (accessed on November 20, 2020). The Book of Prayers, Gratitudes and Testimonies (Knjiga molitvi, zahvala i svjedočanstava). 2019. Blaženi Alojzije Stepinac. Available at: http://stepinac.zg-nadbiskupija.hr/hr/knjiga-­ molitvi-zahvala-i-svjedocanstava/zahvale-i-svjedocanstva/42 (accessed on November 22, 2020). The Ethical Code of the Croatian Ethnological Society (Etički kodeks HED-a) 2013: Hrvatsko etnološko društvo. Available at: https://hrvatskoetnoloskodrustvo.hr/o-nama/etickikodeks/ (accessed on November 8, 2020).

9

The Visual Anthropology of Pilgrimages Exploring the Making of Films and Photographs Manoël Pénicaud

Introduction I started to use a photo camera in 1999 when I undertook ethnographic fieldwork as a student on the routes to Santiago de Compostela. It happened before the digital era and the daily number of available photographs was much more limited than today. I then perfected my ethnographic photographic practice when I made a study of a 40-day pilgrimage performed in South Morocco by Sufi Regragas brotherhoods. At the same time, I began a documentary film – Baraka Paths1 – on this annual Moroccan pilgrimage (Pénicaud and Mesbah 2007; Pénicaud 2008). Almost 20 years later, when images are widely proliferating and anyone films anything, this training has been extremely formative and enriching. Based on my empirical experiences in ‘making’ ethnographic images, I propose to share here some epistemological reflections about visual pilgrimage studies as well as methodological techniques. Pilgrimage implies intrinsically something dynamic and mobile. This is evident in the case of distant pilgrimages, which require long journeys to reach great sacred centers characterized by a ‘spiritual magnetism’ that attracts thousands of people (Preston 1992). However, it is important not to overlook the myriad of smaller sites that attract worshipers on a local or regional level. Here, physical displacement and travel time are limited, especially since walking is not or is no longer the most popular mode for these journeys. Although walking remains constitutive of the pilgrimage habitus in collective representations and imaginaries, at least in Europe, travelling by foot characterizes only a few, well-known routes, such as the famous routes to Santiago. Most of the time, what matters is the internal mobility that pilgrims experience when leaving their everyday religious life, usually centered around a local place of worship, to enter a liminal space-time (Turner and Turner 1978) and motivated by an intimate desire or quest. Hence, pilgrimage involves a complex process of several types of mobilities, and pilgrims are ideal types of people ‘in motion’ (Hervieu-Léger 1999; Eade and Coleman 2004). Mobility is also constitutive through the ritual dynamics evident at pilgrimage centers. Depending on the day or period, the choreographies of people and materialities are potentially very dense. Pilgrimage arenas are often characterized by large crowds and a ritual effervescence that can become quite vertiginous for DOI: 10.4324/9781003137764-13

Visual Anthropology of Pilgrimages: Making of Films and Photos  127 uninitiated visitors and external observers. In these conditions, filming or photographing pilgrimages becomes a singular research practice. Because the scene is constantly in motion ‒ whether it involves a route, a procession or a religious service ‒ participant observation with a camera is, in fact, quite complicated. The heuristic contribution of still and moving images is less and less questioned, which is by the way the raison d’être of visual anthropology. A sub-field of social anthropology, it is essentially correlated with all types of visual representations and, increasingly, with ethnographic film, photography, and new media. As David MacDougall, an emblematic Anglo-Saxon figure of ethnographic cinema, rightly states: ‘Some conceive of visual anthropology as a research technique, others as a field of study, others as a teaching tool, still others as a means of publication, and others again as a new approach to anthropological knowledge’ (MacDougall 1998: 61). I am not convinced that we are facing an ‘iconic turn’ (Mitchell 1994) in the sense of a decline in textual writing and a boom in the reproduction and dissemination of images. However, it is clear that more and more students or researchers specialized in pilgrimages want to film their fieldwork, encouraged and motivated by miniaturization and the democratization of technology. So what is the contribution of visual anthropology to pilgrimage studies? How can we think and represent otherness in the context of pilgrimages through images? This is not as easy to answer as it may seem. Moreover, answers have to deal with the reflexivity of the researcher and the need to reflect on his or her approach, emotions, or blockages. What is the reflexive positionality of the researcher when visually investigating pilgrimages? Filming and/or photographing not only transform the anthropologist’s vision during the fieldwork but also their way of positioning or moving within space. From a methodological perspective, I will also explore the pragmatic issues that emerge when studying religious behavior and pilgrimages through making images. How to capture – or not – when carrying out fieldwork? What are our first and final intentions when filming or photographing? How does the camera change the observed phenomenon? Drawing on empirical experience in the Mediterranean, mainly at holy places shared by the faithful from different denominations in different religious contexts (Albera, Kuehn and Pénicaud 2022),2 I will try to provide keys, tools, tactics and suggestions. Before developing these reflections, it is necessary to briefly ask who makes the images we are talking about, and what is their destination. Will they be only a research tool or a finalized and independent production? Firstly, researchers work on existing materials.3 Whether it be drawings, paintings, icons, prints on wood, engravings, lithographs, photographs maps, or even images posted on social networks, researchers usually do not produce but analyze materials. What matters are the meanings, interpretations and theorizations that can be formulated from visual materiality and different points of view. One can, for instance, count pilgrims at a shrine, observe carefully their rituals or analyze the spatial choreographies. Another technique consists in making a diachronic comparison between different temporalities at the same location. In the process variations and continuities can appear visually (Figures 9.1 and 9.2).

128  Manoël Pénicaud

Figure 9.1 Rachel’s Tomb, Library of Congress Print and photographs Division, Washington, c. 1920.

Figure 9.2 Rachel’s Tomb, 2014 © Pénicaud.

Visual Anthropology of Pilgrimages: Making of Films and Photos  129 Secondly, more and more researchers are using different media in researching pilgrimages, but pictures remain fieldwork to be analyzed further during classical, text-based research. Already in 1948, this scientific process was well defined by André Leroi-Gourhan as ‘cinematographic notes’. These pictures ‘shot from day to day, without a definite plan, offer eminent services and we begin to use the camera as a notepad. What we get from them looks like separate sheets of a draft notebook’4 (Leroi-Gourhan 1983: 104). A camera is as useful as a pen, therefore. It captures what is not easily perceptible to human eyes and ears, such as imperceptible details, pilgrims’ behaviors or gestures. It compensates for the inevitable failures of direct observation and classical written notes by memorizing an uninterrupted flow of information. Nevertheless, the machine’s digital memory is not unlimited and it is important not to overvalue its technical capacities. Thirdly, another stage is reached when one has decided to produce a new ‘visual object’ based on a coherent scientific narrative. This is what Leroi-Gourhan called a ‘prepared film, organised as a publication on film, which is basically what the ethnologist writes, on a given subject’ (Leroi-Gourhan 1983: 109). The diffusion to a large audience logically implies a series of constraints that are much more demanding than the basic cinematographic notes. Exploring and Capturing the Pilgrimage Religiosity in Motion How to carry out pilgrimage fieldwork with a camera? The following reflections are not normative rules, but thoughts, techniques and tactics inspired by empirical experience. As noted above, the pilgrimage scene is highly mobile. For that matter, it is significant to note that this mobility echoes the etymology of ‘cinematography’: the writing of movement (kinoi and graphein in Greek). The moving image is propitious in capturing and understanding religiosity in motion, while still photography freezes movement (yet, suggesting it), and text tends to reify a ritual action. Shooting Conditions and Constraints

Depending on the fieldwork design, the shooting configuration can vary considerably. Is the anthropologist filmmaker alone or is s/he part of a film crew? This factor can generate very different situations, mainly in the relationship with pilgrims and other protagonists, in terms of acceptance, integration, idiomatic understanding, etc. We will see the potential difficulties later, especially with what is called ‘profilmy’. When working in a team, the members may not be familiar with ethnological practices. In my opinion, making one’s own images is the best option. However, this does not preclude working with a fellow anthropologist ‒ as mentioned before ‒ I have often done this with Dionigi Albera. While I am moving around filming, he watches and takes written notes (another way of capturing data). It is important to choose equipment as light and discreet as possible (camera, microphones, tripod, headphones) so that the pilgrims accept it without thinking that they will be on television. Lightness is vital when going on long journeys. During my field shoots with the Regragas, we had to buy a donkey to carry the equipment for hundreds of kilometers. There is also the issue of battery life and weather

130  Manoël Pénicaud conditions. Afterwards, I decided not to use a tripod anymore as it hampered my mobility. Nowadays, one can find light, high-quality equipment that is appropriate for fieldwork conditions. Nonetheless, when filming with digital cards, it is necessary to regularly unload them on an external hard drive or a computer, which includes new devices. In brief, filming will always require technical equipment and technical knowledge. Another constraint inherent in filming or photographing a pilgrimage concerns administrative and legal obligations. The first type depends on the shooting permissions. Depending on the country where the field is taking place, anthropologists need to declare to local or national authorities their presence and intention to film. The risk is that you may be denied such permission or that a police officer may be assigned to ‘protect’ you, i. e., control your work. I experienced this situation in Cairo at the Garden of Mary’s site in Matariah, where a police officer interfered with the proper conduct of the field. Another time, while preparing a film of the pilgrimage of St. George in Istanbul, I realized that an official declaration would force me to be accompanied by a police officer. So, I decided to go there among the pilgrims and do my job unhindered. In Morocco, I had to make an official statement every year in order to film the Regragas’ pilgrimage and after several years, I stopped doing this. One day, a policeman came asking to see my authorization from the Ministry of the Interior but I was ‘protected’ by one of the brotherhoods’ leaders, who explained that I was their guest. The second type of constraint relates to image rights. It is now prescribed by law that we should seek written permission from anyone filmed or photographed. However, during a pilgrimage where the collective atmosphere is often effervescent, it is sometimes very difficult to obtain such formal consent. From experience, consent is often obtained tacitly and informally, by a look, a gesture, or even a smile. The obligation to obtain a signed form, asking for the pilgrims’ addresses and civil status, is difficult since it can distort the relationship. Indeed, the anthropologist suddenly becomes a stranger whose request can undermine the pilgrimage’s special atmosphere, whether meditative or festive. Moreover, the pilgrims can suddenly think that this foreigner will enrich himself by selling their images. This introduces an economic factor that is as false as it is inappropriate. Of course, it may be possible to ask for the transfer of the image rights a posteriori, but this is all the more difficult in the case of a pilgrimage where people just pass by and quickly disappear into the crowd. Personally, I teach my students to always ask for permission and have a form signed whenever possible. Yet during the fieldwork, where the issue of language and literacy arises more than in one’s own country, I sometimes continue to photograph and film with the oral and spontaneous consent of the pilgrims, even though I know that this will be less and less legally possible. What matters ethically, in my opinion, is that we need to respect the person being filmed in his or her integrity. The Pilgrimage Ritual Scenario

The expression ‘ritual scenario’ does not mean that there is a pre-written script for the film, like in a fictional movie. Although it is strongly recommended to write an

Visual Anthropology of Pilgrimages: Making of Films and Photos  131 open draft in advance, as well as your filming intentions, the documentary genre is not based on an unchanging script. Rather, the formula seeks to designate the precise ritual sequencing of the pilgrimage, which the anthropologist has studied through prior investigation. Knowing in advance what is going to happen or the route taken in the case of a pilgrimage on foot or a procession represents a considerable advantage. In the case of a liturgical ceremony, it is also very advantageous to know the sequences before the shooting, so as not to miss the crucial moments or their recording. Such knowledge should also help you to take up the best position. In fact, it often depends on the anthropologist’s level of integration and also on their ability to position themselves as close as possible to the ritual action without disturbing it. Sometimes it happens that a researcher with a camera is considered a journalist; in which case s/he is given a prime spot. This can be very convenient since it prevents you from getting stuck behind a crowd of devotees, but it can also lead you to be assigned an unwanted and fixed location. Placement is a technique in itself. Personally, I recommend always going as close as possible to the ritual action and avoiding filming from a distance. However, it is also necessary to vary shots and always be mobile. Sometimes that is impossible, like during the shooting of Emma-Aubin Boltanski’s documentary Catherine ou le corsp de la Passion: While she remained among the hundreds of worshippers, who came to attend on Good Friday the apparition of the stigmata on the body of this Maronite visionary in her home in Beirut, the Lebanese camerawoman was fortunately able to place herself as close as possible to Catherine (Aubin-Boltanski 2012). In this case, the camera transcribes the effervescence of the pilgrim crowd, which sometimes intensifies from second to second. It is sometimes not easy to film in such a situation, but it is just as easy to write in a notebook. Once you are in the right spot, a sequence shot can be very useful in recording almost the entire ritual, even if it will not necessarily be used in the final cut. Finally, in the case of long pilgrimage journeys like the Regragas’one in Morocco, even if the anthropologist knows the itinerary in advance, the unity of time and place is no longer operative. The scenery and the context of the action change all the time and this complicates the shooting. The ‘Profilmy’

At this point, it is necessary to introduce a concept specific to the ethnographic cinema ‒ at least, as it was theorized by the French anthropologist, Claudine de France (a student of Jean Rouch) ‒ the ‘profilmy.’ In explaining the influence of the anthropologist filmmaker on the protagonists of the action, she defined profilmy as ‘the more or less conscious way in which the people filmed “stage” themselves and their environment, for the filmmaker or because of the presence of the camera’ (de France 1982: 373). In other words, it is crucial to be aware that the camera might induce in those being filmed particular reactions. The main risk, underlined by Claudine de France, is the self-staging of oneself, which strongly recalls the self-presentation theory developed by Erving Goffman, i.e., people adapt more or

132  Manoël Pénicaud less consciously to those with whom they interact through particular social representations (Goffman 1959). As Christian Lallier states: ‘Each one acts and interacts according to the image he considers that the other believes he wants to give of himself’ (Lallier 2017: 190). When carrying out religious fieldwork with a camera, this influence is epistemologically central. One must always wonder about the alteration of ’reality’ and the ritual performance and how this relates to the degree of integration by the anthropologist and the presence or not of a team. In ritual matters, the problem is that pilgrims may overplay their roles, producing a form of super-reality or superrituality and even creating a radical distortion of ritual normality. If pilgrims perform their ritual as if they were on stage in front of an audience, the situation can become a simulacrum or a show. Knowing this, one must always take into account the profilmy to avoid manipulation. A forewarned anthropologist is forearmed. The objective is, therefore, to attenuate or even defuse the importance of profilmy, so as not to distort the behavior or the course of the pilgrimage. However, this type of recommendation is also valid for fieldwork without a camera. Indeed, the mere presence of an anthropologist induces reactions and transformations from the pilgrims, in their performance or their discourses. It is elementary and at the very base of the anthropological enterprise. The challenge consists in reducing the gap between the absence and the presence of the observer through participant observation. In this context, the camera must become a ‘participating camera’ to use Luc de Heusch’s expression (Heusch 1962). In fact, the acceptance of the camera and the success of the shooting depend on the quality of the relationship with the people you are filming: respect, knowledge, mutual understanding, etc. Another remark: in my opinion, it is an illusion to think that pilgrims can totally forget the camera. On the other hand, it is clear that nowadays, democratization and the growing number of filming devices tend to reduce the effect of profilmy. Pilgrims are more and more used to being filmed and photographed; sometimes they film themselves during their own ritual performance. The self-staging is then obvious but has also become an integral part of the ritual, which an exterior camera can try to show precisely. The main change is that the practice of taking pictures has become part of the pilgrim habitus (Pénicaud 2015a). While a few years ago, cameras were often banned in most sanctuaries, this is no longer the case. During the first Moroccan pilgrimage in which I participated in 2001 (Mawsim of Moulay Abdallah), I was almost hit by a stone thrown by an elderly woman whom I was about to photograph because the camera was still considered an object that could capture a person’s soul. This belief has declined sharply nowadays and many pilgrims take photos, most of the time without any discomfort or concern to disrupt the course of the pilgrimage.5 Smartphones have become omnipresent in pilgrimages and the miniaturized anthropologist’s camera is just one camera among many, which makes the fieldwork much easier and reduces the effects of profilmy. During recent shootings, I was surprised by the quasi indifference of the pilgrims to the cameras and mine, in particular. I experienced this at the Greek Orthodox

Visual Anthropology of Pilgrimages: Making of Films and Photos  133 monastery of St. George in Istanbul and at the Ghriba Sephardic synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia. The visitors’ behavior was not particularly ‘altered’ by the omnipresence of cameras and smartphones, even in the epicenter of ritual spaces. In the shrine, the density of the crowd paradoxically encourages many pilgrims, who enter to pray, to ignore the external agitation and presence of cameras. Moreover, it is interesting to note that the Orthodox monks prohibit photographs in the St. George’s church all year round, except on pilgrimage days when the crowd is too massive and where everyone can film or photograph what they want (Fliche and Pénicaud 2020) (Figure 9.3). However, the anthropologist filmmaker is never completely unnoticed either. During an investigation at Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem (West Bank), I first felt I was almost ‘invisible’ to ultra-Orthodox Jews absorbed in their prayers punctuated by body swaying, but I was wrong. When I got up discreetly from a chair, a man interrupted himself and waved to me: not because of my camera, but because my kippah had just fallen to the ground and I had just broken the rule of covering my head in such a holy place. In fact, the pilgrims always know that we are there, but this does not affect their practice; only a long period of observation allows us to become more or less part of the scenery. Coming back to profilmy, I experienced what I call the ‘anthropologist’s profilmy’ in an instructive situation. In 2012, a film crew, which was covering my research, accompanied me on a pilgrimage to the Bachkovo Orthodox Monastery

Figure 9.3 Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, 2015 © Pénicaud.

134  Manoël Pénicaud in Bulgaria. Finding myself being filmed when filming pilgrims, I felt some difficulty in recording the ritual while another camera recorded my every move. It must have been even more unusual for the pilgrims, who were faced with two cameras, one filming the other. However, the situation ultimately helped me understand the process of profilmy, both in front of and behind the camera and avoid overplaying my own anthropological role.6 What to Film, How to Film?

What to film or not to film? This is an unanswered question that depends on individual choices and the film’s purpose. Nonetheless, it is certain that it would be impossible to film or record everything despite these new technological tools. There is the difficulty of storing and archiving a very large number of images and also the danger of ‘image bulimia’, i.e., filming over and over again the same ritual. In my opinion, it is better to film it once as best as possible rather than several times, especially since the raw material will be less manageable during editing. Again, the methodology for filming a pilgrimage depends on whether it is ‘cinematic notes’ or a documentary film project. In this second case, it is strongly recommended to have prepared for the shooting beforehand. This facilitates the filming choices made during the fieldwork and does not prevent contingency from being captured on site. Informing the pilgrimage organizers of one’s presence is another precondition so that you can obtain (often informal) authorization. I have had problems accessing a shrine at least twice. In 2013, I stayed three days in front of the entrance to the sanctuary of Rabbi Amram Ben Diwan at Ouazzane (Morocco), without being able to enter, because I had no authorization from the head of the Jewish community, even though I had one from the Ministry of the Interior. Several schools recommend different techniques for filming while walking, standing, sitting and putting the camera on the shoulder or on a tripod. For example, MacDougall used a tripod, while Rouch preferred the traveling shot to avoid staying in an ‘observation post’ and go directly into the ritual action, using mobility and improvisation, as we will see below. Moreover, it is highly recommended to know cinematographic grammar and syntax: framing, shot lengths, shooting angles (high-angle, low-angle), camera movements (zoom, traveling, panoramic shots), technical rules (30-degree and 180-degree rotation rules). In terms of rhythm – both of the pilgrimage and also of the film – it is essential to capture different intensities ‒ interstices, pauses and silences ‒ and not just ritual effervescence. For example, one can take pictures of the same place during and outside the pilgrimage, to translate its temporary transformation. How to film the sacred, which is essentially something invisible and immaterial? This is a vast epistemological and subjective issue. On the one hand, in practice, we can try to give a place to the invisible beings, who are the prime focus of the ritual, by using tactics to translate this invisible presence through silence, an ellipse, the metaphor of a filmed object, or a particular angle of view. On the other hand, the emotion sometimes provoked by the eruption of the sacred can help make

Visual Anthropology of Pilgrimages: Making of Films and Photos  135 it perceptible to the spectators. Pilgrims can also explicitly testify to this invisible sacredness during an interview. In their documentary on communication with the dead in Iceland by mediums, Christophe Pons and Clément Dorival succeeded in showing this dialogue with the supernatural (Pons and Dorival 2010). In the middle of a pilgrimage, recording at the right time is crucial, otherwise, the sequence is missed. A sense of anticipation is required and this sometimes depends on the intuition of the anthropologist filmmaker. Imagine being in a flow of pilgrims, filming a person or an action. At every moment, the filmmaker hopes to capture the sequence from A to Z. S/he initiates a camera movement, anticipating the move by the subject, who then decides to go in another direction; the shot is missed. This frequent occurrence can generate satisfaction or frustration. Sometimes one just makes bad choices and at other times everything works well. Hence, improvisation needs to be seen as a process of investigation and research. Anticipation and improvisation play a central role in the documentary approach, both in substance and form. At all times, one has to know how to grasp the unanticipated, the unusual scene or the unexpected discussion that will play a key role. It means always being watchful, always having the camera close at hand, feeling what is happening and what is being said. One has to anticipate and dare to start the recording just before the key element to catch it at the ‘decisive moment’ (see Cartier-Bresson 1952). Very often nothing happens, but capturing a successful shot is enough to give you personal satisfaction. This shot or sequence alone can affect the mood of a day because it will definitely be part of the final film. In the field anything can happen: bad weather conditions, a breakdown, the absence of a key character, etc. You just have to adapt and film what is happening, whatever happens. As Rouch writes: ‘Our films are not written, they are incrementally improvised through the viewfinder of the camera...’ (Langlois, Morel and Rouch 1986). Filming as a ‘Cine-Trance’

These considerations concerning improvisation lead me to evoke a particular situation that the anthropologist filmmaker may experience, especially when filming religious rituals ‒ the state of ’cine-trance’ conceptualized by Rouch. In 1971, he wanted to film a possession ritual in Niger but he ran out of film before the trance occurred. Frustrated, he then decided to film a single 10-minute sequence as an archival document. Suddenly, some adepts went into a trance and he found himself standing with his camera, in the middle of the possessed. This spontaneous experiment led to Tourou et Bitti. Les tambours d’avant (1971) and laid the foundations for cine-trance: For me then, the only way to film is to walk with the camera, taking it where it is most effective and improvising another type of ballet with it, trying to make it as alive as the people filming. … Thus, instead of using the zoom, the cameraman-director can really get into the subject. Leading or following a dancer, priest, or craftsman, he is no longer himself, but a mechanical eye

136  Manoël Pénicaud accompanied by and electric ear. It is this strange state of transformation that takes place in the filmmaker that I have called, analogously to possession phenomena, ‘cine-trance’. (Rouch 1974: 41) This neologism has, however, remained quite cryptic and polysemic, according to the anthropologist filmmaker, Baptiste Buob, who remarkably retraces its polysemic character (Buob 2017). Yet, it seems to me that this ‘mysterious’ concept remains a methodological and reflexive heuristic. I will, therefore, explain how I hear it and how I appropriate it in the case of my own filmic practice. I have, indeed, filmed possession ceremonies in Morocco but it is possible to feel this singular state during a procession or a pilgrimage. I agree with Rouch that cine-trance does not mean that the filmmaker goes into a religious trance. It is an ambiguous and paradoxical state, involving both abandonment and maximum concentration, that one reaches, camera in hand, within the heart of a ritual sequence. Being totally a part of the scene while standing back from what I am filming produces a kind of duality or dissociation. Although the chants, the music, the prayers or the general fervor transport me and facilitate empathy and participation, I have to constantly keep my feet on the ground so as to technically control the machine with which I am one. From then on, the camera becomes almost organic and I forget its weight. This state of abandonment is particularly manifested by a singular relationship with my own body, which I forget and force without hesitation for the benefit of the filmed sequence. For example, I stop breathing if necessary or I contort myself at the risk of having a cramp, as Rouch explained: ‘it is a matter of training, mastering reflexes as would a gymnast’ (Rouch 1974: 41). This mode of filming – which is clearly a performance by the filmmaker – is a way of becoming a protagonist, be it someone who is possessed (for Rouch) or a pilgrim (for me). To go further, I would also like to underline the kind of ‘state of grace’ that I sometimes feel when the camera movements are fluid when I no longer feel my body, and when I know that ‘it’s a wrap’, meaning that everything is recorded by the camera. To be honest, in this state of suspension, the satisfaction of seeing the film almost edited live (shot-edited) is quite exhilarating. From a reflexive point of view, I am aware that the ‘state of grace’ is precisely within the field that I am exploring and it is undoubtedly a way of participating in it and ‘vibrating’ in my own way among the exalted prayers of worshippers. From Editing to Mediatisation of Images Previously, we talked about images – still or moving – which mainly involve a relationship between two types of protagonists: the characters (pilgrims or religious leaders) and the anthropologist filmmaker. In this third part, a third category is added: the spectators or recipients of the pictures. The relationship, therefore, is triangular and even more complex. This phase of dissemination and exhibition of the work multiplies the potentialities, interpretations and challenges of images.

Visual Anthropology of Pilgrimages: Making of Films and Photos  137 It becomes even more complex sometimes when a fourth character intervenes, a producer for whom the economic dimension is central. In general, producers do not share the same priorities as the anthropologist filmmaker and this can particularly transform the project’s orientation. In other words, the more a film is funded (for example, by TV), the more the author will have to make compromises to satisfy a mainstream audience and industry. What matters, in the case of a film publication, which is equivalent in a sense to a publication, is to adopt an anthropological point of view and show a good knowledge of the subject, the pilgrimage and the people. In addition to mastering the recording technique and cinematographic grammar, you have to know what to convey to the receivers, and, therefore, put yourself into their shoes. This is a process where writing is central. The Editing as a Writing Process

Making a film requires several complementary writing phases. As a first step, it is advisable to write a project, a note of intent and a shooting plan so as not to scatter in all directions once in the field. Secondly, shooting also involves a form of writing made up of images and sounds as raw materials. Thirdly, the editing phase constitutes the final layer of writing. During these three temporalities, you always have to ask yourself how to narrate the subject of the film, i.e., how to unfold a narration from A to Z in order to respond to the central issue. What are the best ways to achieve this? In the case of a pilgrimage, you might wonder whether or not to follow its chronology, follow this or that character, start the film one way and end it another. This narration – which absolutely does not mean writing a script like in a fiction movie– is arguably the most difficult to do when making a documentary. Editing entails a complete rewriting from rushes collected in situ. This is a pivotal stage because it is the last opportunity to rectify gaps and weaknesses, in order to make the subject of the film understood to the recipients, knowing that the final result can vary a lot from the initial project. When financially possible, it is strongly recommended to work with a professional editor, who does not need to know the topic of the film. This person will know how to put themselves in the spectator’s shoes and detect what works and what does not. They will also make structural and narrative proposals that the anthropologist has not thought of. The final cut will thus be the fruit of shared reflection and aesthetic, so much so that one must often consider it as an experience of co-writing, which is more rarely the case in the writing of scientific articles. Editors are sculptors whose material is the image: their role consists in keeping only what serves the purpose of the film. One of their characteristics is that they are often in the background, except when it comes to the film’s credits. Editing, then, is a writing process that, paradoxically, remains unnoticed by the spectator. In terms of rhythm, a strong principle is to give fluidity, not by doing as if it were in one shot but as one movement. A film also needs downtime and low intensity. A sequence shot does not always have to be kept and can be cut, even though ethnographic cinema usually is favorable to sequence shots. A ritual

138  Manoël Pénicaud sequence can be developed, as long as it does not lose the receiver’s attention nor disturb the narration’s continuity. An ellipse or a time-lapse can be very useful to suggest a change in temporality. The succession of shots also responds to grammatical rules specific to cinema and is much more internalized than one might think. The juxtaposition of incompatible shot angles will unconsciously affect the spectator’s reception, who will have the impression that a spelling error has entered the film without really knowing where or why. It is exactly the challenge of the connection and continuity between two shots taken at different places or different times. Care must be taken to maintain consistency in terms of light, sound environment, as well as the characters’ clothes, etc. Indeed, a connection defect can alter the film’s coherence. As in sculpture, pottery, or architecture, a connection must be discreet, even invisible, so that the viewer does not realize it. Should we deduce from this that the editing would be a re-staging? The notion of ‘staging’ is inadequate in my opinion because it echoes theatrical and fictional staging. In ethnographic filmmaking, it is more of a ‘mise en images’ of the reality observed in the field. To come back to writing, making a film involves thousands of choices and operations, both technical and conceptual. As Jean-Paul Colleyn says: ‘Making a documentary film is a discursive art that involves hundreds of options: to choose in reality the significant details (and therefore leave others in the shade)’ (Colleyn 2012: 463). As for editing software, a time-line film looks like a construction game where picture and sound bricks nest together in several rows. Sometimes a movie is made of several hundreds or thousands of bricks, without you ever realizing it. In other words, the editor writes sentences on the timeline with bricks, like writing a text with words. If the form changes and the syntax is different, the principle of construction is after all quite similar. Who says ‘construction game’ says ‘bricolage’. About ‘Bricolage’

If a film is a construction of images and sounds, the author and editor are its architects. These architects are more like ‘bricoleurs’7 than ‘engineers.’ Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966: 16–33) claimed that engineers design the materials and tools necessary for the realization of their projects, while bricoleurs build their projects from the elements they have at hand. Constantly adapting to their materials, they follow the practice of ‘making do’ and ‘arts of making’ that has been well studied by Michel de Certeau (see de Certeau 1984: 29). The bricolage process involves collage and the assembling of elements to provide consistency in substance and form, which largely echoes the ‘continuity shots’ of cinema film. Hence, a film can be seen as a bricolage and editors are bricoleurs, who constantly repair gaps and failures by finding solutions based on what they have available. If this is true in a fictional movie (where everything is written, controlled and planned), it is even more the case in documentary and ethnographic cinema where the rushes are limited and constrained by the fieldwork. The result is that these constraints result in unavoidable compromises during editing.

Visual Anthropology of Pilgrimages: Making of Films and Photos  139 In a profuse interview, Rouch unintentionally evokes this dialectic between engineer and bricoleur. He was not trained as an ethnologist but studied engineering at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées where he learned the rules of architecture: I make my films like a bridge is made. At that time, there was no computer. So, we drew a bridge and calculated it. When there was something going wrong, we would do it all over again: it was called the ‘successive approximations method’. All my films, I made them by successive approximations. (Boutang 1992) Rouch draws on his engineering training to make his films through bricolage. He also reports how he was introduced to ethnology by Marcel Griaule: I was very lucky to work with Griaule who did fieldwork like one makes a movie. We took our notes on a notebook containing carbon paper. And he said: ‘Do not destroy the original. Tear off the first sheet and cut it; then categorize them by topic, and that is how you must do your job.’ This is how you make a movie! (Boutang 1992) This anecdote reveals that film editing works by successive cuttings (as with worksheets). The Levi-Straussian bricolage paradigm, in cinematographic terms, can be supplemented by Tim Ingold’s reflections. In the second chapter of Making, entitled ‘The Materials of Life’, he examines the process of making objects by ‘makers’ and the flow of materials conceived as ‘active’ rather than passive materials. He thus distinguishes between ‘hylémorphism’ (a complex conception process, which is close to the engineer’s habitus) and ‘morphogenesis’ (a humbler conception, where the object partly creates itself). By transposing Ingold’s thesis to film productions of visual anthropology, I propose to consider images as active and performative. In a sense, the makers/editors are also guided and inspired by the materials they have at their disposal, even if it means deviating from the initial project. The concept of morphogenesis is helpful for understanding the editing writing process where editors/filmmakers operate as bricoleurs, building their films from the collected raw materials, which often guide the editing process: This is not, of course, to deny that the maker may have an idea in mind of what he wants to make. (…) even if the maker has a form in mind, it is not this form that creates the work. It is the engagement with materials. And it is therefore to this engagement that we must attend if we are to understand how things are made. (Ingold 2013: 22) Ingold continues his reflections on the matter by calling for a ‘return of alchemy’ where the creators of artefacts can abandon the posture of a chemist. The latter

140  Manoël Pénicaud thinks of matter in terms of its invariant atomic or molecular constitution, while for the alchemist ‘a material is known not by what it is but by what it does, specifically when mixed with other materials, treated in particular ways, or placed in particular situations’ (Ingold 2013: 28–29). This metaphor is all the more meaningful for cinema since the development of photography and film, before the digital age, has long been a chemical process involving a kind of alchemical manipulation and even raising a certain mystery about the transformation of matter. Finally, in addition to asserting that making a documentary is a process involving the bricolage paradigm, we note that it is also a morphogenetic process. From Emission to Receptions

The idea that images are performative during the editing phase, i.e., they have agency, raises a question concerning the author’s control of the film. The power and semantic force of images is potentially so out of control that receivers can interpret a fact contrary to the director’s intentions. As MacDougall notes: Photographs and filmmakers, of course, continually confront this possibility and do control many aspects of how audiences interpret images, by means of selection, framing, and contextualisation. However, images seem to have a life of their own, and people are capable of responding to them in a wide variety of ways. Several studies suggest that audiences tend to interpret films ethnocentrically, even when this runs counter to the filmmaker’ purpose. Thus, ethnographic films and photographs may be considered dangerous in ways that written descriptions are not. (MacDougall 1998: 69) This is a real epistemological issue. However, the fact that the reception of a picture sometimes escapes its author should not be perceived as a problem but as a constitutive feature of an image, unlike a text where the author tries to contain both the description and the interpretation. As was said earlier, we must not lose sight of the fact that textual writing, to a certain extent, also filters, prioritizes, and limits knowledge about the field. In other words, an ethnographic film or a photograph does not impose the same control as written anthropology and gives potentially a lot to see at once. The main deficiency of image compared to textual writing is that it cannot lead to so much theorizing ‒ one of the goals of anthropology. A photograph or a film can hardly develop a concept like a text can unless there is a voice over or a character in the film speaks it out loud. Yet, this should not obscure the fact that the heuristic force of a picture lies in description, ethnographic immersion and the ability to engage the spectators, for example, with the atmosphere of a pilgrimage. As MacDougall points out, the film medium is ideal for producing ‘experiential knowledge in anthropology’ (MacDougall 1998: 78). While it is useless to claim access through pictures to the same degree of theorizing as in a written text, we must not oppose these mediums. It would be best to promote the complementarity

Visual Anthropology of Pilgrimages: Making of Films and Photos  141 of their writing regimes. Thus, a visual form will reach a larger audience – including non-academic ones – than a scientific text. By initiating a critical look at a social fact, such as a pilgrimage, a film can encourage many spectators to deepen their knowledge by reading specialized articles. Personally, I even recommend publishing a scientific paper alongside a documentary film; not that one needs the other, but so that the public can resort to one and/or the other. In this same inclusive logic, I do not believe it is fruitful to oppose textual and visual writings. I have no issue with incorporating text panels in my films to provide some basic elements for the spectators. Likewise, the text of a caption is often essential to understand and contextualize a documentary photograph. In practice, visual anthropologists have many formal ways to ensure that viewers understand the meaning of their work and they must constantly adapt the way they narrate their images for the recipients. In the case of a pilgrimage, one must follow an original angle in order to enter the phenomenon being studied. This could, for example, involve following the viewpoint of the anthropologist or of one or more pilgrims. The narration can, therefore, unfold according to a narrative arc, with a beginning and an end, while taking care to maintain dramatic tension through the chosen rhythm. A common trap is making a film too long since this will make it difficult to maintain the spectator’s concentration. Contextualization – both historical and geographical – is fundamental. You can use a map, explanatory panels and/or a voice over. Interviews can also be used to provide this information. I am in favor of face-to-face interviews, although an informal conversation between several protagonists is often more lively and spontaneous. There is no hard-and-fast rule here. The important thing is to find the best combination for each film or exhibition (in the case of a photographic work). Beyond the range of formal tools, the emotional and poetic dimension of images is crucial (Barthes 1981). Immersion, Multi-sensoriality and Emotion

The ‘visualization’ of pilgrimages makes it possible to restore their multi-sensory dimension. This applies to the visual register and also the sound register in the case of a film. This also includes the olefactory, taste and tactile dimensions. Indeed, a close shot of a specific substance can evoke its taste or texture for the spectator, so that the audio-visual representation can enhance the role of the senses and the emotions in social life. This suggestive capacity is thus the strong advantage of visual writing within ethnography. The audio-visual form promotes the recipient’s immersion in the multi-sensory universe of a pilgrimage, where the festive atmosphere, songs, dances and clamor are instantaneous markers. At the Ghriba synagogue in Djerba, religious life is punctuated by these times of collective jubilation, which are counterbalanced by moments of meditation and prayer (Pénicaud 2015b). One of the strengths of images is their ability to capture an emotion and return it to the recipients. In 2013, I filmed the Jesuit priest, Fr. Paolo Dall’Oglio, talking about a pilgrimage made in Syria by a Bedouin woman to his monastery in Mar

142  Manoël Pénicaud

Figure 9.4 Festive effervescence in the Ghriba Synagogue, 2014 © Pénicaud.

Figure 9.5  Candles and tears in the Ghriba Synagogue, 2014 © Pénicaud.

Mûsa. She was a Muslim and ‘in love with Jesus’. During the Catholic Mass, she wanted to receive Communion and although he should have refused, he decided to give her Communion, considering that she was ‘baptized in tears’. In the interview, Fr. Dall’Oglio closes his eyes and relives the scene in silence before opening them

Visual Anthropology of Pilgrimages: Making of Films and Photos  143

Figure 9.6 Greek Orthodox Nun kissing the Icon of the Dormition, Jerusalem, 2015 © Pénicaud.

again with a smile. The sequence has a great emotional impact that every spectator feels (Pénicaud 2015c). This example illustrates how visual and emotional participation can sometimes lead to an empathetic understanding of a social fact, even through the medium of a screen. In my opinion, arousing this empathy while avoiding sensationalism at all costs is something that cinema and photography can offer. The same goes for restoring the feeling of the sacred through emotion, whether each recipient is sensitive to it or not. However, we must be careful not to fall into a systematic recourse to the emotional. Such recourse can certainly be effective but it can also be too easy and even reductive. Christophe Pons has underlined its epistemological limits while recognizing the ‘heuristic of emotion’: ‘The exercise of film writing reminds the ethnologist of this subjective part and forces him to re-confront the distant ambivalence he has always maintained (himself and his discipline) with emotion, both object of analysis and method investigation’ (Pons 2008). It is also interesting to observe that the etymology of ‘emotion’ is the Latin verb ex-movere meaning ‘in movement’, which resonates with the etymology of cinema, the writing of movement… Images and Pilgrimages To conclude, this chapter has tried to evoke several cases of making still or moving images in the field of Pilgrimage Studies. There are many heterogenous configurations between ‘cinematographic notes’ and finished works, what matters is that images play a heuristic role in understanding and exploring religion and society, not just as simple illustrations of textual writing – which has long been the dominant

144  Manoël Pénicaud approach in social sciences – but as autonomous or complementary productions to a so-called academic text. If their theoretical scope is certainly less, they offer many advantages in terms of description, restitution, immersion, participation, mediatization, etc. In fact, images are a medium in their own right, where one writes differently. This writing regime has its own epistemological and reflexive issues; unlike an academic text, pictures remain polysemous: their interpretation is multiplied according to the imagination of each. Another important point is that this audio-visual writing is a process of permanent adaptation and successive approximation in response to a succession of events and accidents. The concepts of ‘bricolage’ and ‘making do’ are decisive to understanding the writing process at the crossroads between humanities and art. Thus, there are no intangible rules for investigating the role of pilgrimages through images in the analysis of complex societies. Whether a film is made at the end of an investigative work or whether the camera is present from the beginning, what matters is that this process is explicitly based on an anthropological problematization. It is necessary to maintain an ethical and de-ontological posture and to adopt a critical and reflexive look while giving free rein to one’s creativity. As Rouch says: ‘The only advice we can give to young people who want to make films is to play truant as a rule of life, but by doing it very seriously’ (Boutang 1992). At the beginning of this chapter, I wondered what was the contribution of visual anthropology to Pilgrimage Studies. All the papers tried to show that a visual approach to the pilgrimage phenomenon – in terms of fieldwork, restitutions, and receptions – could be enough efficient and complementary to text-based scientific writings. My argumentation focused only on the ‘making’ of images by the researcher and not on the ones made by the pilgrims themselves. To cover this multivocality would require another study. In the same way, one can ask, at the end of this ‘essay’, what is the contribution of researching pilgrimage to visual anthropology? In the contemporary context of the inflation of audio-visual practices, pilgrimage is a huge field for visual exploration and experimentation, both for researchers and students. Beyond films and photographs, new hybrid forms are emerging and will further increase visual anthropology’s area of influence. I am thinking of web documentaries that make it possible to combine texts, archives, photos, films, sounds, maps, artworks, interviews, 3D animations, etc. These interlocking writing forms can compensate for the deficiencies of certain isolated types. These are new spaces and new architectures that anthropologists will eventually take hold of. Personally, I see no impoverishment here but rather a reciprocal enrichment between art and science. Notes 1  Co-directed with Khamis Mesbah, Les chemins de la Baraka (Baraka Paths) tells the story of the annual pilgrimage performed by Sufi Regragas in the region of Essaouira, Morocco. 2  Since 2003, I have photographed and filmed many ‘mixed’ pilgrimages in the Mediterranean, in the context of joint research, mostly carried out with my colleague, Dionigi Albera (CNRS). Many of these photographs and films have been presented in books,

Visual Anthropology of Pilgrimages: Making of Films and Photos  145 reports, and exhibitions such as the ‘Shared Sacred Sites’ (‘Lieux saints partagés’) exhibition, where we were both curators. 3  This chapter focuses on images shot in the field by the anthropologist, and not on those made by pilgrims themselves. This other abundant angle of research would require an entire article or volume. 4  Translation by the author, as is the next quote. 5  More and more pilgrims are making their own images, at the point that these images represent very rich ethnographic materials for the researcher. This massive phenomenon would be the core of a visual anthropology of pilgrimages through their images. 6  See Lajus (2013) and Sahraoui (forthcoming). 7  The translator of the English edition notes that: ‘The “bricoleur” has no precise equivalent in English. He is a man who undertakes odd jobs and is a Jack of all trades or a kind of professional do-it-yourself man, but, as the text makes clear, he is of a different standing from, for instance, the English “odd job man” or handyman’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 17).

References Albera, D., Kuehn, S., & Pénicaud, M. (eds.). 2022. Special Issue Holy Sites in the Mediterranean, Sharing and Division. Religiographies, 1, 1. Barthes, R. 1981. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang. Buob, B. 2017. Splendeur et Misère De La Ciné-Transe. Jean Rouch et les Adaptations Successives d’un Terme ‘Mystérieux’. L’Homme, 223–224, 3, 185–220. https://doi. org/10.4000/lhomme.30697 Cartier-Bresson, H. 1952. The Decisive Moment. New York: Simon & Schuster. Certeau, M. (de). 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coleman, S., & Eade, J. (eds.). 2004. Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion. London: Routledge. Colleyn, J.-P. 2012. Champ et Hors Champ De L’anthropologie Visuelle. L’Homme, 203–204, 457–480. https://doi.org/10.4000/lhomme.23256 Fliche, B., & Pénicaud, M. 2020. Votive Exopraxis. Muslim Pilgrims at a Christian Orthodox Monastery (Büyükada, Istanbul). Common Knowledge, 26(2), 261–275. https://doi. org/10.1215/0961754X-8188868 France, C. (de). 1982. Cinéma et Anthropologie. Paris: Éditions de la MSH. Hervieu-Léger, D. 1999. Le Pèlerin et le Converti. La Religion en Movement. Paris: Flammarion. Heusch, L. (de). 1962. Cinéma et Sciences Sociales. Panorama du Film Ethnographique et Sociologique. Paris: UNESCO. Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: The Overlook Press. Ingold, T. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture. London and New York: Routledge. Lallier, C. 2017. Le Cadre Théâtral Chez Jean Rouch: Des Maîtres fous à L’ethnofiction. Journal des Africanistes, 87–1/2, 182–196. Langlois, C., Morel, A., & Rouch, J. 1986. Le Bilan du Film Ethnographique: Entretien Avec Jean Rouch. Terrain, 7, 77–80. https://doi.org/10.4000/terrain.2920 Leroi-Gourhan, A. (ed.). 1983 (1948). Cinéma et Sciences Humaines. Le Film Ethnologique Existe-t-il?. Le Fil du Temps. Ethnologie et Préhistoire (pp. 102–109). Paris: Fayard. Levi-Strauss, C. 1966. The Savage Mind: The Nature of Human Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

146  Manoël Pénicaud MacDougall, D. 1998. Transcultural Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1994. Picture Theory. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Pénicaud, M. 2008. Le pèlerinage en image. Expérience d’un tournage chez les Regraga dans le sud-marocain: Les Chemins de la Baraka. Science and Video, 1. Available at: http://scienceandvideo.mmsh.univ-aix.fr/numeros/1/Pages/Penicaud-n1-2008.aspx Pénicaud, M. 2015a. Filmer les pèlerinages et le religieux en movement. ThéoRèmes. Available at: Doi: 10.4000/theoremes.673 Pons, C. 2008. La part subjective. L’émotion, l’ethnologie et l’écriture filmique. Science and Video, 1. Available at: http://scienceandvideo.mmsh.univ-aix.fr/numeros/1/Pages/ Pons-n1-2008.aspx. Preston, J. 1992. Spiritual Magnetism: An Organizing Principle for the Study of Pilgrimage. In Morinis, A. (ed.), Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage (pp. 32–46). Westport: Greenwood Press. Rouch, J. 1974. The Camera and Man. Studies in Visual Communication, 1(1), 37–44. Turner, V., & Turner, E. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press. Filmography Aubin-Boltanski, E. 2012, Catherine ou le corps de la Passion. Joun Film, CNRS Images, ANR, 57mn. Boutang, P-A. 1992. Jean Rouch raconte à Pierre-André Boutang. Films du Bouloi, 104 min. Lajus, S. 2013. MuCEM, naissance d’un musée. 13 Productions, 53 min. Pénicaud, M. 2015b. The Ghriba Synagogue in Djerba. Idemec-Mucem, 6 min. Pénicaud, M. 2015c. Interview with Paolo Dall’Oglio. Idemec-Mucem, 4 min. Pénicaud, M., & Mesbah, K. 2007. Baraka paths. Autoproduction, 50 min. Pons, C., & Dorival, C. 2010. Les yeux fermés. Lieux Fictifs, CNRS Images, 59 min. Rouch, J. 1971. Les tambours d’avant. Tourou et Bitti. CNRS Audiovisuel, Comité du film ethnographique, 9 min. Sahraoui, M. Forthcoming. Sous le même ciel. Autoproduction, 72 min.

10 The Ethnography of Hasidic Pilgrimage in the Digital Age Gabi Abramac

Introduction The holiday of Hanukkah was approaching as I sat with Rivka in her kitchen in Brooklyn on a dark, freezing December night in 2014.1 She was organizing her menu for the upcoming holiday, and we were chatting and browsing through boxes of recipes, cookbooks, and old menus. In the course of our conversation, she brought up a trip that her husband and their six sons had undertaken two years earlier. “It was a great trip”, she explained. “They went all over Europe! They saw so much and visited so many places. It was so uplifting”. Had this been any other American home, a trip to Europe would probably have included places such as Paris, Venice, or Rome, but as this was a Hasidic home in the heart of the Hasidic neighborhood of Boro Park, Brooklyn, I knew that a trip to Europe meant: a pilgrimage to the burial sites of Hasidic rebbes in Eastern Europe, a pilgrimage on which tens of thousands of Hasidic Jews embark each year. I wondered for a while whether I should tell Rivka that three months earlier, during the holiday of Rosh Hashanah, I myself had been on a kind of digital Hasidic pilgrimage. Revealing this experience might, however, conceivably have invoked her disapproval. To be sure, Rivka and her family had welcomed me, a total outsider, into their home. I was very comfortable among them and confident in my awareness of the rules and norms I was expected to observe. Yet, occasionally she would very cautiously tell me, say, before we visited her particularly strict mother, that I might want to remove my almost transparent nail polish, or she might hint at the need for a longer skirt with a looser cut; and on occasion, she would express her fear that my research might portray her community in an unfavorable light, a concern Hasidim frequently raise when they encounter the curiosity of outsiders regarding their shielded world. With all this in mind, I decided not to tell her about my vicarious virtual pilgrimage to Medzhybiz, Uman, and Berdychiv via my membership in a male-only Hasidic WhatsApp group. As a sociolinguist undertaking research on the nexus between language use and underlying socio-religious ideologies, I lived among Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn as a participant observer from 2012 to 2014. Following the completion of my initial research project, I have continued to visit the community, partake in communal events, and conduct research on a different number of interrelated topics. During DOI: 10.4324/9781003137764-14

148  Gabi Abramac one of my conversations with Yitzi, a longtime Hasidic informant, I realized that Hasidic WhatsApp groups offered a wealth of information on community dynamics and would be enormously helpful in allowing me to maintain my proficiency in Yiddish during extended periods of transcontinental absence from the field. Yitzi carefully weighed my request to join one of the Hasidic WhatsApp groups he was managing. Upon negotiating my access with members of the group, Yitzi informed me that I would be granted access on the condition that I did not violate the genderseparation rules that exist in ultra-orthodox Judaism. This meant that I would be allowed to observe, to listen to the participants’ voice notes, and to read their discussions, but I would be required to stay silent behind a virtual mehitza (Hebrew: “partition”) that the WhatsApp administrator created for me. On this condition, I was generously granted access to the group’s data. My membership in this group— as well as, subsequently, a number of other such groups—has given me access to a rich and varied audio-visual archive and allowed me closely to observe a range of discussions pertaining to the planning and practicalities of the pilgrimages as well as their spiritual and emotional significance. Indeed, I have in effect myself been a “vicarious” pilgrim of sorts to the holy sites in Eastern Europe. My focus in this chapter is on the ways in which the blending of offline and online fieldwork offers a new perspective on the topic of Hasidic pilgrimage. I show how Hasidic pilgrims are reimagining the concepts of time, narrative, and movement in a world in which digital realities have become increasingly and irreversibly intertwined with our physical realities. This reconceptualization points to the relevance of novel ethnographic methods to the contemporary study of religious life, ritual, and pilgrimage. The fusing of traditional and digital ethnography can help us develop a critical appreciation of this new kind of fieldwork and increase our understanding of covert meanings, understandings, interpretations, beliefs, behavior, and its social context. Hasidic Pilgrimage Hasidic Jews are followers of a spiritual revival movement that emerged in Eastern Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century, inspired by the mystic, scholar, and ostensible healer and miracle worker Israel ben Eliezer (ca. 1700–1760), known as the Besht (an acronym for the Hebrew epithet Ba’al Shem Tov, “master of the good name”). Hasidism rapidly gained support in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The movement comprises numerous independent sects known as courts or dynasties, each led by its own tzaddik (Hebrew: “righteous one”) or rebbe whom Hasidim credit with mystical powers and a special ability to mediate between their supporters and God. Since the followers of any given tzaddik resided in various locations, those who lived at some distance would make their way to their rebbe’s court at least once a year as pilgrims (Biale et al. 2018: 7). These pilgrimages—an innovation introduced by the Hasidic movement—were an integral part of Hasidic life and marked the ultimate celebration of the bond between the rebbe and the individual Hasid (Assaf and Sagiv 2013: 250). They often involved travel over considerable

The Ethnography of Hasidic Pilgrimage in the Digital Age  149 distances, creating an opportunity to spread Hasidic teaching by word of mouth (Gellman et al. 2018: 228). In Hasidism, “the traditional sanctity of place, which could not be sustained under conditions of exile, found a tangible alternative in the tsaddik”. In other words, sites inhabited by holy men themselves become holy. This has been conceptualized with the sociological term “spatialization of charisma” (ibid., 229). As the authors of Hasidism. A New History point out, citing a saying attributed to Mordechai of Neskhiz (1748–1800), “Every place where the Israelite tsaddik dwells . . . is called the Land of Israel”, pilgrimage to the tzaddik’s court became a substitute for what had once been the pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem (ibid., 230). By the nineteenth century, between 4,000 and 6,000 pilgrims would flock to some of the more popular tzaddikim on Rosh Hashanah, and in the early twentieth century, tens of thousands of pilgrims regularly made their way to the Hasidic courts in Ger, Belz, or Sadagura. Non-Hasidic Jews, many women, and even some Christians, intrigued by the tzaddiks’ miracle-working and healing powers, also joined the pilgrims (Wodziński 2018: 95–96). The faithful assumed that the best times for the rebbe to intercede on their behalf were Erev Rosh Hashanah and Erev Yom Kippur. In his memoirs, the Jewish philosopher Solomon Maimon (1753– 1800) offered an account of the Hasidic courts of Karlin and Mezritsh, recalling that “Young people forsook parents, wives and children, and went in troops to visit these superiors, and hear from their lips the new doctrine” (quoted in Gellman et al. 2018: 121). Following the Talmudic dictum that the righteous “are called living even after death” (Berakhot 18b), some Hasidim maintain an ongoing relationship with their departed leaders by praying at their graves and asking them to intercede on their behalf even now. Consequently, the burial sites of Hasidic rebbes have, in turn, also become pilgrimage sites. Hasidic pilgrimages to these sites were interrupted by the Shoah which decimated the Jewish population in Europe and completely wiped out the centers of Hasidism in Eastern Europe. In the Communist era, such pilgrimages were either restricted or forbidden altogether, but since the fall of Communism, there has been a revival. Yet, while prior to the Shoah, visiting the rebbe’s court stood at the center of the pilgrimage, and attending the resting place of a deceased tzaddik was an additional feature—now only the burial sites remain (Assaf et al. 2018: 428). Many of them have been restored and the requisite infrastructure has been developed to serve the pilgrims. Various Hasidic groups visit the graves of “their” sages and rebbes on their yortsayt, the anniversary, according to the Jewish calendar, of their death, and numerous tourism businesses offer trips to the burial sites. Blended Ethnography The research presented here combined ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Hasidic communities of New York with digital ethnography, qualitative in-depth interviews with community members, and discourse analysis focusing on the Hasidic press. Since digital spaces—above and beyond straightforward internet-based

150  Gabi Abramac research (see Hallett and Barber 2014: 308)—present novel opportunities for research on Hasidic society and its subcultures, the interweaving of digital and traditional ethnographic methods is well suited to render a deeper practical understanding of the phenomena in question. The blending of various offline and online research sites and methods renders complementary and corroborative data and insights and opens up mutually enriching “layers of understanding” (Strathern 2002: 303). Over the last two decades, researchers have increasingly begun to recognize the need to adapt ethnography strategically so it cuts across online and offline spaces (Mann and Stewart 2000; Constable 2003; Leander and McKim 2003; Orgad 2005; and Hine 2007). Hine (2000, 2007) and Leander and McKim (2003) have introduced the concept of “connective ethnography” that seeks to integrate both spheres. For Hallet and Barber (2014: 307), “it is no longer imaginable to conduct ethnography without considering online spaces”. Hence, on Liz Przybylski’s account (2020: 5), “Conducting research in a manner that accounts for the hybrid field responds to the contemporary reality in which fully online and fully offline methodologies offer useful—but not sufficient—tools”. The limitations of earlier methodologies emerged with great clarity “precisely where fields overlap”. In my particular case, integration of the digital field has been indispensable in giving me access to segments of the social group I would not otherwise have been able to attain and facilitating a synchronous trans-local approach to multiple sites. I am based in Croatia, and my research focuses on the United States and Israel. I first entered the community of Hasidic Jews in New York in 2012 for my initial sociolinguistic fieldwork, and my research on the topic is ongoing, firstly, because new research topics have kept emerging and secondly because personal relationships developed that I have carefully maintained, drawing me deeper into the community’s life and culture. My friends invited me to their simchas (Yiddish: “celebrations”). I have called on them while sitting shiva (the seven days of mourning following the death of a relative). One of my initial contacts, Rishe, eventually began calling me her “little sister”. When her aunt Esther, with whom I had a close connection, passed away, she contacted me to ask whether I would like something of “our aunt’s” as a memento. Consequently, I have become increasingly attached to the group I am studying, and a kind of alternative kinship has developed, prompting me to reflect from an autoethnographic vantage on Sahlins’s (2011) concept of the “mutuality of being” among individuals “who are intrinsic to one another’s existence” (Abramac, forthcoming). Bearing in mind Muncey’s insight (2010) that we cannot dissociate the research we undertake from the life we live, I have aspired to a form of narrative ethnography capable of bridging “cultural curiosities and personal lived experience” (Boylorn and Orbe 2014: 13). In my fieldwork, I was keen to avoid being one of the ethnographers Giampietro Gobo (2008: 306, quoted in Girke 2021: 105) has described as predators who “fill their bags, escape with the loot, never to be seen again”. Instead, I wanted to give something back to the community. I gave several talks on language and history in varying community settings and occasionally wrote for some of the communal magazines. Thus, I was able to make myself known and establish my

The Ethnography of Hasidic Pilgrimage in the Digital Age  151 standing in the community as a trustworthy researcher who had not come looking for sensationalist stories about a largely segregated community frequently portrayed negatively in the media. In 2015, my feature on the refugee crisis even won Hamodia, the daily newspaper of Torah Jewry, a New York Press Association Award. When the N’shei Chabad Newsletter, the only Chabad (Lubavitch) women’s magazine, published an article on my staying in Crown Heights and conducting linguistic research, community members reached out to the editor of the magazine, expressing their interest in participating in my research. After Chany Rosengarten, a Hasidic woman with a strong Instagram presence, posted a picture of me visiting her in upstate New York, I was recognized by a number of women at the next Hasidic wedding I attended. One of them became a close acquaintance and proved to be an important research contact. I could point to many more social relationships and interactions of this kind that have allowed me to become intimately familiar with the community’s lived experiences, share in its culture and develop a kind of reciprocal collaboration suited to facilitate the construction of a much more fully rounded form of ethnographic knowledge. It is the digital realm, however, that has really allowed me to stay in the field continuously. Given the interconnectedness of offline and online sites, the field ceased to be exclusively a physical space I could reach only by taking a transcontinental flight. As Van den Scott (2018: 304) has pointed out, the field can now “be physical, social, cultural, virtual, mental, or any combination of these features”. Yet hybrid fields require a conceptual shift in research methodologies (Przybylski 2020: 58). One might think of Timothy Jenkins’s (1994) notion of fieldwork as a series of apprenticeships. Alessandro Caliandro (2018), emphasizing the flexibility of ethnographical methods, has stressed the need constantly to adapt “according to the features and mutations of online environments”. We, therefore, need to pay careful attention to the constantly changing structure of social media environments and their modes of producing content, their practices, and discourses. In combining online and offline research sites and methodologies, we are engaged in the construction of our field site “as a heterogeneous network mapped out from the social relationships of the subjects and their connections to material and digital objects and to physical or virtual locations” (Ardévol and Gómez-Cruz 2014). Drawing on the Digital Methods paradigm (Rogers 2013), Caliandro (ibid.) suggests that we focus on the analytical concepts of community, public, crowd, and self-presentation as a tool, and on the user as a device. In the course of my research on Hasidic communities in New York, I worked with pious community members, with former Hasidim, and with closet heretics, generally referred to within the community as apikorsim (Yiddish: “heretics”) or double-lifers. As a female ethnographer, I faced significant challenges and obstacles in my fieldwork among strictly observant inhabitants of the gender-segregated world of Hasidism. They are subject to gender segregation from the age of three, and interaction with individuals of the opposite gender other than family members is strictly forbidden. Boys and girls, men and women attend different schools and inhabit two distinct worlds separated by gender. Gender segregation is the norm in all public spaces: in synagogues, on Hasidic buses (where women sit at the back

152  Gabi Abramac or a curtain is drawn in the middle), and in some Hasidic enclaves where there are even separate sidewalks. There are no images of women in the public sphere, they do not feature in Hasidic publications. Over time, ways of circumventing these constraints at least in part emerged: (1) the men in the families with whom I lived while “going native” treated me as an “adopted” relative, allowing them to speak to me. Alternatively, they would address me indirectly at larger gatherings; (2) I was able to speak to men who described themselves as “more modern” or “more open-minded” or who lived on the fringes of Hasidic society and were not strictly observant. However, even they would speak to me only in secret and confidentially. It is WhatsApp that has allowed me to access those aspects of male-only Hasidic life and culture that would otherwise have been utterly closed off to me. Unlike static sites, WhatsApp never sleeps—except, of course, on Shabbat and religious holidays when Hasidim do not use electronic devices. My digital fieldwork has encompassed the analysis of relevant websites, YouTube channels, the blogosphere, online discussion forums, personal Facebook profiles, groups and threads, Instagram and Twitter accounts and the discussions that developed there, interviews conducted via Zoom, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, as well as data and observations collected as a long-term member of Hasidic WhatsApp groups. Since WhatsApp facilitates the exchange of instant voice messages, voice memos, pictures, video clips, URLs, and voice calls, it has been an exceptionally rich source. It bears emphasizing that I was able to gain access to it only thanks to the rapport I had previously been able to establish with my research participants. Having initially joined a Hasidic WhatsApp group mainly in order to keep up my everyday Yiddish during periods of extended absence from the field, I soon came to appreciate the significance and potential of WhatsApp as a vibrant, untapped field site in its own right. It offered me a wealth of material for an exploration of code-switching, code-mixing, language mixing, and language alternation in a Hasidic WhatsApp group where Hasidic English, Hasidic Yiddish, modern Hebrew, and referencing in Biblical Hebrew all feature in varying degrees (Abramac 2016). I was able to study code-switching in both speech and text in a common setting. The unique conjunction of text, image, language, video, and sound also enormously enhanced my discourse analysis focusing on the changing nature of authority and community and the ways in which the relationship between the use of digital media and strict observance is negotiated (Abramac 2015). The potential of this kind of research has recently been demonstrated by two further projects in the field. Ayala Fader (2020) and Dikla Yogev (2020) have used WhatsApp as a data collection platform in their work on hidden heretics in the Hasidic community and changes to the nexus between social capital and social control among Israeli Haredim against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, respectively. Pilgrimage to Eastern Europe and Israel emerged as a recurrent and salient theme in both my digital and offline fieldwork. Given that, as a female ethnographer, I would not be able to observe this kind of pilgrimage from the inside in person, digital pilgrimages via WhatsApp, loaded with visual and audio data, emotional expressions, and multiple narrated experiences, offered a rich substitute

The Ethnography of Hasidic Pilgrimage in the Digital Age  153 experience, facilitating a form of “deep hanging out” (Rosaldo 1994; Geertz 1998). This realization amounted to an “ethnographic moment” (Strathern 1999: 6) of sorts, one of those junctures at which the field of observation, on the one hand, and reflection and analysis, on the other, coincide. The site stayed the same yet opened up an entirely new avenue (Hannerz 2003). As Hine (2000: 60) points out, “ethnography in this strategy becomes as much a process of following connections as it is a period of inhabitance”. We might recall Olwig and Hastrup’s clarification (1997: 8) that, rather than viewing the field as a site, it might better be understood as a “field of relations” that are meaningful to actors engaged in the study. Digital Pilgrimage to Uman I embarked on my first digital pilgrimage in 2013. Each year since has brought new factors and challenges, both local and global, into play, compelling me constantly to adjust my approach and mode of reflection. In analogy to Geertz’s (1973) concept of “thick description”, one might perhaps characterize the digital pilgrimage as creating a form “thick presence”. Yet, remote participation nevertheless constitutes, to borrow Gergen’s (2002) term, a form of “absent presence”. As Christine Hine (2015: 21) argues, digital participation prioritizes the quality of the experience over the actual “being there”. I have been participating as a digital observer in annual pilgrimages to three main sites in Ukraine: Medzhybiz, Uman, and Berdychiv where the Hasidic tsaddikim Israel ben Eliezer (the Besht), Nahman of Bratslav (1772–1810), and Levi Yitshak of Barditshev (1740–1809) are buried. Hasidim believe that the resting place of a tzaddik yesod olam (a righteous individual who, according to Mishlei/Proverbs 10:25, constitutes “an everlasting foundation”) is a holy place where the living spirit/presence of the tzaddik prevails. Arthur Green (2020: 407) recently explained this as follows: “None of us felt like we were praying to Levi Yizhak, but it felt important to be praying in his presence, to be able to almost count him as one of our minyan”. Indeed, in his pamphlet “Understanding Prostration” of 1813, Dov Ber Schneersohn, the second Chabad rebbe, suggested that it was in fact easier to communicate with a tzaddik after his death than in his lifetime (Gellman et al. 2018: 200). These sites of piety are also loci of postmemory in the sense defined by Marianne Hirsch (2012)—they are the sites of pogroms and the Nazi genocide that irrevocably destroyed the world of Eastern European Hasidism. My Hasidic respondents, especially the elderly ones, refer to these places in Eastern Europe in Yiddish as “di haym” (home) or “di alte haym” (the old home). The Pilgrimages do not merely take participants to Hasidic holy sites, although this is clearly the primary goal, they also take them to locations associated with a profound nostalgic longing for a time when life was harder, but (supposedly) simpler and imbued with all-encompassing piety. For Yossi, one of my key research participants, the priorities are quite clear: I know I have a great-grandfather buried in Dibov.2 At the right time, I would definitely like to go there. I would love to see where my grandparents

154  Gabi Abramac lived—my grandmother and my grandfather. But I don’t really move around too much myself because it seems to me that if I am just there for a limited amount of time, the time is too precious. In this article, I focus specifically on Uman. There is a rich body of literature on Hasidic pilgrimage in general and on Uman in particular, including the noteworthy recent work of the sociologist Alla Marchenko, herself a native of Uman, who explores the group she studies from an external vantage (Marchenko 2018: 2014). However, in this paper, I am not overly concerned with this literature because I am principally interested in the research methodology of blended ethnography rather than the wider contextual intricacies of the specific case study. Nahman of Bratslav was the great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov. Combining kabbalistic traditions, Torah scholarship, and folk tales to teach a religious philosophy that centered on direct, unmediated interaction with God, he brought important new impulses to the Hasidic movement. In his final years, as his health faltered, visits by his followers were limited to Rosh Hashanah, Shabbat Hanukkah, and Shavuot. Not long before his death in 1810, he moved to Uman to pray for the souls of, and eventually be buried alongside, the thousands of Jewish martyrs massacred there by Haidamak troops under Ivan Gonta in 1768. As his principal disciple, Natan Sternhartz of Nemirow (Reb Noson 1780–1844), noted in Chayei Moharan, Nahman commanded his followers henceforth to gather at his grave in Uman on Rosh Hashanah. Nahman is credited with the assurance that the sound of the shofar (ram’s horn) blown on Rosh Hashanah in accordance with the commands in Leviticus 23:24 and Numbers 29:1 tempers the severity of God’s judgment (Likutey Moharan I: 42) and rouses the faithful from their spiritual slumber, helping them not to idle away their days (ibid., I: 60). Hence the particular focus on Rosh Hashanah. Bratslaver Hasidim assume that their tzaddik has the capacity radically to transform the world from his grave on Rosh Hashanah by tempering or even nullifying all the dinim (Hebrew: “judgements”) that constrain them and bring disorder to the world. The WhatsApp group I have been following for several years now is called Sigya.3 It has more than 100 members. A second group called Tishtuch consists of three mutual friends who, in order to contribute to my research, document each step of their journey to Uman in considerable detail. Three other individuals allowed me to join them on their pilgrimages: Srully, an observant Belzer Hasid from New York; Yossi, a Bratslaver Hasid from New York, and Moishy, a Vizhnitser Hasid from Israel, who is no longer observant but still cherishes what he considers the timeless and transcendental quality of Rabbi Nahman’s spirituality and the concept of joy in Bratslav Hasidism. While I gained the distinct impression that the Tishtuch group acted primarily as a resource group, carefully curating what I was shown in order to impress me, communication in the Sigya group was much more open-ended. Its many participants covered a much broader range of topics, stretching from politics, business, and local events to concerns relating to traffic and the securing of accommodation in Ukraine. In addition, everything suggests that they soon ceased to pay attention

The Ethnography of Hasidic Pilgrimage in the Digital Age  155 to me as a silent observer and were behaving just as they would anyway, disregarding my ghostly presence. When accepting me into this group, the administrator explained that The group is modelled upon real life. Had you come to Lee Avenue in Williamsburg, you would have been able to observe and listen to the conversations of men on the street who would not talk to a woman. Our WhatsApp group is the same. Much like the Tishtuch group, Srully, Yossi, and Moishy clearly curated the information they passed on to me, but their accounts had greater depth and they were more inclined to explain matters in greater detail. Evidently, they considered it a kind of mitzvah (commanded act) and hesed (act of kindness) to help me with my research. Yossi, the Bratslaver Hasid, also saw the assistance he offered me as an opportunity to disseminate Nahman’s teachings and ideas. My research would relay his experiences as a pilgrim to a wider audience, he assumed, and he frequently inquired about other publications exploring Nahman of Bratslav’s teachings and impact. In addition, he hoped that the experiences he relayed would contribute to accounts of pilgrimage in the literature that were both vivid and realistic. He expressed his dissatisfaction with the often superficial representation of Hasidism, which he felt rarely drew on real-life, let alone immersive experience, as follows: I watched an old documentary from 1997 or 1998 on the pilgrimage to Uman. It was very professional, but I was like: so, to be professional the narrator has to be removed? He has to sound like a National Geographic speaker doing a voice over on polar bears? So, this is a Breslover Hasid in his natural habitat, and this is how he sways when he prays. And these are the types of food that he eats. Dude, wake up, we are talking about human beings! Get out there and feel it! By having it so distant, doesn’t that mean that you are distant? And does it mean that you can have a better grasp by not experiencing it and by dissecting it from far away? To me it was very interesting to see how the professionals try to distance themselves. Who actually says that this makes it more accurate? Both the Tishtuch trio and the administrator of the Sigya group were keen to ascertain how I saw Hasidic society more generally, and they clearly enjoyed discussing various nuances of Hasidic life that had caught my attention. Assuming that an external observer’s grasp was unlikely to reach beyond surface phenomena, they were confounded and fascinated when I brought up issues of which they thought only a “lifer” in their communities would be aware. Drawing on Araújo’s (2006) and Przybylski’s (2020) form of dialogic ethnography, I share excerpts of interview transcripts with my research participants and discuss provisional findings and insights with them. The annual Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to Uman begins with joyful scenes of dancing and singing Hasidim waiting to board their outbound planes to Europe at JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark. Video recordings of the festive atmosphere soon

156  Gabi Abramac flood the Sigya WhatsApp group. “Uman! Uman! Rosh Hashanah!” and “Na Nah Nahma Nahman me’Uman” (which may be translated as “now let’s go to Nahman of Uman”) are among the most popular songs. These are followed by countless videos of Hasidim clapping with joy while singing on the planes, some laying tefillin (phylacteries) while others are immersed in their prayer books or sleeping. Together, these pictures and videos form an organic and synchronous multi-authored chronicle telling an unfolding story of Hasidim on their way to their rebbe. In this context, WhatsApp becomes a storytelling medium. We might recall that, according to Fisher (1987), human beings are storytellers, and all forms of communication are best understood as the telling of stories. This tallies with the finding of O’Hara et al. (2014), in their study of WhatsApp as a social practice, that The posting of photos and their particular juxtaposition with textual comments is a constitutive part of resources through which an ongoing narrative is produced, being constructed to sit alongside other sites of narrative production on which relationships are built and through which they are experienced and encountered. The pilgrims either fly directly to Kiev or take connecting flights from Vienna, Prague, or Budapest. From Kiev, they travel to Uman (which is located some 200 kilometers south of the Ukrainian capital) by road. Somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 pilgrims then descend on the town with its roughly 85,000 inhabitants for what some have called “72 hours of Hasidic Burning Man” or “Jewish Woodstock”. Should I be in Croatia on Rosh Hashanah, I tend to meet some of the pilgrims traveling to Uman via Budapest there or the northeast Hungarian village of Bodrogkeresztúr (Yiddish: Kerestir). Kerestir is a pilgrimage destination in its own right, and in recent years ever increasing numbers of pilgrims have flocked to the tomb of a local Hasidic leader, Yeshaya Steiner (Rebbe Shaya’la), who lived in the village from the mid-1870s until his death in 1925. As in other similar locations, the tomb has been restored, the relevant facilities have been enlarged, and two synagogues now cater to the pilgrims all year round. I have never been to Uman myself. A suitable opportunity has never arisen and, as a woman, I would be unable to attend all the festivities. The halakhic rules of modesty and separation cannot be observed during the Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage. Organized pilgrimages for women are available at other points during the year. Women who accompany their families to Uman for Rosh Hashanah generally stay in the rented accommodation, trying to find a place from which they can see the rebbe’s resting place, the tsion. There is certainly no doubt in Yossi’s mind that The women’s experience is inferior to that of the men. The men can enter the tsion on Erev Rosh Hashanah and go and mingle wherever they like. So, no, it’s just not the same. Women can’t push in the line to get food and stuff like that.

The Ethnography of Hasidic Pilgrimage in the Digital Age  157 From the outset, the pilgrimage to the rebbe’s court has entailed detachment from the pilgrim’s nuclear family and everyday responsibilities, creating an alternative form of all-male kinship among the pilgrims (Assaf et al. 2018: 415). More recently, some rabbis as well as other members of the Hasidic community have criticized men who participate in the pilgrimage to Uman rather than spending Rosh Hashanah with their families. Against this backdrop, Racheli Reckles, a columnist for www.breslev.co.il started a WhatsApp group called “Women of Uman” that aims to support women whose husbands travel to Uman for Rosh Hashanah (Reckles 2021). Reckles explains that there are two principal reasons why women should in fact encourage their husbands to take part in the pilgrimage. Firstly, “whoever spends Rosh Hashana with him [Nahman of Bratslav] will not have to see the face of Gehinnom [damnation]”. This is a paraphrase of Nahman’s promise that “anyone who comes to my grave on Rosh Hashana, I will pluck from the clutches of hell, even pulling him out by his payes [sidelocks]” (quoted in Green and Mayse 2019: 363). Secondly, whoever is with him on Rosh Hashanah would not be reincarnated, Reckles argued. For all their immersiveness, my digital pilgrimages have inevitably been fragmented. The members of the WhatsApp group do not use their phones on Shabbat and Rosh Hashanah (a two-day holiday). When Rosh Hashanah precedes or immediately follows Shabbat, I am unable to observe proceedings for a full three days. Undertaking more conventional fieldwork, I would not make recordings or take written notes during Shabbat or the holidays either (writing is one of the forbidden activities), but I am nevertheless able to absorb and record my observations mentally in order to jot them down later. In the digital field, I can only wait for participants to relate their intervening experiences to me via voice notes, text messages, or in a WhatsApp or Zoom interview once Shabbat or the holidays are over. Covid-19: Not Giving Up on Uman Over time, the Hasidic pilgrims to Uman have faced many challenges and obstacles. Traditionally, Hasidim have considered these obstacles, referred to as meniyot, as an inherent part of the pilgrimage that enhances its spiritual quality (Gellman et al. 2018: 230). In the last few years, public health concerns have presented a substantial challenge. In 2018/2019, pilgrims who contracted measles in Ukraine (where almost 70,000 cases were recorded in 2017) caused major epidemics in Israel and New York City. In Israel, the virus spread rapidly among unvaccinated groups, infecting a total of 4,250 individuals (Israeli Ministry of Health 2021). New York City experienced the largest measles outbreak in the United States in nearly three decades and, in light of the hospitalization of hundreds of adults and children, the city’s mayor Bill de Blasio was forced to declare a public health crisis. In 2020, the pilgrimage faced the Covid-19 pandemic. Ronni Gamzu, Israel’s national Coronavirus Project Coordinator, appealed to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to ban the pilgrimage since it was a potential super-spreader event. In response, Ukraine imposed a ban on the entry of foreigners between

158  Gabi Abramac August 28 and September 28. I was keen to observe how, in the face of this statemandated ban, Hasidim would explain their personal decisions to stay away or— potentially—embark on the pilgrimage all the same. I carefully monitored a wealth of Hasidic newsletters, websites, and other online media as well as photo, video, and audio data in WhatsApp groups, and intensified the dialogue with my research participants to gain a sense of the ban’s likely impact. There was only one known historical precedent of a pilgrimage of this kind officially being banned on similar grounds. In 1852, the followers of Menahem Mendel of Kotzk were prohibited from traveling to his court for Rosh Hashanah due to a cholera epidemic (Assaf et al. 2018: 515). The ban gave rise to considerable controversy, with some interpreting the resulting polarization as a reflection of Nahman of Bratslav’s dictum, “I will make you into many groups” (Chayei Moharan 319). Rabbi Shalom Arush, a Bratslaver rabbi with a very strong online presence, in a YouTube video released on August 21, 2020, emphasized the importance of being in Uman for Rosh Hashanah 5781 (2020). Given the heightened difficulties involved in traveling there, the benefits afforded by the pilgrimage would be all the greater. Indeed, this would be the final Rosh Hashanah prior to the appearance of the Messiah (Shuvu Banim 2020). In a newsletter published on the website www.dirshu.co.il, Rabbi Nisan Dovid Kivak, a Bratslaver rabbi based in Jerusalem, wrote that it was more important than ever before that pilgrims made their way to Nahman’s grave on Rosh Hashanah. The ostensible obstacles were in fact “a manifestation of Hashem [God] Himself only for the purpose of strengthening our ratzon [resolve] to go to the tzadik” (Kivak 2020). In the event, tens of thousands of pilgrims refused to heed the ban. Many of them tried to bypass it and attempted to enter Ukraine from Belarus. Thousands were eventually left stranded in no man’s land between Ukraine and Belarus after the Belarusian authorities allowed them to pass but Ukraine, deploying hundreds of law enforcement officers, refused them entry. Among the video clips circulated by those stuck in no man’s land, one particularly surreal clip stood out. It showed dozens of Hasidim dressed up in traditional Ukrainian Cossack costumes singing the Ukrainian national anthem, followed by calls of “Glory to Ukraine!”, in the hope they might yet sway the Ukrainians. Their determination reflected an ethos expressed in a saying attributed to Natan Sternhartz of Nemirov as follows: “Even if the road to Uman were paved with knives, I would crawl there just so I could be at Rebbe Nahman’s grave”. I spent a good deal of time “on site” with the pilgrims as they attempted to enter Ukraine, observing events as they unfolded and were reflected in a range of textual, visual, performative, and multivocal representations. Throughout, I was in touch with Yossi, one of my key informants, who was among the pilgrims determined to reach Uman. In addition, reflecting the insight that “While participant observation allows the ethnographer to get to know the collective life, norms, values, and dynamics of a group, the in-depth interview is a gateway to the perceptions and meanings that respondents attach to their actions” (Ardévol and Gómez-Cruz 2014: 13), in November and December 2020, I undertook two follow-up interviews with Yossi.

The Ethnography of Hasidic Pilgrimage in the Digital Age  159 Yossi landed in Kiev just as the Covid-related ban came into force. Consequently, he and the other pilgrims who arrived with him were unable to leave the airport. As Yossi explained, at this point having a smartphone became crucial for the continuation of his pilgrimage: When I was in Kiev—I was on a plane with mostly Israelis—at that particular airport maybe ten per cent of the people had a smart phone. That made a big difference because I was able to contact Rabbi Bleich, who is something like a chief rabbi in Ukraine, and other people elsewhere, including the reporters I spoke to. Yossi and his fellow pilgrims interpreted the closure of the borders spiritually, as an obstacle that they would be able to overcome with prayer: It really impacted us spiritually. The fact that the border was closed affected us on a spiritual level. It wasn’t just about the physical closing of the border, literally at the last minute—we had hoped that the border would still be open—and we responded to it in a spiritual way. For us, it wasn’t a matter of: there’s the Ukrainian government, there’s the Israeli government who bribed them, there’s Bibi … This wasn’t our focus, you know? We’d occasionally let all this distract us, but in the end we’d always come back to the insight that none of them really counted. They don’t have any power. How far we’d get would actually depend on how much we daven [pray] to Hashem. Yossi’s confidence reflected Nahman of Bratslav’s teaching that prayer was the most effective means of surmounting any conceivable challenge or obstacle and capable of effecting miracles “in the world that defy the laws of nature” (Likutey Moharan I, 7:7). The aforementioned rabbi Nisan Dovid Kivak assured his readers that if they trusted in the power of prayer they would reach Uman: “We should believe in the unfathomable power that we have at the tips of our tongues. We can overturn even the harshest Heavenly decrees. Through our prayers, we can overcome even the greatest and seemingly unsurmountable obstacles”. Among those who, once they reached Uman, made ample use of digital tools to communicate with the pilgrims still hoping to join them, was Rabbi Baruch Gartner. On September 10, 2020, he announced on his Facebook page that he had “managed to make it to Uman despite walls of steel!”. The pilgrims frequently referred to the closure of the Ukrainian border for foreigners with the terms “imaginary walls”, “most fortified walls of stone”, or “walls of steel”. He would pray on behalf of those who asked him to do so via his Facebook account, Gartner promised. In addition, he urged his Facebook followers to pray for pilgrims who were still trying to get to Uman as well. Broadcasting live from Uman on Facebook, he elaborated on the specific significance of coming to Nahman of Bratslav’s grave on Rosh Hashanah, and his Soundcloud podcast, Living Aligned, featured a special episode on Rosh Hashanah. He also used his Living Aligned WhatsApp group— which only lets administrators of the group post and offers other participants no opportunity to engage in discussions—to spread his message.

160  Gabi Abramac Strikingly, these events lent a new level of legitimacy to the digital tools the pilgrims and their supporters were using to communicate. Bratslaver Hasidim in particular have been using digital media for quite some time to disseminate knowledge about the Torah and to spread Hasidic concepts of joy, prayer, and tikkun olam, but other Hasidic groups too now developed a stronger appreciation of their usefulness. As Yossi put it, those who made it to Uman came to serve as digital “ambassadors” for those prevented from joining them at the tzaddik’s grave. Immediately before switching off his phone for Rosh Hashana, Yossi made a series of group video calls from the tsion. Since WhatsApp group calls are limited to eight participants, he repeated the calls to give as many stranded pilgrims as possible digital access and an opportunity to pray remotely at the grave. Yossi included me in one of these calls. In our follow-up interview, he said: My camera lens was focused on the tsion, so they couldn’t see me, but I could see them and I was in awe at the way they were praying, and that was the most emotional thing for me. It nearly brought me to tears to see how people are waiting at the border just wanting so much to get in that they were just so thankful to video in. I met someone recently and I don’t even remember that I called them, because I just called every number I had in my contacts, just randomly—there was no time to think it through. But the person told me “I was just so happy that you called and I felt a part of it”, and people were able to connect this way, you know? Besides that, my wife was on a camping trip in upstate New York. So, they had this big camping trip, and when I called on a video call and she mentioned that I was speaking from Uman, people crowded around and they were so emotional and they were just so happy like: wow, you are there, you are representing us, we are so happy that you are there, even if we’re not.” One of the pilgrims in Uman also connected a speaker to a phone and played a succession of WhatsApp recordings made by individuals who were unable to enter Ukraine and asked all those present to pray for their admission. As Yossi explained, Hearing these messages was just so powerful. As you are praying you hear these messages in the background, and it really gets you into the prayer and you are like: wow, I am so lucky to be here and I am here for those people who are there, and they really want to get in so much. It really gave you the feeling of, I really must make the most of my time here. I am not just here for myself, to be selfish and to say: “Wow, I got here”, but those people really want to be here, and who knows how many of them really tried so much harder than me, and the fact that I made it was just a gift. Maybe it had nothing to do with anything that I did. Really, how could I not focus on the world at large, on how much your own self is connected to the entire world, and how much the world needs this. And everybody was saying, we were there like their representatives—as their ambassadors.

The Ethnography of Hasidic Pilgrimage in the Digital Age  161 Yossi’s wife also arranged for him to speak twice from Uman on the Zev Brenner radio program.4 “That’s another digital thing, I guess”, Yossi, who has gradually become a true research collaborator, told me. Yossi’s self-conscious contributions to my research on how the digital realm is changing ethnographic fieldwork in general and the pilgrimage in particular, have given me ample cause to reflect on the ways in which intense and longitudinal interactions between a researcher and research participants transform both parties. Just as my research has relied on hybrid ethnographic methods, Yossi became a hybrid pilgrim as he merged in situ and online participation, functioning—with the help of digital tools—as an intermediary and digitally bringing pilgrims to Uman. In this process, both he and the pilgrims whose “ambassador” he served experienced the spiritual intensity and emotional impact of the pilgrimage as though the digital was tangible and real: I was telling people: so, here and right now you can see the tsion and pledge that you are giving a penny or whatever it is to charity, there’s no time to say the entire ten psalms, which can take seven minutes, just say Na Nach Nachma Nachman me Uman, and that also counts. Conclusions In this article, I have reflected on my longitudinal research in Hasidic communities, showing how digital methodologies complement offline ethnographic, anthropological, and related interdisciplinary research. I have shown how in the study of gendered Hasidic society, digital ethnography can facilitate access to spaces, realities, and lived experiences that traditional fieldwork cannot. Discussing how digital tools and social media platforms in general and WhatsApp in particular can be used in the study of Hasidic pilgrimage, this article also indicates how pilgrimage studies more generally might benefit from the use of novel ethnographic methods of exploration. Following two years of immersive fieldwork, I switched to a form of patchwork ethnography, combining continuous presence in the digital field with ­numerous shorter field visits of between two and twelve weeks at a time. Patchwork ethnography blurs the distinctions between “home” and “field” and offers an opportunity to “maintain the long-term commitments, language proficiency, contextual knowledge, and slow thinking” that underpin in-depth ethnographic study (Günel et al. 2020). In their manifesto for patchwork ethnography, Günel et al. (2020) explain that the term refers to “ethnographic processes and protocols designed around short-term field visits, using fragmentary yet rigorous data, and other innovations that resist the fixity, holism, and certainty demanded in the publication process”. Drawing on this concept, Chua (2021: 153) has developed the notion of the patchwork ethnographer as “a figure composed of different parts that move constantly in and out of view, while sustaining multiple fictions and relations”.

162  Gabi Abramac The blending of online and offline research sites and methodologies requires synchronous and asynchronous communication and a constant reconceptualization of the field and the fieldwork methods deployed. As our field site shifts toward the digital realm, so does our presence shift from “being there” to being “co-present” (Chua 2015), to a mediated form of “connected presence” (Licoppe 2004). The epistemological roots of blended ethnographic methods do not differ from those of their more conventional counterparts. They remain committed to the telling of social stories (Murthy 2008: 838) to make sense of everyday realities, and to the representation of “real-life cultures”, albeit “by combining the characteristic features of digital media with the elements of story” (Underberg and Zorn 2013: 10). WhatsApp groups are places of “dwelling” (O’Hara et al. 2014) and sites of social activity where stories are told through visual, textual, and audio tools. WhatsApp groups with multiple participants may render large quantities of data and media stemming from diverse sources and reflecting a multiplicity of viewpoints that are circulated with a variety of intentions. By carefully observing and reflecting on who reacts when and how to whom, we gain insights into the scene constructed in our hybrid field (Przybylski 2020: 61) that help us interpret these lived cyber realities. A combination of narrative interviews, constant dialogue with the participants, and analysis of conversational micro interaction in WhatsApp groups viewed against the background of a broad notion of context has the potential immensely to enrich our understanding of the micro and macro realities of contemporary Hasidic pilgrimage and the changing nature of Hasidic social life more generally as it faces the globalized, neoliberal, and digital postmodern age, in which one can pray at Nahman of Bratslav’s grave via Facebook Live or a WhatsApp video call. These empirically grounded accounts demonstrate the multiple ways in which Hasidim navigate multifaceted identities and increasing contact and engagement with the outside world. In an age in which the boundary between offline and online is increasingly becoming blurred, such accounts require a constant commitment to the reshaping of our research methodologies and analytical frameworks.5 Notes 1 I have changed the names of the research participants in order to protect their privacy. 2 Dibov is the Yiddish name for Dubove. The writer Rokhl Faygnberg described the devastating pogrom in Dubove in 1919 in her memorial book, A pinkes fun a toyter shtot (khurbn dubove) (Chronicle of a Dead City: The Destruction of Dubove 1926). 3 The sigya (sugya) is the basic unit of organization in Talmudic literature. 4 Zev Brenner is an Orthodox Jewish radio host and the president and founder of Talkline Communications. 5 The submissions for this volume had been concluded before the Russian invasion of Ukraine which started on February 24, 2022. Therefore, this chapter does not reflect the events that have unfolded and affected the Hasidic pilgrimage to Uman in 2022. That year, despite all the obstacles and warnings from their home governments and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, which urged Hasidic pilgrims to refrain from the pilgrimage, around 23,000 pilgrims made their way to Uman. Ongoing digital fieldwork concerning this pilgrimage has resulted in much more data than can be added to the current chapter.

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11 Studying Mecca Elsewhere Exploring the Meanings of the Hajj for Muslims in Morocco and the Netherlands Kholoud Al-Ajarma and Marjo Buitelaar Introduction This is a story about two anthropologists who conducted ethnographic research on the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca) without ever accompanying their interlocutors on the hajj journey. Instead, Kholoud studied the socio-cultural embeddedness of the hajj in Morocco, while Marjo investigated the significance of Mecca in the multiple senses of belonging for pilgrims with Moroccan or Turkish backgrounds in the Netherlands. Kholoud’s research consisted mainly of participant observation, while Marjo focused on biographical interviews. In this chapter, we reflect on the collaboration between researchers and their interlocutors through the dialogical production of knowledge in these two, interrelated research projects. While participant observation continues to be considered the default mode for ethnographic research by most anthropologists, we concur with Jenny Hockey and Martin Forsey (2012, 74) that sometimes the most effective way to produce ethnography is through interviews. This is particularly the case in Western countries like the Netherlands, where social interaction tends to takes place in different space- and time-bounded social settings. Apart from feasibility, however, opting for participant observation or interviewing first and foremost depends on what kind of data are required to answer the types of analytical questions that are addressed. We will demonstrate that for studying the socio-cultural embeddedness of the hajj in Moroccan everyday life, participant observation is the most suitable method to adopt, while biographical interviewing is a particularly apt tool for exploring the meaning of Mecca in the geography of belongings among pilgrims from the Netherlands. In the coming sections, we will discuss the methodological trajectories we followed in our respective research projects. Besides reflecting on the nature of the data produced by conducting participant observation and interviewing, we will zoom in on the ways our positionality as researchers informed our dialogical encounters with research participants. Before taking the reader to our research settings in Morocco and the Netherlands, we will explain why we chose to investigate the salience and scope of hajj-related practices and beliefs in other locations than Mecca itself. DOI: 10.4324/9781003137764-15

Studying Mecca Elsewhere  167 Studying Mecca Elsewhere Both authors would obviously have loved to have accompanied their research participants during the pilgrimage to Mecca, but neither of us was able to do so: as a non-Muslim, Marjo is prohibited from entering Mecca and Medina, the two most sacred sites in Islam. As a Muslim, Kholoud can visit the holy cities but since she is a Palestinian citizen according to Saudi regulations, she can only undertake the hajj journey from Palestine. Moreover, like all female pilgrims under the age of 45, at the time of writing, she could only obtain a visa if she is traveling in the company of a male guardian (maḥram), such as a husband, father, or brother. Saudi regulations concerning women traveling alone have changed since then, but it remains to be seen how this will affect post-covid pilgrimage regulations. While for reasons of triangulation we would certainly have benefitted from getting a taste of the hajj performance itself, in the light of our specific research objectives, accompanying our research participants on their hajj journey was not essential. In keeping with Simon Coleman’s proposal to expand the ethnographic and analytical gaze beyond the pilgrimage journey itself, we are interested in how Mecca manifests itself in Muslims’ wider lifeworlds (cf. Coleman forthcoming in 2021). The shared aim of our research projects is to explore how people’s hajjrelated practices and stories are entangled with other dimensions of their lives. Particularly where the hajj is concerned, the salience and scope of pilgrimagerelated activities reach far beyond the personal lives of pilgrims. Despite its obligatory character, like Muslims in other Muslim-majority countries, the number of Moroccans who had the opportunity to fulfill the religious duty of hajj is low. While most simply lack the financial means, those who can afford to pay 47,000 dirhams (4,700 euros) for a hajj package tour from Morocco encounter other hindrances. In 1988, a quota system was introduced to regulate the rapidly increasing influx of pilgrims who come to Mecca to perform the hajj between the 8th and 12th of Dhu al-Hijja, the last month of the Islamic calendar (cf. Bianchi 2004, 51). In recent years, 2.5–3 million pilgrims have participated in the hajj annually. In the current quota system, one visa is distributed for every 1,000 inhabitants of a specific country. In Morocco, the bulk of available visas is distributed through a lottery system, giving applicants a chance of about 10% to obtain one (Al-Ajarma 2020). Although Mecca is beyond reach for most Moroccans, many dream of visiting the holy city. Indeed, the symbolic significance of Mecca in the Muslim imaginary can hardly be overestimated. The hajj has a strong presence in Moroccan daily life, for example, through the Saudi Channel ‘Makkah Live’ that live streams 24/7 pilgrims circling the Ka‘ba the cuboid building in the courtyard of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Besides numerous references to Mecca in Moroccan folktales, proverbs, and songs that have been orally transmitted from one generation to the next (cf. AlAjarma 2020), the pilgrimage to Mecca also features in television shows, such as the MBC children’s animation series Taish Eyal and in a recently launched family board game called ‘Rush to Mecca’. Furthermore, in nearly all Moroccan houses, shops, and offices, one finds decorations in the form of photographs, paintings, or wall tapestries depicting the Ka‘ba, often paired with an image of the Grand

168  Kholoud Al-Ajarma and Marjo Buitelaar Mosque in Medina where the prophet Muhammad is buried. Of particularly strong symbolic significance is that for performing the salat, the five daily prayers, Muslims face Mecca. Similarly, the dead are to be buried facing Mecca. In sum, Mecca is a strong, embodied point of orientation in the daily lives of many Moroccans. Exactly because only a few have the opportunity to fulfill their religious duty, those who have performed the hajj enjoy a special status in their networks and are addressed by their honorific title ‘hajj’ for male pilgrims or ‘hajja’ for female pilgrims. This status comes with both privileges and obligations (cf. AlAjarma 2021a). The quota system does not affect Muslims in the Netherlands to the same extent as it does those living in Muslim-majority countries, and most enjoy a standard of living that allows them to put aside money for the journey to Mecca. The number of pilgrims from the Netherlands and other West European countries has increased enormously over the past decade (cf. McLoughlin 2013). Living in a cultural context where going on a holiday is virtually considered a basic need and where families with migrant backgrounds pay regular visits to their country of origin, deciding where to spend one’s annual leave has become a pertinent moral issue for those Muslims who have not yet fulfilled their religious duty of performing hajj. Taking into account the different Moroccan and Dutch contexts, in both projects, we take a narrative approach to the hajj to flesh out how today’s articulations of the pilgrimage to Mecca reflect the ways the habitus of narrators is simultaneously informed by various cultural discourses and ‘grand schemes’: powerful yet never fully attainable ideals that operate as models for a good life (Schielke 2015, 13). Our point of departure is that in their references to the hajj, people establish imaginary dialogical links between Mecca and their everyday lives; they adapt normative meanings concerning the hajj ritual to their own lifeworld, and, vice versa, they deploy their understandings of normative interpretations of the Islamic tradition to create order and meaning in the complexities of their everyday existence. Although most narrators strive for narrative coherence, at least to a certain extent, in practice, story-telling implies improvisation and switching between the different moral registers that inform one’s lifeworld (cf. Ewing 1990). A focus on the particularities in multi-voiced personal stories, therefore, brings to the fore the struggles, negotiations, and ambivalences that lie at the heart of social life and thus locates the significance of the pilgrimage to Mecca in everyday life. Multi-sited Participant Observation in Morocco The strength of long-term ethnographic fieldwork is the value of ‘being there’ to witness and participate in both major events and everyday micro-practices in people’s lives (cf. Borneman and Hammoudi 2009, 14). Participant observation fits in well with the intersectionality approach that characterizes feminist research: documenting lived experience as it is impacted by how gender, race, class, sexuality, and other aspects of participants’ lives co-constitute each other (cf. Craven and Davis 2013, 1; Davis 2014). Conducting participant observation allowed Kholoud to document the different steps in the pilgrimage process in Moroccan society,

Studying Mecca Elsewhere  169 starting from registration, selection, departure, and return. Moreover, it enabled her to map the daily routines of both pilgrims and non-pilgrims and learn their stories and casual references to Mecca by listening to their conversations, asking questions, or trying to steer chats in specific direction as she participated and observed them in the various social domains they move between. Given the country’s religious, linguistic, cultural, and historical diversity, for people who are positioned differently in Moroccan society, the embeddedness of hajj in daily life can vary significantly. Kholoud began fieldwork by moving in with a middle-class family in the medina or ‘old city’ of Fes to whom she was introduced through their relatives in the Netherlands. Living in a family setting offered the advantage of establishing rapport easily, learning the local etiquette and dialect, and having direct access to the family’s daily routines and social networks. Rather than staying with the family in Fes throughout the entire fieldwork period, she chose a multi-sited approach, crisscrossing the country to find local families who were willing to host her for several months. Thus, in line with the intersectionality approach, she was able to study Mecca’s presence in the lives of male and female, older and young urbanites and rural Moroccans, members from upper to lower middle class, and people from more and less-privileged ethnic communities. In each local setting, she engaged not only with pilgrims but also with members of their wider social networks. Both through social media and return visits, throughout fieldwork (and afterwards), she made sure to remain in touch with the families with whom she had stayed previously. An advantage of long-term participant observation is that people who do not have time for a prolonged interview or who would feel uncomfortable about being interviewed can easily be included in the research through casual chats. Chance encounters and unexpected circumstances are often enriching experiences for researchers (cf. Fujii 2015, 526–527). In fact, much of Kholoud’s fieldwork involved looking for instances where references to the pilgrimage or Mecca were made. Noticing a photograph of pilgrims circling the Ka‘ba on the wall of a sweetshop in Marrakesh, for example, she remarked upon it to the shop owner as she paid for her sweets. He responded by telling her about his annual visits to Mecca during Ramadan so that he could avoid confrontation with scarcely clad tourists in Marrakesh while fasting. Similarly, the sound of a song about the hajj coming from the radio in a clothing shop where she was looking at kaftans opened up a conversation with the shopkeeper about his longing for Mecca. Other clients happily joined in. A particularly informative unexpected situation occurred during the hajj of 2015, when a tragic stampede occurred where many pilgrims lost their lives. For weeks, the stampede was a recurring topic in Moroccans’ daily conversations, bringing to the surface dissatisfaction with the hajj management and its politicization that Kholoud’s interlocutors had so far not shared with her (Al-Ajarma 2020). To benefit most from chance encounters and small talk, one must have a good command of the language and local communication etiquette. Particularly, since people in the MENA region often convey messages indirectly, the participant observer must be sensitive to non-verbal communication, subtle allusions, gossip, and (seemingly) accidentally disclosed information in conversations with and between

170  Kholoud Al-Ajarma and Marjo Buitelaar their research participants (cf. Joseph 1993). A telling example of how what is said not always coincides with the meta-level message that is communicated concerns the indirect speech of an older woman at an afternoon tea gathering of women that Kholoud attended. The woman deeply sighed before remarking how much she missed Mecca and longed to go there again. While on the surface the woman’s words expressed a socially approved longing for Mecca, at a meta-level, she was asking her sister-in-law, who also attended the tea party, to talk some sense into her husband and make him take her on his next pilgrimage to Mecca, rather than his younger, second wife. Through a remark about a perfectly legitimate desire in the eyes of all those present, in fact, Mecca was mentioned in order to (also) negotiate relationships. As a Palestinian, Kholoud was sufficiently familiar with the indirect communication style to pay attention to possible multiple messages in the words of her interlocutors, yet also enough of an outsider to be sensitive to the contextual meanings of local expressions and customs. This brings us to the issue of positionality. Much of the validity of ethnography depends on the researcher’s reflections on their own positionality in the process of knowledge production (cf. Thomson et al. 2012). Positionality shapes knowledge production in two ways: One dimension concerns the impact on the intersubjective production of data concerning the ways in which research participants perceive the researcher. The other refers to the ways the embodied dispositions of the researcher inform their interpretation of their data. A challenge that all participant observers face concerns the implications of a gradual movement as fieldwork progresses from being an ‘outsider’ toward becoming somewhat of an insider. Despite its benefits for accessing the networks of interlocutors, immersion in a local family, for instance, often comes with having to adapt to established domestic power structures and the lack of privacy and freedom of movement (cf. Buitelaar 1993, 9). Also, although being categorized as belonging to a specific family facilitates access to the family’s social networks, it also keeps doors closed by those with whom they are at odds. The families with whom Kholoud lived felt an enormous responsibility toward her, particularly regarding her safety in potentially tense social and political situations. Besides worrying about being a burden, at times Kholoud also had to deal with restrictions on her movements. Her hosts would often insist on having someone accompany her when traveling long distances or visiting unfamiliar places. They also advised her on lots of dos and don’ts: “Don’t stay out after dark”; “Don’t travel alone”; ”Don’t visit people you don’t completely trust.” Although she sometimes questioned such advice, to respect her interlocutors and to be on the safe side, she decided not to travel to unfamiliar places on her own but accepted the generous offer to be accompanied. More often than not, traveling together provided a unique chance to engage in private conversations with her companions, and at times, they played an important role in accessing new research settings and getting to know new research participants. Kholoud’s gender obviously played a big role in her hosts’ concern about her safety. In what follows, we will reflect on how the interaction with her research participants was shaped by her positionality as a young, female Palestinian, Muslim

Studying Mecca Elsewhere  171 researcher from a European university. Being Palestinian played a crucial role in Kholoud’s access to and rapport with the people she studied. Most Moroccans sympathize with the plight of Palestinians. Her Palestinian citizenship, therefore, operated as important symbolic capital contributing to her social acceptability. In the eyes of her interlocutors, as a Palestinian Arab and Muslim woman, she belonged to a familiar–albeit not identical–cultural, linguistic, and religious community. People, therefore, positioned her as a relative ‘insider’, and this obviously enhanced their willingness to open up to her and her research interest (cf. AlAjarma 2020; also see Sherif 2001). Particularly, in relation to her research interest in the hajj, being raised as a Muslim and sharing aspects of religious identifications with her interlocutors meant that Kholoud could benefit from her previous understanding concerning the importance of the pilgrimage based on her experiences in her native community. The hajj is a topic that many Muslims enjoy talking about. Therefore, her interest in conversations about the pilgrimage appeared to her interlocutors as natural and unproblematic. Being a Muslim also meant that she could enter mosques–which in Morocco are the exclusive province of Muslims–to attend hajj lessons or Friday sermons. Another dimension of Kholoud’s status as an ‘outsider’s insider’ concerned the difference between her native Palestinian Arabic dialect and darīja, the Moroccan dialect. Although she quickly adapted to darīja, Moroccans would easily identify her foreign accent, particularly in the first weeks of her stay, and were often amused by it. Commonalities and differences between her Palestinian and the Moroccan dialect sharpened her ear for local meanings and made her sensitive to local idioms, such as in-shā’-Allāh (God willing), mā-shāʾ-Allāh [God has willed it), or tbārkAllāh ‘alik (may God bless you). Her familiarity with such expressions made her realize that, if literally translated into English, they acquire a religious ‘weight’ that they do not necessarily have in local language use. Familiarity with references to the hajj in Palestinian contexts also meant, however, that Kholoud had to work at developing ‘explicit awareness’ and adopting a ‘wide-angle lens’ concerning anything that emerged in the research process relating to the hajj, albeit only tangentially (cf. Spradley 1980, 56). Alternative pilgrimage practices are a case in point. Although she had heard about the practice of ziyāra or visitation to local saint shrines before, she had no experience with such practices herself. Only upon visiting a local ‘pilgrimage of the poor’ did she realize that sometimes ziyāra rites resonate with those of the hajj. Also, while she was aware that local pilgrimage is a highly contested practice in normative Islam, it was only through her fieldwork that she learnt about the impact of the negative stances of those who reject ziyāra, on those who feel empowered by practices that to them are perfectly compatible Islam’s tenets. Including the ‘pilgrimage of the poor’ in her research points to a tension that Kholoud’s position as a Muslim researcher occasionally created. Although her interlocutors accepted her curiosity as a researcher, in discussions about contested religious practices, they tended to address her predominantly as a Muslim and were keen that she acknowledge their take on Islam as the correct one. Besides concerns that she might stray from the straight path, we surmise that such worries were also

172  Kholoud Al-Ajarma and Marjo Buitelaar related to concerns about how religious life in Morocco would be presented to the wider world. For instance, a paper she presented on the ‘pilgrimage of the poor’ at a religious studies conference was challenged by a Moroccan academic, who claimed that she had been misinformed and that her case study had nothing to do with Islam. Clearly, it was beyond her ethnographic remit to engage in debates about whether the diverse practices or views she documented could be considered ‘Islamic’ or not. As an anthropologist, she aspired to reflect on what she encountered during fieldwork and leave confirmation of ‘truth’ to theologians (cf. el-Zein 1977; Varisco 2005, 2). The efforts of some interlocutors to discourage Kholoud’s interest in the contested practice of the ‘pilgrimage of the poor’ raises the issue of representation in ethnography; what data to select and what to leave out, whose voices to include, and whose voices to ignore. Also, which emic and etic labels should be used to describe interlocutors’ positions adequately? Leila Abu Lughod addresses the dilemmas in ethnographic representation by reflecting on whether to depict situations in her publications that expose Bedouin women’s vulnerabilities. Her decision to include such instances was motivated by her intention to inspire in her Western readers a recognition of these women’s everyday humanity. The result was met with an unexpected response from her interlocutors; one of them half-jokingly exclaimed, “You’ve scandalized us!” (Abu Lughod 1991, 159). Clearly, such responses reveal the sensitivities of marginalized groups to potential judgements by outsiders. We surmise that the advice Kholoud received from some of her interlocutors to cut out descriptions of ‘unorthodox’ practices, such as the ‘pilgrimage of the poor’, was motivated by a similar anxiety of being represented and judged in a negative light by a Western audience. Another relevant dimension of positionality, already mentioned when discussing restrictions on Kholoud’s freedom of movement, concerns her gender. Particularly in a society like Morocco, which has a long history of patriarchal relations and gender segregation, being positioned in local gendered hierarchies can be challenging for female researchers. In domestic settings, where gender segregation tends to be much less pronounced than outside people’s homes, Kholoud generally mingled freely with both men and women. However, her access to exclusively male gatherings was rare. Spending more time in female company inevitably resulted in an over-representation of data concerning the significance of the hajj and Mecca in women’s lives. Being considered by women as ‘one of us’ and therefore part of female privacy gave her access to women’s ‘back-stage behaviour’ in this respect (cf. Goffmann 1959). The predicament of the aforementioned woman who pressed her sister-in-law to mediate between her and her husband by expressing her longing for Mecca once more serves as a good example to illustrate the interrelationship between pilgrimage practices and domestic social relations. Implicating her sister-inlaw in her competition with her co-wife over who might accompany their husband to Mecca gave Kholoud an insight into how local hajj practices are informed by gender inequality (cf. Al-Ajarma 2021b). At the same time, the woman’s statement demonstrated her ability to appropriate cultural conceptions of personhood creatively in order to state her case by presenting herself as a devout Muslim.

Studying Mecca Elsewhere  173 What people say and how they comport themselves in settings they consider private can differ significantly from how they behave and communicate in settings that they experience as public. For many women in Morocco, gender and family privacy tend to take precedence over individual privacy (cf. Buitelaar 1998). Having ample access to the private settings of women, families provided Kholoud with many opportunities to observe differences in what topics people would address and where and how they would discuss them. Generally speaking, within the family home, both her male and female pilgrims tended to be more open about their personal hajj experiences, including the disappointments they had encountered, such as their dissatisfaction with the hajj management. Also, since she could accompany research participants as they moved between different social domains, Kholoud could note how they might tell the same story over and over again, revising their narrative in different contexts by elaborating on some details and omitting others. The first time she attended a gathering to welcome home a couple that had just returned from ‘UMRA during Ramadan, for example, the husband told his audience that everything had been wonderful. On another occasion, in the absence of his wife and among a smaller group of people, the same man disclosed that his wife had fallen ill in Mecca, but had refused to give up fasting, thus allowing his audience a glimpse of the kind of dilemmas that pilgrims might face and the possible tensions that might arise. Comparing different versions of stories that pilgrims tell in the company of different people enabled Kholoud to identify various layers in pilgrims’ narratives and to study the dialogical nature of their storytelling. Being able to document different versions of stories in different contexts is one of the factors that distinguishes participant observation from biographical interviewing, the method that Marjo employed in her research project to study the meaning of the pilgrimage to Mecca to the multiple senses of belonging of Dutch Muslims of Moroccan or Turkish parentage. As we will see in the next section, however, dialog also plays a crucial role in the self-narratives produced in her interviews with pilgrims from the Netherlands. Producing Hajj Self-narratives through Biographical Interviewing The point of departure for Marjo’s focus on pilgrims’ self-narratives about the hajj is the view that narratives do more than give words to experiences; experiences themselves are shaped by words, more specifically by the meanings words have acquired in the vocabularies of the discursive traditions available to narrators (cf. Coleman and Elsner 2003; Buitelaar 2020). While pilgrims’ hajj stories obviously relate to their actual experiences, their factual information is partial. Not all hajj experiences eventually find their way into stories. Most pilgrims tend to focus on the journey’s highlights in their hajj accounts. In comparison to their memories of intense emotional experiences, more mundane issues may not be remembered as vividly or deemed too insignificant to recollect. Also, in order to cherish the memories of the pilgrimage as a rewarding journey, pilgrims may decide that negative experiences are best forgotten or reframed in terms of important moral lessons. It therefore takes much narrative work to process hajj experiences into stories.

174  Kholoud Al-Ajarma and Marjo Buitelaar Collectively shared conventions of hajj storytelling help pilgrims in this respect by offering a template for processing their experiences into more or less coherent narratives; narrators tend to align their stories, at least to some extent, to one or more already existing highly idealized ‘grand narratives’ about the hajj with which they are familiar (Smith 2008, 26; Buitelaar 2023). In line with a conceptualization of pilgrims’ stories as narrative constructs, the interview format that Marjo used was designed to produce data that would provide answers to the following analytical questions: (1) How do the pilgrimage accounts of Moroccan-Dutch pilgrims relate to their life stories? (2) How are their pilgrimage experiences shaped by the various discursive traditions available to them? (3) How do these pilgrims process their pilgrimage experiences into stories that help them to lead meaningful lives? In the first part of the interview, the interviewees were asked to sketch their ‘life-line’ by marking on a sheet of paper what they considered important phases of their lives so far. The ‘life-line’ served as a point of entry to discuss key events, significant others, achievements, and challenges in their lives. This open, most biographical part of the interview was concluded by reflecting on the interviewee’s religious upbringing and personal religious development over the life course. Asking for childhood recollections about people, who had gone on pilgrimage to Mecca, created a bridge to the second, slightly more structured topical part of the interview, which concentrated on the interviewee’s own pilgrimage to Mecca, either in the form of the ‘umra, the voluntary‘ pilgrimage to Mecca, or the hajj, the mandatory pilgrimage. The life-line interview format was inspired by Dan McAdams’ theory concerning narrative identity (McAdams 1993). He views identities as ‘personal myths’ ‒ people tell stories about the ways they have become, who they are at the time of narration. As circumstances change, so do stories about the self. McAdams argues that the ‘plots’ in self-narratives involve finding a satisfactory balance between agency, the capacity to act upon the world, and ‘communion’, i.e., being embedded in meaningful relationships. What people consider a satisfactory balance between agency and communion can vary between different individuals, depending on their phase in life and the value of specific modalities of agency and communion for different categories of people in the cultural contexts they participate in. According to McAdams, socalled ‘nuclear episodes’, i.e., narrations concerning key events in the life of the narrator, are particularly informative about challenges to and shifts in the balance between agency and communion. Since for Muslims living in the Netherlands it is easier to go on hajj than for those living in Morocco, Marjo was particularly interested to learn whether the motivation of her interlocutors to perform hajj at a certain moment in their lives was related to such ‘nuclear episodes’ in their life stories, and, if so, how performing the pilgrimage had affected their sense of agency and communion. This often proved to be the case. A young male student in his early twenties, for example, explained that his decision to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca was motivated by the wish to gain back control over his life, return to worshipping God,

Studying Mecca Elsewhere  175 and resume his studies after having ‘drifted off’ too much by drinking and smoking pot with friends. Both agency and communion featured prominently in his story; he felt empowered by the idea that he would be cleansed of all sins by performing the pilgrimage. Also, as he had hoped, rather than teasing him for having become a ‘nerd’, his friends respected his new religious stance as befitting the elevated status of being a ‘hajji’ and left him to his studies when they went off to the pub. Empowerment also played an important role in the story of a female interlocutor in her forties who suffered PTSP after having survived a plane crash. Staring death in the face had been a ‘wake-up call’ for her and she decided to fulfill the religious obligation of the hajj before it might be too late. Also, she wanted to thank God for having spared her. Furthermore, she hoped that boarding a plane to the most sacred city in Islam might help her overcome her fear of flying. While the self-narratives pilgrims shared with Marjo were their own stories, in fact, storytelling is always dialogical; it is a process that engages the narrator and audience in an ongoing negotiation of meanings. Narrators are never the sole author of their stories; their narrations are necessarily co-authored and multi-voiced (cf. Zock 2013). For a valid interpretation of the hajj stories recorded in the interviews, the specific context in which they were narrated should be taken into account. To this end, a dialogical approach was adopted that builds on Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on ‘dialogism’ and textual ‘polyphony’ (cf. Bakhtin 1981; Bell and Gardiner 1998; Buitelaar 2006; Hermans and Hermans-Konopka 2010). A first line of inquiry along these lines concerns the ways the stories produced in the interviews are embedded in collectively shared narratives about the self, experience, and meaning making in the various networks that pilgrims participate in. Having a considerable number of interviews provides a lot of information about recurring vocabularies and already existing story lines or ‘scripts’ about the hajj that interviewees draw on and respond to in their stories. Variations to ‘not being to express in words’ what one felt, for instance; or ‘being moved to tears’, like the ‘merging with the flow’ of pilgrims circumambulating the Ka‘ba; and learning to exert sabr, patience, or endurance, feature in most stories. Besides paying attention to the specific appropriation of words and story lines from the Islamic tradition, the interviews were also read for vocabularies related to a modern liberal discourse and the culture of consumerism that dominate in the Dutch cultural contexts where the narrators live. For example, a female interlocutor in her late thirties told about her expectation beforehand that standing near the Ka‘ba would make her feel ‘totally zen’. The woman thus linked the aspired effect of the hajj to a popularized understanding of a certain state of mind as conceptualized in the Buddhist tradition. Similarly, references to finding it difficult to deal with a lack of hygiene or personal privacy point to modern, middle-class sensibilities of younger pilgrims who grew up in the Netherlands. Such references are lacking in the stories of older pilgrims who grew up in Morocco (cf. Buitelaar 2020). A second line of inquiry to analyze the dialogical nature of the stories produced in the interview concerns who, besides the interviewer as primary recipient, are the imagined audiences the interviewees address in their hajj

176  Kholoud Al-Ajarma and Marjo Buitelaar stories. Moroccan-Dutch pilgrims who grew up in the Netherlands are more thoroughly integrated with (predominantly non-Muslim) Dutch social domains than their parents. As a result, they also find themselves more often in situations where their Muslim identity is questioned (cf. Jouili 2015; Göle 2017). Many of Marjo’s interlocutors stated that they had been happy to share stories about their pilgrimage experiences with non-Muslim friends. Several interviewees explained that it had pleased them to tell their colleagues about the beauty of Islam and point out the universal moral lessons of the hajj, thus building bridges between the Islamic tradition and the world views of their listeners. Some, however, had been disappointed by the responses they had received. Instead of being congratulated, they had, for example, been asked about the danger of stampedes in places where millions of ‘ecstatic’ pilgrims congregate. Anticipating such responses, still other interviewees had kept silent about their journey to Mecca to their non-Muslim colleagues, wanting to avoid conversations where they had to defend Islam. Some stated that they had not told their colleagues about their journey out of fear that their colleagues might suspect them of radicalization. A male pilgrim, for example, explained why he had decided to just symbolically cut off one lock of his hair to conclude the hajj rites rather than having his head shaved, as is customary for male pilgrims: “How should I have explained my bald head to my clients? I have a representative position, I cannot afford to draw that kind of attention to my person.” Not having one’s head shaved during the pilgrimage in order to avoid having to explain one’s baldness after returning to the Netherlands is a particularly strong example of the impact of the gaze of a non-Muslim public on one’s hajj performance. More generally, pilgrims’ considerations about telling or not telling their non-Muslim colleagues about their hajj experiences also point to the effect on them of the responses they anticipate from non-Muslims. Being non-Muslim herself, Marjo belongs to the mainstream Dutch population whom her interlocutors consider likely to have one-sided preconceptions about Islam. In most cases, her long-term research in Morocco and her knowledge of Islam proved to be helpful in developing rapport. Indeed, some interlocutors were familiar with her work. Also, the introductory letter that Marjo sent to potentially interested interlocutors contained information about her previous research projects in Morocco and among Moroccan-Dutch women in the Netherlands. It often happened that in the introductory telephone call or in the ‘warming-up’ phase of the interview appointment, her interlocutors would ask Marjo about her years in Morocco and test her knowledge of Moroccan-Arabic. Engaging in social relations embedded in networks of asserted kinship ties and residential proximity has a long tradition in Moroccan society (cf. Geertz 1979). Illustrating the continuing importance of transnational ties for Moroccan-Dutch citizens who grew up in the Netherlands, several interlocutors quizzed her on her Moroccan connections to explore possible overlaps with theirs. To our mutual joy, crosscutting ties could often be found just a few handshakes away. The veracity of such connections should not be taken too seriously; the point about both parties acknowledging their existence is expressing trust in each other’s good intentions.

Studying Mecca Elsewhere  177 In some cases, Marjo’s position as an ‘outsider’ was considered an asset: Several of her interviewees indicated that it had appealed to them to be able to anonymously share feelings and views that, fearing disapproval, they were (as yet) hesitant to express within their Muslim networks. For example, a female pilgrim who had been very disappointed about the conduct of some of her relatives in whose company she had traveled stated after the interview that she had been relieved to ‘unburden one’s heart’. Similarly, another woman explained that she had agreed to the interview because she hoped it would help her to describe experiences that diverge from the one-sided positive hajj stories that pilgrims of their parents’ generation (also see Buitelaar 2020). Nevertheless, since Muslims are routinely questioned about their religious stance by non-Muslim fellow citizens, Marjo may have been seen as a mediator with an imagined non-Muslim audience. This raises the issue of the epistemological ‘impasse’ that Nadia Fadil addresses in a recent review article about the ‘state of the art’ in the anthropological study of Islam in Europe (Fadil 2019). Fadil contends that this research is confronted with a deadlock produced by an Orientalist discourse that continues to inform the dominant popular European frame where Muslim citizens are presented as the abject. Other. One of the tensions caused by this frame revolves around the challenge to deconstruct the binary opposition between a Western ‘us’ and a Muslim ‘other’, while simultaneously acknowledging the specificity of the religious experiences of European Muslim citizens. As a result, researchers are confronted with a double bind when seeking to ‘account for the distinctiveness of [the] ethical subjectivity of Muslims, while at the same time downplaying it’ (Fadil 2019, 118). Over the years, Marjo has tried to deal with this problem by alternating research projects in which Islam is foregrounded, with those where Islam is merely a background presence. In the current hajj project, Islam obviously takes center stage. Regardless of whether one studies Islam as a foreground or background presence, however, it is impossible to be affected by a discourse where integration into European society is the yardstick that demarcates the distinction between the ‘good’ Muslim and the ‘bad’ Muslim. The study of hajj stories among pilgrims who grew up in the Netherlands points to a habitus that is simultaneously informed by various cultural discourses and ‘grand schemes.’ This habitus can easily be seen as a way of domesticating Islam, i.e., Muslims being unintentionally ‘tamed’ to fit the Dutch mold rather than being involved in a process of rooting and cultivation. On a more concrete level, the inescapability of the double bind addressed by Fadil came to the fore during the interview design stage of Marjo’s project. The choice of a topical but very open interview format was motivated by the desire to allow the interviewees to tell stories they themselves considered important. As argued above, however, the dialogical process in storytelling extends beyond the interview setting and includes wider-imagined audiences. It is, therefore, unavoidable that the predominantly negative discourse about Islam in Dutch society affected both the interviewer and her interlocutors when evaluating which topics might be addressed easily and which ones are more delicate or best avoided altogether. In case pilgrims did not mention any negative experiences themselves, Marjo would

178  Kholoud Al-Ajarma and Marjo Buitelaar ask if they had had any toward the latter part of the interview. This was motivated by the aim to create an atmosphere in which her interlocutors might feel comfortable enough to also address more negative aspects of their experiences once they had shared those which they enjoyed looking back on or felt neutral about. In practice, however, when Marjo enquired about negative experiences, she noted a certain unease in herself. It also felt inappropriate to pursue the topic when interlocutors appeared hesitant to elaborate. In retrospect, it is difficult to disentangle to what extent the reluctance to probe further was prompted by a discomfort that her interlocutors actually communicated verbally or through their body language, or by Marjo’s projection of such discomfort onto them. She may also have been worried that interviewees might conclude that her aim was to disclose Islam as an oppressive religion after all. We would argue anyway that the structural condition that accounts for the ‘epistemological impasse’ in the knowledge production about Islam in Europe, identified by Fadil, entraps both researchers and research participants (also cf. van Es 2019). Therefore, the biggest challenge in our research on modern articulations of the pilgrimage to Mecca is to unpack the various discursive strands in these articulations without inadvertently suggesting that some are inherently European and others inherently Islamic. Concluding Remarks: Participant Engagement with Partial Selves and Others The presentation of the methodological paths we walked to investigate the salience of Mecca in the daily lives of Muslims in Morocco and the Netherlands demonstrates that both are partial in at least two respects. First of all, they are partial with regard to the kind of data they generate. An obvious difference between the two projects is that participant observation allowed Kholoud to watch her research participants’ spontaneous references to Mecca in real-life situations, while Marjo invited her interlocutors to step back and reflect on the meaning in their lives of their hajj experiences. In line with the adage attributed to Margaret Mead that “What people say what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things”, one might erroneously conclude that the material collected by Kholoud through direct observation is more valid than the retrospective accounts of pilgrims documented by Marjo. The problem with this assumption is its suggestion that being an academically trained outsider, the anthropologist is better equipped to assess what their research participants are up to than they are themselves (cf. Abu-Lughod 1991, 150; Hockey and Forsey 2012, 75). In ethnographic research, however, validation is not so much a matter of reliability, demanding a detached and objective stance of the researcher, but about checking throughout the research process “whether a method investigates what it purports to investigate” (Kvale 2007, 122). Although participant observation does not exclude the investigation of thoughts, for example, its biggest asset is that it enables the researcher to observe the activities and communication of a larger group of people in specific social situations. Biographical interviewing concentrates more on what individuals say about their thoughts on how they have become the person

Studying Mecca Elsewhere  179 they are and how their actions might be explained. Although both methods are holistic in the sense of producing knowledge concerning the significance of certain practices and beliefs in the lives of the people studied against the background of wider socio-cultural contexts and power structures, they are partial in the sense of producing only specific kinds of data. A second aspect of how ethnographic knowledge is validated concerns reflections about the dialogical nature of the knowledge produced through the collaboration between the researcher and their research participants. According to Tim Ingold, participant observation is not a method of data collection but a “practice of exposure, entailing considerable existential risk, which allows us to grow in knowledge and wisdom from within the lifeworlds into which we are cast” (Ingold 2014b, 772). He considers the total immersion in the social lives of one’s research participants and being able to observe them in different settings, as Kholoud did, as a prerequisite for developing what he calls ‘correspondence’: thinking and learning ‘with’ rather than (only) about others (Ingold 2014a, 391–392). We agree that the embodied and emotive dimensions of fieldwork play a significant role in knowledge production and consider the sensuous approach a valuable corrective to the detached, intellectualized gaze that has dominated much ethnographic praxis in the past (cf. Stoller 1997; Pink 2009; Davies and Spencer 2010; Kanafani and Sawaf 2017). At the same time, we agree with Hockey and Forsey that interviewing can also involve ‘participant engagement’ (Hockey and Forsey 2012, 75). Philosophizing with others on the meaning of life and one’s place in the world is as much part of people’s interactions as are other forms of togetherness. In this sense, engaged listening is no less a ‘being with’ research participants as is eating, walking, or participating in other activities with them. Indeed, ‘learning with’ one’s interlocutors in the sense of mutual empathizing and opening up to each other can work both ways. Some of Marjo’s interlocutors hardly needed any probing to share versions of stories they had obviously told before. Their objective was clearly that Marjo should learn from them. For others, however, interrupting the often-hectic rhythm of daily life through an interview helped them reflect on their experiences and explore their significance in dialogue with the interviewer. In this sense, much like participant observation, biographical interviewing can be an enriching experience for both conversation partners, producing insights that are “cognizant of the past, attuned to the conditions of the present and speculatively open to the possibilities of the future” (Ingold 2014a, 390). Finally, whether a researcher engages in participant observation or in interviewing, ‘being with’ research participants in order ‘to grow in knowledge and wisdom together,’ as Ingold proposes, depends on the mutual recognition of at least some common ground. It presupposes an awareness of how the ‘other’ is at least also partially a ‘self’. Kholoud’s research project on Muslims in Morocco illustrates that the divide between a Western self, who studies non-Western others, that characterized the anthropological paradigm in the past no longer holds (cf. Abu-Lughod 1991, 138). Our reflections concerning the positionality of both authors also demonstrate that no researcher is ever simply an ‘outsider’ or an ‘insider’. First of all, in both of our research projects, the presumed ‘outside’ position

180  Kholoud Al-Ajarma and Marjo Buitelaar as ethnographer was never a fully detached one, but operated within a larger political-­historical constellation which connects the researcher and their research participants in complex ways (ibid., 141). Secondly, the various ways in which both authors share some identifications with their research participants and yet differ from them in other respects illustrate that the self is not a bounded entity but consists of multiple selves. Commonalities and differences between these partial selves and different categories of people in the field play out differently in different contexts. In sum, while we have followed different paths in investigating the salience of Mecca in the lives of Muslims, both Kholoud’s research in Morocco and Marjo’s in the Netherlands involved participant engagement with partial selves and others. Like the pilgrimage experiences of our interlocutors, walking down these paths was an enriching experience both in terms of knowledge production and personal growth. References Abu-Lughod, L. 1991. Writing Against Culture. In Fox, R. (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (pp. 137–162). Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Al-Ajarma, K. 2020. Mecca in Morocco: Articulations of the Muslim Pilgrimage (Hajj) in Moroccan Everyday Life. PhD thesis, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands. Al-Ajarma, K. 2021a. After Hajj: Muslim Pilgrims Refashioning Themselves. Religions, 12, 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12010036 Al-Ajarma, K. 2021b. Power in Moroccan Women’s Narratives of the Hajj. In Buitelaar, M., Stephan-Emmrich, M. & Thimm, V. (eds.), Muslim Women’s Pilgrimage to Mecca and Beyond. Reconfiguring Gender, Religion and Mobility (pp. 56–74). London and New York: Routledge. Bakhtin, M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Austin Press. Bell, M., & Gardiner, M. (eds.). 1998. Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words. London: Sage. Bianchi, R. 2004. Guests of God: Pilgrimage and Politics in the Islamic World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Borneman, J., & Hammoudi, A. 2009. Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth. Berkeley: University of California Press. Buitelaar, M. 1993. Fasting and Feasting in Morocco. Women’s Participation in Ramadan. Oxford: Berg. Buitelaar, M. 1998. Public Baths as Private Places. In Ask, K. & Tjomsland, M. (eds.), Women and Islamisation. Contemporary Dimensions of Discourse on Gender Relations (pp. 103–123). Oxford: Berg. Buitelaar, M. 2006. ‘I Am the Ultimate Challenge’: Accounts of Intersectionality in the Life-Story of a Well-Known Daughter of Moroccan Migrant Workers in The Netherlands. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13, 259–276. Buitelaar, M. 2014. ‘Discovering a Different Me.’ Discursive Positioning in Life-Story Telling Over Time. Women’s Studies International Forum, 43(03), 30–37.

Studying Mecca Elsewhere  181 Buitelaar, M. 2020. Rearticulating the Conventions of Hajj Storytelling. Moroccan-Dutch Female Pilgrims’s Multi-voiced Narratives about the Pilgrimage to Mecca. Religions, 11, 373. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11070373 Buitelaar, M. 2023. Introduction. Narrativizing a Sensational Journey: The Pilgrimage to Mecca. In Buitelaar, M. & van Leeuwen, R. (eds.), Narrating the Pilgrimage to Mecca. Historical and Contemporary Accounts (pp. 1–42). Leiden and Boston: Brill. Coleman, S. forthcoming in 2021. The Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Motion. New York: New York University Press. Coleman, S., & Elsner, J. 2003. Pilgrim Voices: Authoring Christian Pilgrimage. In Coleman, S. & Elsner, J. (eds.), Pilgrim Voices: Narrative and Authorship in Christian Pilgrimage (pp. 1–16). New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Craven, C., & Davis, D.-A. (eds.). 2013. Feminist Activist Ethnography: Counterpoints to Neoliberalism in North America. New York: Lexington Books. Davies, J., & Spencer, D. 2010. Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Davis, K. 2014. Intersectionality as Critical Methodology. In Lykke, N. (ed.), Writing Academic Texts Differently. Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and the Playful Art of Writing (pp. 17–29). New York and London: Routledge. el-Zein, A.H. 1977. Beyond Ideology and Theology: The Search for the Anthropology of Islam. Annual Review of Anthropology, 6(1), 227–254. Es, Margaretha van. 2019. Muslim Women as ‘Ambassadors’ of Islam: Breaking Stereotypes in Everyday Life. Identities, 26(2), 375–392. https://doi.org/10.1080/10702 89X.2017.1346985 Ewing, K. 1990. The Ilusion of Wholeness: Culture, Self, and the Experience of Inconsistency. Ethos, 18(1), 251–278. Fadil, N. 2019. The Anthropology of Islam in Europe: A Double Epistemological Impasse. Annual Review of Anthropology, 48, 17–132. Fujii, L.A. 2015. Five Stories of Accidental Ethnography: Turning Unplanned Moments in the Field into Data. Qualitative Research, 15(4), 525–539. Geertz, H. 1979. The Meanings of Family Ties. In Geertz, C., Geertz, H. & Rosen, L. (eds.), Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society. Three Essays in Cultural Analysis (pp. 315–379). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goffmann, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Göle, N. 2017. The Daily Lives of Muslims. Islam and Public Confrontation in Contemporary Europe. London: Zed Books. Hermans, H., & Hermans-Konopka, A. 2010. The Dialogical Self: Positioning and CounterPositioning in a Globalized World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hockey, J., & Forsey, M. 2012. Ethnography Is Not Participant Observation: Reflections on the Interview as Participatory Qualitative Research. In Skinner, J. (ed.), The Interview: An Ethnographic Approach (pp. 69–87). London: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2014a. That’s Enough About Ethnography’! HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(1), 383–395. Ingold, T. 2014b. Review Article. Undergoing anthropology, suffering life. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 20, 771–773. Joseph, S. 1993. Fieldwork and Psychosocial Dynamics of Personhood. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 13(3), 9–32. Jouili, J. 2015. Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

182  Kholoud Al-Ajarma and Marjo Buitelaar Kanafani, S., & Sawaf, Z. 2017. Being, Doing and Knowing in the Field: Reflections on Ethnographic Practice in the Arab Region. Contemporary Levant, 2(1), 3–11. Kvale, S. 2007. Doing Interviews. London: Sage Publications. McAdams, D. 1993. The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. New York and London: The Guildford Press. McLoughlin, S. 2013. Organizing Hajj-Going from Contemporary Britain. A Changing Industry, Pilgrim Markets and the Politics of Recognition. In Porter, V. & Saif, L. (eds.), The Hajj: Collected Essays (pp. 241–252). London: British Museum. Pink, S. 2009. Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage. Schielke, S. 2015. Egypt in the Future Tense. Hope, Frustration, and Ambivalence Before and After 2011. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Sherif, B. 2001. The Ambiguity of Boundaries in the Fieldwork Experience: Establishing Rapport and Negotiating Insider/Outsider Status. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(4), 436–447. Smith, M. 2008. Religion, Culture and Sacred Space. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Spradley, J. 1980. Participant Observation. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Stoller, P. 1997. Sensuous Scholarship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Thomson, S., Ansoms, A., & Murison, J. 2012. Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa: The Story Behind the Findings. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Varisco, D.M. 2005. Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation (1st ed.). Contemporary Anthropology of Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zock, H. 2013. Religious Voices in the Dialogical Self: Towards a Conceptual-Analytical Framework on the Basis of Hubert Hermans’s Dialogical Self Theory. In Buitelaar, M. & Zock, H. (eds.), Religious Voices in Self-Narratives. Making Sense of Life in Times of Transition (pp. 11–35). Berlin: De Gruyter.

12 Afterword On Multiplying Methods and Expanding the Field Simon Coleman

Introduction Pilgrimage studies have become an increasingly vibrant and varied field of interdisciplinary study in recent decades.1 It is therefore not surprising that excellent ethnographic work has been produced by scholars in anthropology, geography, religious studies, sociology, and related areas.2 What is more surprising is that the expansion in fieldwork has not been accompanied by equivalent levels of methodological reflection. While much thought has been devoted to providing workable definitions of pilgrimage or to the elaboration of fruitful theoretical frameworks, the practical dimensions of gathering data have often been pushed to the background. This relative lack of explicit focus on methods is striking given that recent decades have seen an efflorescence in the critical elaboration of qualitative research techniques within the social sciences more generally. The paucity of work dedicated specifically to examining methods in the study of pilgrimage may have something to do with the fact that, even when focused on contemporary practices, the field encompasses multiple disciplinary orientations. Nonetheless, such variety only increases the need for a clear comparison of strategy and technique, especially given that pilgrimage presents some thorny challenges to scholars dedicated to in-depth fieldwork. Ethnographic approaches have usually emphasized the importance of dwelling in a particular place for as long as possible. Studying pilgrimages therefore raises dilemmas over how to track people before they enter and after they leave a shrine and how to address the fact that a holy site may receive most of its visitors for just a few weeks in a given year. Such issues were beginning to be recognized by more reflexive ethnographic works on pilgrimage published in the 1980s and 1990s, even if they did not form the centre of analysis. At the beginning of her study of a Greek shrine, Jill Dubisch noted both the temptations and the limitations of demarcating and then focusing on a single location: The boundaries of the pilgrimage site itself, which at first seem clearly to delineate a sacred space with a devotional focus, become blurred, and then dissolve, as pilgrims scatter and return to their homes, taking something of the pilgrimage site with them, spiritually and materially. The pilgrimage site DOI: 10.4324/9781003137764-16

184  Simon Coleman is a web—at its center the object of devotion, but with strands spun outward both by the pilgrims and by other forces (such as the media, the church, and national politics), all of which advertise and promote the site, and create mutable and sometimes conflicting meanings. Thus the site is permanent through the presence of its physical center, which provides a magnet to pilgrims, but impermanent and constantly fluctuating in its personnel, as well as mutable in the accumulation of its history and in the meanings assigned to it over time. (Dubisch 1995: 38–39) Dubisch encompasses many pertinent methodological challenges here: not only whether to concentrate on a sacred centre as opposed to a broader ethnographic landscape but also whether to highlight permanent rather than more transient dimensions of the field; whether indeed to regard worship itself as the main object of interest, or to include other activities such as political manoeuvres or media representations. Her concerns were echoed by Ann Gold (1988: 1), who criticized tendencies to focus on sacred destinations while ignoring the return journey of pilgrims to their homes or neglecting to appreciate that many people “are much else before they are pilgrims and for much more of the time than they are pilgrims” (ibid.: 2; compare also Sallnow 1987). Scepticism over a focus on shrines was evinced further by Bawa Yamba’s (1995) chronicling of West African ‘pilgrims’ who spent their entire lives as immigrants in Sudan, permanently poised to undertake the journey to Mecca, but yet never quite setting off. Then, in an influential book published a little later at the end of the 1990s, Nancy Frey’s (1998) Pilgrim Stories devoted almost all of its ethnographic attention not to the ostensible destination of Santiago de Compostela but to the Camino—the network of pilgrimage pathways stretching across Europe leading towards the city and its cathedral. The works I have cited were not dedicated to method per se but pointed to a growing desire among fieldworkers to pay greater attention to spatially and temporally diffused, and behaviourally heterogeneous, frameworks of pilgrimage-related activity. Their perspectives now seem far-sighted given that almost all ethnographers of the contemporary era—not only those dedicated to studying ­pilgrimage— must come to terms with ever more negotiable, contingent, and multi-scalar understandings of locality, place, and presence (Hastrup 2013). Arguably, such developments have helped to make pilgrimage increasingly significant as a field of study, with theoretical and methodological implications that stretch beyond interests in sacred travel per se (Coleman 2021). Its incorporation of mobility and transience alongside longer-term structures and institutions should resonate among all fieldworkers who deal with scapes as well as sites, the everydayness of movement as well as dwelling, the fact that contexts of analysis are increasingly understood to be perspectival choices rather than obvious givens (Dilley 1999). Having occasionally been regarded as a methodological anomaly, pilgrimage now exemplifies fieldwork challenges shared by most researchers attempting in-depth research on contemporary social and cultural phenomena. Indeed, the meaning of ‘depth’ in

Afterword  185 ethnography has become subject to new scrutiny in a world where the grounds of social life are shifting so swiftly (Horst 2009). The contributors to this volume recognize the challenges of creating innovative methods in facilitating the study of an expanded and dynamic pilgrimage landscape. They point the reader to ways in which ethnographers might consciously carve out viable spaces, scales, and socialities of study while reflecting very deliberately on questions of method. The temporalities of academic study as well as of the field are examined, and simple binaries between sacred and mundane, centre and periphery, permanent and transient, local and distant are challenged. We are shown how theory and method cannot ultimately be separated; after all, approaches influenced by interpretive frames ranging from action theory to political economy still rely on concrete means of framing research questions and gathering data. Given the willingness of the contributors to follow activities, objects, and traces at but also beyond shrines, we are encouraged to acknowledge, but also to move far beyond, centripetal models that perceive pilgrimage almost exclusively as entailing linear and temporary movement to a distant destination. In the following, I highlight three interrelated themes that cut across the contributions and that should provide fruitful areas of further reflection for what we might come to think of as an ethnographically informed ‘pilgrimage methodology.’ These themes—which are also descriptions of fieldwork strategies—can be summarized as ‘expanding sites,’ ‘multiplying positionalities,’ and ‘reconsidering presences.’ Expanding Sites If ethnographic approaches are to move beyond what Marc Loustau and Kate DeConinck (2019) aptly refer to as ‘singularism’—the tendency to focus fieldwork on individual shrines—many methodological strategies are available. Loustau and DeConinck propose a serial approach, asking “what it means, for both individuals and communities, to encounter different pilgrimage sites over time” (ibid.: 14).3 Their suggestion acknowledges that pilgrims and administrators have usually been acutely aware of the existence of, and often the competition provided by, other holy places, but their point takes on fresh significance given the enhanced access to mobility (pandemics aside) and information that is available to many presentday pilgrims. In my own research on Walsingham in England, I have often found interviewees eager to draw on personal experience in comparing Christian pilgrimage locations across Europe—perhaps associating one site particularly with visits made in childhood, another with healing, another with cultivating charismatic renewal. Such interlocutors do not view shrines as discrete places, and so studying Walsingham has also meant encountering pilgrims’ memories and imaginaries of Lourdes, Knock, Rome, the Camino, and so on, requiring me to follow chains of (auto)biographical, material, and narrative association that reach across shrines and national borders. This volume suggests further ways of transcending singularism through exploring variations in multi-sited approaches. Mario Katić’s decision to study five

186  Simon Coleman different destinations enables him to uncover numerous layers of Bosnian Croat pilgrimage practice. For him, no single journey, no individual site, provides sufficient information on what must be understood as an interrelated complex of shrines, rooted in the social and political circumstances of a region as a whole.4 Lior Chen’s account of three sites of baptism in the Holy Land proposes an analytical term, ‘adjacency’ (cf. Coleman 2018), to describe the associations between places that are embedded in broadly the same locale and draw on the same canonical narratives, yet maintain rivalrous relations. For Chen, the researcher should take a deep look at each individual site but must also focus attention on religio-cultural spaces that both link and encompass them all. While Katić and Chen develop fieldwork strategies for juxtaposing multiple destinations across ideologically charged landscapes, an alternative approach for fieldworkers eager to broaden their ethnographic perspective is to shift focus to the role of ‘home’ as a vital part of pilgrimage trajectories. This orientation—which implies a shifting of previous ethnographic background into foreground—has received increasing degrees of explicit attention over the past few decades (see, for example, Sallnow 1987; Gold 1988; Frey 1998; Kaell 2014); however, one of the fascinating dimensions of the current volume is that it complicates and stretches what the term might mean, socially, conceptually, and methodologically. Tatsuma Padoan draws on Michael Taussig’s work (1997) to raise the idea of pilgrimage as translation between home and shrine, but one that maintains “the ghost of the translated within the translation, allowing us to witness the presence of the other” (ibid.: 197). A possible reading of Taussig allows us to think of ‘profane’ and ‘pilgrimage’ realms as inherently connected. Padoan refers for instance to Kōyō, a pilgrim and truckdriver, who recites sutras and mantras by heart as he drives across Japan and understands his actions to be a continuation of mental and bodily training experienced during the pilgrimage itself: asceticism transposed into the everyday world of work and family, mediating but also mutually constituting ostensibly separate realms of Kōyō’s life. The challenge that Padoan’s work presents to temporal, spatial, and behavioural disjunctions between home and shrine is reinforced by another chapter on Japan. Ian Reader reflects on the Shikoku pilgrimage in the light of Japanese research traditions that do not readily align with Western representations of pilgrimage, which tend to present it as an inherently ‘set apart’ activity. Many of those whom Reader encounters do not see pilgrimage as extra-ordinary—an attitude often connected with the fact that they have made the journey numerous times and are habituated to being on the road. So, the behavioural ‘flow’ highlighted by Reader is not the exceptional and transient sensibility famously emphasized by Victor Turner (e.g. 1974) but something much closer to that of ongoing, everyday existence. As he finds his ethnographic attention being directed towards the more routine—but not less ethnographically significant—dimensions of pilgrimage, Reader also starts to take more notice of sedentary activities, including the organization of accommodation for pilgrims whose main devotional focus is oriented around saying prayers rather than making effortful journeys. This methodological orientation provides a useful counterbalance to the emphases on Camino-like mobility that have characterized

Afterword  187 much of the recent literature on and even beyond studies of pilgrimage in Europe, and which often see Frey’s work as a touchstone. In the chapter she co-writes with Marjo Buitelaar on Mecca, Kholoud Al-Ajarma provides another advantage of talking to pilgrims at home, in the context of her research in Morocco: both male and female pilgrims feel able to provide frank assessments of their experiences of the hajj, including feelings of disappointment. In other chapters of Approaching Pilgrimage, the home that comes under examination is that of the fieldworker. Gabi Abramac’s study of Hasidic pilgrimage discusses how a ‘patchwork’ ethnography entailing regular if short bursts of fieldwork has the capacity to blur the boundaries between home and field. But if Abramac’s main challenge is ensuring that data collection retains enough ‘depth’ away from full-time immersion, Evgenia Mesaritou’s account of a pilgrimage site in northern, Turkish-occupied Cyprus makes the ambivalent intersections and translations between home and destination a central focus of her project. Indeed, she shows how pilgrimage may entail journeying between different types of dwelling (a point also implied by Reader, in a very different context). Her interlocutors are Greek Cypriots for whom a journey north across the island’s demilitarized buffer zone to visit the monastery of Apostolos Andreas is also, in effect, a visit to a former habitation—a place that they or earlier generations of family might have known intimately before the Turkish invasion forced the southern migration of many Greek Cypriots in the 1970s. As Mesaritou, herself a Greek Cypriot, shows, the specifically ‘religious’ identity of the monastery grows fuzzier as it becomes associated with everyday memories and ties of home, kinship, family, and childhood. The fieldwork I have been describing in this section is oriented towards activities that occur in multiple social and spatial frames and are accessed through a variety of fieldwork strategies. Information is regularly carried out in the houses or offices of interlocutors as well as on the road or in the shrine. Attention is extended from pilgrims themselves to others who contribute to the running and infrastructure of shrine complexes. The permanent is viewed along with the transient; the sedentary along with the mobile; and strict binaries between such states are challenged. Sites are not viewed ‘singularly’ but as part of wider regional or global complexes of both shrines and wider pilgrimage-related activity. The spatiality and temporality of pilgrimage as an academic field as well as ritual practice are therefore shown to go far beyond temporary movement away from home to a distant and exceptional place. However, the point is not merely that the field expands; it is also that such expansion occurs in increasingly self-aware ways, prompting heightened awareness of what ‘pilgrimage methodology’ might entail. Multiplying Positionalities Any attempt to reflect on methods places the researcher’s positionality under scrutiny—a term that I take here to mean both assumptions made by the fieldworker and the stance(s) they actively choose to take in relation to their ‘object’ of study. Admittedly, this is hardly a new issue. In Image and Pilgrimage (1978),

188  Simon Coleman Victor and Edith Turner wrote as scholars but also as pilgrims. While their ethnographic work was not unusual for the time in its presentation of what was said to be ‘the native’s point of view,’ their implication was that, as fellow believers, they were especially well positioned to present an empathetic understanding of spiritual encounters with shrines. Nonetheless, in their introduction to this volume, Katić and Eade note that it was Alan Morinis (1992: 17) rather than the Turners who highlighted the methodological and comparative challenges actually entailed in attempting to grasp the embodied experiences of pilgrims. Juxtaposing the Turners with Morinis raises the perennial issue of whether the participant observer can justifiably claim to understand the experience of pious travellers without sharing their beliefs, though a methodological prioritizing of the presence or absence of personal conviction seems to be a particularly Christian, even Protestant, concern (Asad 1993; Lindquist and Coleman 2008). In any case, methodological questions concerning embodied engagement on the part of the researcher have been much explored in the more phenomenological work on pilgrimage that now abounds in the literature. They have often been connected with discussions of effortful walking (e.g. Slavins 2003) and have played an important role in feminist approaches to studying and participating in pilgrimage (compare Fedele 2012). In this volume, Manoël Pénicaud writes fascinatingly of the state of ‘grace’ he sometimes feels when his use of a camera actually enables a kind of personal participation with worshippers. Padoan’s chapter provides the most explicit attempt to develop a theory and method of pilgrimage experience in his fruitful discussion of ‘sense’ as orientated intentionality. His chapter also links the discussion of experience to broader theories of the nonhuman as well as of action (Latour 2005; compare Eade and Stadler 2022). In the context of this volume, Padoan’s account of experience offers an intriguing juxtaposition with Mirela Hrovatin’s archival tracing of accounts of pilgrimage experiences, but also of the Catholic Church’s attempts to regulate the public expression of pilgrims’ testimonies as a means of controlling and sanctioning representations of sacrality. Discussions concerning experience, embodiment, and action remain vital to fieldwork. What I want to emphasize in the rest of this section, however, are the ways in which contributors to this volume explore positionalities that go beyond broadly phenomenological stances, at least as the latter have been deployed in studies of pilgrimage. We are asked as researchers to consider moves beyond the ‘experience near’ description towards more distanced or ambivalent forms of engagement; to incorporate analyses of institutions and wider contexts; and to imagine how fieldwork might entail the examination of numerous roles beyond that of the striving pilgrim. Appreciating what contributes to researcher positionality includes, but also goes beyond, questions of how far the fieldworker can inhabit the viewpoints of individual travellers. The chapters by Eade and Reader cover many of these ‘multi-positional’ possibilities in reconsidering their own research strategies over the years. As ethnographers with long experience of Lourdes and Shikoku, respectively, they are well placed to reflect on gradual alterations in pilgrimage practices alongside

Afterword  189 evolving trends in academic research. In different ways, they demonstrate how methodological innovations in the study of pilgrimage do not need to rely, in Kuhnian fashion, on paradigmatic shifts of approach between scholarly generations, but may also emerge from changes adopted by the same researcher through the course of their career. The scholarly trajectory traced by Eade entails him moving away from being relatively embedded within Roman Catholicism to taking a more receptive attitude towards other religious stances, while also becoming more open to the idea of allowing academic colleagues to become aware of his convictions. At Lourdes itself, acting as a helper at the baths, he is also struck by a fascinating shift in the articulation of authority displayed by the shrine. Greater recognition of the self-determination of individual visitors results in transformations in how far helpers like himself are permitted to intervene in providing direct advice to pilgrims. Indeed, throughout the totality of his many engagements with a shrine that is itself always changing, Eade finds himself moving between differently positioned and shifting roles of volunteer, pilgrim, and ethnographer. He therefore builds up an overall ethnographic picture that focuses on a ‘single’ site but must always be prepared to alter the direction, intensity, and resolution of that focus. Ian Reader’s account of Shikoku traces further shifts in the point of view adopted by the same fieldworker over time. While he began his research by assuming the need to concentrate on apparently ‘traditional’ and ‘authentic’ pilgrims (identified, for instance, by their decision to undertake arduous walks between shrines), his stance soon complexified. We have already learned of his decision to highlight sedentary as well as mobile behaviours, but we are also told of a sea change in his appreciation of the range and scope of salient context—of the need to examine background influences and not merely the most ‘visible’ behaviours occurring at shrines or on pathways. For instance, recognition of the political and economic dimensions of Shikoku led Reader to explore issues related to law and transportation that he had not originally conceived as having anything to do with pilgrimage studies. Reader’s chapter shows him expanding his methodological horizons and strategies even as he broadens his understanding of Shikoku as a field of study that can operate at different scales; such widening of context does not stop there, since in his view it is also important for the researcher of any given site to incorporate comparison with pilgrimages in other countries and religious contexts. Mario Katić also describes numerous shifts in positionality—over a shorter time scale but over a wider range of shrines. He adopts different roles at each, developing both a multi-sited and a ‘multi-stanced’ methodology in order to accumulate and compare fieldwork perspectives. We might contrast the complexity and heterogeneity of the statuses he adopts with the status simplification implied by Turnerian existential communitas, focused on the pilgrim alone, which celebrates the removal of regular trappings of identity in favour of the bonds of undifferentiated fellowship. Such communitas may sometimes be found, but it is far from the only ethnographic reality present at shrines, and it may well not be the most significant one for the researcher.

190  Simon Coleman While the ingenuity of Katić’s approach emerges out of the challenge of investigating numerous sites as a single researcher, an intriguing alternative to the ‘lone ethnographer’ approach is offered by Kholoud Al-Ajarma and Marjo-Buitelaar in their exploration of the meanings of the hajj for different groups of pilgrims. What is striking about their approach to positionality is not only that they are prepared to compare perspectives on the hajj, but also that the site they are jointly investigating is itself scattered, located in different national contexts: the ‘Mecca’ they are reconstructing is that recalled by informants in Morocco and the Netherlands, respectively. While Al-Ajarma largely deploys participant observation, Buitelaar relies on biographical interviews. The ethnographic field that emerges cannot be an entirely coherent one, but it becomes all the more intriguing precisely because it juxtaposes multiple methods, multiple points of view, and even multiple forms of dialogue. If we recall that the study of pilgrimage resonates with contemporary ethnography because it asks challenging questions about context and scale, we see here the attempt by two anthropologists to both illustrate and address the fractured, or at least diffuse, character of much current research. In the process, Al-Ajarma and Buitelaar also demonstrate something else common to many pilgrimages: that they often incorporate multiple acts of connection and disconnection, disarticulation and rearticulation of social groupings and frames of action, spread over heterogeneous locations that include but extend far beyond shrines themselves. In addition to the dimensions of positionality I have already highlighted, I note the varieties of emotional register explored in this volume, as contributors go beyond placing intensity of experience or engagement at the forefront of ethnographic attention. Mesaritou learns to avoid looking for more ‘extreme’ ritual forms and in fact moves away from what might conventionally be considered core religious behaviours in much of her research. Her approach displays intriguing parallels with other chapters, even on ostensibly very different topics. I think for instance of Manoël Pénicaud’s discussion of the visual anthropology of pilgrimages, where he notes the importance of using film to capture very different kinds and levels of intensity related to pilgrimage—not just ritual effervescence but also interstices, pauses, and silences. Similarly, Eade finds that both he and fellow participants in pilgrimage often engage not in direct but in ‘lateral’ modes of communication and ‘glancing’ engagements with rituals (see also Coleman 2019, 2021). Finally, Katić’s complex strategy of playing different roles at different sites sometimes also leads him to places where semi-detached engagement occurs on the margins of the most central parts of shrines. Such lateral sites may somehow seem less important than the most spectacular dimensions of ritual action; but in an expanded view of pilgrimage, which relies on a ‘multi-stanced’ as well as often a multi-sited methodological approach, they cannot be ignored. Reconsidering Presences There is no doubt that ethnography—with its emphasis on achieving depth, proximity, and immersion—has struggled with ways of reasserting its principles in the

Afterword  191 face of virtual media. To the extent that pilgrimage relies on intimate touch, the co-presence of massed bodies, and physical experiences of journeying, it is also challenged by such developments. Arguably, however, pilgrimage may also display affinities with the explosion of online behaviours in ways that fieldworkers must learn to track. As Eade points out in this volume, and as Pénicaud enacts, the production of powerful cultures of vision and sacralized gazes has long played a part in the recording, development, and publicizing of shrines, even if the precise media of representation have changed over time. Forms of virtual communication have also lent new dimensions to the connective, articulatory qualities of pilgrimage. Eade refers to how the Internet has enabled people to maintain contact with Lourdes, and my own work on Walsingham during the COVID-19 pandemic indicates that while Anglican and Roman Catholic shrines suffered from not being able physically to host pilgrims in the village itself, both nonetheless benefited from gaining global constituencies of remote followers. Gabi Abramac’s careful tracing of how Hasidic pilgrimage is enacted in the digital age shows how proximity and distance, presence and absence, can be redrawn in ways that have significant methodological implications. As a female researcher, she would normally not be granted access to certain aspects of the male-only Hasidic culture she is attempting to understand, yet the group’s use of WhatsApp means that she is able to negotiate a novel kind of ­engagement—observation of interactions from behind a virtual partition constructed by the administrator of the group. In practice, as most fieldworkers must do, Abramac learns to combine digital and more traditional methods of gathering data, and part of that work entails coming to appreciate how online and embodied worlds are blended in the lives of those whom she is studying. She is told, for instance, of how pilgrims who are able to make physical visits to a tzaddik’s grave will mediate digital access to the site to those unable to come, enabling the latter to gain a kind of prayerful presence. Abramac concludes that we must learn to conceptualize—and to study—hybrid fields, incorporating not only co-presence but also forms of ‘connected presence.’ Interestingly, hybridity is also a term used by Pénicaud as he describes pilgrimage as a huge field of experimentation and exploration for researchers (we might add also for pilgrims) in audio-visual practices that combine texts, archives, maps, sounds, animations, and so on. Contemporary media play an important role in Kholoud Al-Ajarma and Marjo Buitelaar’s discussion of Mecca beyond Mecca—the shrine and its pilgrimages remanifested in the lives of Muslims living in both Morocco and the Netherlands. They refer for instance to the Saudi Channel ‘Makkah Live’ that live streams pilgrims circling the Ka‘ba and to the presence of Mecca in television shows, including a children’s animation series. However, even as they document new forms of mediation, they are also careful to remind us of older examples that extend back to ages before the Internet, or even photography, had been invented: paintings, tapestries, narratives. Remaking presence has after all been going on for a very long time. A further implication of their chapter is that our understanding of what is meant by Mecca might need to shift as we go beyond simple hierarchies of ‘authentic’

192  Simon Coleman place versus ‘mere’ substitute—hierarchies reinforced by more traditional attitudes to ethnography that have privileged notions of occupying supposedly original and unique sites. Indeed, much diasporic research has had to overcome prejudices that a pale copy of the ‘real thing’ is being studied, torn from its most appropriate or significant location. The point here is not to deny the importance of the sacred shrine of Mecca in the hijab, but it is to state that traces of Mecca extend into other life worlds of equal cultural significance for the ethnographer (as implied by Yamba [1995] some decades ago). Mecca can be studied ‘elsewhere,’ and it can act as both a distant point of orientation and an embodied daily presence. Indeed, it becomes a kind of lateral reconstitution of the shrine away from Saudi Arabia and one that must be seen as partaking in multiple spatial, political, and ideological contexts. In reconsidering presence and its implications for our fieldwork, it is worth raising one more issue, which is rarely mentioned in this volume although it is often implied: that of ethics. Mesaritou considers the ethical dilemmas of being a Greek Cypriot travelling in an occupied part of her country, and Hrovatin is careful to note the ways in which she reciprocated the help provided to her by the religious institution that provided her with research materials. However, my point is that while widespread deployment of online resources may have an impact on the sites that we study and therefore on our methods, it also has consequences for what we write and who our audiences are. The presence of online connectivity may, in the opinion of some fieldworkers, make ‘immersion’ more difficult to achieve; but in an age of open access, it has helped to draw together informant, researcher, and research output. Our work is potentially more visible than ever before. This development provides new forms of proximity in a digitalized world, and it brings our always-present ethical accountabilities to the fore in significant ways. Concluding Remarks My aim has been to highlight some of the ways in which this volume not only helps us uncover and develop the methods we use to study contemporary pilgrimage, but also shows how we can expand the field while doing so. In this sense, ‘approaching’ pilgrimage also means consciously helping to reconstitute it—rethinking questions of scale, comparison, singularity, context, positionality, and presence. While I have suggested that it is appropriate to talk of a ‘pilgrimage methodology,’ my intention is not to emphasize that such approaches should be used to mark off an entirely discrete or unique area of study. We should feel encouraged not only to trace how sites relate each other across regional or transnational landscapes, but also to link the study of pilgrimage to some of the larger social scientific questions of our time, related to mobility, migration, globalization, mediation, and so on. This book shows that such connections are not only thematic but also methodological, making the task of clarifying the strategies we use to research pilgrimage all the more important for scholars working within, but also beyond, what we conventionally think of as our field.

Afterword  193 Notes 1  By recent decades, I am predominantly referring to the period from the late 1980s to the present. 2  Clearly, pilgrimage studies incorporate many disciplines that do not deploy fieldwork. However, I am focusing on ethnographic research in line with the overall focus of this volume. 3  Victor and Edith Turner’s Image and Pilgrimage (1978) juxtaposed many sites in different chapters but tended not to examine the relations between these sites other than to group them into various types. 4  On pilgrimage, region, and geographical imagination, compare Feldhaus (2003).

References Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Coleman, S. 2018. From the Liminal to the Lateral: Urban Religion in English Cathedrals. Tourism Geographies, 29(3), 384–404. Coleman, S. 2019. On Praying in an Old Country: Ritual, Heritage, and Powers of Adjacency in English Cathedrals. Religion, 49(1), 120–141. Coleman, S. 2021. Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement. New York: New York University Press. Dilley, R. (ed.). 1999. The Problem of Context: Perspectives from Social Anthropology and Elsewhere. Oxford: Berghahn. Dubisch, J. 1995. In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Eade, J., & Stadler, N. 2022. An Introduction to Pilgrimage, Animism, and Agency: Putting Humans in their Place. Religion, State and Society, 50(2), 137–146. Fedele, A. 2012. Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Feldhaus, A. 2003. Connected Places: Region, Pilgrimage, and Geographical Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Frey, N. 1998. Pilgrim Stories: On and off the Road to Santiago. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gold, A. 1988. Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hastrup, K. 2013. Scales of Attention in Fieldwork: Global Connections and Local Concerns in the Arctic. Ethnography, 14(2), 145–164. Horst, C. 2009. Expanding Sites: The Question of ‘Depth’ Explored. In Mark-Anthony Falzon (ed.), Multi-Sited Ethnography. Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Social Research (pp. 119–134). Aldershot: Routledge. Kaell, H. 2014. Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage. New York: New York University Press. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lindquist, G., & Coleman, S. 2008. Against Belief? Social Analysis, 52(1), 1–18. Loustau, M.R., & DeConinck, K. 2019. Editors Introduction. Journal of Global Catholicism, 3(1), 12–25. Morinis, A. 1992. The Territory of the Anthropology of Pilgrimage. In Morinis, A. (ed.), Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage (pp. 1–27). Westport: Greenwood.

194  Simon Coleman Sallnow, M. 1987. Pilgrims of the Andes: Regional Cults in Cusco. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Slavins, S. 2003. Walking as Spiritual Practice: The Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Body and Society, 9(3), 1–18. Taussig, M. 1997. The Magic of the State. London: Routledge. Turner, V. 1974. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ. Turner, V., & Turner, E. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Yamba, C.B. 1995. Permanent Pilgrims: The Idea of Pilgrimage in the Lives of West African Muslims in Sudan. London: Edinburgh University Press.

Index

Abramac, Gabi 6, 187, 191 Abu Lughod, Leila 172 Al-Ajarma, Kholoud 6, 187, 190, 191 Albera, Dionigi 130 Agnew, Michael 99 Ambros, Barbara 31 Apostolos Andreas monastery 43, 45, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 187 archive 5 Assisi 36 autoethnography 16, 19, 150 Avebury 17 Bachkovo Orthodox Monastery 133 Bakhtin, Mikhail 175 Bangladeshi 16 Banja Luka 104 Baraka Paths 126 Beirut 131 Belarus 158 Bella Pais 53 Benedict XVI 15 Benjamin, Walter 59 Berdychiv 153 Bethany Beyond the Jordan 81, 82, 86, 87, 90 Bobovac 106 Boltanski, Emma-Aubin 131 Bosnia and Herzegovina 96, 97, 98, 100, 102, 104 Bosniaks 98 Bosnian Croat(s) 5, 96, 100, 102, 104, 186 British 12; pre-Christian heritage 18 British Pilgrimage Trust 17 Buob, Baptiste 136 Buddha 64; Dainichi nyorai 69 Buddhist 175; chants 68; deities 64; prayers 31; scripture 73; temples 24, 61 Buitelaar, Marjo 6, 187, 190, 191

Cairo 130 Caliandro, Alessandro 151 Cambridge University Chaplaincy 15 camera 14, 20, 126, 129, 132, 135, 136 Camino de Santiago 92 Canterbury 18 Carmel of St Eliah on Buško Blato 104 Carmelites 105 Catholic Chaplaincy 12 Catholics 98, 106 de Certeau, Michel 138 Chen, Lior 5, 186 Chichibu pilgrimage 24 Chinese 63 Christian 80, 82, 84, 88, 92; baptism sites 80; Churches 16; Orthodox 44, 45, 46; shrines 5 Coleman, Simon 1, 2, 5, 37, 45, 47, 48, 54, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 108, 167 Colleyn, Jean-Paul 138 Communist 149 communitas 4, 16, 20, 52, 98, 189 COVID-19 18, 157, 191 Croatia 119, 150 Cyprus 4, 43, 45, 48, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 187 Dall’Oglio, Fr. Paolo 141, 142 De Humanae Vitae 14 DeConinck, Kate 5, 100, 185 Dikomitis 44 dialogic ethnography 155 digital ethnography 148 digital methods 151 Diva Grabovčeva 105 Djerba 133, 141 Dorival, Clément 135 Dubisch, Jill 4, 47, 183 Dutch 174, 175

196 Index Eade, John 2, 3, 4, 23, 96, 97, 108, 188, 190. 191 En no Gyōja 67 Europe 66, 115, 126, 147, 149, 177, 178, 184, 185; Eastern 148, 149, 152, 153 European Association of Social Anthropologist 21 Evans-Pritchard 83 Fadil, Nadia 177, 178 Facebook 14, 152, 159, 162 Ferguson, James 100 Fes 169 Foucault, Michel 16 France 11 de France, Claudine 131 Franciscans 104 Frey, Nancy 4, 184 Gamzu, Ronni 157 Geertz 83 Gestalten 70 Gobo, Giampietro 150 Gold, Ann 184 God 51 Goffman, Erving 131 Gonta, Ivan 154 Greek Cypriot 4, 43, 45, 48, 53, 192 Green, Arthur 153 Green line 43 Greimas 70, 73 Griaule, Marcel 139 Hannerz 83 Hanukkah 147 Hardwar 36 Hajj 6, 166, 168, 169, 171, 174, 177, 187, 190 Hashemite Kingdom 81 Hasidic 6, 147, 148, 150, 155, 156, 158, 160, 161, 187, 191 de Heusch, Luc 132 Hirsch, Marianne 153 Hodja 43 Hollings, Fr Michael 15 Hrovatin, Mirela 5, 188, 192 India 24 Ingold, Tim 139, 179 Instagram 152 internet 14 interviews 113 Islam 16, 167, 171, 176, 178

Ishidera 62 Israel 79, 81, 91; Jews 80 Israel ben Eliezer 148, 153 Istanbul 130, 133 Jakobson, Roman 63 James, C.L.R. 35, 36 Japan 24, 25, 27, 28, 30, 61, 65, 66, 186; Buddhism 24; heritage 29; studies of pilgrimage 39 Jenkins, Timothy 151 Jericho 81, 82 Jesus 11, 51, 79, 80, 82, 83, 86, 90, 91 Jewish 87, 88, 92, 93, 149 John Paul II 11, 15 John the Baptist 80 Jordan River 5, 79, 81, 84, 88, 90; Muslims 80 junrei 35 Ka‘ba 167, 175, 191 Karpass 44 Katić, Mario 2, 5, 23, 186, 189, 190 Katsuragi 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 71 Kerizinen 88 Kiev 159 Kitanoda 66 Knock 37 Kōbō Daishi 24 Komušina 96, 102 Kondžilo 97, 102 Kotromanić, Katarina 106, 107 Kraljeva Sutjeska 106 Kyrenia 53 Lallier, Christian 132 laterality 18 Leroi-Gourhan, André 68, 129 Levi Yitshak of Barditshev 153 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 60, 138 Lochtefeld, James 36 London 16, 18, 66 Lotus sutra 62, 64, 66, 68 Lourdes 3, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 88, 121, 188 Loustau, Marc Roscoe 5, 100, 185 Luz, Nimrod 99 McAdams, Dan 174 MacDougall, David 127, 134, 140 MacWilliams, Mark 35 Maimon, Solomon 149 mantras 68 Marchenko, Alla 154

Index  197 Marcus, George 84, 100 Marrakesh 169 Mary, Mother of Christ 11; Madonna 13 Masato, Mori 30 Matariah 130 Mattingly, Cheryl 61 Mead, Margaret 179 Mecca 6, 166, 167, 178, 184, 187, 191, 192 Medina 167, 168 Mediterranean 127 Medzhybiz 147, 153 Meiji 62 Merleau-Ponty 70 Merz, Ivan 114, 116, 118 Mesaritou, Evgenia 4, 187, 190, 192 Middle East 81 mobile phones 13, 14, 20 Mordechai of Neskhiz 149 Morinis, Alan 4, 114, 188 Morocco 6, 126, 130, 136, 166, 168, 169, 174, 178, 179, 187, 190, 191 Mt Kongō 62, 65, 66 Muhammad 168 Müller, Retief 37 multi-sited ethnography 4, 5, 80, 84, 85, 91, 92, 98, 101, 169 Muslim 6, 87, 88, 92, 93, 98, 106, 167, 171, 177, 179, 191

Peru 1 photograph 13, 14, 20, 120, 126, 133, 141, 143, 169, 191 pilgrimage capital 108 Pons, Christophe 135, 143 proskynima 46, 47, 50, 51 Przybylski, Liz 150 Puljić, Vinko 106

Nahman of Bratslav 153, 154 Nankai 67 Natan Sternhartz of Nemirow 154 National Shrine of Mother of God in Marija Bistrica 114, 117, 118 Ndembu 1 Netherlands 6, 166, 176, 178, 190, 191 Nicosia 43 North America 14

Sallnow, Michael 1, 16, 96 San Giovanni Rotondo 88 Santiago de Compostela 17, 96, 126, 184 Sarajevo 104 den Scott, Van 151 Sea of Galilee 79, 81 Second Vatican Council 14 Second World War 11, 14, 62, 67 Serbs 98 settai 25 Shabbat 152 Shikoku pilgrimage 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 36, 38, 186, 188 Shingon Buddhist 24 Shrine of Our Lady in Trsat 114 Shrine of Our Lady of Zečevo Island in Nin 114 Shugen 61 Shultz 26, 98 singularism 5 smartphones 132 Soloi 53 Soubirous, Bernadette 11, 12, 14, 20 Southampton 18 spiritual magnetism 126

Olovo 100 Ottomans 107 Our Lady of the Wall 99 Padoan, Tatsuma 4, 186, 188 Palestinian 81, 167, 170, 171 palimpsest 5 participant observation 12, 13, 19, 21, 33, 113, 132, 166, 168 patchwork ethnography 161 Paul V1 14 Pénicaud, Manoël 6, 188, 190, 191 Pentadaktylos 43 Pentecostalism 99 permanent pilgrims 26

Qasr el Yahud 81, 82, 86, 87 Rabbi Amram Ben Diwan 134 Rabbi Baruch Gartner 159 Rabbi Nisan Dovid Kivak 158, 159 Rabbi Shalom Arush 158 Rachel’s Tomb 99, 133 Rahkala 47 Reader, Ian 3, 4, 98, 99, 186, 188 Reckles, Racheli 157 Regragas 129 Republic of Srpska 102 Roma 104 Roman Catholic 11, 14, 15, 47; Church 124 Rosh Hashanah 147, 149 Ross, Deborah 3 Rouch, Jean 134, 135, 139, 144 Rousseau, Katherine 99 Rye 18

198 Index St. John of Podmilačje 103, 104 St. John’s Gospel 92 Stadler, Nurit 99 Statler, Oliver 30 Stepinac, Alojzije 115 Sudan 184 Sumption, Jonathan 37

United Nations 44 University of Oxford 12, 14 Usora 96, 102

Talmud 149 Taussig, Michael 4, 59, 72, 73, 186 Tenpōrinji 61 Tokyo 28 Tsukasakō 61 Turkish 49 Turkish Cypriot 44 Turner, Edith 1, 3, 16, 98, 188 Turner, Victor 1, 3, 16, 53, 83, 98, 186, 188, 189 Twitter 152 Tzaddik 148, 149, 154, 191

Wakayama 69 Walsingham 88, 185, 191 Western Christian 35 Western Europe 14 WhatsApp 6, 147, 148, 152, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 191 Winchelsea 18

Ukraine 6, 155, 157, 158 Uman 153, 154, 160, 161 UNESCO World Heritage 29, 30, 86

Zadar 2 Zelensky, Volodymyr 157 Žuljić, Mijo 106

Vareš 100, 106 Vatican 14, 115 volunteers 11, 16

yamabushi 68 Yamba, Bawa 184 Yardenit 79, 81, 86, 87, 90 YouTube 152, 158