Pilgrimage and Political Economy: Translating the Sacred 9781785339431

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Pilgrimage and Political Economy

Pilgrimage and Political Economy Translating the Sacred

Edited by

Simon Coleman and John Eade

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2018 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2018 Simon Coleman and John Eade All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Coleman, Simon, 1963- editor. | Eade, John, 1946- editor. Title: Pilgrimage and political economy : translating the sacred / edited by Simon Coleman and John Eade. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018006512 (print) | LCCN 2018021815 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785339431 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785339424 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Pilgrims and pilgrimages--Social aspects--Case studies. | Religion and sociology. | Anthropology of religion. Classification: LCC BL619.P5 (ebook) | LCC BL619.P5 P5194 2018 (print) | DDC 203/.51--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006512 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78533-942-4 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-943-1 ebook

Contents

List of Illustrationsvii Introduction

Pilgrimage and Political Economy: Introduction to a Research Agenda

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Simon Coleman and John Eade Chapter 1

From the Indian Ganges to a Mauritian Lake: Hindu Pilgrimage in a ‘Diasporic’ Context

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Mathieu Claveyrolas Chapter 2

Transnational Courting through Shakyamuni Buddha: Japanese Pilgrimage and Geographical Dowries in North India

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David Geary Chapter 3

Sufism and the Pilgrimage Market: A Political Economy of a Shrine in Southern Pakistan

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Rémy Delage Chapter 4

Allah Always Hears the Prayers of a Traveller: Nationalized Shrines and Transnational Imaginaries in Bukhara

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Maria Louw Chapter 5

‘Pilgrimage Capital’ and Bosnian Croat Pilgrimage Places: Bosnian Croat Pilgrimages and Transnational Ties through Time and Space

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Mario Katić Chapter 6

Translating Catholic Pilgrimage Sites into Energy Grammar: Contested Spiritual Practices in Chartres and Vézelay Anna Fedele

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Contents

Chapter 7

A Pentecostal Shrine in Mexico: Ethnography of Migration and Pilgrimage

136

Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola Chapter 8

The Paths of Saint James in Brazil: Body, Spirituality and Market

155

Carlos Alberto Steil Afterword

Going beyond the Elusive Nature of Pilgrimage

173

Dionigi Albera

Index191

Illustrations

Figures 5.1 Photo of the Kondžilo pilgrimage site 5.2 Photo of St John of Podmilačje 5.3 Photo of Bobovac military pilgrimage

97 98 101

Map 5.1 A map of Bosnia and Herzegovina with pilgrimage sites

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Introduction

Pilgrimage and Political Economy Introduction to a Research Agenda Simon Coleman and John Eade

Introduction: Communitas, Contracts and Capitalism Pilgrimage has always followed, and sometimes helped to create, trade routes and markets. Victor and Edith Turner’s classic study of Christian pilgrimage – Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978) – talked not only of rites of passage and the extra-worldly, non-hierarchical fellowship of communitas but also of the existence of a ‘pilgrimage ethic’ in operation long before that of Weber’s Protestant Ethic. Indeed, the Turners speculated that medieval European pilgrimage may have formed a landscape of religio-economic connections that would later make ‘mercantile and industrial capitalism a viable national and international system’ (ibid.: 234). In their view, the voluntarism and egalitarianism characteristic of historical pilgrimage provided antecedents for contractual relationships, contributing in significant ways to modern landscapes of capitalist exchange. Yet what is striking is that neither the Turners nor other ethnographers of pilgrimage, with some important exceptions discussed below, have seriously taken up the challenge of examining these themes relating to pilgrimage and the wider organization of the economy. To be sure, much work in tourism management studies has assessed the broad economic impact of travel to sacred sites (e.g. Raj and Griffin 2015), but anglophone fieldworkers in particular have tended to focus on phenomenological perspectives that, while valuable and necessary, have rarely considered wider political and economic processes in systematic ways. Although the pioneering critique of the communitas model by Michael Sallnow (1981) drew on his work in the Peruvian Andes where pilgrims engage in both

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religious and commercial transactions (Sallnow 1987), his untimely death prevented him from pursuing his approach further. Since the late 1980s the contested meanings and contradictory practices involved in pilgrimage have been explored, particularly in Christian contexts (Perry and Echeverria 1988; Eade and Sallnow 1991; van der Veer 1994; Dubisch 1995; Duijzings 2000; Ivakhiv 2001; Digance 2003; Kormina 2004; Maclean 2008; Hermkens, Jansen and Notermans 2009; Bowman 2012; Fedele 2013; Eade and Katić 2014). However, such work has largely focused on the pilgrimage sites themselves, where the presence of strong ideological distinctions between sacred and secular has discouraged analysis of more ramifying and multivalent connections among religious, political and economic processes. Not only informants, but also scholars of pilgrimage, have tended to reinforce Euro-American, post-Enlightenment tendencies to draw boundaries between religion and the economy, or at least to see their mixing as somehow an aberration or compromise (cf Reader 2014). This separation-of-spheres approach not only reinforces the ideal of pilgrimage as a ‘set apart’ realm of anti-structure, it also concentrates attention on the pilgrimage shrine as a discrete focus of analytical attention – an apparently exceptional and bounded place where versions of the sacred are displayed, preserved and/or defended from competing interests. In this volume, we seek to go beyond such models by proposing the virtues of a ‘political economy’ approach to the study of pilgrimage. In using this term, we are conscious of its long history of scholarship (e.g. Vogel and Barma 2008), and its focus on the ever-evolving nexus of relationships between state governance and economic transactions. Such approaches have certainly been profitable in examining links between economic management and perceived national interest, highlighting political efforts to move control of production, consumption, markets and exchange beyond purely local spheres of activity and surveillance (e.g. Valeri 2010: 552). They have increasingly taken into account the growing complexity and unpredictability of economic transactions beyond and across national frames, ranging from the analysis of the effects of colonialism to raising questions concerning the management of international and transnational systems of production, distribution and trade in relation to both the state and corporate interests. While these questions may seem far from discussions of religion, they raise significant issues that challenge the sociological validity of separation-of-spheres assumptions in both Western and non-Western contexts. Rachel McLeary and Robert Barro (2006) powerfully argue that interactions between religion and political economy involve two causal directions: not only how a nation’s economic, political and legal structures affect its religiosity, but also how ‘religiousness’ may influence economic

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performance. Such considerations encourage the use of analytical paradigms that transcend older secularization/post-secularism epistemes, as Gauthier et al. point out (2013: 261–62). We can also see religious activity in many parts of the world operating within new forms of cultural political economy (Gauthier et al. 2013: 261), dominated by consumerism, global media and manifestations of neoliberalism. Through these new forms, market logics seem to permeate many areas of policy and practice, ranging from education or welfare to religion. As Osella and Rudnyckyj (2017: 10) point out, this new economic dispensation has ‘inspired changing forms of religious practice, just as religious moralities have been deployed in new ways in the market’. A post-Fordist era of flexibilized production and global, if uneven, dispersal of labour challenges centralized, Keynesian, state controls over the economy, while creating conditions for rendering the mobility (and immobility) of people and resources objects of considerable anxiety for both governments and individuals. These contemporary varieties of uncertainty not only present problems for stable governance; they also challenge national frames of reference and memory (Hervieu-Léger 1999) at the level of participation in established churches, shared forms of cultural identification, and popular understandings of belonging to particular territories. We can thus see why an increasing volume of research has emerged concerning such issues as ‘detraditionalized’ forms of spirituality, troubled relations between religion and welfare provision, and – perhaps most spectacularly – the growth of prosperity-oriented forms of Pentecostalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). As Coleman (2014: 283) has pointed out, in an era of labour mobility and the flourishing of neoliberal ideologies, such Christianity – well adapted to city life, often borne by labour migrants in the global South as well as those moving from global South to North, and lending spiritual reinforcement to both physical movement and career aspiration – has been a highly productive area of study for scholars interested in contemporary interweavings of capitalism and religion, as well as in the state’s attempts to regulate or exploit corporate, often explicitly transregional or transnational, expressions of faith. Our argument in this volume is that pilgrimage is also an excellent but hitherto under-exploited means of examining these issues. Pilgrimage is an activity and a field constituted around both movement and the constant, chronic work that goes into place-making and place-maintaining. It also raises epistemological and ontological questions concerning what constitutes religion and economic activity, as well as the relationship between them. Pilgrimage is not only a source of popular religious activity but is also subject to varied forms of control on the part of national churches, denominations, social movements, commercial enterprises, and

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regional and national governments, not to mention transnational organizations, such as UNESCO. Furthermore, it often accompanies or mitigates trajectories of labour migration and diaspora formation that result from economic and political demands for flexibilized workforces (cf Eade and Garbin 2007). Pilgrimage is about so much more than the creation of a set-apart, sacred realm, therefore. Indeed, the Turners themselves recognized this point when they described the pilgrimage ‘environment’ as a network of mundane ‘servicing mechanisms’ that included markets, hospices, hospitals, military supports, legal devices … systems of communication and transportation, and so on – as well as antagonistic agencies, such as official or unofficial representatives of hostile faiths, bandits, thieves, confidence men, and even backsliders within the pilgrim ranks. (Turner and Turner 1978: 22)

We contend that all of these elements, and more, are not merely incidental or supplementary to the social scientific or historical study of pilgrimage; they are inherent dimensions of the phenomenon as an object of study as well as a social force. A political economy approach focuses attention on an expanded environment of operation that illustrates the significance for pilgrimage of national and transnational scales of planning, infrastructure and economic activity, even in relation to smaller shrines, since these are often linked in direct or indirect ways to wider spheres of influence. We might, of course, ask why pilgrimage has not been approached through such a perspective before – or, at least, not enough. Our answers are suggestive rather than definitive. Aside from the ‘over-sacralizing’ of pilgrimage contexts, it may be that a focus on shrines as bounded containers of either communitas or contestation has blinded us from examining wider pilgrimage environments, and indeed from furthering the potential agenda that the Turners sketched out. In addition, as Vikash Singh suggests when asking why pilgrimage has been so marginal to the sociology of religion literature, ‘Where it is scholars in religious studies and anthropologists that do detailed ethnographic work on popular religious practice, including pilgrimages in various societies, the broader discourse on religion and globalization is defined by political scientists and sociologists’ (Singh 2013: 285). In practice, we need the detailed ethnography and the broader overview, and pilgrimage, in this sense, provides an ideal opportunity for varieties of multi-sited ethnography that look not only at a single, seemingly isolated shrine but also at a much wider landscape of connection, communication, competition, fractal-like replication, networking, mobility, infrastructure and governance.

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Arguably, such a widening of perspectives has been anticipated by ethnographic perspectives that have shown the importance of looking at the experience of pilgrims not only at shrines but also before they leave and, in particular, once they reach home (e.g. Gold 1990; Delaney 1990; Frey 1998; Coleman 2014; Kaell 2014). It reinforces the implication by Eade and Sallnow (1991) that in order to understand pilgrims’ attitudes and activities at shrines we need to understand their ideological positions away from shrines. In addition, a growing appreciation of global and transnational flows of people, goods, information and images has led some students of Christian pilgrimage to pay more attention to the varied and interconnected links between multiple ‘homes’ (see Tweed 1997; Petersen, Vasquez and Williams 2001; Vasquez and Marquardt 2003; Coleman and Eade 2004; Notermans 2012). Certainly, these perspectives expand the temporal and institutional focus of pilgrimage studies, raising questions about how to define the boundaries of the field. Such tendencies are promoted even more by a concern for how the salience of pilgrimage extends into questions and arenas of political economy.

Broadening Perspectives The long-standing but still growing literature on the connections between pilgrimage and tourism has given added impetus to understanding the links with a supposedly ‘secular’, commercial activity (see, for example, Rinschede 1992; Vukonic 1992; Murray and Graham 1997; Swatos and Tomasi 2002; Badone and Roseman 2004; Kaufman 2005; Timothy and Olsen 2006; Blackwell 2007; Mu et al. 2007; Stausberg 2011; Di Giovine and Picard 2015). Yet the imbrications and mixtures outlined in the previous section have been more obvious to those working outside the anglophone study of Christian pilgrimage in Western Europe and North America. Hence, in Latin American countries, researchers writing not only in English but also in Spanish and Portuguese have uncovered complex relationships between religion, politics and commerce, as well as between Catholic teaching and everyday beliefs and practices. Since the present volume is directed primarily to an anglophone audience, reference is made here only to the English-language publications by Wolf (1958), Della Cava (1970), Slater (1986), Crumrine and Morinis (1991), Slater (2015) and Toniol and Steil (2015) (also see the chapters by Fortuny and Steil in this volume). A similar sensitivity to the entanglements of religion, politics and/or commerce is evident in studies undertaken in India and Japan (see, for instance, van der Veer 1988; Sax 1991; Thal 2005; Reader 2005, 2014; Bianchi 2004; and Singh 2013).

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An important recent addition to the literature is Ian Reader’s Pilgrimage in the Marketplace (2014), which has a broad scope but builds most extensively on work rooted in Japanese Buddhism – in other words, a cultural and religious context where the post-Reformation, Christian-inflected biases within social scientific theory are challenged. Reader’s fundamental aim is to show how pilgrimage operates not merely in the marketplace, but through it, via the deployment of consumer activity, publicity and promotion. Here shrine administrators contend less with the character of the sacred as with a market share of pilgrims, who may not be as numerous as is often assumed (ibid.: 8). In these terms, the nature of pilgrimage is not despoiled by commercialism; it is (partially) constituted by it. Indeed, for Reader, such interweavings between what we usually call the religious and the economic, so evident in historical and contemporary Japan, have parallels with very early Christian sites (ibid.: 11; see also Adler 2002: 27), medieval Christian Europe (Reader 2014: 16; see also Sumption 1975 and Webb 2002) and Hindu pilgrimage sites (Reader 2014: 17). An important implication of his approach that we highlight here is that it extends the range of analysis from the shrines themselves to places such as exhibitions in shopping malls, railway lines and airports, tourist offices and so on. Taking the multitude of such activities and places into account helps to demonstrate the considerable amount of work and, often, conscious strategizing involved in building up and maintaining what we might think of as a pilgrimage ‘system’, ‘assemblage’ or even ‘multi-site’ rather than a single sacred locale. It also opposes what Reader sees as the tendency of some scholars to refer to shrines as if they had some kind of inherent ‘spiritual magnetism’ (Preston 1992); rather, the language of the sacred is shown to be deployed in ways that are as entrepreneurial as they are pious. In fact, we might argue that Weberian charisma is, and has always been, a combination of the two. Thus, Sedona in Arizona has become a New Age pilgrimage site as local tourist agencies have transformed the area into a base for outdoor activists, while more spiritually oriented activists have identified ‘power spots’ in the landscape and organized tours of sacred features (ibid.: 33). Reader does not point out the connection, but there are parallels between his position and that taken by Eade and Sallnow (1991). Although their contestation metaphor has attracted widespread attention (see also Coleman 2002), they also talk about how ‘in a perfect illustration of the classic Marxist model of fetishization and alienation, the shrine … appears to its devotees as if it were itself dispensing the divine power … which they seek’ (Eade and Sallnow 1991: 15–16). Reader’s critique of the idea of sui generis magnetism parallels, therefore, their reference to the fetishization

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of holy influence, with both stances implying that informants and scholars have tended to take the sacredness of shrines too much for granted. This scepticism towards inherent sacrality and, particularly in Reader’s case, specific reference to the multiple agencies involved in the construction of pilgrimage, might be pitched against Victor Turner’s (1973) famous characterization of the shrine as the ‘center out there’, marked by its isolation from everyday politicking and commerce, and thus also distinguishing home sharply from sacred goal (Turner 1973, 195). In fact, when a broader perspective is adopted, many ‘centres’ can be seen to be involved in the production and popularization of any site/multi-site. Or, as Bajc, Coleman and Eade (2007) have argued, pilgrimages can be understood as working through networks of mobilities around which objects, cultures and people circulate, with always fragile ‘destinations’ being made, remade and displaced at different scales of both time and space. We therefore find resonances between our own approach and Reader’s broadening out of what needs to be examined in truly comprehensive studies of pilgrimage. Our emphasis on a political economy approach – and, indeed, a market approach − should not be taken to imply that economic or political relations and strategies somehow represent the ultimate, underlying explanation for the emergence of pilgrimage sites and systems. Such a view would grant too much agency to the strategic master plans of administrators, politicians and entrepreneurs, or to the determining force of material relations. The dynamism and adaptability of pilgrimages emerge through multi-stranded and not always predictable plays of influence among different constituencies, including clergy, politicians, pilgrims, entrepreneurs and wider publics. While factors associated with both economy and governance must be acknowledged, we should avoid the temptation, suggested by neoliberal paradigms, of only allowing ourselves to think through economic metaphors. A fetishization of the powers of the sacred must not be replaced by a fetishization of the transcendental forces of the market. We see both our and Reader’s approaches as expanding the field of pilgrimage studies, not forcing it down a narrow path. Furthermore, we need to develop a sophisticated understanding of what actually might be meant by ‘the market’ in relation to pilgrimage. In their recent overview of religion and the ‘morality of the market’, Osella and Rudnyckyj (2017: 9) note how what we call the market is produced as an effect of the cumulative interventions of a heterogeneous assemblage, involving both human and nonhuman actors: market traders, economists, mathematicians, state apparatuses, legislations, educational institutions, economic theories, information technology, algorithms, electronic trading and more.

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In other words, this is an assemblage that is always changing, is likely to look different according to one’s vantage point at any given moment, and transcends any single human institution. Different representations of the market also call forth different forms of response. For instance, the (modernist) assertion of the amoral, impassive workings of market forces is likely to call forth its equal and equivalent opposite – an impassioned call for the need for ‘pure’ forms of compassion and charity – even if the unadulterated existence of either stance is sociologically unlikely. Or, in the world of scholarly analysis, some writers argue that market-like relations may in themselves act as catalysing forces for the exercise of faith, as in the claims of rational-choice theorists that competition among religious actors is likely to increase participation (Stark and Bainbridge 1985; discussed in Osella and Rudnyckyj 2017: 3). While we have critiqued ethnographic approaches to pilgrimage for their rather exclusive focus on particular ‘sacred’ locations, we argue for the value of good ethnography in exposing the contradictions, subtleties and multi-dimensional character of whatever is instantiated as market relations in any given situation. Here, for instance, we note the work of Vikash Singh (2013) mentioned earlier, in which he refers to the operations of global capitalism but does so through a detailed focus on the Kanwar pilgrimage to Hardwar, an annual operation that involves some twelve million people in religious actions involving, among other things, the arduous movement over perhaps hundreds of miles of especially young, lower-class males. Singh explores ways in which such pilgrimage performances enact concerns over work and lack of recognition: ‘This is not a flight from the world; rather, it addresses the world. It engages the world, gets a purchase on it, precisely through transcending it’ (ibid.: 293). Singh is neither denying here pilgrimage’s capacity for play or recombination, nor is he consigning such elements to a realm of remote anti-structure. Pilgrimage in these terms both reflects and provides the means for addressing the demands of a liberal capitalist logic, even as its possibilities are not exhausted by its engagement with such logic. Singh shows how a deployment of phenomenology and performance theory can complement and reinforce an acute diagnosis of the links between pilgrimage and political economy. In line with our own intentions, he opens up rather than sets boundaries around his field of study: The pilgrimage, I found, intervenes in the social order through the very figures and moments of transcendence. It provides a field for the participants to address their desires and immediate social responsibilities and perform to the unique challenges of an economically destitute yet very hierarchical society,

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increasingly dominated by a liberal capitalist social logic. This is an open field, one without any gated entries or institutional constraints, and yet, a challenging and productive site to practice and prove one’s resolve, gifts, and good faith. (Singh 2013: 297)

As Singh shows so well, ethnographers need more explicitly to acknowledge the ways in which pilgrimages constitute powerful social forces within but also beyond religious landscapes. This realization brings with it methodological challenges in attempting to assess the difference made by and through pilgrimage-related action. A recent instructive example of evaluating the complexities of influence associated with pilgrimage is provided by the study of a Zion Christian Church (ZCC) gathering (Saayman et al. 2014), which occurs annually at Easter weekend in the Limpopo Province of South Africa and attracts well over a million people. In one sense, the event seems to constitute a ‘set apart’ period of religious concentration, with ZCC leaders insisting that pilgrims stay on site in order to be focused on spiritual growth and not be distracted by tourist sites or attractions. Yet the sheer scale of the event means that it inevitably has considerable economic and logistic impact, given the necessity to provide food, transport, security and so on. For our purposes, one of the most fascinating dimensions of the piece is precisely the difficulty, outlined by the authors, of determining not just the size but also the location of such impact: should one focus on the site alone, the immediate locality, the region, the country, or the places from around the world that some pilgrims have come from? Such impact, as they put it, can be seen as ‘direct, indirect and induced’ (Saayman et al. 2014: 410), pointing to the numerous and ramifying channels through which pilgrimage activities – and effects – flow. As with much multi-sited work, the researcher responds to the demands of the field while understanding that the delimitation of any ‘multi-site’ involves choices based on the research questions one is asking. But the point is to remain open to where the pilgrimage assemblage seems to lead. There are times when the influence of pilgrimage in realms of governance can be detected, occasionally in ways that manifest quite directly in observable social institutions. Anne Feldhaus (2003: 14–15) argues that pilgrimage and what she calls ‘religious-geographical conceptions’ may have played a role in the founding of the State of Maharashtra in 1960. Furthermore, she notes that in contexts around the world where regional and national political movements have arisen – for instance in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Indonesia – pilgrimages may even be seen as broad expressions of a kind of ‘proto-nationalism’ (ibid.: 221). Writing from a very different evidence base – that of archaeology – Joy

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McCorriston (2013) explores the idea that pilgrimage may have played an important role in the emergence of Arabian complex societies during the first millennium bce, as mobile pastoralists gathered to reify communities, reshape social arenas and engage in economic exchanges. The results of such crystallizations of community, therefore, appear to have been deeply ‘structural’ in the long term. One of the most developed studies of pilgrimage as an instrument of social, political and economic order is provided by Emanuel Marx’s work on the Bedouin of Mount Sinai from the 1960s onwards, in which he examines the political economy of tribal groupings whose way of life is linked to regional, national and global forces (Marx 1977: 9). The immediate landscape of South Sinai contains some 130 saints’ tombs (ibid.: 134), twenty of which serve as pilgrimage centres. Marx shows how the functioning of such centres in the lives of the Bedouin must be understood in parallel with the fact that most men work in insecure jobs and are often away from their families for much of the year. Given the lack of other resources and the general distance of state infrastructures, pilgrimage brings people together who ‘help to make an alternative economy’ (ibid.: 166), since gatherings enable meetings with friends and relatives, contacts with business associates from various tribes, and reaffirm the right to use territorial resources. As Marx puts it, in reflecting on the ritualized activities at saints’ tombs, ‘purely’ spiritual occasions are inconceivable, as indeed are ‘purely’ material ones (ibid.: 154). If these examples from South Africa, India, ancient Arabia and Sinai all point to the influence of pilgrimage in economic and political realms, there is also evidence for it being deployed as a tool for soft power in international relations. Mikiya Koyagi (2014) provides the striking case of the Hajj enacted by Japanese travellers during the interwar period. He notes that at this time the Japanese government hoped to develop an alliance with Islam as part of a vision of a new world order in Asia, with the Imperial State keen to expand such economic connections as a means of mitigating economic hardships generated by the Great Depression. Thus, Koyagi quotes the words of one pilgrim, who is explaining the meaning of Allah to his fellow countrymen and women: It may sound disrespectful (to the Emperor) to say that the ideal main god for West Asians today (i.e. Allah) is the same as the ancestor of our Emperor … Still, I came to believe that what they worship in a changed form is nothing but the ancestor of our Emperor. It is the duty of our nation and essential for the grand plan of the Imperial Nation to propagate the absolute Shinto Faith, enlighten people, and enrich them by changing them into the subjects of the Emperor. (Koyagi 2014: 854)

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In this account, the intersections of religion, forms of governance, empire and conversion are genuinely difficult to disentangle; there is little evidence that the Hajj itself actually had any of the effects described. Yet the point here is to indicate the understanding of the Hajj as a conduit both for a universalized sense of faith and for an almost missionary sense of transmitting political fealty to a foreign realm.

Contributions to a Widened Field A political economy approach implies that economic relations – not only market ones but also others associated with patronage, public works, the financing of national religious bodies and so on – are enmeshed with actions (successful or not) aimed at directing resources in ways that benefit state or other political entities. In these terms, pilgrimages are to be seen as ‘resources’ that contain or generate numerous forms of capital (monetary, cultural, social), even as they might simultaneously promote ideologies that militate against the accumulation of what are perceived as secular expressions of prestige and power. Thus, we agree with the common understanding of a pilgrimage as characteristically made up of ‘crossings’ (Tweed 1997, 2006) and intersections, but the intersections that we focus on are not merely associated with liminal relations between heaven and earth, but also with the encounters between religious, ethnic, political, economic, national and transnational frames of reference. Contributors to this volume investigate how wider factors behind national and transnational mobility have impacted on pilgrimage activity in, and by definition across, different parts of the world. We are particularly interested in how pilgrimage relates to movements associated with migration (often prompted by economic and/or political imperatives), diaspora and political cooperation or conflict across nation-states. While tourism is often associated with voluntary action, pilgrimage may equally be practised by communities that have undergone enforced journeys away from homelands, and ones where the prospects of return may be unclear. Under such circumstances, we ask how pilgrimage might work in the creation of new landscapes of ambiguous and/or aspirational belonging, possibly overlaying or even claiming historically and religiously charged sites in host nations. How are assumptions concerning ‘sacred’ action translated into new contexts and novel temporalities, where the role of religion in the public and civic spheres might be viewed and regulated very differently from the situation at home? More generally, how can we see pilgrimage as not so much reflecting, or in competition with, secular assumptions and institutions, but articulating with them, so that for instance the experience

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of forced migration might be translated into the domesticating routines of ritual, creating chains of mobility that shade into each other over time? The volume is made up of chapters that have been commissioned to provide a range of geographical perspectives. They indicate how the movements of the colonial past still have effects in the postcolonial world, but also how the minutiae of religious action in a given shrine can provide a ritualized commentary on much wider articulations of identity. We cover not only various forms of Christianity but also Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and the New Age. Our first chapter is an exploration of the networks linking Hindus in India with their co-religionists across the Indian Ocean in Mauritius. As Mathieu Claveyrolas points out, Mauritius has always been embedded in globalized contexts. A crossroads of ancient sea routes, the island has been populated by Africans, Indians and Europeans. Slave trade and indenture labour accounted for most of its population. Today, half of the island’s 1,200,000 inhabitants identify themselves as Hindus and most are descended from the half a million indentured labourers brought there from India during the second part of the nineteenth century. From the early twentieth century they managed to gain access to land and property and, after national independence in 1968, members of the Hindu elite gained control of political power. Claveyrolas shows how shrines in sugarcane plantations and temples in villages close to the plantations were part of the settlement of Hinduism in the island and its invention as ‘Little India’. Encouraged by the dominant political elite, Hindu Mauritians have been (re-)developing rapidly growing links with India, among other things through local priests or devotees going there as tourists and pilgrims. Ganga Talao, a sacred lake in the Mauritian mountains, was claimed to be connected to the Indian Ganges and it developed as the island’s main Hindu pilgrimage site, attracting hundreds of thousands of pilgrims not only from Mauritius but also from India. First conceived as a consolation for the loss of Hindu India, Ganga Talao both duplicates the sacred motherland of Hinduism (India) and gradually becomes seen as unique. The ways by which community leaders and institutions have managed the site and the pilgrimage illustrate, then, the role played by pilgrimage in diasporic contexts through mobilizing not only the religious but also the economic and political soft-power dimensions of transnational links. In Chapter 2 we move to India itself and transnational networks generated by young Indians working at the famous Buddhist pilgrimage site of Bodh Gaya in the northern state of Bihar. David Geary begins at the national level and the federal government’s development of political and economic collaborations with the Japanese government, which include

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the development of the country’s Buddhist pilgrimage circuit. Analysing Buddhist heritage as forming mechanisms of soft power, he shows how Buddhism provides a cultural and political resource for strengthening partnerships and creating formal bilateral aid arrangements across Asia. The increasing importance of pilgrimage activities at several Buddhist sites in north India has generated an array of economic, social and romantic opportunities for local Indian residents that are not available in other parts of the country. Drawing on stories of transnational encounter and cross-cultural ties between East and East, Geary examines the role played by pilgrimage and the service sector in providing jobs that can lead to marriage proposals and migration. These stories reveal some of the emotional entanglements and cultural constraints that underlie these romantic ties and emerging inter-Asian connections in the early twenty-first century. In Chapter 3 the focus shifts to Pakistan, where Rémy Delage seeks to develop a political economy approach to the study of Sufism and South Asian devotionalism, while considering the importance of movement and religious circulation in reconfiguring the geography of Muslim pilgrimages and ritual cartographies. To substantiate this general project Delage focuses on the shrine of the Muslim saint, La`l Shahbâz Qalandar. He describes how the migration of the saint and his disciples from the West has forged imaginary links between past and present sacred geographies and how these transnational Islamic imaginaries coexist with emerging forms of local religiosity. The intimate relationship between religion and politics has played a major role in changing the nature of the places Delage describes. Hence, the partition of British India led to the flight of Hindu families, who had long been involved in the shrine’s ritual activities. Furthermore, the cult’s repositioning towards Shiism reflects its transnational religious and political connections with Iran and the Central Asian republics. The emergence of a new map of ritual places also reflects the shrine’s re-appropriation by Shias from within Pakistan, who constitute the main audience during the pilgrimage season. Although the state has tried to project the official version of an orthodox Sunni Islam onto this major Sufi site, it has signally failed to counter the growth of Shia influence. In the next chapter we move further west to Central Asia and the Republic of Uzbekistan. Maria Louw explores national and transnational conceptions of Islam and Muslimness through an ethnographic study of shrines in the city of Bukhara. Most of these are grave sites – the burial places of Muslim saints – but there are also sites that have other connections with a saint: they may be places with which he or she has been in contact, rested or performed a miracle. Today, many are being used

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as places where the post-Soviet ideology of national independence can be proclaimed, an ideology that promotes a particular Uzbek form of Muslimness and which tends to see transnational Islam as a threat. Yet, while the shrines are replete with traces of the links established between Bukhara and the wider Islamic world that point to the city’s glorious past associated with the Silk Road and its fame as a centre for Islamic learning and mysticism, they are also sites for imaginaries that call for the re-establishment of ties with the wider Islamic umma. The chapter explores, then, the tensions between national and transnational conceptions of Islam and Muslimness and the ways in which they find their expression in pilgrimage practices. Mario Katić’s chapter on Bosnian Croat migrants’ annual visits to their homeland and associated shrines is also rooted in transnational landscapes, while exploring a concept that juxtaposes and interweaves the themes of this volume. The term ‘pilgrimage capital’ draws on Bourdieusian models to refer to the capital that contributes to and participates in the promotion, development and (re-)construction of pilgrimage places. It thus operates at the intersections between producers and consumers of pilgrimage, clergy and entrepreneurs, economic gain and religious or historical imagination, displacement and the remaking of place. Katić traces the re-establishment of a number of Christian shrines in a region still marked by post-Second World War migration as well as post-communist ructions, involving tense relations among Croats and Serbs. And, as he notes pithily of one shrine, Kondžilo in Northern Bosnia, ‘Wherever there is a mass of potential voters, it is normal to find politicians’. The capital analysed here is clearly a resource, tied to the location, materiality and history of various sites; it can be accumulated, but is not in itself a stable entity given that it is always reacting to the shifting economic and political imperatives of the region. If many of the pilgrims described by Katić are suspended between different forms of agency in their travels across Europe, combining economic necessity with the regular desire to return ‘home’, Anna Fedele depicts a very different form of mobility: that orchestrated by ‘spiritual entrepreneurs’ as they translate Roman Catholic sites into New Age power places, both marketing the sacred in neoliberal fashion but also articulating new ‘landscapes of belonging’ for travellers seeking re-enchantment. While the dominant analytical metaphor for Katić was that of capital – itself a term touching on but going beyond purely economic forms of prestige and power – for Fedele the guiding metaphor is ‘energy’, a term describing how distinctions between tourism and pilgrimage, Catholicism and the New Age, become blurred in pilgrimages that complement both ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ assumptions. Energy itself is, in effect, part of

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a transnational lingua franca for those who see themselves as ‘spiritual’ rather than religious per se. Like Katić, Fedele makes her case by juxtaposing the development of different shrines and allowing us to see how common themes are translated across multiple sites. In so doing, she shows how, like religion itself, ‘energy grammar’ is both product of and antidote to the disembedding mechanisms of modernity. When Fedele’s pilgrims talk of returning ‘home’, they do not mean the nostalgic homeland of Katić’s informants, but rather a search for the possibility of feeling ‘grounded’ in the earth. Interestingly, national and regional Church administrators across Europe and the Americas are not only aware of such visitors, but also torn between the desire to preserve what they see as the authenticity of shrines and the imperative to attract people to what Reader might well call the pilgrimage market. In the next two chapters we shift the focus towards Latin America, where the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church has been challenged from a variety of directions. Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola examines the connections between transnational labour migration and pilgrimage to the headquarters of a Pentecostal Church, La Luz del Mundo (The Light of the World) in the Mexican seaside town of Guadalajara. Economic, social, cultural and political activities are closely connected through the cyclical movement of migrants, who are involved in constant border crossings between the USA and Mexico. This migration differs from that of other nationalities in Latin America because transnationalism among Mexican immigrants has been in existence for a very long time. After a short outline of the Church’s history and a discussion of migrants’ perceptions concerning the annual pilgrimage, Fortuny Loret de Mola describes the various ritual events that are held at and around the Church’s Mexican headquarters during August when the migrants return in force from the USA. She then places these religious ceremonies in a wider structural context, explaining their role as ‘active economic agents connecting different places and transforming them at local, national and global levels’. Hence, a broad range of economic and social activities are undertaken during the pilgrimage, such as reinforcing old and building new friendships, undertaking marriages and beginning romantic liaisons, trading cars and enjoying the local beach. The economic influence of these transnational migrants is also felt beyond Guadalajara, as some visitors also travel across the region and take the opportunity to add to the special items purchased in Guadalajara for use in festivities back in America. Carlos Alberto Steil also analyses an alternative to, or at least adaptation of, Roman Catholic forms of pilgrimage in his discussion of the Caminhos de Santiago (Paths of Saint James) in Brazil. These routes are the new creation

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of a notable assemblage of agencies – local councils, the state, the Church, tourist agencies, university and civil society organizations and so on – and they produce pilgrimage routes that translate both the European idea of the Camino to Brazil, and the hierarchical assumptions of Catholicism into the more immanent, postmodern spiritualities of New Age walkers. The ‘sacred’ is patently being constructed in this case study and it is mobile, indeterminate and often embodied within the self. This internalization is not only a matter of theology or phenomenology; it is also cultivated on pathways whose function and trajectory indicate a wider reconfiguration of religion and the cultural economy in Brazil as a whole. Taken as a group, these chapters not only introduce us to pilgrimages from different religions and countries, but also explore a huge variety of institutional locations: shrines, plantations, UNESCO offices, regional and national government and so on. They show how a political economy approach is not a reduction of pilgrimage to a set of economic imperatives or market metaphors. It is an invitation to broaden our focus in ways that will be both ever more relevant and ever more productive: pilgrimage perceived at different and overlapping scales; linked in chains of production and promotion with religious bodies as well as commercial and governmental bodies; conjoining and blurring the boundaries between movement and the making of place. Simon Coleman is Chancellor Jackman Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. He works on topics relating to pilgrimage, Pentecostalism, cathedrals and the practice of religion in urban contexts. He has conducted fieldwork in Sweden, the UK and Nigeria. A former editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, he is currently co-editor of the journal Religion and Society: Advances in Research and a co-editor of the book series ‘Routledge Studies in Pilgrimage, Religious Travel and Tourism’. Previous books relating to pilgrimage include Pilgrimage Past and Present in the World Religions (Harvard UP, written with J. Elsner, 1995), Pilgrim Voices: Narrative and Authorship in Christian Pilgrimage (Berghahn, edited with John Elsner, 2003) and Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion (Routledge, edited with J. Eade, 2004). He is currently contributing to an Arts and Humanities Research Council study of pilgrimage and English cathedrals led by Dee Dyas (University of York). John Eade is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Roehampton, Visiting Professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, co-founder of the ‘Routledge Studies in Pilgrimage, Religious Travel and Tourism’ series and co-editor of the

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‘Bloomsbury Religion, Space and Place’ series. His research interests focus on the anthropology of pilgrimage, global migration and urban ethnicity. Relevant publications include Contesting the Sacred (Routledge, edited with M. Sallnow, 1991), Reframing Pilgrimage (Routledge, edited with S. Coleman, 2004), Pilgrimage, Politics and Place-Making in Eastern Europe (Routledge, edited with M. Katić, 2014) and International Perspectives on Pilgrimage Studies (Routledge, 2015) and New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies (Routledge, 2017), both of which he co-edited with D. Albera.

References Adler, J. 2002. ‘The Holy Man as Traveler and Travel Attraction: Early Christian Asceticism and the Moral Problematic of Modernity’, in W. Swatos and L. Tomasi (eds), From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism: The Social and Cultural Economics of Piety. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, pp. 25–50. Badone, E., and S. Roseman (eds). 2004. Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Bajc, V., S Coleman, and J. Eade. 2007. ‘Introduction: Mobility and Centring in Pilgrimage’, Mobilities 2(3): 321–29. Bianchi, R. 2004. Guests of God: Pilgrimage and Politics in the Islamic World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blackwell, R. 2007. ‘Motivations for Religious Tourism, Pilgrimage, Festivals and Events’, in R. Raj and N. Morpeth (eds), Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Festivals Management: An International Perspective. Wallingford, UK: CABI, pp. 35–47. Bowman, G. (ed.). 2012. Sharing the Sacra: The Politics and Pragmatics of Intercommunal Relations around Holy Places. New York: Berghahn Books. Coleman, S. 2014. ‘Pilgrimage as Trope for an Anthropology of Christianity’, Current Anthropology 55(S10): S281–91. Coleman, S., and J. Eade (eds). 2004. Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion. London: Routledge. Coleman, S. 2002. ‘Do You Believe in Pilgrimage? Communitas, Contestation and Beyond.’ Anthropological Theory 2 (3): 355–368. Comaroff, J. and J.L. Comaroff. 2001. ‘Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming’, in J. Comaroff and J.L. Comaroff (eds), Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–56. Crumrine, N., and A. Morinis (eds). 1991. Pilgrimage in Latin America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Delaney, C. 1990. ‘The Hajj: Sacred and Secular’, American Ethnologist 17(5): 13–30. Della Cava, R. 1970. Miracle at Joaseiro. New York: Columbia University Press. Di Giovine, M., and D. Picard. 2015. The Seductions of Pilgrimage: Sacred Journeys Afar and Astray in the Western Religious Tradition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Digance, J. 2003. ‘Pilgrimage at Contested Sites’, Annals of Tourism Research 30(1): 143–59. Dubisch, J.  1995. In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Duijzings, G. 2000. Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Eade, J., and D. Garbin. 2007. ‘Reinterpreting the Relationship between Centre and Periphery: Pilgrimage and Sacred Spatialisation among Polish and Congolese Communities in Britain’, Mobilities 2(3): 413–24. Eade, J., and M. Katić (eds). 2014. Crossing the Borders: Pilgrimage, Politics and Place-Making in Eastern Europe. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Eade, J., and M. Sallnow (eds). 1991. Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage. London: Routledge. Fedele, A. 2013. 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 in India. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Frey, N. 1998. Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gauthier, F., et al. 2013. ‘Acknowledging a Global Shift: A Primer for Thinking about Religion in Consumer Societies’, Implicit Religion 16(3): 261–76. Gold, A. 1990. Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hermkens, A.-K., W. Jansen, and C. Notermans (eds). 2009. Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Hervieu-Léger, D. 1999. Le pelerin et le converti: la religion en movement [The Pilgrim and the Convert: Religion in Movement]. Paris: Champs Flammarion. Ivakhiv, A. 2001. Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kaell, H. 2014. Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage. New York: New York University Press. Kaufman, S. 2005 Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kormina, J. 2004. ‘Pilgrims, Priest and Local Religion in Contemporary Russia: Contested Religious Discourses’, Folklore 28: 25–40. Koyagi, M. 2014. ‘The Hajj by Japanese Muslims in the Interwar Period: Japan’s PanAsianism and Economic Interests in the Islamic World’, Journal of World History 24(4): 849–76. Maclean, K. 2008. Pilgrimage and Power: The Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, 1765–1954. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, E. 1977. ‘Communal and Individual Pilgrimage: The Region of Saints’ Tombs in South Sinai’, in R. Werbner (ed.), Regional Cults. London: Athlone Press, pp. 29–54. McCorriston, J. 2013. ‘Pastoralism and Pilgrimage: Iban Khaldun’s Bayt-State Model and the Rise of Arabian Kingdoms’, Current Anthropology 54(5): 607–41. McLeary, R., and R. Barro. 2006. ‘Religion and Economy’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 20(2): 49–72. Mu, Z., et al. 2007. ‘Religious Tourism and Cultural Pilgrimage: A Chinese Perspective’, in R. Raj and N. Morpeth (eds), Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Festivals Management: An International Perspective. Wallingford, UK: CABI, pp. 98–112. Murray, M., and B. Graham. 1997. ‘Exploring the Dialectics of Route-Based Tourism: The Camino de Santiago’, Tourism Management 18(8): 513–24. Notermans, C. 2012. ‘Interconnected and Gendered Mobilities: African Migrants on Pilgrimage to Our Lady of Lourdes in France’ in W. Jansen and C. Notermans (eds), Gender, Nation and Religion in European Pilgrimage. Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. 19–36. Osella, F., and D. Rudnyckyj (eds). 2017. Religion and the Morality of the Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perry, N., and L. Echeverria. 1988. Under the Heel of Mary. London: Routledge.

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Petersen, A., M. Vásquez, and P. Williams (eds). 2001. Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Preston, J. 1992. ‘Spiritual Magnetism: An Organizing Principle for the Study of Pilgrimage’, in A. Morinis (ed.), The Anthropology of Pilgrimage. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 31–46. Raj, R., and K. Griffin (eds). 2015. Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Management: An International Perspective. Wallingford, UK: CABI. Reader, I. 2005. Making Pilgrimages: Meaning and Practice in Shikoku. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press. Reader, I. 2014. Pilgrimage in the Marketplace. London: Routledge. Rinschede, G. 1992. ‘Forms of Religious Tourism’, Annals of Tourism Research 19(1): 51–67. Saayman, A., et al. 2014. ‘Perspectives on the Regional Economic Value of a Pilgrimage’, International Journal of Tourism Research 16(4): 407–14. Sax, W. 1991. Mountain Goddess: Gender and Politics in the Himalayan Pilgrimage. London: Oxford University Press. Singh, V. 2013. ‘Work, Performance, and the Social Ethic of Global Capitalism: Understanding Religious Practice in Contemporary India’, Sociological Forum 28(2): 283–307. Slater, C. 1986. Trail of Miracles: Stories from a Pilgrimage in Northeast Brazil. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Slater, C. 2015. ‘Journey to Juazeiro’, Room One Thousand 3(3): 339–66. Stark, R., and W. Bainbridge. 1985. The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Stausberg, M. 2011. Religion and Tourism: Crossroads, Destinations, and Encounters. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Steil, C. 2017. ‘Studies of Catholicism and Pilgrimage in Brazil: Continuities and Ruptures over the Long-Term’, in J. Eade and D. Albera (eds), New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies. New York: Routledge, pp. 162–180 Sumption, J. 1975. Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion. London: Faber and Faber. Swatos, W., and L. Tomasi (eds). 2002. From Medieval Pilgrimage to Religious Tourism: The Social and Cultural Economics of Piety. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Thal, S. 2005. Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods: The Politics of a Pilgrimage Site in Japan, 1573–1912. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Timothy, D., and D. Olsen (eds). 2006. Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Toniol, R., and C. Steil. 2015. On the Nature Trail: Converting the Rural into Ecological through a State Tourism Policy. New York: Nova Publishers. Turner, V. 1972. ‘The Center Out There: The Pilgrim’s Goal’, History of Religions 12(3): 191–230. Turner, V., and E. Turner. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Tweed, T. 2006. Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tweed, T. 1997. Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami. New York: Oxford University Press. Valeri, M. 2010. Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Van der Veer, P. 1994. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Van der Veer, P. 1988. Gods on Earth: The Management of Religious Experience and Identity in a North Indian Pilgrimage Centre. London: The Athlone Press.

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Vásquez, M. and M. Marquardt. 2003. Globalizing the Sacred: Religion Across the Americas. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Vogel, S., and N. Barma (eds). 2008. The Political Economy Reader. New York: Routledge. Vukonić, B. 1992. ‘Medjugorje’s Religion and Tourism Connection’, Annals of Tourism Research 19(1): 79–91. Webb, D. 2002. Medieval European Pilgrimage c.700–c.1500. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolf, E. 1958. ‘The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol’, Journal of American Folklore 71: 34–39.

Chapter 1

From the Indian Ganges to a Mauritian Lake Hindu Pilgrimage in a ‘Diasporic’ Context Mathieu Claveyrolas

A

t first glance, ‘Hinduism in diaspora’ sounds like an oxymoron. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did the term Hinduism first appear in a political context when anti-British Indian nationalists were eager to unify all Hindus, and to promote a reformed version of Hinduism able to compete with monotheist religions (Vertovec 2000). Hinduism was then invented as coterminous with the Indian national territory. Hindu fundamentalists have constantly argued that one could only be truly Hindu while living in India (hence the sometimes-violent campaigns against India’s Muslims and Catholics). Conversely, this meant that one could not be Hindu outside India’s sacred territory (dharmabhumi). Such an argument was all the more problematic since it was developed roughly during the same period (from 1850 to 1950) when half a million mainly Hindu Indians left India for Mauritius and settled down there quite successfully. If India is the paramount reference for Hinduism, how can Hindu pilgrimage develop outside this country? This chapter will seek to answer this question by studying the role of Hindu pilgrimage in the Mauritian context, both as a paradigm for domesticating displacement (when Mauritian pilgrimage is built on continual references to India) and a tool to promote emplacement (when Mauritian pilgrimage echoes Indo-Mauritians’ rise to power). We will also explore the way in which this pilgrimage case study parallels the changing institutional links between Mauritius and India.

Notes for this chapter begin on page 37.

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The Transnational Context of Indenture to Mauritius Mauritius is an island in the Indian Ocean, some five hundred miles east of Madagascar. This young nation, uninhabited until the seventeenth century, is now densely populated (1.2 million inhabitants for 787 square miles). It was first briefly colonized by the Dutch (1658–1710) and then the French (1715–1810). The latter imported slaves from Africa and Madagascar but also from India, before developing a plantation society around the sugarcane industry at the turn of the nineteenth century. The British eventually took over the island in 1810 and ruled it until 1968, while the abolition of slavery in Mauritius was declared on 1 February 1835. The subsequent demand by the French sugar barons, who still controlled the booming industry, for a cheap workforce was met through indentured labour. Indentured workers were recruited as ‘volunteers’ in British India and were brought to Mauritius to replace the former slaves, who either refused to work for their former masters or asked for decent wages. According to available estimates, from 1835 to 1907, five hundred thousand Indians were brought to Mauritius. Even if a five-year contract was signed that guaranteed a wage and free passage back to India, work and living conditions were very close to slavery, at least during the 1837–53 period (Tinker 1974). Mauritius is often described as a ‘world centre’, given its position at the ‘crossroads of the three continents’. True enough: a quarter of the Mauritian population come from Africa and Madagascar, while twothirds come from India and the remainder originate from France and China. Hinduism, Islam and Catholicism (but also Chinese religious traditions and various Charismatic traditions) are all practised, and you can hear Creole, English, French but also Bhojpuri and other Indian or Chinese languages fluently spoken in Mauritius. The island is often described as a ‘rainbow nation’ in tourist brochures as proof of cultural richness and general tolerance, even if these realities are more endured than accepted with enthusiasm. Indeed, the ‘world centre’ denomination matches a historical fact: Mauritius has more than anywhere else been embedded in globalized contexts. Let us mention, chronologically, the naval rivalry between the French and the British for control of the sea route to India; the slave trade and sugar monoculture meant for export; the transfer of half a million Indians between two British colonies; the current emigration of Mauritians looking for better opportunities in North America, Europe, India, South Africa or Australia; the successive development of textile manufacturing, tourism and ‘global finance’; or the newly revived links between India and its Indo-Mauritian ‘diaspora’.

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Globalization means far more than a catch-all, fashionable phrase from the Mauritian point of view. In less than 150 years, the Indian indentured labourers and their descendants have experienced a remarkable collective success story, from a quasi-enslaved (or lumpen proletariat) status to national political and cultural hegemony. Let me mention a few stages of this success story. First: demographic majority. As early as 1861, Indians accounted for two-thirds of the colony’s population and, before the end of the nineteenth century, Mauritius-born Indians outnumbered those who were born in India. Second: access to the land. Around 1880, economic difficulties led planters to sell their lands and the richest among Indian labourers (the sirdar overseers) started acquiring sugarcane plots, became small planters and soon emerged as important economic agents. Third: political power. Thanks to a new constitution and voting system established in 1948, Indians finally became a political majority. Afterwards, the only ‘fight’ for independence involved a struggle between the British and the colonized population that pitted pro-independence Indo-Mauritians (confident that the democratic majority law would ensure their political future) against anti-independence Creoles and Franco-Mauritians, who feared that Mauritius would become totally Indianized. As a matter of fact, the rainbow nation image of a harmonious multicultural society conceals the Indo-Mauritians’ hegemony and their temptation to disengage from a Mauritian identity born out of the plantation and shared with slave descendants (Claveyrolas 2012). These emplacement processes and strategies within the country are best analysed through religious transfer. Hinduism (a religion declared by half the population in the last census) has rapidly taken root in Mauritius. This happened first in the plantation, where small popular shrines (kalimai) but also bigger temples were installed soon after the first labourers arrived (1860–80), and then at the edge of the plantations, when the first villages were set up by Indian small planters, who rapidly financed Hindu temples (1880–1920). More recently, with labourers being easily able to leave the plantation premises, Hindu celebrations (mainly village processions during calendar festivities) have grown steadily. Impossible to miss thanks to their recurrence and easily identifiable Indian characteristics, they are sometimes perceived as an aggressive claim on village public spaces that reflect a wider (national) communalist development (Claveyrolas 2010b). The reasons behind the Indo-Mauritian communities’ success story lie first and foremost in the island’s history of sugar plantations and not back in India or in some Indian cultural genius, as is often argued locally. However, the links with India have indeed been instrumentalized by

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Indo-Mauritians to galvanize or legitimize their historical rise to power. One of the best-known examples of India’s influence on Mauritius is the day chosen to celebrate Mauritian national independence – 12 March – since this was the very day of Gandhi’s Salt March in India. Early in the twentieth century, the new Indo-Mauritian elites forged links with Indian nationalists. Gandhi himself had stopped in Mauritius when sailing from South Africa to India, and met with local elites before sending his emissary, Manilal Doctor, to represent them in court and promote their empowerment. Even recent Hindu reformist movements such as the Arya Samaj, founded in India in 1875, were implanted in Mauritius at the beginning of the twentieth century, and have had a major influence on the island’s religious and political life, by promoting religious reform and a revival of Indian-ness. Anouck Carsignol’s study of the Indian diaspora perfectly illustrates how the indentured labourers or their descendants were a major lever for the nationalist movement in India. It was a matter of solidarity between colonized victims of the British, forged through the ability of indentured labourers to focus nationalist protest on behalf of those who were being abandoned and ill-treated. Some of the influential political individuals among the IndoMauritians were born in India (Manilal or Gandhi), while others were from Mauritius (the Bisoondoyal brothers – Basdeo Bisoondoyal having been influenced by a trip to India), and some (like Ramgoolam, the ‘father of Independence’) met Indian elites while studying in London. Besides individuals, Indian institutions, whether religious such as the Arya Samaj reformists or political such as the young Indian Congress Party, were deeply invested in the Mauritian situation. When the centenary of indenture was celebrated in 1935, for instance, members of Indian elites helped their Indo-Mauritian counterparts to organize a staging of their history that culminated in the erection of an obelisk in the courtyard of the Mauritian Arya Samaj building commemorating, according to the written text, the first hundred years of ‘Indian colonization’ (Carsignol 2011: 211ff.). Yet relations between India and Mauritius loosened during the following decades (1950–70). On the one hand, Indo-Mauritians had to secure their place on the island and prove their loyalty towards this new nation they were going to rule. On the other hand, Nehru, who became Prime Minister in a recently independent India, did not want to interfere in the fate of emerging nations or abandon his vision of India as a nation-state defined by a territory that excluded Mauritius. Note that Indian nationalists also tended to criticize indentured workers as ‘traitors’ since they left when the country most needed them (Carsignol 2011: 65ff.).

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Only in the 1990s did the links with India flourish again, culturally, politically and economically. This was mainly the result of a reciprocal instrumentalization: India was discovering again and enhancing the assets of its worldwide diaspora (in terms of financial flows and of diplomatic ‘soft power’), while Indo-Mauritians strengthened their political legitimacy and their perception of belonging to a civilization made all the more prestigious through its emergence as a worldwide political and economic power (Carsignol 2011: 203ff). From the 1990s we also note an ever-growing institutionalization of Mauritian Hinduism (Claveyrolas 2014). All over the island, Hindu temples were built or renovated, according to an ‘orthodox’ Indian model. This Indianization of local Hinduism was monitored by national temple federations, which called for a Sanskritization of temples and practices that sharply contrasted with popular non-institutionalized Hinduism linked to the plantations. These federations, financed by the Mauritian secular state as ‘socio-cultural associations’, have brought priests, architects and craftsmen from India in order to counter or ‘correct’ local forms of Hinduism. Even the ritual statues installed in these renovated temples are now made in India and contrast with the stones ‘discovered’ or ritually installed in plantation temples. Temple federations are also powerful political actors, promoting an Indian-ness that often encourages communalism. They have become more and more concerned with political issues outside the country, such as the Ayodhya affair in 1989 when they joined the Hindutva1 worldwide campaign to send consecrated bricks to India to rebuild god Rama’s temple, supposedly destroyed and replaced by a mosque (Eisenlohr 2006: 36). Furthermore, South Indian Mauritian Tamil authorities have regularly protested against the ‘genocide’ of Tamils in Sri Lanka, forcing the Mauritian government to boycott official meetings held in that country. On a general level, the institutionalization of Indian links has been promoted by Mauritian para-governmental organizations (temple federations, the Hindu House, the Voice of Hindus) in support of the Hindutva agenda as ‘provider of [nationalistic] values for overseas Hindus’ (ibid.: 37).

The Political Economy of the Indenture Journey: From Trauma to Pilgrimage Given India’s standing as the true home of Hinduism, the Indian Ocean came to symbolize a space where Indian roots were severed or transferred. Once in Mauritius, Hindu labourers built their own sacred places that were deeply rooted in local plantation structures. Finally, during the twentieth

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century when the descendants of these labourers progressively left the plantations, Hindu communities began to claim the entire Mauritian national territory, most of all through an ever-growing network of sacred places and religious circulations. In the globalized, transnational context of Mauritius, the concept of territory is far from obsolete. Indeed, I will argue, along with Gupta and Ferguson (1997: 3–4), that mass migrations and transnational cultural networks oblige the anthropologist to explore ‘place-making’ and ‘people-making’ processes. In other words, Mauritius, as a territory and nation born out of migrations and typical of a globalized world, urges us to study both displacement and emplacement processes. Religion (its loss, transfer and reconstruction) has played a major part in the Indian indentured experience, just as in most other migratory trajectories (Bava and Capone 2010). As so often, analysis hesitates between the creation, via religion, of hybrid identities, and the reaffirmation or hardening of identities perceived as authentic (Claveyrolas 2010b). In the Mauritian context, the stakes are particularly high. Indeed, within the young nation, which only became independent in 1968, there is still a precarious balance between different communities whose identities are strongly associated with particular religions. Moreover, the Mauritian communities that originated from Indian indentured migrants are not a diasporic minority dependent on their country of origin but a majority community that has been in charge of the concrete and symbolic construction of the Mauritian nation. Given this hegemony, the temptation to focus on a ‘pure’ identity rooting the Indo-Mauritian community in a distant India is very conflictual (Claveyrolas 2012). Before turning to a case study of a Mauritian Hindu pilgrimage, it is important to note the importance and characteristics of the local reference for mobility, i.e. the original displacement of indentured labourers. Such a detour is all the more necessary since we will see that quasi-coerced labour migration can be reformulated into an ideal frame shared with pilgrimage mobility. In a famous quote, William Crooke (1897) describes the Hindus as having no ‘migratory instinct’. While pilgrimage has been widely acknowledged as part of the Hindu tradition for centuries, analysing the general context of mobility and migration among Hindus remains hindered by the cliché that Crooke’s comment illustrates. On the contrary, those who became indentured labourers must be seen as constituting a workforce in a rapidly changing world. They were certainly not living in harmonious self-sufficient villages that were suddenly confronted with strange, entirely new worlds full of violence and alienation. Such an image of an India made of static villages hides a profusion of circulations, whether

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religious or economic, that has been the rule from at least the beginnings of the colonial period (Markovitz, Pouchepadass and Subrahmaniam 2003). Let us take the example of the Bhojpuri world from which most of the Mauritian indentured labourers originated. It is specifically renowned for its migratory traditions which, well before indenture, encouraged Bhojpuri merchants, soldiers and agricultural labourers to leave their homeland. Their travel along rivers and across oceans, initially as far as Nepal and Burma (Myanmar), resulted in popular traditions, such as song repertoires, often focusing on exile (Servan-Schreiber 2001, 2010). In fact, the so-called inability of Hindus to travel and the taboos linked with leaving India and crossing the ocean only concerned orthodox high castes, which were very poorly represented among indentured labourers. As a consequence, the debates regarding indenture would benefit by digressing from displacement issues and focusing on emplacement issues in the ‘host society’. In Mauritius, as in most societies based on slavery, the ocean is closely related with the original trauma of the crossing that followed the uprooting. Many narratives draw on the comparison between indenture and slavery. Crossing the Indian Ocean can get close to the slaves’ Middle Passage experience in Mauritian literature. It can also be embedded in competing victimization strategies between contemporary communities of the descendants of slaves and indentured labourers. Yet, among the Indo-Mauritian elites, many promoted a break away from the history of slavery. The Mauritian historian Hazareesingh, who was involved in the Mauritian independence movement, for instance, insisted on a vision of indenture that radically promoted Indian culture. According to this reading, rightfully tagged as ‘revisionist’ by Marina Carter (1995: 6), poverty could never have sufficed to explain the decision to leave India. Only the desire to bring to distant lands ‘India’s message and the light of its culture’ (Hazareesingh 1973: 21) could help a ‘true’ understanding of indenture. Indeed, like the ‘colonization’ associated with the process of indenture migration, the displacement from India has gradually come to be seen as a glorious process of emplacement in Mauritius. One of the most obvious demonstrations of this reversal is the date generally (not only in Mauritius) associated with indenture: whereas 1 February commemorates the abolition of slavery, 2 November celebrates the arrival of the first indentured pioneers. In parallel with the Middle Passage of African slavery, the crossing of the Indian Ocean can also draw on specifically Hindu paradigms, such as the kala pani (dark waters) taboo, that added a cultural trauma to the harsh conditions of the experience. Catherine Clémentin-Ojha (2016)

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precisely explains what is at stake behind the idea of kala pani, and what the crossing involved, at least for nineteenth-century orthodox Hindus. In her novel about indenture, Les Rochers de Poudre d’Or, Nathacha Appanah (2003) also describes the tearing apart of Hindu cultural markers on the boat, where socializing is not only forced (separation, suffering, humiliation) but also transgressive vis-à-vis Hindu ideology. Piled into the boat and cut off from village society that was organized according to Hindu ritual purity requirements (endogamy, avoidance of contact and commensality), the indentured labourer was directly exposed to a dangerous anonymity incompatible with caste identity. Even if it seems highly doubtful that lower (or even middle) caste indentured labourers ever shared the taboo against crossing the kala pani, the Mauritian literature constantly uses the loss of caste to symbolize the experience of indenture as a threshold and a rite of passage (Claveyrolas 2013). Indeed, the tearing apart of cultural markers focuses on the (at least theoretical) impossibility of returning to the previous status. Another Mauritian novelist, Ananda Devi, describes indentured workers as truly dead to their relatives: ‘They had all crossed “Kala pâni”, the ocean’s dark waters, and they knew that they were already dead to those of their caste who stayed in India, that the ritual for the dead had been celebrated in their name’ (Devi 1993: 47). In contrast to the kala pani taboo but consistent with the rite of passage paradigm, recent re-readings of indenture have compared the passage across the Indian Ocean to a Hindu pilgrimage – a kind of liminal egalitarian state widely resulting in being reborn to a better status. The original crossing here evokes the passage from one territory to another and from one identity to another. Through this pilgrimage paradigm, many narratives focus on a communitas experience similar to that theorized by Victor Turner (1974), reflecting Hindu beliefs (only partially confirmed by practical realities) that pilgrims go socially undifferentiated in an exceptional, liminal communitas-like experience Hence, on the ocean, the indentured workers are presented as ‘brothers of the ship’ (jahaji bhai), whatever their caste or religion, and the narratives repeatedly draw on a comparison with the boats bringing pilgrims to the Jagannath temple, a famous pan-Indian Hindu pilgrimage site. However, when focusing on regeneration, Mauritian narratives also transform the very meaning of the indenture crossing and make Mauritius a promised land or a territory to be seized. Whatever the historical realities behind such narratives, Hindu pilgrimage definitely serves as a major paradigm to domesticate displacement (Coleman 2002: 364) for Indian indentured labourers in Mauritius.

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The Political Economy of a Mauritian Pilgrimage: Translating the Hindu Sacred Once they had left India, crossed the ocean and reached Mauritius, the Indian labourers lived a coerced sedentary life within the plantations’ confines, i.e. the sugarcane fields they were working in and the plantation camp they were residing in. It took nearly a century before the first – often religious – mobility echoed the community’s rise to power, both through freedom from the plantations and the appropriation of the national territory. I will study this Hindu Mauritian mobility through a pilgrimage case study, constantly articulating national and transnational issues. In one of the Contes de l’enfant Bihari (coming from Bihar, the main recruiting region for North Indian indentured labourers) published in 1966 by the Mauritian writer Marcel Cabon, the central figure is a child who took refuge in the Mauritian forest that Cabon describes with constant reference to the Indian landscape pervading the child’s Hindu culture. How magnificent is the valley! How wide open the view we have from here! Can it be true that I am not travelling in one of those countries they talk about at the baïtka [village club] in some mountain where Hanoumane lives and that Parvati loves so much? Or in a little while am I going to see come out of the foliage one of those old masters the pandit talked about and who, in times past, in the land of our grandparents, on the bank of the river Ganges, ran a school in the forest? … The moon sits in the sky, as in the time of Krishna, as in the time of Ram, as at the beginning of the world. (Cabon [1966] 2006: 30f., my translation)2

Beyond the literary image, the local rooting of Hinduism finds its source in the assimilation of Mauritius to the country of origin. In Mauritius, global toponymy is also sometimes pervaded by the Indian reference. Let us mention its naming as ‘Little India’ (Chota Bharat) or its touristic branding as ‘India Abroad’, even if most towns and villages bear French or English names. Most importantly, the first Hindu sacred places have been named after the titles of the sugar estates they were attached to. With the claims to Indian-ness, most recent temples reconnect with Indian names and references. A Tamil temple in Port Louis, for example, is known as ‘Madurai’, one of the main pilgrimage towns in South India, while the Quatre-Bornes ‘Palani’ temple refers to the main Murugan pilgrimage temple in Tamil Nadu. Again, a small shrine amid cane fields greets the devotee with the inscription on its pediment, ‘Welcome to Vrindavan [Krishna’s main pilgrimage site in North India]’. Hinduism is specifically prone to this logic of substitutes: I have discussed elsewhere how Banaras is easily recognized in each and every Indian sacred town, and the Ganges in each and every river

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(Claveyrolas 2010a). No wonder then that the subterranean flows of the Ganges finally resurface in Mauritius. Let us discuss a specific case of Mauritian Hindu pilgrimage, which I will examine through two congruent ‘elite’ eulogistic discourses, one advanced in a booklet edited by the institution managing the pilgrimage site (Mishra, Ramchurn and Sewtohul 2005), and the other by a book written by one of the main temple’s founders (Dayal n.d.). We will see how the articulation of the reference to India and the local stakes, as dealt with by those in charge, fits into the transnational context of Mauritian Hinduism. Regularly presented as the most prestigious Hindu sacred place in Mauritius, Ganga Talao (the sacred lake or talao in Bhojpuri) is known as a resurgence or the equivalent of the Ganges (the North Indian sacred river assimilated with the goddess Ganga). A series of temples has gradually been installed on the banks of this volcanic lake, which stands five hundred metres above sea level more or less in the middle of the island. The site mainly comes to life during the annual Shivaratri festival when it is the focus for the most popular Mauritian pilgrimage (Claveyrolas 2010b). Various foundation narratives help us to understand the construction of the site and pilgrimage as an authoritative Hindu complex in a transnational context. The link between Mauritius and India first looks like a consolation. Having lost their culture and missing their homeland, indentured labourers decided to re-create a place where they could represent what they had lost. At least this is the argument put forward in the 1950s (thirty years before the construction of the first temples around the lake) by Hazareesingh: The first Indians who reached Mauritius remembered with nostalgia the pilgrimages they performed on the banks of the Ganges … where Krishna played the flute accompanied by his gopi [shepherdesses]. They began looking for a place where they could, in this land of exile, maintain a tradition very dear to them. But as, in the island, there was no majestic river comparable with those of the Indian peninsula, they finally elected Grand Bassin which, with its still, solitary waters and its majestic setting, appealed to the imagination of olden days pilgrims, who saw there a place suitable to the veneration of their antique gods. (Hazareesingh 1973: 18)

Edited by the Hindu Maha Sabha (HMS), the Mauritian institution controlling the site, the ‘Guide de Ganga Talao/Grand Bassin’ (Mishra, Ramchurn and Sewtohul 2005: 7) also draws on this idea of consolation by presenting the pilgrimage site, its temples and deities as substitutes for an Indian authentic Hindu-ness. The initiative for the first pilgrimage to the lake, in 1898, is attributed to Giri Gossagne, a priest of the Terre-Rouge temple. The Guide explains how Gossagne

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came to Mauritius while he was still in his teens. He was a budding priest from the banks of the Ganges. The flow of emigrants caught him, too … Gossagne missed the Ganges in Mauritius and he longed for its sacred water. He had premonitory dreams of the existence of a lake whose water oozed from such depths as to have direct links with the Ganges in India. (Mishra, Ramchurn and Sewtohul 2005: 7)

In another direct reference to India, the pediment of the main temple located on the banks of the lake carries the title ‘Kashi-Vishwanath’, the name of the famous Golden Temple which stands at the heart of the sacred geography of Banaras (‘Kashi’ being the town’s mythological name). The re-enactment of the Indian sacred geography is supported by the fact that every crucial element of the ritual site comes directly from India, whether it be the sacred water, the divine image of Shiva (in the form of his lingam – phallic representation) or the main priest (hailing from Banaras). Dayal, one of the founders of the first temple, notes in his book that its construction was necessary in order to repair the forgetting of rites and the absence of a skilled priest. He narrates how, after many pilgrimages to the lake in the 1970s, he regretted the absence of ritual assistants: It was during one of those [yearly] pilgrimages when I reached the sacred lake, there was hardly a big crowd of pilgrims, there was no officiating priest to guide us for the prayers and the rituals. I waited for a while meditating …. Still no officiating priest turned up. Goaded by a spiritual intuition I climbed down the dressed stone steps leading to the waters of the sacred lake meticulously chiselled by our ancestors who came as ‘Coolies’ (indentured workers) … There I was in the sacred lake with water up to my knees facing a small murti [divine statue] of Shiv and Parvatee consecrated in a small metallic casing. I did the devotional rites best known to me. I implored forgiveness for being unable to fulfil the rites as prescribed in the sacred Shiv Puran  [ritual normative text]. (Dayal n.d.: 12)

In 1983, while Dayal was in India for military training, he also went on pilgrimage and was inspired by a divine message to install a Shiva temple on the banks of the Mauritian lake, ‘where an officiating pundit [specialist] will officiate [sic]’ (ibid.). In Dayal’s eyes, it was a matter of filling a crucial gap in the Mauritian Hindu practices of the time. The installation and evolution of the Ganga Talao pilgrimage, paralleling the institutionalized standardization of Mauritian Hinduism, reflected the attempt by Indian elites at the end of the nineteenth century to resist popular, lower caste practices, which were less dependent on sacred texts and high caste ritual specialists. Installing a resident priest at the Shiva temple would require the observance of orthodox, Brahmanic Hinduism,

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despite the standardization of Hinduism. (Indeed, many shrines and ritual practices in Mauritius (and India) still lack a ritual specialist.) Besides these representations of Ganga Talao as a substitute for the Indian Ganga, Mauritius has also been progressively interpreted as a Hindu land by itself. The very landscape is summoned to support such a claim. Hence, Dayal was reminded by the ‘extraordinary’ local scenery of (Indian) Hindu mythology: ‘Ganga Talao is perched as a natural lake embedded in the Central Plateau high grounds just like the Mansarovar of the Himalayas, the ancestral abode of Lord Shiva’ (Dayal n.d.: 9). The site is seen as predestined: the author provides pictures to support his argument that, in Mauritius, ‘even mountains have the shape of the lingam!’ (ibid., 8). More than a consolation, this time we see the discovery of an eternal Hindu nature in the local landscape. Even Western commentators could not support the idea of a Mauritian Hindu-ness without referring to India. As early as the 1850s, the future British governor of Mauritius, for example, described ‘a mud hut, bedizened with sundry bits in dabbled dripping calico of every sort of colour [which] bespoke an Indian place of pilgrimage’ (quoted in Mishra, Ramchurn and Sewtohul 2005: 5). Another legend insists on the fortuitous dimension of the Hindu presence in Mauritius. It stages Shiva who, while shaking his unmatted hair where the goddess Ganga dwells, involuntarily pours a drop of the river goddess onto the Mauritian soil. Is it precisely because of this fortuitous incarnation of Hindu-ness in Mauritius that the general idea of a subterranean link between the Ganga river and the Mauritian lake seems to be insufficiently convincing? Indeed, in 1972, an Indian priest ritually poured into the lake Ganga river water that he had specifically brought from the Indian pilgrimage site of Haridwar. This ritual translation was financed jointly by the Indian and Mauritian governments, and promoted by a Mauritian minister, Dayanand Basantrai, well known for his connections with Hindu activism, both in India (as leader of the Mauritian delegation to the right-wing Hindu nationalist VHP conference in Allahabad in 1979) and in Mauritius (as leader of the temple federations) (see Eisenlohr 2006: 37 passim). This ritual transfer of Hindu territory and identity from India to Mauritius not only demonstrates the Indianization of Mauritian soil and the resulting legitimization of the lake as a Hindu sacred place, but also puts it under the auspices of Hindutva. The attempt to change the name parallels the process: with the transfer of ritual water, the place passes from ‘fairy lake’ (Paree Talao) to Ganga Talao (Ganga lake), a name it actually still shares with the more commonly used French ‘Grand Bassin’, including among Hindu devotees. Moreover, Hindu authorities insist that the lake waters are flowing into the Indian Ocean (Dayal n.d.: 9), which

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they see as a space linking Mauritius and India. Indeed, the ashes of the Hindu Mauritian dead are ritually poured into the sea in order to allow them to join the territory of their ancestors. The very fact that ‘Ganga was realized in Mauritius’ implies that ‘all Hindus were still in the land where the Ganga flowed’, which ‘led them to accept to die [sic] and be cremated there’ (Mishra, Ramchurn and Sewtohul 2005: 7). While reassessing this intimate connection with India in the transnational context of a Hindu Mauritius, discourses gradually tended to claim also a specifically Mauritian Hindu legitimacy. This process has involved the construction of many temples and the growing institutionalization of rituals and global management of temple sites. Yet, as we have seen above, legends have also been mobilized. Again, returning to the link between the Indian river and the Mauritian lake, the latter finds its origin this time in the goddess Ganga herself, who is said to have shed a tear at the sight of her sons, the Indian indentured, leaving their motherland (Eisenlohr 2006: 248). Through Ganga, therefore, the Hindu territory is directly embodied in Mauritius. Furthermore, the Ganga Talao’s main image of Shiva as his lingam was officially recognized on 2 March 1989 as the thirteenth ‘lingam of light’ (jyotirlingam), and authorities and devotees alike proudly insisted that it was ‘the only one outside India’. The lightning miraculously striking the image during the ritual consecration ceremony underpinned this designation as a ‘lingam of light’. The event was acknowledged by many Indian spiritual authorities, whose legitimacy is repeatedly mentioned when introducing the sacred lake to the pilgrims. It is usually added that this legitimacy is established by the strict procedures observed in India: ‘This has already occurred in the holy land [India] where the Ganges flows and where the twelve Jyotir Lingams have been divinely graced by supernatural happenings’ (Dayal n.d.: 57). It also claimed that these miracles have repeatedly occurred at each and every consecration of a secondary shrine or statue around the lake. Even the landscape was mobilized as living proof: the small island on the lake took the shape of a crocodile during the consecration of a statue of Ganga, whose ‘vehicle’ (vahana) is precisely a crocodile. The Mauritian Hindu-ness is far from merely symbolic here. Many pictures bear witness to all those divine manifestations and confirm the concrete appropriation of the Mauritian territory by Hindu deities. Translating the Hindu sacred through a local pilgrimage soon arose as a properly Mauritian issue, demonstrating how local identity issues could transcend the India-Mauritius relationship. We can first mention the administrative and legal dimensions. The forest landscape surrounding the lake used to be renowned for hunting activities where animals were butchered on the very banks of the lake. In 1962, legal jurisdiction

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passed from the Forest Department to the Hindu Maha Sabha, an association financing, managing and promoting many (Bhojpuri) temples and so-called ‘socio-cultural’ activities in Mauritius. The Ganga Talao Shiva temple became officially known as ‘Mauritiuseswarnath’, meaning ‘The Lord of Mauritius’. The island was thereby designated as a sacred territory (kshetra) where Shiva reigned symbolically as ‘the only master and protector of the whole of Mauritius’ (Dayal n.d.: 127). These Hindu claims on Mauritian territory have only strengthened in recent years. Along with the growing number of shrines and statues, a 108-foot-high statue of a standing Shiva – again built by an Indian artist – was inaugurated in 2007. Impossible to miss and intended to be complemented by a statue of Durga, it marks the entry of the site. As a pilgrimage centre and a sacred place, the Ganga Talao complex not only sacralizes the lake, it Hinduizes the whole Mauritian territory through the pilgrims’ circulations connecting various villages. From the very beginning, Ganga Talao has been connected with other Hindu sacred places in Mauritius, since it was the destination of the original pilgrimage of Giri Gossagne that started from Maheswarnath temple in Triolet (north-west Mauritius) accompanied by its founding priest, Sajibon. More recently, a Shivaratri pilgrimage stages annual processions from every corner of the island, and they eventually converge on the lake. Each carries its chariot (kanvar) with the name of the temple, village or association it represents. As early as the 1920s, the first village temples served as meeting points for pilgrims walking to the lake and gave them refreshments (Indradanush 2004: 7). Like the inaugural pilgrimage, many of these processions appropriate the Mauritian landscape by overcoming natural obstacles (distance, heat, rain, mountains or the absence of facilities):  ‘White-dressed pilgrims carrying kanwars appeared on the scene and snags in the form of roads and bridges were overcome to reach the lake’ (Mishra, Ramchurn and Sewtohul 2005: 11). Of course, this was not just about building roads and bridges but also about unifying the Hindu community in a communitas-like experience: ‘Hindus from over the whole country met along the roads, rest shelters, etc. The rich and learned rubbed shoulders with the poor and the unschooled galvanized by the spirit of service to Lord Shiva and each showered respects on the other’ (ibid.). As was the case after the initial pilgrimage of Giri Gossagne, the water is ritually taken back across the island by the pilgrims, who pour it on the temples’ sacred images or on the domestic shrines. This process, where pilgrimage activates a territorial national network, is well known in India (Claveyrolas 2008) but lacks any equivalent in Mauritius where festive processions are usually confined to the village space.

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For the Indian indentured labourers, the Ganga Talao pilgrimage symbolized their ability to leave the plantation territory. Not only was this mobility hindered for a long time by ‘vagrancy laws’ and a ‘pass system’ (Carter 1995: 200; Tinker 1974) but, until recently, labourers did not have many occasions to travel. Yet once the first authorizations to leave the plantation were given by planters, Hindu circulations increased exponentially. The road to the lake was opened in the 1920s (Indradanush 2004: 23), but when Burton Benedict did his fieldwork in 1957, he mentioned fifteen to twenty thousand pilgrims involved in Shivaratri (Benedict 1961: 38). Today, the number is estimated to have reached several hundred thousand. In a context where territory used to be quite clearly divided between communities and mobility was very limited, travelling beyond plantations and villages on pilgrimage was initially a political act of emancipation, and then a political act of appropriation, both deeply rooted in the local, Mauritian issues in an overall communalist context. Furthermore, it comes as no surprise that the same individuals who founded the first temples in the villages – elites often born inside the plantation (sirdar) and fierce promoters of the social empowerment of Mauritian Hindus – were again those who promoted the first Hindu pilgrimages in Mauritius. The subsequent expansion of Hindu circulations, which claimed Mauritius as Hindu, logically paralleled the cultural and political success story of the Hindu community during the second half of the twentieth century (Eisenlohr 2006: 9). The Mauritian pilgrimage’s success has attracted prestigious Indian visitors to Ganga Talao. As early as 1977, the Hindu nationalist politician Vajpayee, who was then India’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs, initiated the construction of a Hanuman temple in Ganga Talao while visiting the site. Today, when Indian political or religious authorities visit Mauritius, they take care to pay homage to both the Apravasi ghat (the landing place of the indentured labourers and a symbol of the original displacement from India) and to Ganga Talao (the symbol of the indentured descendants’ successful emplacement in Mauritius). And when, in 2015, an Indian businessman launched a five-star hotel in Mauritius, he donated a life-size statue of Sai Baba to Ganga Talao, which was installed facing the main temple. Ganga Talao definitely serves as a catalyst for most representations of Mauritius as a Hindu diasporic land. The status of the lake as a symbol of Hindu-ness has transformed today’s pilgrimage as a place for communalist assertions. The growing stranglehold of radical organizations, such as Voice of Hindus (VOH), known for its violent intolerance based on Hindutva principles (it proposed to set up tents here as shelter for pilgrims), cannot go unnoticed.

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Moreover, each year, not only do Mauritian politicians use the pilgrimage as a platform for vote-catching purposes, but many Indian religious or political authorities, such as Hindu leaders or government ministers, are officially invited. However, criticisms are often made, including among the IndoMauritian communities, that religious pilgrimage has been perverted by politics. It is indeed arguable that, for the time being, the Hindutva agenda mostly meets the Mauritian elites’ interests and points of view. Most Mauritian Hindus are actually not very interested in this transnational, ‘diasporic’ context (Claveyrolas 2014) and go on pilgrimage across the island mostly to make individual votive offerings. They also criticize Indian specialists for sometimes overshadowing their Mauritian counterparts. Some religious artists, for example, were offended when no Mauritian was officially invited to Ganga Talao. They claimed that Shiva was offered a ‘deplorable show, with songs only worthy of a local fancy-fair … We would have wanted to listen to our local artists rather than to these artists and musicians brought from India at huge cost’ (Le Mauricien, 13 February 2007). Last but not least, the formerly ecumenical pilgrimage that had brought together Catholic Creoles and Indian Muslims side by side with Hindus has now become the symbol of Hindu hegemony in Mauritius. Indeed, non-Hindu Mauritians are becoming more and more frustrated and concerned by an Indianized pilgrimage where all the key actors (from the stone gods to the official guests, musicians and priests) come from India, where Mauritian flags along the road are largely outnumbered by VOH-Indian flags, and where Mauritian and Indian speakers alike insist – in an Indian language they do not understand – on the Indian roots of Mauritian Hindus. As well as this sectarian development, even intra-Hindu pilgrimage does not escape institutional conflict. In June 2013, the government granted land around the lake to the Mauritius Sanatan Dharma Temples Federation (MSDTF) to build a temple. This may well be announcing a possible paradigm shift in the management of Ganga Talao (Défimédia, 11 June 2013), since the MSDTF is controlled by the majority Vaishya caste. Vaishyas have been challenging the Brahmin Hindu Maha Sabha ever since a split in 1985 around the issue of the Brahmins’ monopoly on priesthood. To bypass the Brahmins’ refusal to share their ritual knowledge, the MSDTF called on Indian Brahmins to have Mauritian non-Brahmins initiated into the priesthood. In the Mauritian political economy of Hinduism, the transnational links with India mostly benefit the majority (Vaishya) population, rather than always supporting Brahmin definitions of orthodox belief and practice.

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By duplicating India as the unique sacred motherland of Hinduism, the Mauritian pilgrimage site of Ganga Talao has gradually acquired local uniqueness by translating and transforming the Hindu sacred. As soon as the first local elites emerged, Indian-ness appeared as a major issue among local Hindus. Eventually though, with the rise to hegemonic power of Hindu communities on the island, the Indian reference has appeared as a way to break away from the indentured past and from a Mauritian identity shared with those descended from slaves. Local promoters of Mauritian Hindu-ness, especially para-governmental institutions, have also drawn on the Hindutva agenda and networks and promoted the development of pilgrimage on the island, but without systematically importing Indian issues. Hence, the creation and development of the Ganga Talao pilgrimage perfectly parallel institutional relations between India and Mauritius and stand as a very meaningful example of the passage from a transnational, diasporic problematic (translating the sacred from the genuine Indian reference to a non-Hindu land) to a national problematic (promoting political hegemony through the appropriation of a national territory). Mathieu Claveyrolas is an anthropologist, a Research Fellow at the French Centre for Scientific Research and a statutory member of the Centre for South Asian Studies (EHESS, Paris). His research interests focus on the anthropology of Hinduism and sacred territories, both in Varanasi (Uttar Pradesh, India) and Mauritius. Relevant publications include Quand le temple prend vie. Atmosphère et dévotion à Bénarès (CNRS Éditions, 2003), Territoires du Religieux dans les mondes indiens. Parcourir. Mettre en scène. Franchir (edited with R. Delage, EHESS Editions, 2016) and Quand l’hindouisme est créole. Plantation et indianité à l’île Maurice (EHESS Editions, 2017).

Notes   1. Hindutva is a political and aggressive claim to Hindu-ness as opposed to all other possible Indian identities.   2. Que la vallée est belle ! Que la vue est large que l’on a d’ici ! Est-il vrai que je ne voyage pas dans un de ces pays dont on parle à la baïtka, dans quelque montagne habitée par Hanoumane, aimée de Parvati ? Ou ne vais-je tout à l’heure voir sortir des feuillages un de ces vieux maîtres dont le pandit nous a parlé et qui, jadis, au pays des

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grands-parents, au bord du Gange, tenaient école dans la forêt ? … La lune est dans le ciel, comme au temps de Krishna, comme au temps de Ram, comme au commencement du monde.

References Appanah, N. 2003. Les Rochers de Poudre d’Or. Paris: Gallimard. Bava, S., and S. Capone (eds). 2010. Migrations et transformations des paysages religieux. Paris: IRD, Presses de Sciences Po. Benedict, B. 1961. Indians in a Plural Society: A Report on Mauritius. London: HMSO. Boyle, C. 1867. Far Away or Sketches of Scenery and Society in Mauritius. London: British Library, Historical Print Editions. Cabon, M. [1966] 2006. L’Enfant Bihari. Vacoas: Éditions Le Printemps. Carsignol, A. 2011. L’Inde et sa diaspora: Influences et intérêts croisés à l’île Maurice et au Canada. Paris/Geneva: PUF/The Graduate Institute Publications. Carter, M. 1995. Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834–1874. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Claveyrolas, M. 2008. ‘Les temples de Mère Inde, musées de la nation’, Gradhiva 7: 84–99. Claveyrolas, M. 2010a. ‘Construire un espace à part: Circulations rituelles et territoires sacrés à Bénarès’, in V. Dupont and F. Landy (eds), Circulation et territoire dans le monde indien contemporain. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, pp. 41–71. Claveyrolas, M. 2010b. ‘L’ancrage de l’hindouisme dans le paysage mauricien: transfert et appropriation’, in S. Bava and S. Capone (eds), Migrations et transformations des paysages religieux. Paris: IRD, Presses de Sciences Po, pp. 17–38. Claveyrolas, M. 2012. ‘With or Without Roots: The Compared and Conflicting Memories of Slavery and Indenture in the Mauritian Public Spaces’, in A.-L. Araujo (ed.), Politics of Memory: Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space. New York: Routledge, pp. 54–70. Claveyrolas, M. 2013. ‘L’hindouisme mauricien, une histoire de passages’, in I. Hidair and L. Pourchez (eds), Rites de passages et constructions identitaires créoles. Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines, pp. 29–40. Claveyrolas, M. 2014. ‘Un prêtre tamoul dans le chantier de l’hindouisme mauricien: Orthodoxies et autorité religieuse’, in C. Servan-Schreiber (ed.), Indianité et créolité à l’île Maurice. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, pp. 139–68. Clémentin-Ojha, C. 2016. ‘Kālāpānī ou les limites à ne pas franchir: Le voyage en Angleterre du maharaja de Jaipur (1902)’, in M. Claveyrolas and R. Delage (eds), Territoires du Religieux en Asie du Sud. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, pp. 251–74. Coleman, S. 2002. ‘Do You Believe in Pilgrimage? Communitas, Contestation and Beyond’, Anthropological Theory 2(3): 355–68. Crooke, W. 1897. The North Western Provinces of India: Their History, Ethnology and Administration. London: Methuen. Dayal, J.R. n. d. Mauritiuseswarnath / Shiv / Jyotir / Lingum. Port-Louis: Globe Printing. Devi, A. 1993. Le voile de Draupadi. Paris: L’Harmattan. Eisenlohr, P. 2006. Little India: Diaspora, Time, and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gupta, A., and J. Ferguson. 1997.  ‘Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era’, in A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (eds), Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 33–51. Hazareesingh, K. 1973. Histoire des Indiens à l’Île Maurice. Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve. Indradanush. 2004.  ‘Dookhee Gungah: The Unforgettable Philanthropist of Mauritius’, Dookhee Gungah 23(32), special issue.

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Markovitz, C., J. Pouchepadass, and S. Subrahmaniam. 2003. Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750–1950. Delhi: Permanent Black. Mishra, R., N. Ramchurn, and N. Sewtohul. 2005. Guide de Ganga Talao/Grand Bassin. Mauritius: Hindu Maha Sabha. Servan-Schreiber, C. 2001. ‘Le mouvement bhojpuri: Culture et revendication identitaire en Inde du nord’, in J.-L. Racine (ed.), La question identitaire en Asie du Sud. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, pp. 147–90. Servan-Schreiber, C. 2010. Histoire d’une musique métisse à l’île Maurice: Chutney indien et séga Bollywood. Paris: Riveneuve éditions. Tinker, H. 1974. A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas. London: Hansib Educational Books. Turner, V. 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vertovec, S. 2000. The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns. London: Routledge.

Chapter 2

Transnational Courting through Shakyamuni Buddha Japanese Pilgrimage and Geographical Dowries in North India David Geary

Introduction In a 2015 special editorial in the Times of India, Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister of Japan, stated that ‘the Japan–India relationship is blessed with the largest potential for development of any bilateral relationship anywhere in the world’ (Abe 2015). Following his speech before the Indian parliament, entitled the ‘Confluence of Two Seas’ – the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean – he noted that Japan and India are ‘natural partners’ that share a tradition of Buddhism, as well as fundamental values such as freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Working closely with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Shinzo Abe expressed his commitment to strengthening these cultural and personnel exchanges that would make India and Japan one of the greatest partnerships in the twenty-first century. Underlying this ‘natural partnership’ and economic confluence between India and Japan is the growing significance of India’s Buddhist heritage and the collaborative initiatives that flow from it. In recent years, major economic transformations have occurred around the Buddhist pilgrimage sites in India and Nepal, such as new airports, rail lines and significant city infrastructural investment, especially through their designation as UNESCO World Heritage sites, bringing Buddhism in line with Notes for this chapter begin on page 56.

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wider development trajectories and goals (Geary 2008, 2017). Although these developments are not unique to Buddhist sacred sites and are part of a broader movement by the Indian government to promote pilgrimage travel and tourism circuits across India’s living religions, Buddhism in the ‘land of origins’ does provide an added transnational resource that speaks to a long history of cultural contact and interchange throughout Asia. How is the growing interest in Buddhist pilgrimage and heritage tied to transnational memory and a pan-Asian discourse involving common cultural pasts and ancient civilizational ties? How is such extra-national interfacing and inter-financing driven by Buddhist communities and national governments throughout Asia? To examine these growing Asian exchanges and networks, this chapter examines two facets of transnational courting between India and Japan, and how these relationships are mediated through Buddhist pilgrimage activities. In using the term ‘transnational courting’, I define it as a set of processes whereby individuals and government agencies actively cultivate relationships that span two or more nation-states with the goal of establishing strategic alliances and bilateral relations that support cultural, political and economic interests. These kinds of exchanges and alliances are particularly pertinent in the context of North India where a revived Buddhist culture of pilgrimage figures into diplomatic policy structures around the conservation of sacred space, technology transfer, development aid and other strategic ties designed to strengthen India–Japan relations in the region.1 In the first section, I begin by looking at how the Indian state government looks to build new political and economic collaborations with the Japanese government around the development of India’s Buddhist pilgrimage circuit. As a form of ‘soft power’ (Nye 2004; Akagawa 2014) that can be used to influence foreign relations and improve the country’s image, I show how Buddhism provides a cultural and political resource for strengthening regional partnerships and creating formal bilateral aid arrangements across Asia. Given the rise of pilgrimage activities at several Buddhist sites in North India, I also show how contact with Buddhist pilgrims and tourists can offer an array of economic, social and romantic opportunities to local Indian residents that are generally not available in other parts of the country. Through stories of transnational encounter and cross-cultural ties between East and East, in the second section of the chapter I examine how pilgrimage and the service sector provide jobs with a high degree of interaction with Japanese women that can lead to marriage proposals and migration akin to new forms of geographical dowry. In summary, the goal of this chapter is to explore the varying ways in which Buddhist pilgrimage in the Indian context gives rise to transnational connections that provide a mechanism for negotiating broader

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political agendas and economic interests, and strengthening cultural ties in the region.

Transnational Courting from above: Japanese Development Aid and Cultural Diplomacy It has been our long-cherished desire to visit India, especially this holy place of Lord Buddha. The spiritual and cultural tie which was created between India and Japan some 17 centuries ago through the Teachings of Lord Buddha is so deeply rooted and has been maintained up to this day when its revaluation is being ushered in under much changed modern situations, internal as well as international. My friends! When I stand here on the very spot where Lord Buddha attained His Supreme enlightenment two thousand and five hundred years ago, my heart is filled with pious respect, and those centuries seem to roll away like the mist. Lord Buddha is still alive in your hearts, and also in the hearts of tens of millions of Japanese. That is the solid spiritual foundation on which the most cordial co-operation between India and Japan might be built and strengthened. —Japanese Crown Prince Akihito during a visit to Bodh Gaya, 5 December 19602

For centuries, the people of India and Japan have engaged in cultural exchanges, primarily as a result of the Buddha’s sasana (‘teachings of the Buddha’), which spread from India to Japan via China and Korea. From the late nineteenth century, Japanese Buddhists also played a significant role in the revival of India’s Buddhist heritage and pilgrimage geography. As Richard Jaffe (2004) describes, the travel accounts of Japanese Buddhist traveller Kitabatake Doryu (1820–1907) to India in the 1880s, alongside a growing textual and Orientalist discourse of Buddhism, helped to stimulate a rethinking of Shakyamuni Buddha as a historical figure and a focal point of an emerging world Buddhism among Japanese Buddhists. These travel reports, as Jaffe illustrates, helped to increase the awareness of Asian Buddhism and signalled growing Buddhist cooperation within the region, which has continued up to the present. Although much more could be written about these earlier transnational ties and encounters that underpin the revival of Buddhism during British India (Kemper 2005, 2015; Jaffe 2004), the focus of this section is on the post-World War II period and the emerging networks of collaboration following the decolonization of India. The arrival of new nations, especially in various parts of Asia, according to Winter (2015: 1010), ‘heralded a new era of sovereignty and property claims over culture, with material pasts being

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put to work in the forging of newly formed “imagined communities” in regions with deep histories of cultural exchange and flows’. The strengthening of these bilateral ties was particularly evident during the Cold War period with the arrival of several Japanese Buddhist organizations that took an interest in the development of Buddhist heritage and sacred sites, such as the Japan Buddhist Federation, the International Buddhist Brotherhood Association (IBBA) or Kokusai Bukkyo Koryu Kyokai, and the Nipponzan Myohoji sect founded by the Nichiren monk Fujii Nichidatsu, a close friend and associate of Mahatma Gandhi. Although the actions and motivations of these Japanese Buddhist organizations are not entirely the same as those of the government, they do share a concomitant interest in strengthening Indo-Japanese cultural ties and seizing Buddhist heritage as a sphere of influence. Since 1986, for example, India has been the largest recipient of Japanese Official Development Assistance (ODA), with Buddhist heritage and India’s Buddhist pilgrimage circuit providing an important vehicle for disseminating these loan packages. In order to get a better understanding of the economic prospects of India’s Buddhist sector among the Japanese public, the Government of India’s Ministry of Tourism set out to provide a detailed report on the Japanese market so that development aid and technical support could be more effectively utilized (Department of Tourism, Government of India 1992). This report, entitled Development of the Buddhist Sector for the Japanese Market (hereafter Japanese Market Survey) was published in 1992 and was a joint venture coordinated between Pacific Consultants International in Tokyo and Consulting Engineering Services Pvt. Ltd, in New Delhi under the Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund (OECF) loan agreement. Drawing on data gathered from Japanese consumers, experienced tourists to India, group interviews, pilgrimage organizers and Japanese tour wholesalers/travel agents’ views on India, the report suggests that India’s Buddhist sector has great potential, especially among the large number of postwar baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1949) in Japan, who will be reaching retirement age at the beginning of the new century. It is believed that this rapidly aging population, ‘who tend to become more religious with age’, will have a favourable impact on the Buddhist circuit in India, creating a vast leisure market for the elderly (Japanese Market Survey: 6). With pressure from the US government to reduce its trade balance and increase expenditure on overseas produce in the 1980s, these changing generational demographics were very much in line with the Japanese government’s policy to promote overseas travel, reduce the average yearly working hours and improve holiday entitlements (Leheny 2003).3 For example, in 1987, the government launched the ‘Ten Million Programme’, which was aimed at doubling the number of Japanese travellers overseas

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by 1991 and was seen as an important step in building cultural relations that would complement economic growth and further Japanese importance in Asian and world affairs (Hall 2001: 125). After reaching its target in 1990, this programme was succeeded by the ‘Two Way Tourism Programme’ launched in 1991 that was aimed at promoting outbound and inbound tourism as well (Japanese Market Survey: 6). To summarize some of the findings from this fascinating report, according to government statistics, there were ninety-one million registered Buddhists in Japan in 1990. Although the ‘general attitude of Japanese people toward religion is not very enthusiastic’ (Japanese Market Survey: 1), with important changes in ‘priority of life’ among Japanese society this might trigger a change towards a ‘less workaholic’ and ‘more leisure-oriented society in the near future’ (ibid.: 9). To compliment Japan’s growing GDP and the appreciation of the yen since 1986, statistics from the OECF indicate that Japanese travel expenditure in the early 1990s amounts to US$2,187 on average, which is more than double that of other major countries including France, the United States and the United Kingdom. Related to the high travel expenditure and enthusiastic spending habits are three key factors. (1) The Japanese market has a higher percentage of group tourists and fewer individual budget tourists than in other countries because of the relatively short length of travel and the high language barrier for Japanese. (2) There is a social custom in Japan that souvenirs for one’s colleagues, friends and sometimes neighbours are almost obligatory. (3) Imported goods tend to be overpriced in Japan and consumers have become aware of this fact. Thus, for some overseas destinations, shopping is the principal motivation for travel (ibid.: 11). Another important finding that correlates with this rising economic prosperity in Japan is that this leisure market also consists of a growing number of unmarried Japanese women in their twenties with disposable time and income, most of whom continue to reside with their parents. Unlike the strict work ethic and expectations associated with Japanese men, these young women have a greater chance to travel abroad and for pleasure. Based on statistics provided by the government, the number of young female tourists increased 184 per cent from 1983 to 1990, while the growth rate of the male market is relatively low, and becoming less conspicuous (Japanese Market Survey: 13). In other words, young Japanese women, in addition to the postwar baby boomers, provide a growing segment of the Japanese travel market that may have repercussions for the Buddhist sector in India, as I explore in greater detail in the next section.

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On average, overseas travel for Japanese is less than eleven days, and tour itineraries are relatively short and rigid. With 93 per cent of Japanese overseas travellers using travel agencies and 58 per cent of them participating in group tours, including those organized by Japanese Buddhist priests, these numbers suggest that there is vast potential in states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar for stimulating packaged tourism itineraries along the Buddhist circuit. Although package tours along the ‘Golden Triangle’, namely Delhi, Agra and Jaipur, remain very popular, with the number of Japanese visitors to India doubling from 29,103 in 1982 to 58,707 in 1989, this development highlights the potential of the ‘Buddhist sector’ as an alternative. However, in order to compete with the ‘Golden Triangle’, the consultants note that ‘security’ and ‘sanitary conditions’ must be improved, as they are key factors that determine travel destinations among Japanese consumers, showing that Japanese tourists ‘are very sensitive to travel environments’ (Japanese Market Survey: 23). In terms of prevailing images of India and the Buddhist sector among the Japanese public, the survey report indicates that there is a strong association with the ‘cultural and historical’ attributes of India, which ‘seems to be almost synonymous with seeing the Buddhist sector’ (Japanese Market Survey: 25). The most popular images of India reproduce a familiar set of Orientalist constructions as a ‘religious’ and ‘mysterious’ place, accounting for 87 per cent and 70 per cent respectively. For the majority of these Japanese respondents, their travel motivations are also linked with a desire ‘to see’ or ‘to know’ India, rather than to relax or to enjoy themselves (ibid.: 38). One female interviewee commented that if one goes to India, it is expected that he or she will ‘become like a philosopher’ (ibid.: 38). Outside of general interest tourists, the Japanese market survey also explores views of India from Buddhist pilgrims who are largely coordinated through specific group tours organized by Buddhist societies, sects and priests. Among the interviews conducted by the Japan Travel Bureau Foundation in January 1991, three Buddhist societies were selected: Nichiren-shu, Rissho Kosei-kai and Jodo-shu. Among these Japanese Buddhist sects, the findings indicate that the principal motivation for visiting India and the Buddhist sector was ‘spiritual’, including remarks such as ‘to reach a state of mind like that which Buddha had attained’ or ‘to feel as if one’s soul was purified’ (Japanese Market Survey: 39). Yet antithetical to this quest for purification were complaints about the poor sanitary conditions, unreliable transportation and a lack of wayside amenities, especially among the Buddhist pilgrimage sites. While some interviewees appreciated the Indian tour guides, others felt that tour guides were a major problem. One suggestion that was offered by a Japanese pilgrim from the Nichiren-shu sect, who had recently returned from Bihar, was that he

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would like to see a re-education programme for Indian tour guides. It was noted that tour guides ‘seem to be uneven in their ability and morals’ and their main concern and motivation ‘seems to be the commission they get at souvenir shops’ (ibid.: 40). Building on these findings from the Japanese Market Survey, a number of development and conservation projects were launched by the Indian government through official Japanese development assistance from the 1990s onwards. These loan packages and technical collaborations were provided by the OECF4 and the Japanese Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), now known as the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). As one of the world’s largest sources of development finance, with an annual budget of over three trillion yen (approximately US$27 billion), the influence of the Japanese Bank has grown significantly throughout parts of Asia, with India being one of the top recipients of international development assistance (Motoyama 2000). To provide a few examples of the intersection of Buddhism and official Japanese development aid to India, the Japanese government has been providing loans for the restoration and development of the famous UNESCO World Heritage site Ajanta Ellora in the state of Maharashtra since the early 1990s.5 Initially conceived as a joint venture between Tata Consultancy Services, India’s largest IT services provider, and Pacific Consultants International (PCI) in Japan, the scope of these works is primarily focused on monument/heritage conservation, infrastructure development and tourist development that involves building water supplies and tourism infrastructure such as toilet facilities, installation of signage, landscaping and beautification, land development and training for tourism planners. Under the Conservation and Tourism Development Project (Phase I) from 1992 to 2002 there was an expenditure of 127.50 crore (roughly US$18.5 million), while Phase II, spanning 2004 to 2013, had an expenditure of Rs. 214.18 crore (roughly US$31 million). Most of these funds were provided by the JICA through the Union Ministry and were implemented by the Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation (MTDC). According to Sanjay Dhekne, senior manager of publicity for the MTDC in a recent news article, ‘Maharashtra Tourism is confident of translating these investments into long-term assets which would not only attract revenues from foreign tourists and investments in the future but also a steady stream of foreign exchange earnings for India’ (Godbole 2013). Further Japanese loan agreements under the JICA were also introduced in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2005 for improving tourism/pilgrimage infrastructure and connectivity, such as roads, public utilities and site development, at the major Buddhist sites of Sarnath, Kushinagar, Kapilvastu,

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Shravasti and Sankisa (Manjul 2011; see also Government of India, Ministry of Tourism 2014). Following a visit by the former Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh to Japan in December 2006, a Joint Statement regarding ‘Promotion of India–Japan Tourism Exchange’ was signed between the two countries. The Uttar Pradesh Buddhist Circuit Development Project is one of the main loan packages provided by the Japanese government, alongside investment in the North Karanpura Super Thermal Power Project and the Ganga Action Plan Project (Embassy of Japan 2005). As noted by the Embassy of Japan’s press release, while the amount of assistance for the Buddhist Circuit project may not be very large, ‘the project has a very special significance as it highlights centuries-old ties between Japan and India. Buddhism, having a vast following in Japan, symbolizes a very special bond of friendship between the peoples of the two countries’ (ibid.). Through their soft loan of Rs. 9,494 crore (US$1.5 billion), the goal is to develop tourism-related infrastructure along the Buddhist circuit in Uttar Pradesh, to allow for larger flows of Buddhist pilgrims and other tourists and to ‘enhance people-to-people exchange between Japan and India’ (ibid.). In keeping with wider development objectives, the loan package strategically covers power, urban transportation, drinking water supply, irrigation and afforestation projects. It is also expected that the economic activities will help to alleviate poverty in the area that comes under the Buddhist Circuit in the state. As an extension of the main Buddhist pilgrimage sites in North India, the JICA has also been providing loans to the State of Bihar for assistance with the Bihar National Highway (NH) Improvement Project that falls under the Buddhist circuit.6 With a soft loan of Rs. 1,350 crore (roughly US$197 million), the widening of a 127-km stretch along Patna-GayaDobhi (the entry point for Bodh Gaya, the place of Buddha’s enlightenment) will also serve as a key link road for the new Nalanda International University at Rajgir. Under the former chairmanship of Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen, the revival of this ancient seat of Buddhist learning that flourished between the fifth and twelfth centuries has attracted a great deal of media attention in recent years as it articulates with a ‘rising Asia’ (Pinkney 2015). This newly established university came into existence in 2010 with the implementation of the Nalanda University Bill and is a multilateral initiative financed by a consortium of Asian countries, especially India, Japan and Singapore, who have committed millions of dollars for its ongoing construction. Although these examples could be multiplied, in concluding this section, what is novel about these state-sponsored initiatives designed to enlarge the scope of aid and build strategic transnational ties across Asia are the myriad ways in which Buddhism figures into cultural diplomacy and

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official development assistance. Looking to capitalize on what is arguably India’s greatest international export and cater to the financially lucrative Asian Buddhist diaspora, these developments speak to the importance of religion and pilgrimage as vehicles for transnational courting.

Transnational Courting from below: Geographical Dowries and Japanese Wives The roots of the tourism industry in Japan are closely related to (and embedded in) pilgrimage and the development of pilgrimage routes and structures that have a long history in the Japanese archipelago (Reader and Swanson 1997; Reader 2014). The popular reputation of a sacred shrine and/or famous place (meisho) due to its association with a particular event has also been a key factor contributing to a modern Japanese culture of travel (tabi no bunka) that now extends far beyond its national boundaries (Guichard-Anguis and Moon 2008). However, following World War II, leisure and extended travel were discouraged as the government embarked on a programme of rapid modernization that emphasized devotion to work and home (Chambers 2009; Moeran 2004). This commitment to domestic growth continued until 1964 – the year of the Tokyo Olympics – when the government began lifting its restrictions on foreign currency allowances and many Japanese people began to see international travel as a desirable activity (Moeran 2004). Coupled with the rapid growth of the Japanese ‘miracle’ economy from the late 1960s, this also spurred new leisure and travel incentives for Japanese groups, especially middle-aged Japanese Buddhist pilgrims, who looked to places like India for spiritual inspiration. By 1979, according to Moeran, more than four million Japanese people were travelling overseas on business and/ or pleasure, and expenditure on international travel was US$4.8 billion (Moeran 2004: 111). This trend made Japan the third largest country in terms of scale of travel after the United States and West Germany, and the numbers only increased in the 1980s and 1990s following Prime Minister Tanaka’s push for ‘internationalization’ (Moeran 2004) through the ‘Ten Million Programme’ and ‘Two Way Tourism Programme’, as described above. As Sanjay, owner of a Buddhist handicraft shop in the popular Buddhist pilgrimage town of Bodh Gaya, explained to me: ‘The Japanese began arriving in the late 1970s and by the mid-1980s things really took off! During that time the Japanese had developed an interest in Bodh Gaya and other Indian Buddhist sites and were providing very good business’, he said with emphasis. ‘The Japanese were also very simple or ignorant you could

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say … and locals were charging very high prices. They were heavy buyers and were also blind. Some people also started having good relations with the Japanese. Some were even going to Japan. The owner of Sujata Hotel, he was the beginning’. The story of Sujata Hotel and the legend of Kedar Prasad Agrawal is a local point of reference for many residents who reflect on the impact of Japanese pilgrimage and tourist entrepreneurship in Bodh Gaya. Coming from a lower caste, Kedar Prasad Agrawal ran into some family difficulties and eventually settled near the government-sponsored Harijan Colony, not far from the recently built Japanese temples. From a young age, he gained a popular reputation as a horse-cart driver in Bodh Gaya, providing pilgrims and tourists with this rustic form of transportation before the arrival of motor vehicles. In addition to his local fame as a horse-cart driver, he also opened a small roadside handicraft shop where he prospered from early Japanese patrons, including a Buddhist priest who later sponsored members of his family to acquire permanent settlement visas in Kyoto. With eight children, including five sons, the Agrawal family firm has since cultivated strong business ties with the Japanese market as owners of the popular Sujata Hotel (a unit of Hotel Niranjana Pvt. Ltd.), which was formally opened in 1995. With its air-conditioned rooms, marble flooring and exclusive o-furo styled Japanese steam baths, the hotel claims to offer quality service and traditional Indian hospitality. Helping to showcase their hotel and travel agency is their family-run Sujata Restaurant, located in Kyoto, Japan. Rahul, one of the young family members who frequently moves between Japan and India for business, noted: ‘Due to the connections with Buddhists in Kyoto, they all know we are from Bodh Gaya and through them we receive much support. So, in Kyoto, we give thanks to Lord Buddha and serve typical Indian food’. As with Kedar Prasad Agrawal, there was an entire generation of young enterprising youth who benefited from the growing Japanese ties at the place of Buddha’s enlightenment. Most of them began as mobile hawkers selling rosary malas, photos, precious stones, dried peepal leaves and other sacred souvenirs. With their footloose business acumen, the group would chase the Japanese pilgrims and/or sell handicrafts on bedsheets near the Mahabodhi Temple or at the front gates of the Japanese monastery. There were also some who acquired rare Buddhist statues and sculptures from surrounding areas, including the grounds of the Mahabodhi Temple itself (before the boundary wall), which fetched a significant profit among the Japanese and other international buyers. Other youth gained leverage by learning to speak Japanese, and this linguistic asset helped to strengthen cultural intimacy among these early Japanese pilgrim flows. As two shopkeepers in the bazaar explained:

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In Bodh Gaya, the Japanese were coming in large groups. There were also Thai pilgrims but their economy was not good. So, we only bothered the Japanese. They were not foolish people but would pay much more than the actual price. If something would cost Rs. 10 the Japanese would pay 10 US dollars. Some of us were getting 50 US dollars in one day, and back then Rs. 200 (equivalent of 5 US dollars) would have been big money. So, the Japanese had lots of money and there is some complex among them … they want to bring home unique things. During that time, the Japanese used to have trust. There were very few travel agents back then. The Japanese would come to Bodh Gaya and also visit other tourist sites like Agra. But the Buddhist places were of central interest. They were very much here for the shopping. It is a custom among Japanese people, wherever they go, they buy something.

As noted in the previous section, the tendency for group travel accompanied by a guide, and the obligation to purchase gifts and/or shopping, are key factors that contribute to a modern Japanese culture of travel (see also Guichard-Anguis and Moon 2008). Through these growing expenditures among Japanese pilgrims, many young entrepreneurs in Bodh Gaya chose to reinvest these earnings in land, with the dream of building a hotel like Kedar Prasad Agrawal and running their own handicraft empire. Thus, during this period of heightened economic prosperity, a number of hotels, guesthouses, travel agents and handicraft emporiums were built. Although other Asian pilgrim groups were visiting Bodh Gaya during this time, especially Tibetan refugees, it was the Japanese pilgrims who left a significant economic footprint on the social landscape of Bodh Gaya that continues to reverberate today. One of the more surprising ethnographic findings in relation to the development of a tourism entrepreneurship in Bodh Gaya is the extent to which a large number of these hoteliers have (or have had) Japanese wives and girlfriends. Like other popular tourist destinations, transnational courting at the place of enlightenment is becoming more familiar these days. It is believed there are upwards of thirty to forty local men who have foreign wives, and many of them are Japanese. Whether they have been sponsored by Japanese visitors, or have had romantic ties with Japanese women, these ‘success’ stories circulate widely in the bazaar as symbols of increased social and economic mobility. Within the local taxonomy of foreign guests, the Japanese are widely seen as the ideal type for their enthusiastic spending habits and as a potential stepping-stone for marriage-based migration. To explore the flights of imagination and fantasy that flourish between Bihari men and Japanese women, let me introduce one of the more famous married couples in Bodh Gaya today: Yuki Inoue and Sudama Prasad, the owners of Hotel Mahamaya. Like many youth in Bodh Gaya today,

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Sudama held aspirations to work in the tourism industry and eventually moved to Delhi where he was employed as an interpreter for Cox & Kings, one of the longest established travel companies in the world. In Delhi, Sudama met his future wife Yuki, who was visiting India on a sightseeing trip with her father, a Fine Arts professor in Kyoto. During the guided tour, the two fell in love and thereafter a fury of romantic letters and phone calls was exchanged. When I spoke with Sudama in the lobby of Hotel Mahamaya one afternoon, he told me that after his initial meeting with Yuki he was invited to Japan, where he met with her parents and they agreed to the marriage. Although Sudama had the opportunity to live and work in Japan, he found the Japanese work culture very difficult and there were few opportunities available to him at that time. So, in 1998, the same year Sudama and Yuki were married, he quit his job as a guide, took out a bank loan and began constructing Hotel Mahamaya, where they currently reside. As Sudama explains: We got married in 1998 and have been living a very happy life. But in the beginning it was difficult, not so much for me, but for my wife. Many local people were abusing her when she first arrived. She did not understand Hindi so well at that time. But now she has become Bihari. She has even adopted many Hindu practices and has become a traditional Indian woman, you could say.

As Sudama suggests, becoming a ‘traditional Indian woman’ has not been easy for Yuki, and she was surprised at just how different Bodh Gaya was to New Delhi. Speaking with Yuki from her hotel one afternoon, she explained: When I arrived [in Bodh Gaya] for the first time, there was no electricity for ten days and I had to live with an extended family of twenty-five people. Although I have enjoyed living here, it has been very difficult at times. Because my husband was a tourist guide I thought I would travel a lot, but after marriage he quit the guide work and began constructing a hotel. At that time I was very alone and the entire family spoke Hindi. Only the youngest sister could speak some English. After one year I also found that the Hindi was different from the book I was using to practise with. Later, I discovered that they were speaking Maghi [regional dialect]. So slowly I began to learn both Maghi and standard Hindi. It has also been difficult to meet other Japanese here. The home is very conservative. It is very traditional here, although my husband is not. Only after marriage would the family allow me to open the windows and speak with others. I have had to adjust by following the local customs and learning local Indian cooking.

Another challenge that comes with transnational courting in south Bihar is the jealousy and suspicion that surrounds their inter-racial romance in

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this rural area. According to Yuki, for many local people in Bodh Gaya today, it is believed that ‘if you marry a foreigner you will get rich. The people are just thinking about status and money, not family. There are many cases of divorce here. They also chase after Japanese girls because they think they are easy’. Yuki then explained: In our case Sudama had pulled together the funds for building the hotel before our marriage, but the perception among local people is that he became rich because of our marriage. The truth is, after construction of the hotel began, we got married. Sudama has had success through his own hard work.

Despite Yuki and Sudama’s efforts to counter these assumptions and put an end to the flow of gossip in the bazaar, their recent construction of a second hotel on the banks of the Niranjana River in a prime real estate area has only fuelled the belief among Bodh Gaya’s residents that foreign women (both Buddhist and non-Buddhist) translate into material prosperity. Although the case of Sudama and Yuki is certainly one of the more famous examples of transnational courting in Bodh Gaya today, as Sanjay Jha (2003) reports in a special issue of India Today entitled ‘Knot Uncommon’, this is not an isolated case. ‘East is increasingly meeting East in this temple town’, he writes. ‘Call it happenstance, call it heaven’s blessing, but youths in the land of Buddha’s nirvana now court Japanese girls with rustic aplomb.’7 While many Japanese women, like Yuki, live in Bodh Gaya year round, there is also a growing number of young men who reside in Japanese cities such as Sapporo and Kyoto, and who have, like the Sujata Restaurant, started hotel businesses, restaurants and travel agencies that cater to the Indo-Japanese traffic in Buddhist pilgrimage. Many of these success stories perpetuate the myth of a ‘geographical dowry’ and the role of marriage as a means of obtaining financial security in a ‘developed’ country (Jha 2003). Similar to Brennan’s (2004) account of sex workers in the Dominican Republic, these few instances of locals migrating to Japan as the husbands of Japanese women only propel the fantasy of the ‘opportunity myth’ where ‘anything could happen’. For these Indian men, therefore, the ‘performance of love’ – the idea of pretending to be in love with someone – is deployed strategically. It ‘emerges as an economic strategy as well as a legal route to securing the papers necessary to migrate’ out of India (Brennan 2004: 30). The transactional use of marriage as a form of social mobility and a means of crossing national borders has become more common in a globalizing world. For many of these young Indian men coming from poor agricultural backgrounds with limited education and resources, it is one of few viable options available to secure the papers necessary for legal migration.

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By laying claim to a geographical dowry, it is widely believed that one’s material comforts will be improved and the possibilities to remit money back to their families will be expanded. While salaries are much higher in Japan than in Bodh Gaya, as I have learned, the experience of Japan often falls short of their expectations and the economic fantasies of an easier life are often the opposite – there are considerable legal constraints to migrate outside of India; it also requires hard work in a different culture where the social expectations are difficult to fulfil, especially isolated from family and community. Few relationships last, and there is often little improvement to their economic status over the long run, and most eventually return to India. Despite these difficulties, a considerable amount of social capital is gained by living in a foreign developed country, regardless of its brevity, and upon return these migrants act out wealth and perpetuate the image of Japan and other foreign countries as places of undue riches and possibility. One also wonders if this transactional form of marriage through a geographical dowry challenges some of the culture-bound assumptions and ideals about what constitutes a ‘good marriage’ in rural India, where caste and community are seen as an integral part of maintaining social status. At the same time, it is well known that economic imperatives have long underlined the dowry exchange and usually outweigh romantic variables in arranged marriage proposals between families and caste communities. Although it is commonly held that transnational courting has become a strategic means of improving economic standing and social mobility for local men, the question of why the Japanese women are attracted to the home-grown Bodh Gaya stalk is not an easy one to answer. As noted in the Japanese Market Survey and the work of various scholars (Ivy 1995; Moeran 2004), it is now well known that a very large percentage of Japanese tourists abroad are women. Drawing on Marilyn Ivy’s (1995) book Discourses of the Vanishing, Chambers (2009) discusses how the emergent Japanese tourist industry in the 1960s focused much of its promotional effort on Japanese women, assuming that young, unmarried women were the appropriate pacesetters in encouraging greater societal acceptance of leisure travel. Men, on the other hand, were constrained by work and family duty, and viewed leisure travel as a superfluous activity. Thus, in a reversal of the tendency to view Western tourism as having developed through a ‘masculine gaze’, Ivy argues that women were less bound to social conventions and helped to broaden the travel market because ‘where women go, men follow’ (cited in Chambers 2009: 63). Similarly, Moeran (2004: 122) suggests that many of these Japanese women aimed to postpone getting married until their thirties, and viewed travel as an

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international opportunity to rebel against a masculine Japanese work ethic and escape the drudgery of an employment system that failed to make the most of their skills. As Deepak, a local guesthouse owner with long ties to Japan, explained to me one afternoon, there are only a few residents in Bodh Gaya who have any knowledge of Japan. ‘What they have heard’, according to Deepak, ‘was from the elders who were making money’. The image of Japanese from the 1980s was that they were very rich and foolish, he told me. ‘They just give money.’ It was also believed that Japanese women were not satisfied with Japanese men: The men do not have much time for them or respect. And when the women come to India, they see our culture where the women do not work in formal jobs. Instead, they stay at home and take care of the children. They also receive respect from the society. So they likely felt that the Indian men are good to marry, giving time to their wife and children.

Another reason why the men do not have respect for women in Japan, according to Deepak, is that they simply do not have time: In one week, maybe they have only one day. The Japanese men are work machines. A close friend of mine calls them ‘economic animals’ because they just work, work, work. There is no care for family and society. They have money and brains, but no heart. So the Japanese women come to Bodh Gaya and get heart, respect and sexual relations.

Although he acknowledged that these emotional entanglements between Japanese women and Indian hosts are quite common in Bodh Gaya today, the reality, Deepak suggests, is that it is all a façade. You can call it emotional blackmail. Locals requesting marriage when they are only staying here for eight to ten days and during this time there is lots of talk. This is followed by proposals from the men and women’s side … So you can say there are two reasons: one, the Japanese women are marrying Indian men for culture, not for money, even though they do not know the status of the man, his caste, or how much money he has. And second, among the Bodh Gaya men, they just want to marry so they can go to Japan and stay there. It is a spousal visa. They can work there on a spousal visa and as a result they can earn much more money. After they get married, maybe after two or three years, they separate, but the men still manage to obtain a visa. So there is no harm to marry for six months.

Although it is difficult to distinguish relationships for love and for spousal visas, what is clear is that the allure of Indian culture as the homeland of Buddhism appears to be one of the underlying mystiques that contributes to Japanese women’s fantasies.

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These findings stand in contrast to Karen Kelsky’s (2001) ethnography Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams and her analysis of Japanese women’s lives and careers. In this book, Kelsky explores the complicated and contradictory role of transnational desire among young Japanese ‘internationalists’, who seek romance with Western men as a means of circumventing their country’s oppressive corporate and patriarchal family structures. Kelsky (2001: 4) argues that the feminine allegiance to the West and the ‘occidental longings’ among Japanese women are seen as a ‘potentially transgressive and transformative force’. In contrast, Japanese women in Bodh Gaya do not emulate the global West as the model of unfettered freedom but rather see Indian culture as a potentially transgressive step towards new opportunities. But in leaving behind the excesses of patriarchy and oppression in Japan, they must also learn to adapt and adhere to various social expectations in terms of gender, family and household responsibilities in the Indian context. Thus, instead of circumventing their country’s oppressive and patriarchal family structure, new asymmetries of domination are inscribed, at least in the case of Yuki, who has had to adopt many Hindu practices and reconfigure her status as a ‘traditional Indian woman’.

Conclusion The interweaving of commerce and pilgrimage has a long history in the South Asian context, especially in India where there is a robust culture of religious-motivated travel and where the sacred resonates with Buddhists throughout Asia, and around the world. Through increased mobility and growing economic integration through parts of Asia, India’s Buddhist pilgrimage geography provides an important transnational arena for rebuilding and reimagining Asian civilizational ties and connections in the early twenty-first century. Due to the religious and historical importance of these sacred sites as the focal points for an emerging world Buddhism, they also articulate with broader cultural, political and economic interests through the forging of bilateral and multilateral collaborative investments in the region. The use of development aid in foreign policy and cultural diplomacy has particular salience among the Japanese, who have deployed this heritage-based strategy to mark their presence in the international arena, both globally and regionally following the end of World War II (Akagawa 2014). While these forms of transnational courting between India and Japan are evident in the consumer market surveys and official development assistance following the launch of India’s ‘Look East’ policy in the early 1990s, the

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growing number of Japanese pilgrims and tourists along the Buddhist circuit has also triggered more intimate encounters. Unlike sex tourism destinations where racial differences are eroticized and commodified, in Bodh Gaya it is religion and culture that appear to arouse marital desires and play into the flights of imagination and fantasy among Indian men and Japanese women. For some of these young jet-setting Japanese women, the spiritual magnetism (Preston 1992) of the place of Buddha’s enlightenment also contributes to romantic prospects in the holy land. It is perhaps a strange irony that these Buddhist inclinations lead to marriage proposals from local Indian men who derive from Hindu backgrounds and require the women, like Yuki, to conform to traditional gender roles. Thus, one could argue that it is the prominent place of Buddhism and the allure of enlightenment that prefigures these transnational encounters between Indian men and Japanese women. As Sanjay Jha (2003) notes, it is the spiritual significance of Bodh Gaya among the Japanese … that contributes to cross-cultural matches between the East and East. When Yuki’s father was asked about his daughter’s marriage to Sudama, he said: ‘Like Lord Buddha, my daughter came here to get ultimate enlightenment … It was her fate that she got married at Bodh Gaya to Sudama’.

David Geary is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Community, Culture and Global Studies at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan). He has held research and teaching positions at International Institute for Asian Studies (Leiden), the Antioch University Buddhist Studies Program in Bodh Gaya, India, and at the University of Oxford. His research interests include pilgrimage, tourism and diaspora, the spatial politics of UNESCO World Heritage, and the contemporary Buddhist revival movement in India. He is the author of The Rebirth of Bodh Gaya: Buddhism and the Making of a World Heritage Site (University of Washington Press, 2017) and co-author of Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on a Contested Buddhist Site: Bodh Gaya Jataka (Routledge, 2012).

Notes Portions of this work originally appeared in D. Geary, The Rebirth of Bodh Gaya: Buddhism and the Making of a World Heritage Site (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017). Reprinted with permission.

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 1. This sacred geography mirrors the widely cited Mahaparinirvana (‘Great Final Enlightenment’) Sutra, where the Buddha encouraged his disciples to undertake pilgrimage and visit the places associated with the pivotal events in his spiritual and biographical life. These four main sites are recognized as Lumbini (the birthplace of the Buddha), Bodh Gaya (the site of Buddha’s enlightenment), Sarnath (the place of Buddha’s first discourse) and Kushinagar (the place of Buddha’s death), but also include other important satellite sites in North India, such as Shravasti and Rajgir-Nalanda.   2. ‘Notes and News’, Journal of the Maha Bodhi Society 69 (1961): 22–23.  3. This is quite different from Japanese state policy today, which encourages domestic tourism. Ian Reader, personal communication, 19 October 2017.  4. The OECF was created in December 1960 and initially extended loans to Japanese firms engaged in projects in development countries such as India. In 1965 it joined with Eximbank to extend direct loans to foreign governments, and in 1975 it split from Eximbank and became the main body for administering ODA loans (Takagi 2015: 83).  5. Information related to the Ajanta Ellora Conservation and Tourism Development Project can be found at http://ajantacaves.com/html/Ajanta-Ellora-ConservationProject.asp. Other news media stories include Chatterjee (2002) and Godbole (2013).  6. ‘JICA Sanctions Rs. 1,350-cr Loan for Bihar Buddhist Circuit Road’, The Hindu, Business Line, New Delhi, 22 February 2013.  7. Another report on transnational courting in Bodh Gaya can be found in ‘Mr. Kumar and His Japanese Wife’, Hindustan Times, New Delhi, 13 September 2009.

References Abe, S. 2015. ‘India, Japan Are Natural Partners: This Relationship Has the Greatest Potential in the World, I Will Turn It into Reality’, Times of India, 11 December. Akagawa, N. 2014. Heritage Conservation and Japan’s Cultural Diplomacy: Heritage, National Identity and National Interest. New York: Routledge. Brennan, D. 2004. What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Byrne, D. 2014. Counterheritage: Critical Perspectives on Heritage Conservation in Asia. New York: Routledge. Chambers, E. 2009. Native Tours: The Anthropology of Travel and Tourism. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Chatterjee, A. 2002. ‘Japan Pitches in to Spruce up Ajanta, Ellora’, Times of India, 27 November. Daly, P., and T. Winter (eds). 2012. The Routledge Handbook of Heritage in Asia. New York: Routledge. Department of Tourism, Government of India. 1986. Action Plan for the Development of the Buddhist Sector. New Delhi: A.F. Ferguson & Co. Department of Tourism, Government of India. 1992. Development of the Buddhist Sector for the Japanese Market. New Delhi: Pacific Consultants International in Tokyo and Consulting Engineering Services Pvt. Ltd. Embassy of Japan. 2005. ‘Japan Extends Largest Ever Soft Loan Package to India’, 29 March. Retrieved from http://www.in.emb-japan.go.jp/Press_Releases_Embassy/PR07-08. html. Geary, D. 2008. ‘Destination Enlightenment: Branding Buddhism and Spiritual Tourism in Bodh Gaya, Bihar’, Anthropology Today 24(3): 11–14. Geary, D. 2014. ‘Rebuilding the Navel of the Earth: Buddhist Pilgrimage and Transnational Religious Networks’, Modern Asian Studies 48(3): 645–92.

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Geary, D. 2017. The Rebirth of Bodh Gaya: Buddhism and the Making of a World Heritage Site. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Godbole, P. 2013. ‘Tourist Footfall up by 80% at Ajanta-Ellora’, Business Standard, 3 October. Government of India, Ministry of Tourism. 2014. ‘Development of Buddhist Tourism’, Press Information Bureau, 10 February. Guichard-Anguis, S., and O. Moon (eds).  2008. Japanese Tourism and Travel Culture. New York: Routledge. Hall, C.M. 2001. ‘Japan and Tourism in the Pacific Rim: Locating a Sphere of Influence in the Global Economy’, in D. Harrison (ed.), Tourism and the Less Developed World: Issues and Case Studies. Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing, pp. 121–36. Ivy, M. 1995. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Jaffe, R.M. 2004. ‘Seeking Śākyamuni: Travel and the Reconstruction of Japanese Buddhism’, The Journal of Japanese Studies 30(1): 65–96. Jaffrelot, C. 2003. ‘India’s Look East Policy: An Asianist Strategy in Perspective’, India Review 2(2): 35–68. Jha, S.K. 2003. ‘Knot Uncommon’, India Today, 31 March. Kelsky, K. 2001. Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kemper, S. 2005. ‘Dharmapala’s Dharmaduta and the Buddhist Ethnoscape’, in L. Learman (ed.), Buddhist Missionaries in the Era of Globalization. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 22–50. Kemper, S. 2015.  Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Leheny, D.R. 2003. The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japanese Leisure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.. Malone, D. 2011. ‘Soft Power in Indian Foreign Policy’, Economic & Political Weekly 46(36): 35. Manjul, T. 2011. ‘Japanese Funds to improve Buddhist Circuit’, The Indian Express, 8 March. Moeran, B. 2004. ‘Rereading the Language of Japanese Tourism’, in S. Gmelch (ed.), Tourists and Tourism: A Reader. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, pp. 111–25. Motoyama, H. 2000. ‘Development Finance, A Giant is Born’, Watershed, March 2000. Retrieved 16 March 2013 from http://www.foejapan.org/en/aid/giant.html. Nye, J.S. 2004. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs. Pinkney, A. 2015. ‘Looking West to India: Asian Education, Intra-Asian Renaissance, and the Nalanda Revival’, Modern Asian Studies 49(1): 111–49. Preston, J.J. 1992. ‘Spiritual Magnetism: An Organizing Principle for the Study of Pilgrimage’ in A. Morinis (ed.), Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 31–46.Reader, I. 2014. Pilgrimage in the Marketplace. New York: Routledge. Reader, I., and P. Swanson. 1997. ‘Editors’ Introduction: Pilgrimage in the Japanese Religious Tradition’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 24(3–4): 225–70. Takagi, S. 2015. Conquering the Fear of Freedom: Japanese Exchange Rate Policy since 1945. New York: Oxford University Press. Winter, T. 2015. ‘Heritage Diplomacy’,  International Journal of Heritage Studies 21(10): 997–1015.

Chapter 3

Sufism and the Pilgrimage Market A Political Economy of a Shrine in Southern Pakistan Rémy Delage

Introduction The relationship between economy and religion in South Asia has long been studied through the examples of trading castes, family businesses and firms. A fine example is provided by the collection edited by Pierre Lachaier and Catherine Clémentin-Ojha (2008), in which the impact of religion on economic behaviour is explored through mostly Hindu merchant castes (see also McLeary and Barro 2006). They underline the many analogies between ritual and market transactions: investment, reciprocity, donations, redistribution, exchange, loan and debt,1 and so on. However, while the relationship between religion and economics in the 2008 volume was examined through the very specific example of the Khojas – a merchant community of Ismaili Shiites for whom enrichment is considered as the privileged means to access to salvation (Boivin 2008) – pilgrimage and religious gatherings as economic driving forces, in a South Asian and/or Muslim context, were not the volume’s central focus. However, in a more recent publication, Nile Green (2011) has addressed this relationship through the lens of popular expressions of Islam (street shrines, ritual processions, religious gatherings etc.). He discusses the emergence of industrial capitalism in nineteenth-century Bombay and concentrates on the close links between work, commerce and Muslim mysticism. He draws on economic terms to examine the heterogeneous and growing religious ‘market’ where ‘religious firms’ are composed of Notes for this chapter begin on page 71.

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‘entrepreneurs’, who are ‘producers’ and suppliers to ‘customers’, who are ‘consumers’ of religious services. This conceptual framework, which is similar to some extent to the approach used by Fedele and Katić in this volume, enables him to support his central thesis that the diversity (sometimes the saturation) of the religious offer leads to competition between the different actors and groups. This diversity is also a factor in the production and reproduction of multiple forms of Islam, which are specific and localized. According to the author, one of the most productive and typical ‘religious firms’ is the place of worship to be found in devotional (or customary) Islam (Green 2011: 17–18), such as the tomb of a saint (mâzâr) or a larger Sufi mausoleum (dargâh). In this chapter I will draw on examples from sites situated along the Indus Valley and will pay particular attention to Sehwan Sharif, a Sufi pilgrimage town in the Sindh region of Pakistan.2 I will first explore the relationship between Sufism and the economy in order to better understand pilgrimage in terms of the ‘market’, where religious and festive practices are closely enmeshed with economic processes (see Reader 2014). I will then describe the historical evolution of the ‘pilgrimage market’ in the Sindh region during the pre-colonial and colonial periods. Thirdly, I will focus on the political appropriation of the Sufi landscape in Sindh, especially the role played by the Bhutto family in actively promoting the pilgrimage to Sehwan Sharif through urban and architectural innovations. Finally, I will describe the impact of the nationalization of Sufi sites on local ‘spiritual entrepreneurs’ and the progress of the pilgrimage in order to explain the current issues affecting Sehwan Sharif’s religious economy, which is grounded on an annual pilgrimage attended by between one and two million devotees depending on the year.3

Sufism, Economy and the Pilgrimage Market In South Asian Sufism, as elsewhere in the Muslim world, manual and intellectual work were valued, and saints (pîrs) often contributed to the development of economic activities, particularly in the fields of agriculture but also in the sectors of education, health, culture and so on. In the Indus Valley, saints’ tombs and the institutions that supervise their functioning have been important centres of economic and commercial development since at least the seventeenth century. The religious fairs (mela), organized on the occasion of the annual pilgrimage (`urs) to a saint’s tomb, were major events of local and regional economic life. Around these large markets, animated by local socio-religious elites and facilitating trade between the

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tribes, saint cults played a significant role in regulating society and controlling and redistributing resources. The religious life of the pilgrimage is, therefore, inseparable from its economic and commercial dimension, as well as from the consumption practices that can be observed at these cult places (see Décobert 2005; Reader 2014; Coleman and Eade in this volume). Besides the legal norms and rules prescribed by Islamic law to ensure proper economic conduct, the relations of Sufism with the categories of market and pilgrimage can be observed here at two levels. They are sought, on the one hand, through an economy of salvation, which is based on the presence of a major economic actor (the saint) within a complex religious market. The economy of salvation is sustained by a social and ritual organization composed of ‘spiritual entrepreneurs’ (see also Fedele in this volume), as well as the cult’s administrators, who act as mediators between devotees and Sufi saints according to the principles of patronage. On the other hand, the annual pilgrimage is the only real engine of Sehwan’s economy now through both the multiplication and diversification of public and institutional actors and the massive increase in economic exchanges and transactions it arouses. It is even a place where local processes engage with global contexts (Stauth and Schielke 2008; Blok 2010; Hyndman-Rizk 2012; Singh 2013). How did Sehwan’s ‘pilgrimage market’ and its functions evolve during the modern period? Has it changed significantly in response to the rise of the market economy and consumerism? What drove its expansion and the massive increase in those participating in the pilgrimage during the postcolonial period? How do different social, economic, political and religious actors participate together in place-making and in the production of pilgrimage space? What has been the impact of institutional reforms centred around the management of Sufi shrines and the pilgrimage market? Can this be considered as an available resource for the promotion of heritage policies or new forms of tourism and circulation? Following the propositions advanced by Simon Coleman and John Eade in the introduction to this volume, a renewed approach to the political economy of the pilgrimage would involve examining the intersections between infrastructure and superstructure, economic and religious activities, mobility and sedentariness, pilgrimage and tourism, and so on (see also Décobert 2005; Adelkhah 2007; Camhi-Rayer 2012; Reader 2014; Katić in this volume). A renewed approach through the local lens would also need to take into account other places of reference and links outside the locality.4 Furthermore, like any place, a pilgrimage centre exists only through the movements that have passed through it in the past and that continue to give it new meanings today.

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The development of the mobility paradigm across the social sciences (Tarrius 1993; Markovits, Pouchepadass and Subrahmanyam 2003; Retaillé 2005; Sheller and Urry 2006) and in the field of pilgrimage studies (Gold 1988; Frey 1998; Werbner 2003; Coleman and Eade 2004; Bajc, Coleman and Eade 2007) has enabled us to appreciate the key role played by movement in spatial production and differentiation. Drawing on this paradigm, we can define pilgrimage as a temporalized crossroads of mobility which is subject to numerous forms of social, territorial and political control throughout its history.5 Adopting a longue durée approach, we begin here by following the evolution of the pilgrimage market in Sehwan in parallel with the various mobility contexts that led to its development and successive redefinitions.

The Pioneer Fronts of Sufism: Circulations, Trade and Religious Fairs From the beginning of the Islamization of the Indian subcontinent to the colonial period, the Sindh region was not only the subject of military raids, bloody battles and forced conversions. Intense circulations and migratory networks developed between the original cradle of Islam and the new spaces to be conquered in Asia (Green 2003). Alongside traders and merchant entrepreneurs, armed troops composed of horsemen and foot soldiers, missionaries and scholars, the first mystics of Islam and Sufi saints originating from Central Asia arrived in Sindh around the twelfth century. La`l Shahbâz Qalandar, an itinerant Sufi of Persian origin, travelled extensively before settling in the locality of Sehwan, where he spent the last years of his life at the end of the thirteenth century. Sehwan at this time was under the influence of Hinduism and Shaivism, and some residual traces still survive in the social and ritual arenas as well as in the local architecture (Delage and Ortis 2014). The arrival of the Sufi saint gave a new meaning to the locality and its social development became intimately bound up with Sehwan’s emergence as a major place of Islamic worship. The history of this small town has long been depicted as the product of its location at a crossroads where influences and mobilities, associated with conquest and territorial control by dynasties and regional economic elites, came together. Because of its dominant position on the Indus, the small fort (qilâ) allowed local rulers to monitor movements upstream and downstream. The site was coveted throughout its history and was subject to many invasions, whose strategic aim was control of access to the Arabian Sea and the trans-oceanic trade. Sehwan has played a number of roles, therefore, including that of garrison and military checkpoint, an

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important Shaivite and Hindu place of worship,6 and a political capital and major economic centre, especially during the Mughal period, between the sixteenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century (Chablani 1951). Like the mobile pioneering Bengal region in some respects (see Eaton 1993: 207–19), the consolidation of the social and economic power of Sufi saints in pre-colonial Sindh was paralleled by the development of canal-irrigated agriculture along the Indus River (Ansari 1992).7 Agrarian change went hand in hand with the strengthening of the economic and political influence of these Sufi devotional centres. Agricultural development led to the sedentarization of nomadic tribes along the Indus Valley and a decline in rural Sufi cults, which was offset by the growing power of saints or spiritual masters in urban Sufi centres (Ansari 1992). The economic prosperity of these urban cults was partly related to the ability of families, who inherited the personal charisma (Baraka) of a saint, to build up networks of disciples across the surrounding countryside. These spiritual entrepreneurs (sajjâda nashîn) collected from a number of devotees, with whom they nurtured contractual relations, a contribution (nazranâh) for the support of their Sufi lodge (khânqâh, kâfî). These religious and urban institutions were and still are places mediating spiritual authority through the transmission of Muslim mysticism and the maintenance of a master-disciple relationship (pîrî-muridî). Other sources of income for these spiritual leaders came from the lands allocated by the Delhi sultans and local rulers, either to the Sufi mausoleums in the form of waqf (religious endowments) or directly to the families of sajjâda nashîn in the form of jagîrs (land grants). This process led gradually to the formation of a powerful elite of landowners (zamîndâr) and spiritual entrepreneurs whose political influence steadily grew. The prosperity of the cities organized around Sufi mausoleums was also linked to the economic dynamism generated by the activity of religious fairs on the occasion of the annual gatherings around the saint’s tomb. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, Sehwan was a very active and prosperous market for its agricultural, textile and fish products. The town was also a transit point for cereal crops, such as wheat and rice, circulating between the northern and the southern parts of Sindh. Furthermore, like other urban centres in the Indus Valley, Sehwan was a major player in the regional circulatory network through its role as a key link in the chain forged between local and international trade. In terms of river trade, however, Sehwan’s port saw a gradual decline during the colonial period. At the beginning of the twentieth century, transport was transformed by the arrival of the railway and the development of the roadways. The itinerant community of fishermen (Mohana), which played an important role in the logistics of the river trade, settled

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permanently in Sehwan and continues to play a role in certain rituals related to the cult of the saint. The numerous accounts produced by the colonial ethnography (Gazetteers) show that the pilgrimage to Sehwan was flourishing in the second half of the nineteenth century. The pilgrimage was supported through the economic and political power of the Muslim Sayyid elite, who acted as both landowners and religious leaders (well encapsulated in the category of ‘spiritual landlords’, used by Ansari 1992). At the same time, Hindu families also played a major role until the twentieth century, both at an economic level through the merchant Lohana caste and in terms of ritual involvement by the Qanungo group. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hindus represented nearly half of the local population and they occupied a central neighbourhood in the locality (the Thakur mohallah). The cult of Udero Lâl, a Hindu deity associated with the Indus River, protector of the boatmen and sailors, was widespread in Sindh and its cult was encouraged in Sehwan by a priestly caste that was active in local temples. The migration of the Hindu population to other parts of Sindh and to India, before and during the Partition,8 but also until the 1990s, profoundly transformed the population structure and the local religious economy. Today there are only a few dozen Hindu families residing in Sehwan, some of whom are still involved in processional rituals during the annual pilgrimage. The territorialization of the Indus Valley by Sufi saints and brotherhoods was achieved, therefore, across various fronts: agriculture and urbanization (sedentarization, formation of socio-religious elites), religious conversion (growing adherence to the cult of saints) and economic development through the control of resources (lands, raw materials) and marketplaces (religious fairs). The local pilgrimage market thus gradually became part of the globalized market space on a trans-oceanic scale that was controlled in South Asia by the British Empire in connection with regional communities of Sindh merchants, Hindu and Muslim. As a result, the local elites of spiritual entrepreneurs played a growing political role at the national level.

Political Mobilizations of Spiritual Capital and the Redesigning of the Locality During the pre-colonial and colonial periods, the space of Sufism and of the pilgrimage market stabilized and solidified all along the Indus Valley. However, the relationship between the socio-religious elites and the political sphere continued to evolve. The colonial administration relied on

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these elites to ensure political stability until independence. Furthermore, throughout the postcolonial period, Pakistani political leaders identified themselves with famous saints in order to feed their ideologies and mobilize a particular electorate. They forged a ‘spiritual constituency’ (Philippon 2011: 11), which was similar to the Islamic notion of a ‘spiritual jurisdiction’ (vilâyat) ruled by the saints and administered by their descendants (Werbner 2003; Delage 2016: 155–59). Sufism and pilgrimage have provided a resource for political leaders (see also Katić, Louw and Geary in this volume), not only as a vote bank but also as a platform on which they could spread their political message and implement public policies. In this regard, the figure of the saint La`l Shahbâz Qalandar and the locality of Sehwan are inseparable from the Bhutto dynasty. Sehwan has been the epicentre of this dynasty’s ‘political spirituality’ for many generations (Verkaaik 2004: 38). The shrine and Ghari Khuda Bakhsh, the Bhutto family cemetery located in the Larkana region of northern Sindh, have been the two anchors of the family’s religious practice (Boivin and Delage 2010: 194). The public appropriation of La`l Shahbâz’s mausoleum by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto started in the 1960s and 1970s during political competition with Ghulam Murtaza Shah Syed, who had chosen as patron saint another figure of sainthood, Shah `Abd al-Latif, in Bhit Shah, the cultural capital of Sindh. Through their dynastic links with Sufi holy places, the Bhutto family and regional elites, both religious and secular, have competitively mobilized their spiritual capital in postcolonial Sindh and sought to turn it into political and charismatic capital (ibid.). The embrace between the Bhutto family and the figure of La`l Shahbâz, still visible in both Sufi and political iconography, was also expressed through the urban development works initiated by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto during his term as President and Prime Minister (1971–77) and continued by Benazir, his daughter, in the 1990s. These included the strengthening and construction of dykes protecting the locality against floods from the Indus. By stabilizing the site and turning it into a much safer place in which to live, these flood protection works have stimulated the arrival of new Baloch populations from rural areas. The population of Sehwan tripled in size and the city’s suburbs expanded considerably.9 At the same time, several restoration and refurbishment works, as well as the architectural transformation of the La`l Shahbâz mausoleum, were initiated. In 1972–73, a very ambitious urban development programme was devised by the provincial authorities of Sindh to entirely reshape the city (Mohammad 1978). However, the proposal to build a large complex never came into being. It was completely different from the historical morphology of the site, identified by its dense and tortuous network of narrow

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alleys, and the plan would have been extremely difficult to implement given the constant activity at the shrine. However, an access gate was created on the south side of the mausoleum to complement the historic entrance, associated with the spiritual elites. During the late 1970s, the historic entrance received a monumental ‘golden gate’, which was imported from Iran and has only been used during the visits of special guests. When Benazir Bhutto became Prime Minister in the 1990s, she continued the work planned by her father as well as initiating a vast project to enlarge the size of the sanctuary. Although the first phase of restoration works was completed on time (1994–97), the following two phases scheduled for the period 1998–2006 were considerably delayed, notably because of Benazir’s long exile between 1998 and 2007. These changes, which marked a transition from Islamic Sindhi architecture to an Iranian-inspired architecture, are still continuing; the demolition of the residential areas around the shrines is very advanced and the new structures (Shia and Sunni mosques, caravanserai, etc.) are near to completion. All the public works undertaken in Sehwan, whether at the city level or in the sanctuary, as well as the promotion of the cult on the national scene, significantly boosted participation in the pilgrimage.10 They were part of a political agenda designed to imprint the seal of the Bhutto clan on the site of La`l Shahbâz by ‘modernizing’ the city and greatly enlarging the size of the sanctuary.

The State and the Regulation of the Pilgrimage Market The changes introduced by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto were also intended to consolidate the local vote bank for the Pakistan Peoples Party, which he had created in order to gain power at the nation-state level where hereditary dynasties, like his family, faced a formidable and sustained challenge from those belonging to rival political and economic elites. From the 1960s, the state had sought to control the devotional market by nationalizing Sufi shrines and thereby capture the land, financial and symbolic resources that they generated (Malik 1990). The administration of the main Sufi places, i.e. the most remunerative ones, passed from the hands of many hereditary families to those of central and provincial governments, thus upsetting the functioning of the local religious economy. The confiscation of the religious endowments owned by sajjâda nashîn families was followed by the appointment of new caretakers (khâdim)11 to ensure the daily management of the mausoleum. By appropriating the intercession function between the saint and his disciples, which had traditionally been undertaken by the spiritual leaders, these caretakers thought they could

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take advantage of the dense customer networks which the sajjâda nashîn had established across the countryside. However, they never really succeeded in breaking the local structures of social and spiritual authority. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto used the mausoleum of Sehwan to implement his policy of promoting large religious gatherings, where rural pilgrim visitors could learn about agrarian reforms, especially new farming and agricultural techniques (Ewing 1983). Even today in Sehwan, the municipality takes advantage of the pilgrimage to organize educational exhibitions on agricultural and industrial innovation (research, mechanization, water management etc.). Unlike the social democracy and reform policy advocated by Bhutto, the Islamization policy implemented by his successor, General Zia ul-Haq (1978–88), promoted a very Sunni, orthodox and legalistic version of Islam. Zia did not want to promote the cult of the saints, even if he saw in the largest religious centres a valuable resource to develop his (failed) attempt to promote international tourism. Nevertheless, during Zia’s regime the improvement in communications played a decisive role in the growth of pilgrimage to Sehwan Sharif. A bridge was built in the north of the town and a special pilgrim train service was introduced which directly connected Lahore, the capital of Punjab, to the town. Steps were also taken to eradicate robbery and banditry around Sehwan, and several operations have secured access via the northern route, from which many pilgrim contingents have come from northern Sindh and Punjab. What exactly are the resources generated by the pilgrimage activity that directly benefit the administration of the mausoleum? The provincial branch of the state’s Awqaf Department coordinates the conduct of the annual festivals held in seven large dargâh,12 including that of La`l Shahbâz. The branch’s intervention is essentially limited to the mausoleum (occupation of space, management of offerings, follow-up of the ritual calendar, various services to pilgrims) and its surroundings (water supply, medical camps, security). The information gathered in situ led me to conclude that the financial benefits for the administration come less from the monetary donations in the collection boxes (a few dozen lakhs of rupees) than from the large government subsidies provided for organizing the event.13 Furthermore, some administrative officers also receive informal monetary donations from devotees near the tomb, making their position very attractive among ritual workers. A major driver of the ritual and circular economy comes from the ‘market of offerings’, which develops products, maintains a clientele and liaises with local economic partners (Camhi-Rayer 2012: 332). Pilgrimage to a saint’s shrine (ziyârât) typically entails praying (du`â) and making a vow (mannat) in front of the tomb. The official caretakers also may sometimes

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recite the fâtiha (first chapter of the Koran). The pilgrims then lay a stole (ghilâf) on the tomb of the saint. In Sehwan, when the pile of these coloured cloths, marked with verses of the Koran, becomes too bulky, the administrators take them away and recycle them either through donation of the bestpieces to VIPs or outside the mausoleum in the small shops of ritual products that line the main axes of pedestrian traffic. Outside the sanctuary, commercial and ritual transactions (community cooking, food exchange) between spiritual leaders and devotees are beyond the control of the shrine’s administration. Nevertheless, they play a fundamental role in the private economy of the pilgrimage and contribute to the reproduction of the system of patronage at the local level. It is also important to note that the Sufi lodges in Sehwan are not traditional institutions of mysticism but places from where social and moral life is controlled, and disputes and intra-family conflicts are settled.14 Several small markets also appear during the time of the pilgrimage along the roads or around less celebrated mausoleums. These are frequented by traders, itinerant musicians and singers, healers, snake charmers, fortune tellers and food vendors. They also provide the opportunity for more recreational activities through a circus. Many small local businesses, as well as houses, are also rented out to visitors. The recent refurbishment of the mausoleum showed once more the state’s influence over Sehwan’s ritual life and pilgrimage. Several spaces occupied by Sufi lodges or adjoining cemeteries were rearranged, creating conflict between the administration and some sajjâda nashîn families. Until the mid 2000s, the dhamâl or gyratory and ecstatic dance was performed by men and women together in the large courtyard that separated the entrance of the mausoleum and the saint’s tomb. This vast courtyard was a place especially appropriated by women and their families who could stay at night and engage in devotional practices such as dancing, singing and possession. However, it has now been divided into two sections, one for men and another reserved for women, and the courtyard is closed at night. A smaller dhamâl courtyard has been built outside and is open to the public, with the result that women have lost their privacy and the devotional practices mentioned above are losing ground. These architectural changes around the mausoleum have also been accompanied by new cleaning practices, which the Awqaf Department has introduced at many other Sunni-Sufi centres under its control. Yet the local processional routes do not appear to have been affected by these changes, during either the annual pilgrimage or the commemorations of the martyrdom of Hussain during the month of Muharram. Finally, the state’s administration of the cult has contributed not only to rearranging social and ritual space to the detriment of certain local

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families, but also to promoting new leaders of some Sufi lodges at least. The local organization of Sufi society has not disappeared but has been reorganized, therefore, as has the pilgrimage market as a whole.

Concluding Remarks A political economy approach raises a number of open questions about the multi-dimensional dynamics of the pilgrimage market. As we have seen through the case study of Sehwan, this market has evolved over centuries. Until the colonial period, the pilgrimage market was essentially local and liberal, as it was controlled by the families of sajjâda nashîn. However, since the nationalization of the Sufi shrines, the market has become resolutely open to outside forces and is regulated through a kind of public-private partnership. It is characterized by the widespread exchange between people, not only between the saint and his followers either through spiritual entrepreneurs or agents of worship, but also between state administrators and their local partners, i.e. private (local elites, traders) and public (municipality, police, government agencies). In addition, the competition between different groups of religious entrepreneurs has shifted today outside the mausoleum. It is expressed in particular during the commemorative rituals of Muharram, which are not regulated by the cult’s administrators, except for the temporary loan of the saint’s relics, and which involve negotiations between private actors concerning the choreography of processional circulations within the public space. The pilgrimage market as a whole participates, then, in the consolidation and reproduction of a spiritual community around the saint. However, the mobile and transitory society of pilgrims remains quite heterogeneous and represents various religious sensitivities, echoing the broader contexts of religious politics embedded in the globalized religious market. The popularity of the saint La`l Shahbâz Qalandar has extended the circulatory space of the pilgrimage nationally and, to a lesser extent, internationally. Besides a traditional ascetic pole formed by groups of faqîrs and malangs, and a devotional one animated by various publics and sections of society, the most salient phenomenon of the pilgrimage to Sehwan for about thirty years is the collective appropriation by Twelver Punjabi Shias of the site and the cult. Many people explain Punjabi enthusiasm for La`l Shahbâz’s cult in terms of its regional origins in contrast to another indigenous saint, such as the poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, who has become an icon of Sindhi identity during the contemporary period. But above all, it is in the memory of La`l Shahbâz’s visits to the great Shiite mausoleums and his affiliation with the martyr, Ali,15 that we must seek an explanation

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for this phenomenon. What is more, the sanctuary’s administrators have never managed to control the very demonstrative practice of self-mortification (matâm), imported and imposed in Sehwan by exclusively Punjabi male groups during the celebration of the `urs. These groups make maximum use of all the interstitial spaces available to indulge in such practices, both inside and outside the mausoleum.16 This phenomenon of the ‘Shiitization’ of public space during the pilgrimage contrasts sharply with the Sunni Islamization of Pakistani society, which has developed over several decades now and has contributed to the marginalization of the Shias in the country.17 This phenomenon has led us to explore the articulation of scales in our political economy approach of pilgrimage and, more precisely, the role of the administration in regulating the ‘Islamization of the local’ in a context of globalization (Werbner and Basu 1998; see also Claveyrolas in this volume18). For example, the administrators attempted to erase in the mausoleum and its surroundings all residual traces of an Islam judged to be inconsistent with prescribed religious norms (i.e. wall inscriptions considered to be blasphemous and material references to devotional Hinduism). Yet, although the administration has had some success in regulating the pilgrimage market, it has failed to transform the daily rituals and cannot control the new Shia practices. Indeed, it is more through a dual dynamic of architectural standardization and sanitization that the state really impacts on the collective representation of Sufism, the visual perception of the mausoleum by the pilgrims as well as the conduct of certain ritual practices. If the local Sufi pilgrimage market participates in the reproduction of popular and localized Islams (Green 2011, 2014), it is also through the pilgrimage that the state intends to project discretely an official version of Islam, stripped of representations and devotional practices deemed transgressive.19 Hence, we could say that the local space of the pilgrimage market is in permanent tension with the space of the globalized (religious) market, since local Islam cannot be disconnected from its global and transnational expressions (Stauth and Schielke 2008; see also Louw in this volume). Because the Hajj provides a sense of realization of the global and of belonging to a universal Muslim community (Décobert 2005), it is interesting to note the conviction among those who travelled to Sehwan that they have accomplished the Hajj; the saint’s mausoleum is seen as a substitute Mecca. The shrine provides an alternative and fluid local-global relationship, which pilgrims continuously reinvent. On their return home, they generate new spiritual and social capital through re-evaluated conceptions of pluralistic Islamic piety, thereby also contributing to the renewal of pilgrimage as an interpretative category.

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Rémy Delage is a Research Fellow at the Centre for South Asian Studies (CEIAS-EHESS, Paris) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). His work focuses on the role of religious circulations in structuring places and territorial belonging. After a PhD centred on an in-depth study of a Hindu mass religious gathering in South India, he shifted from South to North India and Pakistan, from Hinduism to South Asian Islam. His most recent publications include Territoires du religieux dans les mondes indiens: Parcourir, mettre en scène, franchir (edited with M. Claveyrolas, Edition EHESS, 2016) and Devotional Islam in Contemporary South Asia: Shrines, Journeys and Wanderers (edited with M. Boivin, Routledge, 2016).

Notes  1. Following vows made to a deity, a saint, a spiritual guide or an ascetic-renouncer, the visit to a Hindu temple or a Sufi mausoleum is often aimed at the acquisition of intangible (spiritual healing, good fortune, well-being) or material benefits (social upliftment, economic prosperity). For instance, when a vow taken by a Hindu Tamil pilgrim to a deity is fulfilled, he goes on a pilgrimage to thank her. The words used to qualify this type of transaction relate to the semantic field of economics: for a ‘vow’ taken as well as for the action of thanking a deity for its fulfilment, the word kadan is systematically used. It refers to a ‘loan’ (nêrttikkadan) and the ‘reimbursement of a debt’ (nêrndukadan) contracted during the initial vow (Delage 2004; see also Raj and Harman 2006).  2. The observations and analyses here rely on data mainly collected between 2008 and 2013 during several individual and collective field trips. These were conducted as part of a major collective project headed by Michel Boivin, the French Interdisciplinary Study Group on Sindh, in the wake of the French archaeological mission in Sindh/ Indus (1996–2002).  3. As we saw during the mission carried out in 2012, the numbers attending the annual pilgrimage may be declining. A combination of factors was suggested by our interlocutors, such as economic instability in the households and regions of departure (riots related to the electricity shortage), major floods that had severely impeded traffic in the previous two years, and the fear of terrorist attacks. Indeed, many Sufi centres have been targeted since 2010, especially in Punjab and the Peshawar region but also in Karachi and Sindh. Spared for a long time, the main mausoleum in Sehwan was the target of a deadly attack on 16 February 2017 (about ninety dead and several hundred wounded), which was claimed by the trans-regional branch of the Islamic State, covering Afghanistan and Pakistan. In spite of this tragic event, the sanctuary reopened the next day at dawn and its attendants resumed their daily activities, thus testifying to the strong resilience of these devotional practices in the face of those supporting a radical and violent Islam.  4. The method of multi-site ethnography popularized by George Marcus also included another dimension, that of ‘strategically situated (single-site) ethnography’ (1995: 110– 13). This non-mobile approach supports a localized field investigation which takes into

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account external links and places of reference that the researcher does not necessarily visit.  5. For instance, Hindu ascetics, warriors or traders controlled pilgrim routes until the nineteenth century, offered their military protection in the holy places and levied taxes on sedentary farmers and travellers, pilgrims, nomads or merchants (Cohn 1964; Clémentin-Ojha 2008).  6. Many Sufi centres were built on or adjacent to ancient heterodox worship places dedicated to the god Shiva during the pre-Islamic period.  7. Since the colonial period the murid entrepreneurs in Senegal, whose holy city, Touba, attracts annually millions of pilgrims, had also invested in the conquest of new agricultural spaces and the development of commercial crops, thereby boosting the economy of the Sufi murid brotherhood.  8. Maria Louw shows in this volume how the instability of the political and economic conditions in Uzbekistan has led to massive circulatory migrations across several countries, a process through which these migrants brought back home new religious conceptions and practices of Islam. In our case study, the Hindus who left Sehwan exported to India their local knowledge of the cult of Udero Lâl which, eventually, turned into new local cults bearing different meanings.  9. Sehwan had only a few thousand people a century ago, while its population now stands at nearly 100,000 inhabitants. 10. The worship of La`l Shahbâz was popularized not only at the national level through the involvement of Zulfiqar but also on the international scene during the 1970s through the famous singers Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Noor Jehan and Abida Parveen. 11. The word means ‘servant’ as well as ‘client’, highlighting the contractual relationship or the economic transaction between the saint and its devotees. 12. Out of 189 religious properties owned in Sindh, 78 are mausoleums and the rest are mosques and simple waqf. In the administrative division of Sehwan, the Awqaf Department manages about seventy stores and owns more than 450 land properties (agricultural land), in addition to its administrative building incorporated into the architectural framework of the sanctuary since 1999. 13. On the contrary, pilgrimages like those of Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh or Sabarimala in Kerala (South India) generate huge revenues (monetary or in-kind donations, dematerialized ritual transactions, bank investments etc.) for the public administrations (Devaswom Boards) in charge of the management of temples. 14. The equivalent institution in the Arab world, the Sufi zaouïa is sometimes approached by governments as a model of social and solidarity economy where they can spread and implement public policies. 15. The Prophet Muhammad’s assassinated first cousin and son-in-law was the fourth caliph and the first imam revered by the Shias. His son, Hussein, was also killed during the battle of Karbala. These two major figures of Shiism are closely associated in the religious imaginary at Sehwan with the saint La`l Shahbâz Qalandar. 16. Another emerging phenomenon in recent years is the arrival of pilgrim-tourists represented by the Mohajirs (displaced Urdu-speaking Muslims between India and Pakistan at the time of the Partition) residing in Karachi. For them, Sehwan has become a very attractive destination; they see it as both exotic and enigmatic. For them, the worship of Saint La`l Shahbâz is a new form of religiosity, i.e. both Sunni and Shia. 17. Beyond its local roots, the deepening of communal conflict between Sunnis and Shias during the 1970s and 1980s was also encouraged by the financial support of foreign powers such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, which has exacerbated competition between radical groups in Pakistan. 18. The case study of a Hindu pilgrimage in Mauritius described by Mathieu Claveyrolas in this volume is very instructive here. After replicating a Hindu toponymy within the

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island, the descendants of indentured labourers gradually appropriated a network of places of worship through a distinctive ‘Hinduization’ of the local, which now has influenced national imaginings. This is the case of Data Ganj Bakhsh, another important Sufi centre located in Lahore (Punjab), where the state retains total control over the worship of the saint and the ritual practices conducted there.

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Eaton, R. 1993. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ewing, K. 1983. ‘The Politics of Sufism: Redefining the Saints of Pakistan’, Journal of Asian Studies 42(2): 251–68. Frey, N. 1998. Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago, Journeys along an Ancient Way in Modern Spain. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gardner Cassels, N. 1988. Religion and Pilgrim Tax under the Company Raj. New Delhi: Manohar. Gold, A. 1988. Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Green, N. 2003. ‘Migrant Sufis and Sacred Space in South Asian Islam’, Contemporary South Asia 12(4): 493–509. Green, N. 2011. Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean. New York: Cambridge University Press. Green, N. 2014. Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam. London: Hurst. Hyndman-Rizk, N. (ed.). 2012. Pilgrimage in the Age of Globalization: Constructions of the Sacred and Secular in Late Modernity. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Lachaier, P., and C. Clémentin-Ojha (eds). 2008. Divines richesses: Religion et économie en monde marchand indien. Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient. Malik, J. 1990. ‘Waqf in Pakistan: Change in Traditional Institutions’, Die Welt des Islams 30(1–4): 63–97. Marcus, G. 1995. ‘Ethnography In/Of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. Markovits, C., J. Pouchepadass and S. Subrahmanyam (eds). 2003. Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750–1950. Delhi: Permanent Black. McLeary, R., and R. Barro. 2006. ‘Religion and Political Economy in an International Panel’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 45(2): 149–75. Mohammad, I. 1978. Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar of Sehwan Sharif. Karachi: Royal Book Company. Philippon, A. 2011. Soufisme et politique au Pakistan: Le mouvement barelwi à l’heure de la ‘guerre contre le terrorisme’. Paris: Karthala – Sciences po Aix. Raj, S.J. and W.P. Harman (eds). 2006. Dealing with Deities: The Ritual Vow in South Asia. New York: The State University of New York Press. Reader, I. 2014. Pilgrimage in the Marketplace. New York: Routledge. Retaillé, D. 2005. ‘L’espace mobile’ in B. Antheaume and F. Giraut (eds), Le territoire est mort: Vive les territoires! Paris: IRD Éditions, pp. 175–201. Sheller, M., and J. Urry. 2006. ‘The New Mobilities Paradigm’, Environment and Planning 36: 207–26. Singh, V. 2013. ‘Work, Performance, and the Social Ethic of Capitalism: Understanding Religious Practice in Contemporary India’, Sociological Forum 28(2): 283–307. Stauth, G., and S. Schielke (eds). 2008. Dimensions of Locality: Muslim Saints, Their Place and Space. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Tarrius, A. 1993. ‘Territoires circulatoires et espaces urbains: différenciations des groupes migrants’, Les Annales de la recherche urbaine 59–60: 51–60. Verkaaik, O. 2004. Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Werbner, P. 2003. Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult. London/Bloomington, IN: Hurst Publishers/University of Indiana Press. Werbner, P., and H. Basu. 1998. Embodying Charisma: Modernity, Locality, and Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults. London: Routledge.

Chapter 4

Allah Always Hears the Prayers of a Traveller Nationalized Shrines and Transnational Imaginaries in Bukhara Maria Louw

Shrines and Saints’ Veneration in Bukhara On a spring day in 2011, my friend Yulduz and I went to visit the mausoleum of the Muslim saint Imom Xoja Baror close to the city centre of Bukhara, an ancient Silk Road oasis now part of Uzbekistan. Belief in, and veneration of, God’s avliyo (saints) has often been identified as the most important aspect of popular Islam in Central Asia. Avliyo are widely seen as the Prophet Muhammad’s spiritual successors, persons who, by the grace of God and because of their exemplary lives, hold a special relationship with God and possess Baraka (blessing power) (see, for example, Bennigsen and Wimbush 1985; Fathi 1997; Lipovsky 1996; Privratsky 2001; Schubel 1999). As the historian Robert McChesney has noted (1996: 19), other religious sites – mosques, for example – do not seem to have the same hold on the imagination as the shrines, whose importance lies in their being thresholds or doorways to the spiritual world and what lies beyond human experience. The belief that sacred places embody the divine and are thus endowed with some kind of contagious blessedness is rejected and condemned as shirk (idolatry) by many more scripturally oriented Muslims, but it is nevertheless widespread among Muslim believers who pay ziyorat (visit, pilgrimage) to the places in order to perform Notes for this chapter begin on page 89.

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what they consider to be their duty as Muslims; to search for blessings on the occasion of rites of passage or in more individual situations characterized by illness, misfortune and uncertainty; to pray; to reflect; or to find moments of peace (see, for example, Basu and Werbner 1998; Bellamy 2011; Eickelman 1976; Gilsenan 1992; Abramson and Karimov 2007; KehlBodrogi 2006; Louw 2007; Mernissi 1977; Mittermaier 2008; Reeves 1995). In this chapter I will discuss the changing meanings of ziyorat to shrines connected with avliyo in Bukhara, and in particular how tensions between national and transnational conceptions of Islam are expressed in pilgrimage practices and conceptions. Many of these shrines are being used as places where the post-Soviet ideology of national independence is spread, an ideology that promotes a particular Uzbek form of Muslimness and tends to see transnational Islam as a threat. However, the hagiographic narratives connected with the shrines – narratives that often tell of links established between Bukhara and the wider Islamic world – also make them important sites for imaginaries invoking the re-establishment of ties with the wider Islamic umma, or religious community (cf. Delage, this volume). Furthermore, the concerns visitors bring to the shrines – believed to possess Baraka, which may affect the lives of ordinary people – reflect the harsh politico-economic circumstances that have led to massive migration, as people have left the country in search of better lives, sometimes changing their conceptions of Islam in the process. These tensions make ziyorat the occasion of reflection on such fundamental questions as the meaning of place and the significance of movement for religious experience and, more generally, what it actually means to be Uzbek and Muslim. In Bukhara, shrines are everywhere.1 They are traces of a golden past that gave the city a reputation as one of the most important holy places in the Muslim world. As a focal point on the Silk Road and a centre for Islamic philosophy, art and theology, Bukhara has long acted as a meeting point for people from very different parts of the world. In particular during the Persian Samanid dynasty (874–999), which ruled over a vast territory from their capital in Bukhara, the city became a centre of Islamic art, culture and science. Most shrines in Bukhara are grave sites, the burial places of saints. Others are places with another connection with a saint, such as a place with which he or she has been in contact, where they have rested or performed a miracle.2 Some shrines are relatively anonymous, and typically known only to a few people in the immediate vicinity or by family members, who engage with them on an everyday basis, whereas others attract pilgrims from the whole region of Central Asia and the wider Muslim world, to whom local tourist companies offer tour packages that make

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travel easier. Ziyorat to shrines range from the habitual short prayer or gesture of awe and respect when passing a shrine on the way to or from work, for example, to more planned and longer journeys that often involve whole families, profound contemplation on religious questions and the performance of sacrifices. Some of the more famous shrines are associated with the Sufi orders, notably the Yetti Pir (Seven Pirs), all of whom are important links in the Naqshbandiyya spiritual chain.3 Some are associated with biblical figures, for example the shrine Chashma Ayub, which is associated with Ayub – or Job – who is a model of patience in Islam as well as Judaism and Christianity. Some shrines are connected with secular rulers such as Ismail Samani, whose conquests of Khorasan and later the whole of Persia laid the foundation of the Samanid dynasty. Certain avliyo are regarded as patron saints of various occupations, notably handicrafts, and others are associated with the conversion of the people in the region to Islam. The latter is the case with Imom Xoja Baror, the saint whose burial site Yulduz and I visited on that spring day in 2011. Imom Xoja Baror is said to have played an important role in making Bukhara’s inhabitants convert to Islam. He accomplished this by curing the city’s disabled, the blind, the deaf and the mentally ill in the name of Allah immediately after the region was conquered by the Arab Umayyad dynasty at the beginning of the eighth century. Around his tomb grew what is now Bukhara’s central cemetery. Neither Yulduz nor I had visited the place for the past eleven years, and approaching it was a rather disorientating experience. Yulduz recalled how, back in 2000, we had to pass rows of more or less decayed and overgrown grave sites; how we were approached by groups of Roma children who were looking for jobs to do at the site, and how scared she had been when accompanying me there. Now there was a paved path leading to the mausoleum, nicely decorated with trees, flowers and benches, and a wall had been built to shield it from the adjacent grave sites. The mausoleum itself, furthermore, had changed considerably. Instead of the humble site we remembered, a huge building had recently been raised, its terracotta brickwork slightly reminiscent of the Ismail Samani mausoleum. A group of visitors from Tashkent, the country’s capital, arrived at the place, and greeted the domlo (the religious authority serving at the shrine).4 As is common practice, the domlo then recited the Fatiha, the first Sura of the Qur’an, which was then followed by a dua, a free prayer in plain words and local language. The visitors handed the domlo some money and a couple of bags full of sweets and went on to visit the mausoleum.

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Most of the people I met and with whom I discussed the meaning and significance of shrines during my fieldwork in Uzbekistan held ambiguous ideas about the powers of sacred places. They wavered between the idea that shrines are merely inspiring symbols or traces of a divine presence in the world and the ideals attained by the saint, and the idea that they are endowed with some kind of contagious blessedness – Baraka – which cannot be perceived by ordinary human reason but can only be properly experienced by the reason of the heart. On the one hand, they would express the belief that place is not something of importance, since God is everywhere and can be praised everywhere, and since the most important thing for one’s prayers to be met is faith. Some, furthermore, emphasized what is also written on posters at many shrines: that it amounts to shirk (idolatry) to ‘touch the stones’ – that is, to touch the shrine believing that it has magical powers. On the other hand, even people who warned against the danger of committing shirk had often experienced unusual things at such places. In times of difficulty, many had experienced being ‘drawn’ to shrines by some kind of ‘force’,5 and things happening there that they could not explain: miraculous healing, for example, or merely the experience of renewed energy, a certain lightness of being, or peace of mind. Some had even experienced being punished for not believing in the power of the place. Take Muazzam, for example, an elderly woman who told me how she visited Bukhara’s ‘Seven Pirs’ back in the 1980s together with some friends. They came to one of the shrines but there was nothing to see, and so she did not believe there was anything special about the place. Then she was suddenly lifted about twenty centimetres above the ground. She was very scared. That, she said, was a sign from God that she should trust her heart more than her eyes. Certain shrines are considered to have specialties in miraculous action. These specialties typically relate to the particular life story of the saint. Because saints have experienced difficulties or lived through situations similar to those that lead pilgrims to their shrines, they are considered particularly sympathetic and helpful towards these pilgrims. Hagiographies of saints, in other words, inspire biographies of ordinary people, and people often have relationships with specific avliyo whom they consider to be particularly influential in their lives. What motivated the group of people who had come to visit the shrine of Imom Xoja Baror on that particular day in 2011 I do not know, as I did not talk with any of them. However, my mind wandered back to 1998 when I visited the city for the first time, and to Bahodir and his story which, to me, had somewhat epitomized the tumultuous times, but also the atmosphere of hope that characterized the city in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century.

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Bahodir When I first met Bahodir6 he was in his late thirties and had served as a domlo at the Imom Xoja Baror shrine for about a year. The time immediately after the breakup of the Soviet Union and Uzbekistan’s independence had been hard for him, as it had been for so many others. He was a bricklayer, but after a period of illness he had not been able to find any work and instead ‘sat at home’, as the situation of being unemployed is commonly termed. He turned to drinking and became notorious in his neighbourhood for being able to drink one and a half bottles of vodka a day. Then, one day in 1997, something happened that was to change his life. Burdened with illness and debt and shunned by others, he had started paying frequent visits to several of Bukhara’s shrines. One night he decided to sleep at the shrine of Imom Xoja Baror, a place where his father used to take him at night when he was a child. He hoped that the saint would show up in his dreams and give him counsel and strength that could help him out of his troubles. ‘I fell asleep’, Bahodir told me, And suddenly I saw a figure in a ray of light. That was Imom Xoja Baror. Imom Xoja Baror said that just as he himself had been one of those men … one of those links who for the first time connected Bukhara with the Islamic world, I should take part in bringing Islam back to Bukhara again … ‘Tomorrow you must start rebuilding this place in order that it may again be visible to all the world … and you must serve the people who come here!’ Then he disappeared.7

In imitation of acts of a distant past, Bahodir then broke down the wall that had blocked the access to the mausoleum for a long time, put in the door from his own house and started restoring the decayed place. After that, he told me, he recovered his health, stopped drinking, paid off his debt and had since been able to maintain his family – a wife and four children – by building tombs at the burial place that surrounds the shrine and by praying for the visitors to the shrine. The stories Bahodir told about Imom Xoja Baror were often interwoven with stories about his own life and his hopes for the future. When Imom Xoja Baror was born, Bahodir told me, Islam had not yet gained a proper foothold in Bukhara. The Arab invasion had taken place, but people had not yet accepted the religion the Arabs brought with them. Imom Xoja Baror left the city in order to travel the Muslim world and deepen his knowledge about Islam. When he returned, forty years later, and saw that people had still not converted, he started praying for the sick in the name of Allah, and as people saw how blind people were suddenly able to see, how deaf people were able to hear, and how lame people were able to walk, they became Muslims in increasing numbers.

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Bahodir considered himself to be living at a similar turning point in history, a time when many, as a result of the seventy years the region had been part of the Soviet Union, were ignorant of Islam, and after his dream encounter with Imom Xoja Baror he saw it as his life’s mission to help bring Islam back to Bukhara. His meagre income did not allow him to travel the Muslim world to accomplish this, and his pilgrimages were restricted to Bukhara and its surroundings, but he did his best, reading the religious literature he could obtain in between receiving visitors at the shrine and building tombs at the graveyard, and cycling around the city in order to visit other shrines, praying and learning about their history and passing on his knowledge.

Post-Soviet Revival of Islam The years surrounding the breakup of the Soviet Union and Uzbekistan’s independence were turbulent ones for most people. It was a time when the world as they knew it was replaced by something yet in the making, and the ‘transition’ from the centrally planned Soviet economy to a market-based economy led to a significant drop in living standards for most of the population, high unemployment rates and a fall in the level of real wages owing to high rates of inflation, the liberalization of prices and the reduction of subsidies (Everett-Heath 2003; Hunter 1996; Ilkhamov 2001; McAuley 1995; Spechler 2000). It was also a time when all sorts of hopes and fears for the future proliferated, many associated with religion. In the Soviet Union, restrictions against religious practice had been a central aspect of government policies since the Revolution, and the Sovietization of Central Asia involved a massive assault on Islam. Anti-religious campaigns were launched, religious property was confiscated, mosques and madrassahs were destroyed, members of the ulamā were persecuted and Soviet Muslims were isolated from contact with the rest of the world. The number of mosques permitted to operate was relatively small and people were discouraged from attending them. In addition, shrines and more particularly shrine pilgrimages became major targets for anti-Islamic measures and propaganda. As David Tyson (1997) points out, perhaps the deepest and most lasting effect of the campaigns against shrines and shrine pilgrimage was the eradication of the shrines as local and regional centres of teaching, discussion and discourse. Religious authorities connected with the places were persecuted. As for the shrines themselves, most were destroyed or left to decay, whereas a more subtle strategy was played out towards others, notably the main shrine centres. Some of these were preserved as museums

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or tourist attractions, as monuments of Central Asian architecture expressing an earlier stage in the development of the culture of the proletariat (Azzout 1999; Bennigsen and Wimbush 1985: 95; McChesney 1996: 73). They were subjected to what Benedict Anderson, in a discussion of nineteenth-century colonial South Asia, has aptly termed a ‘museumizing imagination’, an imagination that turns ancient shrines into important institutions of modern state power (Anderson 2003: 183). The museumizing imagination in Soviet Central Asia desacralized the sacred sites. They were as far as possible emptied of pilgrims and filled with tourists instead. Many people, however, continued to pray at the shrines, couching their activities in such accepted secular terms as ‘tourism’ or ‘studies in ancient architecture’, going at night, under the cover of darkness, or in their dreams,8 or going to places they knew were relatively safe, where they knew that local officials turned a blind eye to shrine visitation. When the Soviet Union dissolved, there was a sense among large parts of the population in the region that the seventy years of Soviet rule had isolated them from the rest of the Muslim world and made them forget what it means to be Muslim. Correspondingly, there was widespread hope that people would soon be able to recover that lost knowledge, regaining a core part of who they were. It was a time when many started reaching out to their half-forgotten Muslim past and to the wider Muslim world, pursuing knowledge through the media and in books and pamphlets, religious literature having become increasingly available; seeking out religious authorities of various sorts; visiting the mosque or visiting sacred places or engaging in the task of rebuilding them (Louw 2007; Rasanayagam 2011; Peshkova 2014). In this period, many efforts took place at the local level to rebuild and restore sacred places that had been left to decay – efforts which, as in the case of Bahodir whose work to rebuild the shrine of Imom Xoja Baror was intimately connected with his efforts at rebuilding his own shattered existence, linked individual life stories and sometimes stories of whole communities with the larger Islamic revival. The domlo at the shrine of Xoja Mahmud Anjir Fag’naviy (one of Bukhara’s Seven Pirs), for example, told me how some people from the neighbourhood came with stones and bricks, how the man in the house next door installed gas, and how her husband brought an engraved stone to put on the tomb (he had made the promise that if he went on Hajj, he would buy it and put it there). Another story described the shrine of Said Ahmad Pobandi Kushod, which had been used as some kind of sports administration building in Soviet days and was later destroyed because there were rumours that there was gold to be found there. What was left of the shrine would have been torn down if its domlo, an old man without family, had not taken the

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initiative to collect money in the neighbourhood for its refurbishment and contributed the money he had saved for his own funeral. When I asked the domlo about his motivations for doing this, he told me one of the legends associated with Said Ahmad Pobandi Kushod: the latter had been thrown in jail and was put in chains, but when it was time for prayer, the chains broke and made him free to pray. When the guards described what had happened to the emir, the holy man was released from prison. Now people would visit his burial place if they had ‘chains in their hearts’ or were ‘unable to move’ – being inhibited in whatever they wanted to do – or if they were embarking on a journey and wished the road to be free of obstacles. People in Bukhara, the domlo reasoned, had been in chains for a long time, restricted in their physical as well as their spiritual movement, and now it was time to break free. These efforts at the grassroots level, however, were met with increasing control from the government, and as time went by the state muftiyat, the body responsible for controlling mosques, madāris and clerics, appointing Imams and monitoring religious practice,9 took over the control of most shrines, which became central to, and sites for the spread of, the ideology of national independence.

Post-Soviet Authoritarianism, Muslimness and the Ideology of National Independence The post-Soviet Uzbek government, led by former communist apparatchik Islam Karimov until his death in 2016,10 has been increasingly authoritarian, crushing dissent, banning all serious political opposition and exerting complete control over the media. Most notably, the government has launched repeated crackdowns on Islamic activism in an attempt to limit the influence of unofficial Islamic movements and groups, presenting religious ‘extremism’ or ‘Wahhabism’11 as the most serious threat to the state and nation.12 The Karimov government, however, sought not only to control Islam, but also to co-opt it as an element in its state-building projects and as a source of legitimacy. As in the other post-Soviet Central Asian republics, in Uzbekistan there have been efforts to construct a distinct national ideology and narrative of nationhood, built on images of the country’s great historical antiquity and importance (Adams 2010; Louw 2007: 16; Rasanayagam 2011; Rasayayagam, Beyer and Reeves 2014). Islam has figured centrally in these efforts: Karimov himself regularly referred to Islam in political speeches, essays and interviews, lamenting the destruction of Islamic culture and of ancient moral principles – or more precisely of

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Uzbek’s Musulmonchilik (‘Muslimness’) – during the Soviet years, picturing this Uzbek Muslimness as both intrinsic to Uzbek identity and under continuous attack from outside ‘extremist’ or ‘Wahhabi’ forces (see also Kendzior 2014; Louw 2007: 30–33). The form of Islam that is promoted by the government in Uzbekistan is formally based on the Sunni Islam of the Hanafi School. In practice, however, the most diverse thinkers and mystics who have a connection with the present territory of Uzbekistan have been co-opted to the ideology of national independence as progenitors of official nationalist ideology, as if their views were mere manifestations of a single spiritual thread running through history. Aspects of the Sufi tradition, notably, are pictured as expressions of a kind of Islam that developed in harmony with the Uzbek national character and that is compatible with a modern secular state. A distinction is made, then, between ‘good’ Uzbek Islam, which is portrayed as indigenous, tolerant and non-political, and ‘bad’, ‘extremist’ or ‘Wahhabi’ Islam, which is characterized as alien, antithetical to national spiritual values, intolerant and politically motivated. The interpretations of Islam that are seen to be in accordance with the ideology of national independence are promoted through the muftiyat, which issues outlines for the sermons to be held during the Friday prayer. Though depicted as directed against an external threat, the crackdown on Islam has influenced the lifeworlds of ordinary Muslims and created a paranoid climate where virtually anyone who expresses devotion to Islam, or who is critical of local customs and traditions, risks being labelled ‘Wahhabi’; where people are never quite sure which ways of expressing religious identity make them suspicious, and which constitute them as good Muslims, in the eyes of their neighbours or local authorities (see also Hilgers 2009; Louw 2007; Peshkova 2014; Rasanayagam 2011).13 Patronage over shrines has been one of President Karimov’s most common reference points for the argument that his government has worked towards the rehabilitation of the nation’s Islamic tradition. Indeed, the late Gorbachev years and the years after independence gave new significance to Bukhara’s shrines, continuing what had been a long history of political patronage (McChesney 1996: 84, 97). Numerous saints connected with the area that is now Uzbekistan were rehabilitated and celebrated, their shrines restored and inaugurated anew with state funding. However, these efforts were not fundamentally different from the attempts of the Soviet era to ‘museumize’ Islam. Rather than being icons of the sacred in its universal, transcendental sense, they were to become chronotopes14 of national, monumental time (cf. Herzfeld 1991), sanctioning official national historiography. Indeed, one could argue that what has been going on in Uzbekistan since independence is a kind of canonization

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of the saints of the nation, an attempt to appropriate the avliyo associated with the area, employ them as narrative heroes in national history, pay tribute to them for their contribution to the spirituality of the nation, and make them important sites for the articulation and institutionalization of national culture. In an analysis of hagiography in post-Soviet Uzbekistan, Jürgen Paul has demonstrated how central saintly figures in this literature have been invested with qualities that are promoted by the government at the present political juncture: ‘Serve society, work honestly, do not stick your head out, listen to what your “ancestors” say, do not aspire to self-fulfillment if this means a really individual effort’ (Paul 2002: 637), values that are interpreted as ‘national’ rather than ‘Muslim’. No wonder, then, that the practice of ziyorat remains very popular in post-Soviet Uzbekistan – or rather has become popular in a different way, for if it was a public secret in Soviet days, it has now become conspicuously public, something that leading government officials willingly engage in, particularly on the occasion of national celebrations of saints and scholars, and preferably in front of cameras. In 1993, the 675th birthday of Bukhara’s by far most popular saint, Bahouddin Naqshband (1318–89), who lent his name to the Naqshbandiyya sufi tariqa (way or order), was celebrated with the inauguration of his newly restored shrine complex, a celebration closely followed by the state media and with the participation of President Karimov who cut the red ribbon to the shrine, connecting the revival of Islam with himself and his regime. Billboards featuring the sayings of central Naqshbandiyya avliyo were erected. Bukhara’s main street, once named after Vladimir Lenin, was renamed after Bahouddin Naqshband. There was a boom in newspaper articles and academic and popular books and pamphlets on the Naqshbandi tradition in Central Asia, Bahouddin Naqshband’s mystical poetry was translated from Persian into Uzbek, and academic research on the Naqshbandiyya was encouraged (see also Louw 2007: 55–57). Later again, at the beginning of the new millennium, the place was refurbished. In 2011, when I returned there, I was just as struck by the changes as I had been when I went back to the shrine of Imom Xoja Baror. The beggars who used to flock around the entrance to the site were gone, and so were the little stands where locals sold everything from chewing gum to religious literature and amulets to visitors. And as a foreigner, one had to buy an entrance ticket. There had surely been increasing control and increasing attempts to museumize Bahouddin Naqshband’s shrine, like Bukhara’s other major shrines, and make it into a site for the dissemination of the ideology of national independence, to co-opt and routinize charisma (cf. Delage, this volume). However, the meanings of the shrines and the powers people

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experience them as holding are difficult to control. An acquaintance of mine who used to work there as a tourist guide recalled how awkward she had felt when she recently brought a group of visitors from Afghanistan to the shrine. When approaching the mausoleum of Bahouddin Naqshband, one of the visitors, an elderly man, suddenly went into ‘trance’, as she termed it, crying and seeming impossible to address. This display of affect contrasted strongly with the nationalist message she was supposed to deliver at the shrine, in which the Baraka of the shrine was held at a museumized hand’s distance, creating for a moment, however short, a different atmosphere to the place, one that was awkward for her, as a representative of the state, but which might have been inspiring for others. People in Uzbekistan rarely dare to criticize the regime and its nationalist rhetoric openly and in unambiguous terms. However, as people relate shrines and officially sanctioned master narratives to their own experiences, projects and hopes, such narratives and their images of past, present and future are often contested. The things shrines do, and the associations they trigger, are not always in accordance with the ideology of national independence. As they were for Bahodir, shrines and shrine pilgrimages are often at the centre for many in their efforts to rebuild shattered lives. As I have argued elsewhere (Louw 2007), in Uzbekistan shrines have been central to many people’s efforts to recapture agency and moral grounding at a time when rapid social change has made the ground shake beneath their feet. The stories people bring to the shrines quite often tell of experiences that stand in harsh contrast to the bright future that they have been promised is just around the corner ever since independence – stories about economic hardship, unemployment and debt (ibid.) and, increasingly, stories about the search for viable lives across the country’s borders. Let me dwell upon one such case, which again takes us back to my 2011 visit to Bukhara and the shrine of Imom Xoja Baror together with my friend Yulduz.

Allah Always Hears the Prayers of a Traveller Bahodir had long been gone from the shrine. The domlo there, who had served at the place since 2001, did not know anything about him and his whereabouts and did not seem very interested in talking about it. Yulduz and I left him and withdrew to a bench behind the shrine. When she was sure nobody could hear us, Yulduz whispered that Bahodir had probably been arrested (as he had acted as a religious authority outside of the framework of the muftiyat). She laughed at the plaque that had been put up at the shrine, promoting the ideology of the day – ‘2011 – the year of small businesses and entrepreneurism’ – pointing out that in practice it

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was virtually impossible to obtain even a small loan from the bank without the payment of bribes. With a more serious expression on her face, she said that it was Allah’s will that we were in that very same spot together again, after so many years, and that she was sure my prayers would be heard there as I was a musafir, a traveller, and Allah always hears the prayers of a traveller. Yulduz herself had spent parts of her life as a musafir, having lived and worked in London for a few years until she returned to Bukhara in 2010. She had fled an unhappy marriage and an economically insecure situation in Uzbekistan, leaving her one-and-a-half-year-old son in the care of her parents, arriving with only a small bag and six hundred dollars. Like so many other migrant workers, she struggled along, living in a small room together with several others and earning two pounds an hour at her first job in an Afghan restaurant. Three years passed before she came home and saw her son, who was now almost five and called Yulduz’s mother ‘mum’. By then, there were rumours in her neighbourhood – according to Yulduz most likely spread by her former mother in-law in her efforts to get custody of her grandson – that she had actually not been in London but in Dubai, working as a prostitute. Subverting traditional Uzbek gender ideals, which see the role of women as that of the guardian of the home and the main force in keeping the family together and bringing up children, women labour migrants are often the subjects of harsh moralizing discourses (cf. Reeves 2011), and the fact that Yulduz was a divorcee only added to the social condemnation she experienced upon her return. In short, Bukhara did not really feel like a welcoming place to her any longer; she was quite sure that her future was not in Bukhara, and that she would be better able to secure the future of her son by once again joining the large proportion of Uzbekistan’s population that has emigrated in search of better opportunities.15 Now, sitting on the bench behind the Imom Xoja Baror mausoleum and pondering her life trajectory, Yulduz also referred to Imom Xoja Baror’s life story: the way he had spent forty years abroad in order to gain knowledge, and returned with the mission of converting Bukhara’s inhabitants to Islam. Although her journey had not taken her to the ‘Arab countries’, as she said, but to London, and although it was a journey in search of economic security rather than spiritual knowledge, it ended up being a kind of pilgrimage, a journey with religious significance, which had significantly affected her ideas about Islam and her own identity as a Muslim; and a journey which, more than the shrines she had grown up among, had involved something akin to the experience of communitas which Victor and Edith Turner, in their classic treatment of the subject (Turner and Turner [1978] 2011), saw as central to (Christian) pilgrimage. She used not to be

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a practising Muslim, but her attitude changed in London, as she started visiting the Central Mosque there. She recalled how she had entered the mosque, but did not know how to pray, and how embarrassed she had felt when people expressed awe at the fact that she was from Bukhara – a place everyone had heard of – knowing that she was ignorant when it came to even the very basics of Islam. A woman told her not to be ashamed but just to do what she did. So she learned to pray and began visiting the mosque every Sunday. Although she never met anyone from Uzbekistan, she felt at home there like she never felt at home anywhere else in London. Her brother, who lived in Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital, also started to pray at that time, and when she did the same in London she felt closer to him and the rest of her family, in spite of the fact that they lived far from each other. It was also in London that she started to fast during Ramadan. At that time she worked in a fish and chip shop. She recalled how difficult it was to fast, how her head was aching as she stood all day bent over boiling oil, but also how it strengthened her faith. Even though her boss was not a Muslim himself, he always made sure that she was free to leave in time for iftar (the breaking of the fast at sunset). Now, back in Bukhara, Yulduz felt that her stay in London had brought her closer to Islam than she had ever been before, in spite of the fact that she had grown up in one of Islam’s most sacred cities. Indeed, it was only in London that she felt she had properly understood the significance of Bukhara and its shrines. Looking back, she was embarrassed about how nonchalantly she had treated them during the years she lived in their vicinity, most often not paying any attention to them, only making the short, occasional visit on her way to or from school or work, and being initially unable to tell me anything about their history and significance when I met her for the first time in Bukhara in 1998. Now she intended to bring her son to all the places we had visited together when I had done my fieldwork in Bukhara eleven years earlier, telling him about them, and was indeed very determined that he be brought up to be a good Muslim. In the family’s flat she kept a small collection of books, pamphlets and DVDs with religious subjects, most of which she had brought with her from London. Her mum did not like it when she watched the DVDs, as ‘people’ could misunderstand them. After all, this was ‘foreign’ material about Islam. The family did not need to take any risks: foreign DVDs about Islam, rumours about illegal whereabouts in an Arab country, a divorce, and connections with a foreign anthropologist interested in Islam provided a dangerous mixture which, in the paranoid climate characterizing Uzbekistan, could potentially label the family as ‘Wahhabis’. While we were sitting on the bench next to the Imom Xoja Baror mausoleum, the domlo came over a couple of times to check what we were doing.

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Finally he pointed out that we were not allowed to sit there for such a long time, and so, after Yulduz had said a prayer in which she asked for God’s help in finding a good job and providing strength and support to us travellers, we left the place.

Conclusion Shrines being central to popular Islam, the patronage and use of them to sanction authoritarian regimes and promote official historiography has a long history in Bukhara. This history has continued up to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when the shrines were first co-opted in the Soviet anti-religious campaigns, serving as secularized monuments of Central Asian architecture, and later, after Uzbekistan’s independence, used as places where the post-Soviet ideology of national independence has been spread – an ideology that promotes a particular Uzbek form of Muslimness and tends to see transnational Islam as a threat, making the ziyoratchi (pilgrim) into a person who pays tribute to the spiritual ancestors of the nation rather than a seeker of religious knowledge, inspiration and power as such. However, as I have tried to show, delving into two concrete cases, the shrines and the stories people bring to them tell of other, transnational connections; they tell of a profound economic decline and a repressive political environment that has brought despair to large parts of the population in the years after independence and led many to migrate from the country in pursuit of better opportunities, sometimes changing their ideas about Islam in the process; and they tell of the long history of transnational connections that made Uzbek Islam – to the extent it makes sense to use that concept – into what it is, and which still feed into people’s ideas about Islam and their hopes for the future. Pilgrimage in Uzbekistan today is characterized by a deep dissonance between the restricted meanings of ziyorat in official discourse and the varieties of experience visitors articulate when visiting the shrines; between the slogans plastered to the walls of shrines, celebrating the country’s great achievements and promoting the ideology of the day, and the transnational lives led by many families who only manage to make ends meet because of the remittances sent from relatives working abroad; and between, on the one hand, official distinctions between Uzbek Muslimness and foreign ‘Wahhabism’, and on the other hand the role a transnational umma, Muslim community plays in many hagiographic narratives. These tensions or dissonances characterizing shrines, hagiographies and pilgrimages make ziyorat – rather than an instrument for sanctioning the regime – the occasion for reflection on

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such fundamental questions as what a pilgrimage actually is, the meaning of place, the significance of movement for religious experience, and, more generally, what it actually means to be Muslim, and whether being Muslim the Uzbek way differs, or should differ, from the ways other Muslims live and practise their religion. Maria Louw is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University. Her research interests include religion (in particular Islam, Sufism, spirituality and mysticism), secularism and atheism, morality and ethics, phenomenology and philosophical anthropology. She is the author of Everyday Islam in Post-Soviet Central Asia (Routledge, 2007) and a number of other publications focusing on everyday religion, secularism, atheism and morality in Central Asia and beyond.

Notes  1. The local historian Narzulla Yo’ldoshev wrote about the best known of them in his book Buxoro Avliyolarining Tarixi [The History of Bukhara’s Avliyo] (Yo’ldoshev 1997).  2. Terms such as mozor (graveyard) or ziyoratgoh (place of visit) are used for them, but they are most frequently referred to as avliyo or pir.  3. Abdulxoliq G’ijduvoniy (d. 1220), Xoja Orif ar-Revgariy (d. 1259), Xoja Mahmud Anjir Fag’naviy (d. 1245 or 1272), Xoja Ali Rometaniy (d. 1306 or 1321), Muhammad Boboiy Samosiy (d. 1340 or 1354), Sayyid Mir Kulol (d. 1371) and Bahouddin Naqshband (d. 1389) (all names provided in their present-day Uzbek versions).  4. Domlo means ‘teacher’ and is used as a general term for shrine guardians and religious authorities serving at shrines.  5. Some use the terms Baraka (blessing power) or nur (radiating light) when referring to this force, but it is more often referred to with mundane terms such as quvvat, kuch and qudratr, all meaning ‘power’, ‘strength’.  6. This story is a modified version of a case I previously addressed in Louw 2006 and 2007.  7. In Uzbekistan, as elsewhere in the Islamic world, dreams are often seen as potential sources of omens and divine revelations (see also Edgar 2011; Louw 2007, 2010, 2015; Mittermaier 2011; Privratsky 2001; Rasanayagam 2011). While all other forms of divination are regarded as unlawful, dream interpretation, owing to the prophetic example of Muhammad, is generally acceptable and can be seen as what Iain Edgar in a discussion of the dream in Islam has termed a ‘potential technology of the sacred’ (Edgar 2011: 122). Visionary dreams may provide the dreamer with more or less explicit warnings or predictions about future events, or give advice or instructions for action that the dreamer should undertake in order to bring about a desirable future.  8. People pay ziyorat in their dreams, or experience avliyo appearing in their dreams. Such dream-encounters with saints and shrines become particularly important in situations where one’s physical movement is inhibited.

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 9. At the beginning of the 1990s, the former Soviet Muslim Spiritual Directorate of Central Asia and Kazakhstan, which had been established during the Second World War, was split into individual boards, or myftiyats, by republic, each of them under the control of their respective governments, and each of them performing the same functions as the Soviet-era board. Though formally a non-governmental organization, the Uzbek muftiyat remains under the control of state authorities. 10. Karimov was replaced by Shavkat Mirziyoyev. 11. Throughout the whole of the former Soviet Union, including Uzbekistan, the term ‘Wahhabi’ is widely used – in what Muriel Atkin (2000) has aptly called the ‘rhetoric of Islamophobia’ – as a shorthand for the general idea of Islamic menace and as an umbrella designator for Muslims considered to be a threat to the established system. 12. Measures against the latter reached a peak in the aftermath of a series of bombings in Tashkent in 1999 that were attributed to Islamic extremists. Later, on 13 May 2005, hundreds of protesters were killed in the city of Andijan. According to the Uzbek government they were armed extremists, but according to international human rights groups the majority comprised unarmed civilians who had gathered to protest against economic hardship and authoritarian rule. Independent human rights and crisis watch organizations have regularly documented how these crackdowns have hit not only Islamic radicals and militants but also their families, as well as thousands of ordinary pious practising Muslims, who have been exiled, jailed, tortured and sentenced to long prison terms for anti-state activities and alleged links with Islamic fundamentalists. 13. As Johan Rasanayagam and Irene Hilgers have demonstrated, even Christians in Uzbekistan are sometimes accused of ‘Wahhabism’ (Hilgers 2009; Rasanayagam 2011). 14. Mikhail Bakhtin (1998) used the concept of chronotope (literally ‘time space’) to denote the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships; the inseparability of space and time. 15. A World Bank study (Ajwad et al. 2014) estimated that in 2010, two million Uzbek citizens – around 7 per cent of the population – lived outside the country, the great majority (86 per cent) in Russia (ibid.; see also Partpiev 2015 for a profile of the typical labour migrant).

References Abramson, D., and E. Karimov. 2007. ‘Sacred Sites, Profane Ideologies: Religious Pilgrimage and the Uzbek State’, in J. Sahadeo and R. Zanca (eds), Everyday Life in Central Asia: Past and Present. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Adams, L. 2010. The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ajwad, M., et al. 2014. The Skills Road: Skills for Employability in Uzbekistan. Washington, DC: World Bank. Anderson, B. 2003. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Atkin, M. 2000. ‘The Rhetoric of Islamophobia’, Central Asia and Caucasus Journal 1: 123–32. Azzout, M. 1999. ‘The Soviet Interpretation and Preservation of the Ancient Heritage of Uzbekistan: The Example of Bukhara’, in A. Petruccioli (ed.), Bukhara: The Myth and the Architecture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pp. 161–173. Badone, E., and S. Roseman (eds). 2004. Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

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Bakhtin, M. 1998. ‘Forms of Time and Chronotypes in the Novel’, in M. Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 84–258. Bellamy, C. 2011. The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bennigsen, A., and S.E. Wimbush. 1985. Mystics and Commissars: Sufism in the Soviet Union. London: Hurst and Company. Edgar, I. 2011. The Dream in Islam: From Qur’anic Tradition to Jihadist Inspiration. New York: Berghahn Books. Eickelman, D. 1976. Moroccan Islam: Tradition and Society in a Pilgrimage Center. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Everett-Heath, T. 2003. ‘Instability and Identity in a Post-Soviet World: Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan’, in T. Everett-Heath (ed.), Central Asia: Aspects of Transition. London: Curzon/Routledge. Fathi, H. 1997. ‘Otines: The Unknown Women Clerics of Central Asian Islam’, Central Asian Survey 16: 27–43. Gilsenan, M. 1992. Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Middle East. London: I.B. Tauris. Herzfeld, M. 1991. A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hilgers, I. 2009. Why Do Uzbeks Have to Be Muslims? Exploring Religiosity in the Ferghana Valley. Berlin: Lit Verlag. Hunter, S. 1996. Central Asia since Independence. Westport, CT: Praeger. Ilkhamov, A. 2001. ‘Impoverishment of the Masses in the Transition Period: Signs of an Emerging “New Poor” Identity in Uzbekistan’, Central Asian Survey 20: 33–54. Kehl-Bodrogi, K. 2006. ‘Who Owns the Shrine? Competing Meanings and Authorities at a Pilgrimage Site in Khorezm’, Central Asian Survey 25: 3. Kendzior, S. 2014. ‘Reclaiming Ma’naviyat: Morality, Criminality, and Dissent Politics in Uzbekistan’, in M. Reeves, J. Rasanayagam and J. Beyer (eds), Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia: Performing Politics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 223–242. Lipovsky, I. 1996. ‘The Awakening of Central Asian Islam’, Middle Eastern Studies 32: 1–21. Louw, M. 2006. ‘Pursuing “Muslimness”: Shrines as Sites for Moralities in the Making in Post-Soviet Bukhara’, Central Asian Survey 25(3): 319–39. Louw, M. 2007. Everyday Islam in Post-Soviet Central Asia. New York: Routledge. Louw, M. 2010. ‘Dreaming Up Futures: Dream Omens and Magic in Bishkek’, History and Anthropology 21(3): 277–92. Louw, M. 2015. ‘The Art of Dealing with Things You Do Not Believe In: Dream, Omens and Their Meanings in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan’, in S. Vibeke et al. (eds), On the Limits of Reason: New Perspectives in Anthropological Studies of Magic, Social Technology, and Uncertainty. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 287–314. McAuley, A. 1995. ‘The Economies of Central Asia: The Socialist Legacy’, in Y. Ro’I (ed.), Muslim Eurasia: Conflicting Legacies. London: Frank Cass, pp. 257–259. McChesney, R.D. 1996. Central Asia: Foundations of Change. Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press. Mernissi, F. 1977. ‘Women, Saints, and Sanctuaries’, Signs 3(1): 101–12. Mittermaier, A. 2008. ‘(Re)Imagining Space: Dreams and Saint Shrines in Egypt’, in G. Stauth and S. Schielke (eds), Dimensions of Locality: Muslim Saints, Their Place and Space (Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam 2008). Bielefeld: Transcript, pp. 47–66. Mittermaier, A. 2011. Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Parpiev, Z. 2015. ‘Who Is Behind Remittances? A Profile of Uzbek Migrants’, UNDP Uzbekistan. Retrieved 22 December 2015 from http://www.uz.undp.org/content/

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uzbekistan/en/home/ourperspective/ourperspectivearticles/2015/03/05/who-isbehind-remittances--a-profile-of-uzbek-migrants.html. Paul, J. 2002. ‘Contemporary Uzbek Hagiography and Its Sources’, Hallsche Beiträge zur Orientwissenschaft 32: 631–38. Peshkova, S. 2014. Women, Islam, and Identity: Public Life in Private Spaces in Uzbekistan. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Privratsky, B. 2001. Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory. Richmond: Curzon. Rasanayagam, J. 2011. Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rasanayagam, J., J. Beyer and M. Reeves. 2014. ‘Introduction: Performances, Possibilities, and Practices of the Political in Central Asia’, in M. Reeves, J. Rasanayagam and J. Beyer (eds), Ethnographies of the State in Central Asia: Performing Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 1–26. Reeves, E. 1995. ‘Power, Resistance, and the Cult of Muslim Saints in a Northern Egyptian Town’, American Ethnologist 22(2): 306–23. Reeves, M. 2011. ‘Staying Put? Towards a Relational Politics of Mobility at a Time of Migration’, Central Asian Survey 30(3–4): 555–76. Schubel, V. 1999. ‘Post-Soviet Hagiography and the Reconstruction of the Naqshbandi Tradition in Contemporary Uzbekistan’, in E. Özdalga (ed.), Naqshbandis in Western and Central Asia: Change and Continuity. Istanbul: Swedish Research Centre, pp. 73–88. Spechler, M. 2000. ‘Uzbekistan: The Silk Road to Nowhere?’, Contemporary Economic Policy 18: 295–303. Turner, V., and E. Turner. [1978] 2011. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Tyson, D. 1997. ‘Shrine Pilgrimage in Turkmenistan as a Means to Understand Islam among the Turkmen’, Central Asia Monitor 1: 15–32. Werbner, P. and H. Basu. 1998. Embodying Charisma: Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults. London: Routledge. Yo’ldoshev, N. 1997. Buxoro Avliyolarning Tarixi. Buxoro: Buxoro.

Chapter 5

‘Pilgrimage Capital’ and Bosnian Croat Pilgrimage Places Bosnian Croat Pilgrimages and Transnational Ties through Time and Space Mario Katić

Introduction Not every pilgrimage has a sacred object or apparition story but, at the same time, not every pilgrimage needs one. A pilgrimage site possesses something that has enabled it to become a pilgrimage place and which can be used to develop and redevelop it on the pilgrimage market (Reader 2014). I want to explore the translation and transformation of such special features through the analytical category of what I call ‘pilgrimage capital’.1 Reflecting on this etic category prompts us to observe and analyse the interactions between different religious, political and economic agents, civil society associations and other stakeholders whose actions influence a particular pilgrimage place, and vice versa. The concept of pilgrimage capital encourages us to focus on how these different agents have drawn on cultural, economic and political resources for their particular benefit and helped to develop particular pilgrimage places. It points to the power struggles surrounding such places, as well as the resources used by groups and individuals for their own benefit. It enables us to see more clearly how a particular place can become more prominent and compete more effectively with other pilgrimage sites and, thereby, directly enhance the economic status of local communities and/or an individual’s social position. Notes for this chapter begin on page 110.

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I focus here on Bosnian Croat pilgrimage sites and the material manifestation of pilgrimage capital through the construction of new sanctuaries and the creation of new pilgrimage places based on their pilgrimage potential. These processes require strong institutional economic and political effort as well as the mobilization of pilgrims. I discuss how the ‘pilgrimage capital’ of Bosnian Croat pilgrimage places is being ‘profitably’ used to bring together at least once a year those who are visiting their ‘homeland’, and also how it contributes to the struggle by Bosnian Croats for survival in a religiously and politically divided Bosnia and Herzegovina (see Katić 2014a). I show how pilgrimage capital generated at different pilgrimage places is being put to use for local and national economic and political benefit. The visits to these places by Bosnian Croats living abroad involve both a ‘secular’ journey and a ‘religious’ pilgrimage. In one sense they constitute a gathering of a displaced community accompanied by leisure time and festivities, but they also involve a religious pilgrimage by individuals

Map 5.1. A map of Bosnia and Herzegovina with pilgrimage sites. Map by the author.

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in need of spiritual comfort. Hence, while religious pilgrimage is not the only motive for the travel, it is still a good reason for returning to one’s old home – to one’s roots (Katić 2014b: 156). Using the potential of particular places to generate pilgrimage capital leads not just to supporting transnational ties but also to developing ‘historical’ ties between Bosnia and Herzegovina and those who may have migrated a long time ago. Following these practices and processes, therefore, will take us on a journey through time and space. In the next section I will put particular pilgrimage places into context, by outlining their historical background, the reasons why they exist, and their major features. This description is important in order to be able to follow how the pilgrimage potential of these places is being used, developed and transformed into pilgrimage capital.

Setting the Stage: Bosnian Croat Pilgrimage Places The Kondžilo Pilgrimage The pilgrimage to Kondžilo in the Usora region of Northern Bosnia,2 today a part of the Republic of Srpska and municipality of Teslić, was established at the end of the eighteenth century to honour the miraculous painting of the Madonna that was kept from that time in the village of Komušina, and taken in a procession to the hill of Kondžilo every year on 15 August to commemorate the Assumption. Before the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–95), this pilgrimage site was just one of many places that drew masses of people to pray and make vows for health and other benefits. Because the region was occupied during the war by Bosnian Serbs, the miraculous painting was taken to Croatia where, like her pilgrims, she was a refugee. The painting, as a powerful symbol of local community, drew pilgrims to places where it was kept during the war, i.e. Split and Zagreb. Hundreds of Bosnian Croat refugees from the Usora region went on pilgrimage to see the painting and to pray for the end of war and a return to their homes. At this point we can already observe the painting as an object actively engaged in gathering a displaced community. After the Dayton peace agreement, this part of the Usora region was included within the Bosnian Serb Republic of Srpska. This development delayed the return of the Croats and the painting to their home for some years. The painting was finally returned in 1999 and since then pilgrimage to the site has resumed. Moreover, this site is becoming more prominent, with the construction of a new sanctuary. It gathers thousands of pilgrims from all over Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as Bosnian Croat economic

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and political migrants from other European countries such as Croatia, Austria and Germany. The Madonna of Kondžilo has become a strong symbol of identity, the return of the community but not yet many of the people, and survival of Bosnian Croats. During the process of reconciliation between Croats and Serbs, this pilgrimage shrine took on both economic and political significance. Most of the pilgrims that come every year are people originally from this area who are now working in mostly Western European countries and, therefore, are more or less in a financially strong position, at least within the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina. During their visits to their former homes, which last between a week and ten days, they renovate or build their houses, buying materials and hiring workers from the predominantly Serbian city of Teslić. Many also plan to hold their children’s baptisms and marriages in their old home. Not only is the latter cheaper than in the countries where they live now, it also contains most of the family that would take part in such celebrations. Moreover, during the organization of the pilgrimage event that climaxes on 14 and 15 August, local entrepreneurs, mostly Serbs but also Croats, have their busiest days of the year, preparing parking places for which they charge a fee, organizing musical entertainment, arranging food and drink, setting up stands with religious souvenirs and children’s toys, renting out toilets: in short, everything that can be let or sold to thousands of pilgrims gathered there for these two days. Local hotels are full, while the wedding halls are hired every night of the week. During the 2016 pilgrimage, even the hotels’ official TV channel was promoting ‘a Catholic gathering’ as they called it, together with an excursion to a nearby Orthodox monastery. Something like this was unthinkable just a couple of years ago. Wherever there is a mass of potential voters, it is normal to find politicians. Every year, especially during election years, politicians from the Republic of Croatia, local Bosnian Croat politicians but also local Serb political representatives, such as the mayor of the city of Teslić, are special guests at the pilgrimage event. They are welcomed by Church officials and join them for the evening dinner. Politicians hope to attract voters, while Church officials hope to obtain more funds for their projects.

St John of Podmilačje The sanctuary of St John in the village of Podmilačje is a much older pilgrimage place than Kondžilo, although it does not actually possess a sacred object. This pilgrimage originates from the time of the medieval Bosnian kingdom, but the place’s sacred role may have been established before the Christian period. The cult was founded around a spring that was later

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connected to St John the Baptist. Today, it is visited by various religious communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially local Muslims. While the region in which Kondžilo is located is dominated by Bosnian Serbs, Podmilačje is located in a region that is part of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and is dominated by Bosnian Muslims − Bosniaks. The nearest administrative centre is the city of Jajce, which was once a Bosnian medieval royal city. Even though the population of this region is a mixture of Catholic Croat and Muslim Bosniak, coexistence and mutual recognition on an everyday level were evident during the war. The ‘enemy’ here were Bosnian Serbs, especially because the bordering municipality is the city of Banja Luka, the Bosnian Serb capital and main political centre. Moreover, the village of Podmilačje and the site of the St John Pilgrimage lie on the main road from Banja Luka to Jajce, making them very visible. It was the Bosnian Serbs who destroyed the old church of St John in 1993. This church had a lateral chapel that was apparently the medieval church of St John, the only medieval Catholic Church that remained during the Ottoman Empire. At the end of the nineteenth century it became a part of a bigger parish church. After the war, the pilgrimage to St John was restored and the construction Figure 5.1. Photo of the Kondžilo pilgrimage site. Photo by the author.

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of the new church was initiated by the Catholic Church in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Beside this new sanctuary, the old medieval church that used to be a lateral chapel was also reconstructed. Today, the reconstructed old church represents the medieval continuity of the pilgrimage site and is a Bosnian and Herzegovinian cultural heritage monument. It is where the statue of St John is kept and taken out in a procession to a small outside chapel for Mass and the performance of pilgrims’ vows (mostly circumambulating the statue and praying, some people on their knees). The spring, which previously had a much more important role in pilgrimage practices, is now a place where pilgrims wash after their exhausting walk, having come from places of origin located sometimes hundreds of kilometres away. The spring was originally closer to the church, but with the construction of a new sanctuary it has been relocated to an easily accessible place for pilgrims, though one more physically distant from the churches and main religious events. The spring forms part of the secular area of this pilgrimage site, and is where tents are erected, and lambs, pigs and chickens roasted. At the same time, it retains a connection to St John; on a concrete wall above the spring, a painter has sketched St John the Baptist surrounded by locals in traditional folk costumes together with Franciscan friars, who continue to have a very important role in Bosnian Croat identity formation and survival.3 The main events are held in a field between the two churches – the new reconstruction of the old medieval church of St John and the new church that boasted the biggest bell tower in Bosnia and Herzegovina when it was erected. This reorientation of the sanctuary did not reduce its

Figure 5.2. Photo of St John of Podmilačje. Photo by the author.

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importance; on the contrary, it is perhaps the biggest pilgrimage gathering of contemporary Bosnian Croats.

Pilgrimage to Bobovac Bobovac4 is a medieval royal city of the Bosnian kingdom and was the capital for some of the Bosnian kings, some of whom are buried there. Anyone who wanted to conquer the kingdom marched to Bobovac (Anđelić 2004: 160). At the end of the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia in 1463, the victorious army of Sultan Mehmet II focused on the city, considering this campaign to be the most crucial point in the war, and conquered it (ibid.: 161). In 2002, the Bosnian Cardinal, Vinko Puljić, established a ‘prayer hike’ (molitveni pohod) that later developed into a military pilgrimage of Bosnian Croat members of the post-2005 Bosnian army to, as he put it, the ‘altar of the fatherland’ (oltar domovine) – the royal city of Bobovac − honouring the death of the Bosnian queen, Katarina Kotromanić Kosača, who fled to Rome in 1463, apparently taking with her the royal insignia. She died in exile there in 1478. The military pilgrimage is a nostalgic Croatian claim to the medieval Bosnian kingdom; but so is a counter-pilgrimage by Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) that started in 2015. The Muslim Bosniaks do not claim the dead queen as a Muslim but instead deny her identity as a Croat, since she was Bosnian and born into the Bosnian Church, even if she converted on marriage to Catholicism (see Katić 2017). The only reconstructed and usable building of the old town is a mausoleum of Bosnian kings and queens, which may be seen as religious heritage, but forms cultural heritage for Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was excavated and reconstructed by archaeologists under the supervision of Pavao Anđelić in the late 1960s, and was renovated again after the 1990s war by the Bureau for the Preservation of Monuments (Zavod za zaštitu spomenika) of the Ministry for Culture and Sport of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Today the mausoleum holds a small exhibition about the city of Bobovac and the kings buried there, and is open during the pilgrimage. On the day of pilgrimage, the Saturday in October that is nearest to the 25th – the date when the queen died in Rome – hundreds of Bosnian Croats from around Bosnia and Herzegovina visit this historically and culturally important place. Most of their journeys are organized by their local parishes, which rent buses, but there are many that come in smaller groups, especially those who live in villages and municipalities near Bobovac. Apart from the Mass held in front of the mausoleum, another event connected with the Bobovac pilgrimage is the mass socializing organized by the Bosnian Croat part of the Bosnia and Herzegovinian army. A couple of

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kilometres from Bobovac, the military erects tents and prepares hundreds of portions of beans that are shared with pilgrims. Every year the Bobovac pilgrimage is attended by Bosnian Croat political and religious elites together with guests from abroad, mainly political, religious and military representatives from Croatia. Besides the Bosnian Cardinal and military bishop, other regular visitors include the military bishop from Croatia, military attachés from Croatia and Slovenia, members of EUFOR forces, and Bosnian Croat high political representatives and military officials. On occasion they have also included the President of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Minister of Defence and the commander of the Bosnian army joint staff (see Katić 2017). Even though it has been established as a pilgrimage site by the Roman Catholic Church in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the site could also be seen as a secular and historical place. Bobovac is not associated with miracles, nor does it have an acknowledged Catholic saintly protector, relics, statues or paintings. Coming to Bobovac involves a quest for an identity, based on historical heritage and subject to different interpretations depending on one’s religious and/or national background, i.e. whether one is a Muslim Bosniak or Catholic Bosnian Croat (see Katić 2017).

Bosnian Croat Pilgrimage Places and Pilgrimage Capital With these short descriptions I have tried to give some insight into possible readings of how varieties of pilgrimage potential might be used to create pilgrimage capital. Here we have rather different types of pilgrimage places: (1) Kondžilo – connected and framed by Bosnian Croat identity, return and survival; (2) St John from Podmilačje – a pilgrimage place with a long historical background, traceable to pre-Ottoman Bosnia, that still promotes narratives of sharing and coexistence; (3) Bobovac – a newly established pilgrimage place that has become an object of contestation. Pilgrimage capital in these three cases is differently constructed, deployed and recognized by different agents. Pilgrimage capital at Kondžilo accrues mainly from the miraculous painting of the Madonna. Its symbolic meaning, narrative and historical journey are being developed into a powerful symbol that develops this pilgrimage and brings it to a whole different level, from local and regional importance to national and transnational importance. On the other hand, the St John of Podmilačje pilgrimage site has no religious object per se, and the spring that was one of the tangible sacred aspects of the pilgrimage has been reduced in importance, while another site has been developed – the reconstructed old medieval church. The church that did not

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physically exist a decade ago, and was previously part of a bigger church, is today one of the main pilgrimage resources at the St John of Podmilačje sanctuary. It represents a form of cultural and historical heritage, a continuation of Christianity in this region and the presence of Bosnian Croats.

Figure 5.3. Photo of Bobovac military pilgrimage. Photo by the author.

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The second strong potentiality of Podmilačje resides in its name and what it represents. Without any sacred object or relic, apparition or some other miraculous event, this pilgrimage place has a narrative that functions as the main form of ‘pilgrimage capital’ that is being transformed and materialized in architecture, thereby making the pilgrimage place even more prominent. Even though Bobovac does not have a miraculous narrative and religiously sacred objects, it is still an officially proclaimed and established pilgrimage place. The pilgrimage capital of Bobovac consists in an historical narrative that acts as a magnet to many members of the Bosnian Croat cultural, political and religious elite. Its main importance and role results, therefore, from the transformation of its pilgrimage potential – consisting of a historical narrative and material remnants – into pilgrimage capital of crucial importance for contemporary Bosnian Croat elites. From these readings of the production and accumulation of pilgrimage capital, a key issue emerges: architecture and/or the material aspects of the pilgrimage place. In all three examples, pilgrimage capital is manifested through the construction and reconstruction of architecture and forms of marking the landscape. These developments reflect on all spheres of pilgrimage – religious, economic and political – and are directed to the creation of pilgrimage capital. According to geographer David Harvey, the most important function of the built environment is to facilitate production, circulation, consumption and exchange. The character of ‘space counts for little or nothing politically unless it connects symbiotically with the organization of institutional and private spaces. It is the relational connectivity among public, quasi-public, and private spaces that counts when it comes to politics in the public space’ (Harvey 2005: 31). Production, distribution and consumption are mutually constituted by social relations organized around power, and the ability to control ‘other people, processes, and things, even in the face of resistance’ (Mosco 2009: 24). Mosco usefully suggests that ‘control processes are broadly political in that they involve the social organization of relationships within the community. Survival processes are fundamentally economic because they concern the production of what a society needs to reproduce itself’ (ibid.: 25). Hence, in the context of my research, control refers to the institution of the Church and its power relations with pilgrims. Any form of capital seeks returns on its investment. In the pilgrimage contexts examined here, this return is achieved by adding new architectural elements into the pilgrimage landscape. Although individual pilgrims can agree or disagree with some particular development of a pilgrimage site, the Church ultimately has the power to form and frame the place. Investment and production on this level can be achieved only by

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a strong and organized institution that can also rally pilgrims and direct them towards a particular goal. Perhaps the best example of such a manifestation of power is the Bobovac pilgrimage where the pilgrimage landscape and the pilgrims are created as if from nothing. In the next section I will outline the relationship between pilgrimage sites as public spaces, forms of private space (meaning the local Bosnian Croat villages and infrastructure), control processes and constructions, and the economic aspect of these aspects of pilgrimage.

The Development of Pilgrimage Capital Kondžilo and St John of Podmilačje are strongly connected with the economic and political migration of Bosnian Croats. When the former state of Yugoslavia opened its borders and allowed workers to work in capitalist European countries, such as Germany and Austria, among the hundred thousand people who left for ‘temporary work’ during the 1960s and 1970s was a significant number of Bosnian Croat men. Their decision to leave their mostly agricultural work and become low-qualified workers radically changed the lives of their families, and consequently their local communities. As I have illustrated elsewhere (Katić and Marčetić 2014), a three-month period of working in Germany could launch families from a ‘pre-industrial’ to an ‘industrial’ way of life. One of my informants explained this point with an anecdote about how after his return from Germany he sold his ox and bought a tractor, and threw out his bed made of hay and bought a real one with a mattress. Although these developments occurred during the socialist era, people who went to work in different parts of Europe visited their homes during vacations, and their visits were planned to correspond with the religious calendar: Christmas, Easter and local saint celebrations. Some of the religious holidays that gathered workers were on 15 August (the Assumption of the Madonna) in the region of Usora and the 23 June celebration of St John the Baptist in the Jajce region. Although these events involved massive gatherings of people, they congregated initially around relatively small sites. The St John sanctuary, in the small village of Podmilačje near the town of Jajce, centred around a small church built at the beginning of the twentieth century during the Austrian-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Kondžilo Hill, where the locals from the village of Komušina took the miraculous painting of the Madonna in a procession every year on the feast of the Assumption, also only possessed a small wooden chapel built by the locals in the 1950s.

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The situation has changed considerably since the collapse of Yugoslavia and a war that had a particularly dramatic influence on the formerly Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina with its three nations: Muslims (today’s Bosniaks), Serbs and Croats. The Bosnian Croat economic migrants became political migrants, and were joined by many others. The male migrant workers often brought their families to the places where they were working, and helped their friends and neighbours to join them. Because of the war, their ‘temporary work’ started to look more like a permanent move and the start of a new life for them and their families. After the war, the saints came back but the people did not. Following three years of devastating conflict and, in some places, a few more years of difficult inter-ethnic relations, it was hard to convince anyone, especially young people, to return to a country that could not offer a good education, work, or social and medical security. Moreover, for many people who had lost loved ones, the wounds of war were too fresh. Most of the people who did return were seniors with foreign pensions or with children working abroad, who could financially support themselves in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Among the initial returnees to villages were the priests. The churches were the first places to be reconstructed and they became symbols of return and hope. Pilgrimage places were no longer just religious places that attracted believers. They found themselves in a war-torn country with a displaced population but they had a potential that could be developed through celebrations that could draw people back. Hence, in 1999, four years after the war, the pilgrimage to Kondžilo started again, prompting initially a negative response from local Serbs, while pilgrimage to St John of Podmilačje returned in 1996. Prominent pilgrimage places such as St John of Podmilačje and Kondžilo developed as more than places of religious significance; they were foci of identity. Thus, it was not enough to reconstruct their former architectural characteristics; local parishes, with the support of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Catholic Church and local populations, started to design and construct more prominent markers in the landscape. Bobovac, on the other hand, is a newly created pilgrimage site that has become a place of contestation. The military pilgrimage to Bobovac was established on the model of similar pilgrimages in Lourdes in France and the Croatian Marian shrine of Marija Bistrica. The International Military Pilgrimage to Lourdes has emphasized reconciliation (see Eade 2017), while Marija Bistrica is a national sanctuary bound up with Croatian identity and historical struggle. Pilgrimage to Bobovac lies between these two types. A historical narrative about the last Bosnian queen has been developed to promote her and the city itself as symbols of identity and an

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‘altar of the fatherland’, bringing military and police officials as well as the religious and cultural elite to this place. On the other hand, the Bobovac pilgrimage encourages reconciliation among Bosnian Croats themselves, who were divided between ‘uniformed’ members of the Communist Party in former Yugoslavia and other Croats, who were religious and more aware of their ethnic identity. Nowadays, it is necessary to show that wearing a uniform does not make one a representative of the Other but rather a member of a joint struggle. Today, these places act as very strong magnets. The construction of modern architectonic shrines – the Kondžilo sanctuary takes up an entire hill that used to have a small chapel, and the new church of St John apparently has the biggest bell tower in Bosnia – began to draw more and more people to pilgrimage, and at least once a year back to their homeland. In addition, the increasing numbers of pilgrims started to change the local economy, encouraging the reconstruction of houses and infrastructure, and their financial support is taking on a crucial role in the continuation of the shrines’ construction. As they did before the war, people link their vacations with pilgrimage events. The latter provide the opportunity to ‘come back home’, see relatives and friends, bring children (most now born in other countries) to their homeland, mow their lawns, visit family graves, marry, baptise the children and have a nice time during festivities that surround the pilgrimages, but also to pray for their families and fulfil vows. Pilgrimages are affecting the local non-Croat economy as well. Hotels are being used by pilgrims, or for weddings; shops, cafes and markets are full of people with a substantial income by Bosnian standards. Most of the entrepreneurs who surround the pilgrimage places selling food, drink, fun and holy objects come from different religious and national backgrounds. It seems that economic benefits have outweighed the political problems. What was unthinkable twenty years ago is nowadays normal: a Serbian two-headed eagle (the national symbol), on a police uniform from the local Bosnian Serb force in Teslić, guards the procession of Bosnian Croats carrying their national flag (the red and white chess board). The Bosnian Croat pilgrimage site thus functions on two levels: at the level of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state, and as a transnational ‘gathering node’. Once a year people gather from different parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, various countries of Europe, and even beyond, in a place where they can recognize that they are members of the Bosnian Croat community. Such in-gathering has a substantial economic impact on the local community and its entrepreneurs, on the Church and on other spheres of social development. The large numbers of pilgrims every year

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that demonstrate the presence of Bosnian Croats in their native country is also a political statement. In contrast, we might consider the fate of another example of Bosnian Croat pilgrimage in Bosnia and Herzegovina – Olovo. A symbol of sharing the sacred and of coexistence, and a place that used to host one of the biggest and most important Catholic pilgrimages in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Martić and Belaj 2014), Olovo today is declining in importance and has only local significance, even though it possesses considerable potential for pilgrimage capital based on miraculous events connected to the Madonna, its role as a place of inter-religious dialogue, and its yearly pilgrimage on 1 May that even Cardinal Vinko Puljić attends. However, this potential goes largely unrealized, perhaps because the site lacks strong transnational ties. In the contemporary political situation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it may be that symbols of identity that gather displaced communities are more important than symbols of coexistence and sharing. Only kilometres away we have the Bobovac pilgrimage, a newly established practice attracting Bosnian Croats from all parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Transnational Ties through Space and Time Besides these obvious ties connected with contemporary economic and politically motivated migrants, there is another dimension of transnational mobility that takes us on a journey back to the distant past. For years, I have been a lay helper on the pilgrimage to Kondžilo, working mostly around parking lots, keeping order and helping to collect money during Mass. I have a special vest that marks me as a ‘monitor’ (redar). Those pilgrims who are confused or have questions regularly approach me, and one day in 2016 a middle-aged man came up to me, explaining that he was here for the first time and asked me where to go and what to do. I noticed that his Croatian was a bit strange, so I was intrigued. I asked him where he was from, and was very surprised at his reply. He lived in Poland but his family originated from the Usora region. After the Second World War his mother had left Bosnia and Herzegovina and had now returned to her homeland together with thousands of other Polish citizens who, according to him, still cherished their special identity and ties with Bosnia and Herzegovina. While he was growing up, he used to listen to his mother’s stories about the country where their family had lived for decades and the place they considered their home, and she was especially emotional about the Kondžilo pilgrimage. He had finally decided to come and see his family’s old home and visit the Kondžilo pilgrimage site.

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We did not have the opportunity to go into the details of his family story but it is reasonable to assume that his family, like many others from Central and Eastern Europe, was settled in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Austro-Hungarian protectorate and the subsequent annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1878 and 1918. After the Second World War and the coming to power of the communists, some of these settlers, especially those of Austrian and German origin, were no longer welcome and therefore returned to their native countries, leaving only their cemeteries and oral tradition about the ‘Germans who used to live here’. Others, including Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Ukrainian and Polish settlers, endured poor economic conditions. Some decided to go back, while others stayed. My attention to these historical transnational ties was drawn once again by another example, this time coming from Bobovac, which one Hungarian Croat who visited Bobovac in 2015 referred to as ‘a sacred place’.5 Polish Bosnians and Bosnian Croats are not the only ones to seek identity confirmation by looking nostalgically to the past. Hungarian and Austrian Croats are also making pilgrimages through the ‘Paths of our Ancestors’ (po staza naših starih). This is a project that was set up during 2013 and embraces seventeen places in seven countries from where Hungarian Croats apparently migrated to Hungary. The idea of this project is to retain a memory of origin and establish stronger connections with those living in their country of origin today. The Ethno-Memorial and Information Centre of Burgenland Croats, which is mainly responsible for developing the project, sees the pilgrimage as a journey that includes visiting significant historical places and objects, learning about cuisine, language, customs, their cultural background and their identity.6 At Bobovac in 2015 they had an emotional meeting with local Bosnian Croats, which was supported by military re-enactors from Croatia. Clearly, Bobovac is a ‘sacred place’ not just for Bosnian Croats but also for similar groups outside Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it is important to underline the fact that the starting point of their ancestral path was from the royal city of Bobovac. One more example that surprised me but further convinced me that Bosnian Croat pilgrimage places are becoming important not just for recently exiled Bosnian Croats but also for those whose ancestors were displaced centuries ago, comes from the St John pilgrimage in Podmilačje. The main guest of this pilgrimage event in 2016 was the bishop of Burgeland, Egidije Živković, whose seat is based at Eisenstadt in Austria. The Burgeland area in today’s Austria is home to one of the oldest Croat emigration communities, whose origins are bound up with the wars against the Ottomans. They preserve their Croat identity and

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language and have strong connections with contemporary Croatia. The bishop was invited by Bosnian Cardinal Vinko Puljić, who celebrated the main Mass with him. Bishop Živković, in his greeting, emphasized that one of the main reasons he was there, as an eighteenth-generation descendant, was to thank the Bosnian Franciscans for following his ancestors five hundred years ago to Austria, Slovakia and Hungary. He became very emotional while speaking about the contemporary situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, asking Bosnian Croats gathered there, who were now mainly living outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to love their country, to treasure their Catholic and Croatian roots, but also to respect others who are different. These historical transnational ties recall a series of recently developed concepts that frame similar practices as ‘heritage tours’ (Ebron 1999), ‘pilgrimage tourism’ (Schramm 2004), ‘roots tourism’ (Basu 2004), ‘nostalgic pilgrimage’ (Ioannides and Ioannides 2006) and ‘diaspora tourism’ (Collins-Kreiner 2010). These concepts are used to analyse pilgrimage journeys, motivated by different personal reasons, with transnational ties, which are maintained by displaced individuals and communities and generated by a search for identity, the making of place and landscape, as well as by secular political and economic processes. These pilgrimages involve those travellers/pilgrims who annually travel to their homelands which they were forced to leave because of an economic situation, war, political pressure, or some other reason. Their travel back home is observed as pilgrimage to their family and national roots even though some of them are not actually going to any official religious place. (Katić 2014b: 145)

Some of these homeland visits, for example to Ireland, Poland and Portugal, can be made in conjunction with official religious pilgrimages, which often take on a nationalistic character (Stausberg 2011: 48). Much may also depend on the perspective taken by informants (see Eade and Katić 2017). For example, an annual religious pilgrimage to the formerly Greek island of Imvros (Turkish Gökceada) on 15 August is interpreted as a touristic visit to Gökceada (Greek Imvros) by Turkish newcomers – a connotation that is rejected by the Greeks, who consider this pilgrimage a way to reclaim their homeland (Tsimouris 2014). This example and other instances of heritage tours, pilgrimage tourism, roots tourism and diaspora tourism suggest that the pilgrimages in Bosnia and Herzegovina discussed above, which seek an ‘ancient past’, have a wider resonance. Perhaps these pilgrimages are leading towards new forms of practice. Will Bosnian Croats become more like the Greek visitors to Imvros in a few decades?

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Conclusion To the Bosnian Croat community – those who had been displaced from their country of origin as well as those who lived as a dominated minority in their native country – the above-mentioned pilgrimage places function as ‘gathering nodes’, i.e. frames for practices where they can celebrate their membership of a wider community. Going on religious pilgrimage is not the only, sometimes not even the main reason for visiting one’s homeland, but it is an occasion that frames the journey and has implications for identity-, place- and landscape-making, politics and economy. Recently, these sites have begun to take on the role of commemorating historical as well as contemporary forms of displaced Croat identity. As a result of political, identitarian, economic and demographic crises caused mainly by the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–95), previously local or regional sites and pilgrimage places that did not even exist before the war are being transformed into pilgrimage capital. This capital works to attract displaced people at least once a year back to their homeland, to maintain transnational ties and demonstrate the presence of Bosnian Croats in the local political landscape. In parts of the country where there are no pilgrimage places or religious festivities, especially where there is no transformation of pilgrimage potential into pilgrimage capital, the Bosnian Croats are declining in number and representation, and people are not drawn home, even annually. We could also consider this the other way round. In parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina where Bosnian Croats are declining in number and representation, there are fewer examples of pilgrimage potential transforming into pilgrimage capital. Political economy, according to Vincent Mosco (2009: 26), gives priority to understanding social change and historical transformation. As we have seen, institutional investment in pilgrimage potential can lead to the creation and accumulation of pilgrimage capital oriented towards a particular group – in this case the Bosnian Croat displaced community. Eventually, pilgrimage capital is produced through the construction and reconstruction of sanctuaries, increasing numbers of pilgrims, stronger transnational ties, the creation of historical transnational ties, and political influence, with implications for the survival of Bosnian Croats in Bosnia. The creation of this capital is a result of far-reaching social changes, i.e. devastating war and a poor economic situation that resulted in the mass departure of a population. Moreover, with the end of the former Yugoslavia, Bosnian Croats became a minority in their own native country (the newly established Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina) almost overnight. The Roman Catholic Church became the only stable factor that could unite those who stayed and those who left. This religious institution has, among other

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things, developed particular pilgrimage sites and generated pilgrimage capital in order to ensure the survival of Bosnian Croats. The extensive architectural transformations of these sites and the masses of visitors are the highly visible demonstrations of this pilgrimage capital at work. Mario Katić is Assistant Professor at the University of Zadar, Department of Ethnology and Anthropology. His main areas of interest are pilgrimage, folklore and death studies, urban anthropology and methodology of research. He is co-editor of Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism: Commemorating the Dead (Routledge, 2017), Pilgrimage, Politics and PlaceMaking in Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2014), Pilgrimage and Sacred Places in Southeast Europe: History, Religious Tourism and Contemporary Trends (Lit Verlag, 2014) and author of Death in Dalmatian Hinterland: Mirila from Ritual to Theatre (Naklada Ljevak, 2017).

Notes I would like to thank Simon Coleman and John Eade for their tremendous help in writing this chapter. Without their careful reading, comments, ideas and patience I would never have been able to write it. Thanks are also due to Robert Hayden for reading the draft and offering insightful comments and asking important questions, as always. I would also like to thank my Department colleagues, Jelena Kupsjak and Danijela Birt, for discussing my ideas and raising constructive questions that helped me develop them.   1. Pilgrimage capital is influenced by Pierre Bourdieu’s model of capital (1986). He sees capital as accumulated labour that enables agents to transform it into three fundamental guises: economic, cultural and social (1986: 246). However, aside from his inspiration I am not specifically developing Bourdieu’s ideas here. Rather, I consider pilgrimage capital as a form that bridges all other forms, and which can be transformed into others.   2. For more on the Kondžilo pilgrimage place, see Katić 2014a and 2014b.   3. For more details about the Franciscan historical and contemporary role, see Katić 2014a.   4. For more on Bobovac military pilgrimage see Katić 2017.   5. For more on the visits of the Hungarian Croats see http://www.unizd.hr/Portals/5/ Bobovac broj 247 web-1.pdf.  6. For more on the project ‘Paths of Our Ancestors’ see http://www.hrvati.hu/index. php/hr/.

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References Anđelić, P. 2004. Bobovac i Kraljeva Sutjeska: stolna mjesta bosanskih vladara u XIV i XV stoljeću. Sarajevo: Sarajevo Publishing. Basu, P. 2004. ‘Route Metaphors of “Roots-Tourism” in the Scottish Highland Diaspora’, in S. Coleman and J. Eade (eds), Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion. London: Routledge, pp. 150–74. Bourdieu, P. 1986. ‘The Forms of Capital’, in J.E. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 241–58. Collins-Kreiner, N. 2010. ‘The Geography of Pilgrimage and Tourism: Transformations and Implications for Applied Geography’, Applied Geography 30: 153–64. Eade, J. 2017. ‘Healing Social and Physical Bodies: Lourdes and Military Pilgrimage’, in J. Eade and M. Katić (eds), Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism: Commemorating the Dead. London: Routledge, pp. 15–34. Eade, J., and M. Katić. 2017. ‘Commemorating the Dead: Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism’, in J. Eade and M. Katić (eds), Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism: Commemorating the Dead. London: Routledge, pp. 1–13. Ebron, P. 1999. ‘Tourists as Pilgrims: Commercial Fashioning of Transatlantic Politics’, American Ethnologist 26(4): 910–32. Harvey, D. 2005. ‘The Political Economy of Public Space’, in S. Low and N. Smith (eds), The Politics of Public Space. London: Routledge, pp. 17–35. Ioannides Cohen, M., and D. Ioannides. 2006. ‘Global Jewish Tourism: Pilgrimage and Remembrance’, in D. Timothy and D. Olsen (eds), Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys. London: Routledge, pp. 254–270. Katić, M. 2014a. ‘From the Chapel on the Hill to National Shrine: Creating a Pilgrimage “Home” for Bosnian Croats’, in J. Eade and M. Katić (eds), Pilgrimage, Politics and PlaceMaking in Eastern Europe: Crossing the Borders. New York: Routledge, pp. 15–36. Katić, M. 2014b. ‘Pilgrimage and/or Tourism in Bosnian Croat Shrine of Kondžilo’, in M. Katić, T. Klarin and M. McDonald (eds), Pilgrimage and Sacred Places in Southeast Europe: History, Religious Tourism and Contemporary Trends. Berlin: Lit Verlag, pp. 145–159. Katić, M. 2017. ‘Military Pilgrimage to Bobovac: A Bosnian “Sacred Place”’, in J. Eade and M. Katić (eds), Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism: Commemorating the Dead. London: Routledge, pp. 85–100. Katić, M., and S. Marčetić. 2014. ‘Prošlost, običaji i životna svakidašnjica Ravne-Brčko’, in M. Katić and S. Marčetić (eds), Ravne Brčko: prošlost, običaji, životna svakidašnjica. Zadar: University of Zadar, pp. 11–19. Martić, Z., and M. Belaj. 2014. ‘Pilgrimage Site beyond Politics: Experience of the Sacred and Inter-religious Dialogue in Bosnia’, in J. Eade and M. Katić (eds), Pilgrimage, Politics and Place-Making in Eastern Europe: Crossing the Borders. New York: Routledge, pp. 59–78. Mosco, V. 2009. The Political Economy of Communication. London: Sage Publications. Reader, I. 2014. Pilgrimage in the Marketplace. London: Routledge. Schramm, K. 2004. ‘Coming Home to the Motherland: Pilgrimage Tourism in Ghana’, in S. Coleman and J. Eade (eds), Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion. London: Routledge, pp. 135–52. Stausberg, M. 2011. Religion and Tourism: Crossroads, Destinations and Encounters. London: Routledge. Tsimouris, G. 2014. ‘Pilgrimage to Gökceada (Imvros), a Greco-Turkish Contested Place: Religious Tourism or a Way to Reclaim the Homeland?’, in J. Eade and M. Katić (eds), Pilgrimage, Politics and Place-Making in Eastern Europe: Crossing the Borders. New York: Routledge, pp. 37–58.

Chapter 6

Translating Catholic Pilgrimage Sites into Energy Grammar Contested Spiritual Practices in Chartres and Vézelay Anna Fedele

Introduction Focusing on ‘energy pilgrimages’1 (Fedele 2014a), a type of sacred travel influenced by contemporary forms of spirituality that has become increasingly popular during the last thirty years, this chapter explores how spiritual entrepreneurs from different European countries and the US translate Catholic pilgrimage into a transnational energy grammar. This kind of grammar allows them to reconceptualize and revitalize medieval Catholic pilgrimage sites in Europe and transform them into what they see as power places, contributing to a worldwide web formed by energy lines spanning across the globe. Analysing the struggles over access and control at two Catholic pilgrimage sites with a centuries-long tradition in France, the cathedral of Chartres and the basilica of Vézelay, I will explore the contemporary politics of space with reference to Catholic pilgrimage sites and situate them within a wider historical context. In particular, I will analyse the linkages that exist between the notion of an energy grammar and the ‘mobility class’ of pilgrims, which stems mainly from the middle class. Although this ‘New Age takeover’ of Catholic sites may appear new, it can also be seen as the contemporary manifestation of struggles over the meaning and control of Catholic pilgrimage sites (and, one might argue, Notes for this chapter begin on page 130.

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sacred sites in general) that have always existed. Rather than considering ‘energy pilgrimages’ as yet another expression of contemporary neoliberal tendencies towards a marketization of the sacred (see also Steil in this volume), I argue that they can be interpreted as contemporary expressions of the entanglements between pilgrimage and the marketplace that have always existed but have been largely neglected by religious scholars (Reader 2014). In line with Eade and Sallnow’s analysis of Christian pilgrimage sites, Chartres and Vézelay emerge as ‘arenas for competing religious and secular discourses’ (1991: 2) where social actors have sometimes conflicting approaches and the Catholic authorities in charge of the sites are torn between the desire to attract more visitors and their duty to watch over the appropriate religious use of these sites, a tension that has been described in the case of other pilgrimage shrines worldwide (e.g. Reader 2014). ‘Energy pilgrimages’ are proving increasingly attractive because they are not in competition with secular or religious assumptions and institutions, but articulate with them, through an energy grammar that blurs the distinctions between tourism and pilgrimage (Rountree 2006b; Ivakhiv 2001; Fedele 2013a, 2014a) but also those between secularism and religion, as well as other dichotomies of Western thinking that derive from its Judeo-Christian and classical heritage (Fedele 2014a; see also Badone 2004). This energy grammar is not exclusive to the pilgrims I accompanied during research for my dissertation (2002–2005) about alternative pilgrimages to French Catholic shrines dedicated to saint Mary Magdalene or holding dark Madonna statues (Fedele 2013a), but provides a transnational lingua franca (Heelas 1996) for the increasing number of people in the West who refuse to form part of an established religious tradition, preferring to identify themselves as ‘spiritual’ rather than religious (see, among others, Heelas and Woodhead 2005; Fedele and Knibbe 2013a; Ammerman 2013). As I have discussed in detail elsewhere (Fedele and Knibbe 2013a, forthcoming), as an anthropologist I consider the distinction between spirituality and religion problematic in analytical terms because, although ‘spirituality’ tends to be constructed in opposition to ‘religion’, many persons describing themselves as spiritual but not religious still belong to an established religion. Some scholars have argued that spirituality is a construct that has little empirical value (e.g. Ammerman 2013), or that the religious movements described by it can be seen as a contemporary expression of vernacular religion (Sutcliffe and Bowman 2000; Fedele and Knibbe 2013b). For reasons of brevity, we cannot enter into this debate in more detail here, but the increasing number of people who identify with the term spirituality and tend to perceive religion negatively is a social

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phenomenon that needs to be taken into account2 and is fundamental to understanding the increasing popularity of ‘energy pilgrimages’. We will see that the energy grammar used by the pilgrims responds to a desire for a more malleable notion of the divine that can be performed in church spaces but also in other sacred places, belonging to different traditions. It offers a language that goes beyond religious affiliation and can therefore be used across different communities on a transnational scale. Considering pilgrimage sites as power places forming part of a worldwide web also helps the pilgrims to contrast their sense of the ‘disembedding of everyday life’ that Anthony Giddens (1991) has described as a feature of late modernity, learning to feel embedded and supported by a cosmos made of energy. Through the reinterpretation of pilgrimage sites as interconnected power places, the local becomes global, and for ‘energy pilgrims’ travelling becomes a way of experiencing home away from home (see the ethnographic examples discussed below as well as Susanna’s experience described in Fedele 2014a. Thus, energy pilgrimages offer ways of creating new ‘landscapes of belonging’ (see introduction to this volume), in the context of increasingly secularized Western societies in which the pilgrims refuse to embrace established religions but also reject what they describe as a growing disenchantment with the world fostered by trends of secularization. Interpreting the world in terms of energy allows the pilgrims to feel at home virtually everywhere they can find a power place, and this orientation helps them to cope with a sense of fragmentation and rootlessness (Giddens 1991), which they see as the direct consequence of increasingly unequal, neoliberalist policies and the exploitation of natural resources. My analysis, therefore, seeks to contribute to a better understanding of this extremely malleable and creative form of sacred journeying, which is often dismissed as yet another form of touristification and marketization of pilgrimage sites. Building upon studies that have deconstructed the nostalgic, romantic idea of pilgrimage as a purely spiritual experience that is in opposition to tourism and the marketplace (Badone and Roseman 2004; Reader 2014), I explore the translation of pilgrimage into the language of energy and explain why this energy approach is proving so effective, transforming Catholic shrines into knots of a transnational, transreligious web of power places. Catholic shrines emerge as points of conjunction not only of different energy lines stemming from different parts of the world, but also of different religious traditions, since they are believed to have been built on places of pre-Christian worship. They therefore represent an ideal point at which to blend the Christian and the pre-Christian (also described as ‘pagan’) traditions.

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Energy Pilgrims During the last thirty years, an increasing number of pilgrims who do not identify themselves as practising Christians have visited Catholic shrines in Europe and the Americas to benefit from the ‘energy’ of these places and connect with the healing forces and spiritual beings related to such ‘power places’. These spiritual travellers are influenced by religious movements that have been described by different umbrella terms such as ‘New Age’ and ‘Neopagan religions’ (Pike 2004), ‘holistic spiritualities’ (Sointu and Woodhead 2008) or ‘contemporary spirituality’ (Fedele and Knibbe 2013a). They are predominantly women and tend to be middle class and well educated, and they mainly come from Europe, the US and Canada (see Steil in this volume, about this phenomenon in Brazil). However, this kind of journey also attracts younger generations as well as lower and lower middle-class pilgrims who are often unable to pay for organized tours. They travel on their own or with friends and are, therefore, more difficult to spot for the ethnographer. At least from the late 1970s onwards, travellers were visiting ‘power places’ to meditate and draw on their ‘energy’. Since the 1980s, organized trips to ‘sacred places’ and centres to welcome them also developed and social scientists began to discuss sacred journeys to power places during the 1990s (e.g. Badone 1991; Bowman 1993). Various terms have been used to describe these new kinds of religiously inspired traveller, including ‘ecospiritual pilgrims’ (Ivakhiv 2001), ‘Goddess pilgrims’ (Rountree 2002), ‘Pagan pilgrims’ (Zwissler 2011), ‘New Age pilgrims’ (Dubisch 2015) and ‘spiritual tourists’ (Norman 2011). As a consequence, many edited volumes published in the interdisciplinary domain of pilgrimage studies in the twenty-first century include at least one chapter on such pilgrimages (e.g. Swatos 2006; Margry 2008; Di Giovine and Picard 2015). The Catholic authorities in charge of pilgrimage sites, such as Assisi (the Italian hometown of Saint Francis and Saint Claire; see Davis 2015), the cathedral of Cuzco in Peru (Hill 2008) or the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain (Frey 1998), have developed different strategies to deal with these pilgrims. Since the late 1990s, I have visited Catholic shrines that I knew were particularly attractive for energy pilgrims, especially in Italy and France, but also in other European countries, California and Peru. As the years passed by, the clergy or laypersons in charge of these sites became increasingly aware of the presence of energy pilgrims and the visibility of their alternative rituals. Some chose to ignore them, others sent them away, while others were willing to grant access to organized pilgrimage groups after official closing hours in exchange for a donation to the church. As we will see in more detail below, in California

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rituals and symbols that are popular among energy pilgrims have been incorporated in some Christian churches (Beaman 2006). During research for my dissertation (2002–05), I accompanied three organized groups of pilgrims, one from Italy, one from Spain and the other from the United States and the United Kingdom, who visited French shrines dedicated to saint Mary Magdalene or holding dark Madonna statues. ‘Mary Magdalene pilgrims’ (Fedele 2013a) have a Christian (mostly Catholic) background but have embraced ideas and spiritual practices related to the international Goddess movement. Such pilgrims usually consider themselves as spiritual but not religious (Heelas and Woodhead 2005; Fedele and Knibbe 2013a). They reject pre-established religions as exclusive, hierarchical and patriarchal, and prefer to use terms they feel are not inscribed in any existing religion. In an attempt to find an umbrella term that could cover not only Mary Magdalene pilgrims but also other spiritual travellers referred to above, I suggest the term ‘energy pilgrims’ (Fedele 2014a). This term avoids references to a specific religious movement (New Age, Neopagan, Goddess movement, spirituality etc.) and the terminological debates related to them, and focuses on one of the main elements that these travellers have in common – their interest in contacting the ‘energy’ of the places they visit. The centrality of this concept is supported also by the fact that pilgrims use an energy grammar (Fedele 2009, 2013a) not only to describe their worldview and spiritual practices but also to make sense of their journeys as a whole.3 In this context, energy emerges as a ‘neutral’ term (Fedele 2014a), a lingua franca (Heelas 1996) that allows them to draw on references from existing religions, as well as psychology, quantum physics and anthropology (Fedele 2009). According to the energy grammar used by the pilgrims, everything is made of energy, i.e. an all-pervading divine life force. Energy manifests itself through the material world and people can learn to become aware of and take care of their ‘energy body’ that envelops the physical body and to connect with the energy of the surrounding world. Many different energy techniques exist to receive nurturing energy from the surrounding world, and to release the harmful energy.4 Energy pilgrims hold that many Christian churches, especially Gothic cathedrals, have been built on ‘power places’, where there had previously existed ‘pagan’ sacred sites dedicated to pre-Christian divinities (Rountree 2002, 2006a, 2006b; Beaman 2006). Like the Glastonbury pilgrims described by Ivakhiv (2001) and Bowman (1993) and the women studied by Weibel who visited Rocamadour (2005), the pilgrims I talked to contested the use the Church had made of these sites. Some even charged the Church with theft (Fedele 2013a: 97–109). They wanted to tap into the ancient energy

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of the Catholic sites they visited – an energy that supposedly pre-dated Christianity and the distorting transformations of the Church. ‘Energy pilgrims’ are voracious readers and look out for theories reaffirming their view of the world in academic texts, especially in the areas of history, anthropology and quantum physics. For their ideas related to sacred journeys, they find inspiration in authors such as James Lovelock (1979) and Alfred Watkins ([1925] 1984). They are concerned with ecology and believe that Mother Earth should be revered as a divine being as it had been by ancient populations and still is by certain indigenous groups. This devotional attitude is also considered a way to contrast the pitiless exploitation of natural resources. ‘Energy pilgrims’ believe that Mother Earth is crossed by lines of energy (‘ley lines’)5 and that places where two or more of these lines cross are particularly powerful. They hold that the ‘religious specialists’ of ancient religions, who had built sacred monuments upon them, had once known the power of these places. In some cases, such ancient pre-Christian sacred monuments still exist, such as Stonehenge, the pyramids in Egypt and Mexico and ancient Greek temples, while in other cases they have been taken over by the Church. Power places exist in almost every country of the world and can be found through websites or guides (see, for instance, www.sacredsites.com, run by anthropologist Martin Gray). ‘Energy pilgrims’ reject the disenchanted vision of the world that ‘science’ offers them and criticize contemporary tendencies of secularization as well as capitalism and globalization (Ivakhiv 2001). Some ‘energy pilgrims’ are particularly influenced by Goddess spirituality and are attracted by power places specifically related to the pre-Christian Goddess or the ‘Sacred Feminine’ (Rountree 2002, 2006b; Badone 2008; Fedele 2013a). Even if all churches can potentially be signposts for power places, in Europe Gothic cathedrals are considered particularly effective indicators because they are thought to have been built following the rules of a secret ‘geomancy’. According to Fulcanelli ([1929] 1964),6 most of the Gothic cathedrals, particularly those linked to the Order of the Knights Templar, were built by certain orders of masons. These ‘Christian geomancers’ erected the cathedrals on particularly powerful sites according to their secret knowledge of telluric currents and astronomy. For reasons of brevity I will focus here only on Vézelay and Chartres because they clearly represent the variety of reactions to energy pilgrims displayed by the clergy.7 Moreover, the controversies about Mary Magdalene’s relics in the basilica of Vézelay show that struggles around the meaning of and control over Catholic pilgrimage sites and their symbols have a long history. The case of the labyrinth of Chartres also illustrates how these issues play out elsewhere, because, especially in the United States and

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Canada, this labyrinth is being exported to Christian churches (Beaman 2006) to facilitate the performance of rituals that are attractive for energy pilgrims as well as for more casual visitors influenced by the same kind of spirituality. We can see the emergence of a form of spiritualized mobility that is linked to the middle class but not exclusive to it, and allows these travellers to overcome a sense of rootlessness that, as we will see in more detail below, emerges as one of their main problems.

Vézelay and Its Relics Vézelay is a village on a hill in French Burgundy, and the Romanesque basilica of Saint Magdalene is located at the top of the hill. Both the village and the basilica have been designated UNESCO world heritage sites. Vézelay is one of the traditional starting points for French pilgrims on the way to Santiago de Compostela; however, in the Middle Ages Vézelay was also an important pilgrimage site related to the cult of saint Mary Magdalene. According to the legends about Mary Magdalene collected by Jacobus de Voragine (The Golden Legend, ca. 1260), the saint died in Provence. Her body was long believed to be in the crypt of the basilica of Saint-Maximin-en-Provence. However, in the eleventh century the monks of Vézelay claimed to have found the authentic body of the saint, allegedly removed from Saint-Maximin in order to save it from Saracen incursions. In 1058 a papal bull recognized Vézelay’s claims and the village became an important shrine visited by pilgrims from all over Europe. The monks in Saint-Maximin maintained that theirs were the ‘real’ relics, and that the bones stolen were fakes, which had been put into Magdalene’s tomb specifically to fool the Saracens. Vézelay offers a privileged window upon the changing meanings of religious sites and symbols at pilgrimage sites. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century, the relics’ presence helped the sanctuary to become one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Europe. As the historian Katherine Jansen notes, it became ‘so important that Bernard of Clairvaux preached the second crusade there in 1146, and pious Louis IX made four visits, even attending the elevatio of her relics in 1267, at which time he received some of them for his personal collection’ (2001: 36). As Jansen shows, the struggle around the authenticity of the relics was not only related to religious motives but also to political and economic struggles. Given Mary Magdalene’s presence at the crucifixion and her important role during the resurrection, her tomb was and still is considered the ‘third tomb of Christianity’.

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Vézelay’s economic and political power as one of the major pilgrimage sites in Europe started to decline in 1279, when Charles of Salerno, Count of Provence and future King of Naples, put an end to the controversies through the miraculous ‘invention’ of Mary Magdalene’s relics in the crypt of Saint-Maximin. In 1295, Pope Boniface VIII officially declared the true relics were in Saint-Maximin, sealing the decline of Vézelay.8 After the publication of the international bestseller The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2003), Vézelay again became a major site of interest related to Mary Magdalene. On my visits, however, I found that Vézelay was attracting travellers and pilgrims with esoteric interests long before The Da Vinci Code was published. The church was known in esoteric circles, especially in France, as a place of power, built on secret principles in order to benefit from an intersection of telluric currents. In summer 2003 I accompanied an Italian group of three men, ten women and a child led by Celso Bambi, an Italian naturopath in his fifties.9 Their tour ended in Vézelay and had started nine days before in Provence, at the Sainte-Baume, not far from Saint-Maximin. Standing in front of the basilica in Vézelay, Celso introduced his pilgrims to the place, offering historical as well as architectural information through the use of an energy grammar (Fedele 2009, 2013a). As he had done at Sainte-Baume (Fedele 2013a: 83–97), Celso referred to the Catholic pilgrims visiting this site in the past and described their beliefs and practices in terms of energy. In order to enter the basilica’s nave, one has to pass through two doors. Beyond the first door there is a hall. According to Celso, in the Middle Ages pilgrims would spend the night waiting there to go through the second door the next morning. When they slept in this first part of the church, those pilgrims, he thought, benefited from telluric energy, which was able to produce dreams with important spiritual messages. On the following morning, when the second large central door was opened, these pilgrims were suddenly inundated by light. As Celso saw it, this sequence of darkness and light had been prepared to give them a physical representation of how the glory of God rescued them from darkness. The big windows and the clear walls of the church gave it a striking luminosity, especially on sunny days. Hence, Celso observed, Vézelay was called ‘the basilica of the light’. For Celso this delayed entrance into the main part of the church represented a symbolic and energetic progression. The Italian pilgrims had discovered, thanks to their guide, how the process of elevation stimulated by the church’s building worked, whereas, Celso pointed out, medieval pilgrims and contemporary Catholic pilgrims did not possess this kind of knowledge. However, from Celso’s perspective, even if they were not aware of this process, the Catholic pilgrims of the past and present

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benefited from the healing power of the energies present there, and this might explain the cases of miraculous healing reported by some pilgrims. Even tourists visiting the place were inevitably exposed to its energy and might experience unexpected outcomes. In Celso’s explanations we find some of the main characteristics of energy grammar. It allows the pilgrims to transition from their Catholic background towards a kind of spirituality centred upon the worship of Mother Earth and to reinterpret the meaning of Catholic sites, figures and symbols (Fedele 2009, 2013a). In this context, there is no clear-cut distinction between pilgrim and tourist because the energy present at power places can have healing effects for both. However, those aware of the presence of telluric energies and capable of tapping into them through certain techniques are more likely to benefit from their healing power. In the crypt below the main altar there was a small chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene with some of her relics. Here the pilgrims established the last ‘connection’ between their pilgrimage and this saint. As he had done with Magdalene’s relics in Saint-Maximin, Celso encouraged the group to link their personal energy field with that of the relics through a ray of light that could pass through the metal bars around the chapel. He emphasized that it was not important what each pilgrim thought about the authenticity of these relics or about the healing power of relics; they should feel the energy of Mary Magdalene present at the crypt and see if the quality of energy present there was useful and meaningful for them. While one of the pilgrims was breastfeeding her two-year-old son, Sathya, sitting close to the chapel with her eyes closed, Celso further explained that the relics should help the pilgrims to connect with the saint and reactivate their own ‘Magdalene qualities’. As the pilgrims closed their eyes and attempted to connect with the relics, Celso guided them with a low soft voice. He told them to remember and connect with the energy of all the places related to Mary Magdalene they had visited during the trip, the moments when Magdalene had spoken to them or had appeared. They should try to conclude this journey now and interiorize all the messages and gifts they had received from her and make them their own. While the Italian pilgrims were engaged in this exercise, a nun arrived and opened the small chapel to change the flowers. Little Sathya instinctively followed her on his hands and knees into the chapel. His mother, Cinzia, still had her eyes closed for the connection with the Magdalene, and when she opened them she saw her son already in the chapel. The whole group was deeply touched by the scene, and interpreted Sathya’s crawling into the chapel as a demonstration of an attraction towards the energy of Magdalene’s relics and as a physical manifestation of the energy

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connection created by the group with the bones. Even more striking for them was that Sathya left the chapel by crawling backwards, always facing the relics, in a way that reminded Cinzia and Celso that Catholics of the past never turned their backs to the altar. As we can see, energy grammar allows us to incorporate typically Catholic elements, such as the relics of a saint, and also to overcome discussions about their authenticity. What matters is not so much whether they are authentic or not, but rather whether they work, i.e. could they foster the pilgrims’ connection with the energy of Mary Magdalene? Here again we can see how malleable this energy grammar is and how it allows the pilgrims to feel that they are not blindly following a religious tradition but embracing a spirituality that allows them to test the efficacy of sacred sites and figures and choose only what works for them. This is a rather rational, secular approach to the sacred that implies an explicit refusal of pre-set dogmas and rules and wants to experience the divine, checking its effects. If, in a Christian context, the authenticity of the relics was proved by the fact that they worked miracles that could be collectively recognized as such (Jansen 2001), here it is only their potential for personal healing that is important. As Steil observes in this volume, pilgrimage becomes not so much a movement towards a destination but rather an effort to encounter oneself. Another peculiarity of energy grammar is that it allows the transformation of what is apparently an ordinary and non-religious act (the changing of the flowers and Sathya’s reaction to it) into a sacred event that can be interpreted as evidence of the power of the relics and the efficacy of the pilgrimage as a whole. After the nun left the crypt, Celso explained to the group how to perform the last ritual of the pilgrimage, a ‘reciprocal exchange of an initiation’ or of one’s ‘personal power’.10 It was performed in pairs with one person putting her hands on her partner’s head. Celso connected this practice to the Magdalene by saying that she was a healer and that the ability to engage in laying on of hands in order to bless and heal was a way of transmitting energy. According to Celso, this act of imposing hands upon people had distinguished Christians from other religious groups through the centuries. Hands, he said, cured, brought love and permitted communication. The energy grammar thus allowed people once more to create a link between Christianity and the pilgrims’ spirituality, and to present Mary Magdalene as a spiritual healer and teacher rather than a Christian saint.11 Celso had the pilgrims divide into couples for this ritual. Each partner had to choose a particular quality, knowledge or skill he or she wanted to acquire from the other and something they were able to offer in return. It was possible to exchange virtually everything among partners in the

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form of energy. The ritual was meant to be the final act of communion for the pilgrims before the group’s dispersal on the following day. The idea underlying this ritual was that every pilgrim possessed personal qualities, skills or knowledge that nobody else possessed in quite the same way or to the same degree. At the end of the trip pilgrims would, therefore, go home with knowledge acquired in the form of energy not only from their contact with Mary Magdalene’s energy and the power stored in the places visited, but also from their companions. Towards the end of the ritual, a young man, who was the guardian of the basilica, arrived and asked one of the pilgrims what the group was doing. He was told that they were ‘doing an energy connection’ and that the leader was Celso. The guardian seemed to be used to energy-visitors. He approached Celso, who was sharing qualities, and waited respectfully until the leader had finished and opened his eyes. He then asked Celso firmly but gently to leave the crypt with his group, saying that in this place only prayer was allowed. This attitude contrasted with that of the nun, who had seen that Sathya’s mother and also other pilgrims were sitting around the chapel with the relics, their eyes closed, without folding their hands in prayer, but had not bothered to investigate their practices further. The reaction of the guardian in Vézelay came as a surprise for the Italian pilgrims because they had not encountered any resistance when visiting other shrines during their trip. The pilgrims and the guardian are not only fighting over access to sacred space, they are also competing over the kind of energy present in that space and the interpretation and use that is made of it. This kind of competition between a Catholic perspective and an energy perspective becomes even more evident in the case of the cathedral of Chartres.

Chartres and Its Labyrinths The Gothic cathedral of Chartres was completed in the thirteenth century and was an important pilgrimage site during the Middle Ages. Today it is a UNESCO world heritage site and, like some other churches in France such as Amiens cathedral, it contains a labyrinth. A labyrinth is an elaborate structure that has a route to the centre and back and was used in different ancient cultures in Europe as well as in other parts of the world. Some labyrinths, such as the one in Chartres, are big enough to allow people to walk along its complicated pattern.12 There seems to be no agreement among religious scholars about the meaning of labyrinths in Christian churches. It is often claimed by Christian authors that they represent the difficult path of the individual towards God (the

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centre) or that they were created as a substitute for those pilgrims who could not undertake a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Unfortunately, we do not know how labyrinths in Christian churches were used in the past, whether visitors were allowed to walk along them and, if so, what those walkers experienced (Beaman 2006). Chartres cathedral has a long history as the subject of esoteric research and is one of France’s best-known centres for ley line hunters, contemporary Templars and labyrinth walkers. It represented for many Mary Magdalene pilgrims a particularly powerful place because it was Gothic and possessed both a labyrinth and a dark Madonna statue (Notre-Dame de Sous-Terre). Drawing on a tradition based on the theories of Louis Charpentier (1966), Celso said the cathedral was built on a site where powerful telluric currents crossed. He claimed that the cathedral was one of the highest expressions of the sacred architecture fostered by the Templar Order, and the labyrinth represented a path where masculine and feminine energies were united. It therefore enabled pilgrims to access both the centre of the world and the unifying centre in themselves. According to Celso, the entire building, especially the labyrinth, served as a catalyst for spiritual elevation. The fact that a ‘Black Madonna’ was revered in the crypt further demonstrated the place’s telluric energy. Energy pilgrims tend to consider dark Madonna statues as survivals of ancient pre-Christian statuettes of the Goddess carried back by the Crusaders or as replicas of Goddess statuettes created by artists, who belonged to underground movements within the Church that secretly venerated the Sacred Feminine.13 According to this perspective, Black Madonnas not only work as signposts for power places but also emanate energy that fosters ‘grounding’ or, in other words, a connection with Mother Earth (Fedele 2013a: 217–43). In 2004 I visited Chartres on the day of the spring equinox because energy pilgrims consider the days of equinoxes and solstices to be times when the energy present at Chartres is particularly powerful. Celso had explained that during these days the sun entering through the stained glass windows at noon illuminated and thereby activated the energy of specific places inside.14 Visiting the crypt, the French guide explained to me that ‘New Age visitors’ were quite common. He spoke of them in a secretive way and furtively hinted that after the official closing hours of the cathedral, a group of Americans would be inside the church to walk the labyrinth and to ‘do their things’. As in the case of Vézelay, at Chartres the clergy and the guides working at the shrine were well aware of the ‘Pagan’ theories related especially to the labyrinth and to the dark Madonna, and tried to contain their visibility and control access to them. This proved to be a challenging task,

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especially in the case of the labyrinth, which was situated in the main part of the church where the Mass was celebrated every day. In 2003 and 2004 the labyrinth could be completely seen but could only be walked every Friday; on other days it was covered with chairs.15 Since the cathedral was normally half empty, the chairs situated on the labyrinth do not seem to be entirely necessary. Many visitors who had come a long way to walk the labyrinth but did not know about its restricted access expressed their disappointment. In their opinion, the Church was monopolizing a power spot that had belonged to other religions and civilizations long before them. Who owned the labyrinth? Was it the ‘Church’ who had stolen the sacred places of pre-Christian civilizations? Or were energy pilgrims trying to make an inappropriate use of Christian grounds and symbols?16 What seemed to be a conflictual issue in Chartres had been incorporated at another cathedral without any problems. In the spring of 2009, entering San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral I was surprised to discover on the floor a pattern that I immediately recognized. Noticing my evident interest in the labyrinth, a middle-aged lady handed me a leaflet and proudly invited me to walk along ‘the exact reproduction of the labyrinth in Chartres’. We began to talk and I soon discovered that she was involved in the Goddess movement and eager to visit the original labyrinth in France. At Grace Cathedral the Chartres labyrinth pattern is also reproduced outside, and the cathedral’s website provides information about candlelight labyrinth walks, instructions on how to walk the labyrinth and even a worldwide labyrinth locator.17 In 2010, when I visited Stanford’s Memorial Church, I was again surprised to find another middle-aged lady inviting me to walk along the labyrinth of Chartres. This time the labyrinth pattern was reproduced on a wide piece of cloth placed on the floor near the main altar. Unlike its ancient and immovable French equivalent, this labyrinth was mobile and visited Stanford on the first Friday of each month. Labyrinths, especially reproductions of the one in Chartres, are becoming increasingly popular. Portable labyrinths, usually reproducing the Chartres pattern, are used in churches, especially in the US and Canada but also in secular institutions such as hospitals or prisons. The pattern of the labyrinth is also reproduced on amulets, gadgets, t-shirts, CDs and so on. Lori Beaman (2006) has analysed the international ‘labyrinth movement’, whose main leader is Lauren Artress, the head of Veriditas,18 an international labyrinth organization. Artress is a priest of the Episcopal Church, who served as Canon Pastor and then as Canon for Special Ministries at Grace Cathedral from 1986 until 2004. As we can read on the

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Veriditas website, ‘her rediscovery of the labyrinth was honored by Grace Cathedral’ and Artress received the lifetime title of Honorary Canon.19 For her research, Beaman also attended a workshop in Chartres held by Artress. Both Artress (1995) as well as the lady who invited me to walk along the labyrinth at Grace Cathedral made use of an energy grammar to explain its effects. Like the pilgrims I accompanied, those who form part of the labyrinth movement claim that they are uncovering the authentic meanings and functions of labyrinths and explain these through the use of an energy grammar. Although they never used the term ‘energy’ explicitly, they employed other terms such as ‘grounding’, ‘releasing’, ‘connecting’ or others that form part of that grammar (Fedele 2013a: 83–92; 2016). Some of the experiences of those walking the labyrinth are reported on the Veriditas website: ‘centers and grounds me’, ‘receives my grief and pain and allows for its release’, ‘connects me to that which is greater than me’, ‘balances my energy’.20 These comments do not have a specifically religious connotation and the terms used can therefore also be accepted in secular settings where the labyrinth is being introduced. Here again we must resist the temptation to see the mobilization and transposition of the labyrinth in Chartres as something radically new. As Beaman notes, portable finger labyrinths, for instance, were used during the Middle Ages and some of them still exist (2006: 85). Like many other relics in the history of Christianity, Mary Magdalene’s relics were moved from one place to another, and were (and in some cases still are) at the centre of a flourishing market. The power and importance of a church often depended on the relics it owned and, as we have seen in the case of Mary Magdalene, kings were eager to invest their mundane power with an aura of sanctity through the possession of relics. If one thinks about the relics that are not body parts but clothes or objects, like the contested Holy Shroud in Turin and its replicas, the similarity with Chartres labyrinths reproduced on canvas becomes even more striking. The energy grammar used by the pilgrims, but also by an increasing number of people in the Western world who embrace different forms of contemporary spirituality, provides a new way of accessing and talking about the divine. Spiritual practitioners feel they are not embracing a new religion but learning and co-creating a spirituality that allows them to maintain their agency by testing the efficacy of sacred sites and figures. Energy grammar therefore attracts people with different cultural and religious backgrounds and fosters a transnational flow of pilgrims to power places all over the world. The struggles over access and control of Catholic shrines and symbols, as well as the medieval controversies about the authenticity of the relics in Vézelay and the marketization of the labyrinth image in Chartres, show

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how ‘pilgrimages are embedded in a context of markets, consumer activity, publicity and promotion’, and ‘the interweaving of commerce and pilgrimage has been a recurrent theme from early times, as well as one that has evoked much criticism’ (Reader 2014: 11). We should therefore analyse ‘energy pilgrimages’ through a perspective of continuity rather than rupture that goes beyond ‘notions of past purity and modern corruption’ (ibid.) through tourism, consumerism and the marketplace.

Energy Grammar In her analysis of the distinction/opposition between tourism and pilgrimage, Ellen Badone has argued that they derive ‘from a set of implicit oppositions in Western thinking’, such as money/asceticism, material/ spiritual or evil/good, which are themselves ‘the product of the JudeoChristian and classical heritage’ (2004: 185). Energy pilgrims disrupt these dichotomies (Fedele 2014a) because they construct their own spirituality in opposition to a patriarchal ideology (Fedele and Knibbe 2013a) that they often associate with the Church. From the pilgrims’ perspective, this patriarchal approach denigrates the material aspects of life and thereby legitimizes the exploitation of the planet and the domination and devaluation of women. Throughout this chapter we have moved some steps further in analysing examples in which the use of an energy grammar has allowed pilgrims to disrupt the distinctions between local and global, and also the secular/religious dichotomy grounded in the Judeo-Christian heritage (Asad 2003). As we have seen, energy pilgrims claim their right to have free access to Catholic shrines and other sacred sites or heritage sites around the world and to celebrate their own rituals there. According to their worldview, these sites do not belong to any precise religion or nation, because they existed long before the appearance of monotheistic religions or nation-states. For them these are local shrines, because they work as antennae for the telluric energy of that precise spot, but they are also global, because they form part of a worldwide web of energy that connects all the power places of the planet. Energy grammar also allows the pilgrims to combat the disembedding mechanisms within modernity and come to terms with a world they perceive as increasingly globalized, fragmented and risky (Giddens 1991). It is difficult to assess whether they experience these forms of globalization any more than other moderns, but they certainly problematize the outcomes of globalization as well as the exploitation of the planet in a particularly intense way. Pilgrimage sites become a way of experiencing

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home away from home, because they provide the possibility of connecting with the telluric energies of Mother Earth. The pilgrims often described the powerful energy of a certain site with phrases like ‘I immediately felt at home there’, ‘it felt as if I had finally returned home’ or, more metaphorically, ‘I felt embraced by Mother (Earth)’. Élisabeth Claverie (2003) observed a similar phenomenon in the case of French pilgrims visiting the Marian shrine of Medjugorie. At the beginning of her ethnography she analyses the answers given to a confused pilgrim with a brain tumour who asks where he is. Some pilgrims try to reassure him by saying ‘vous êtes chez la Sainte Vierge’ (‘you are at Our Lady’s place’). As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, at some Marian shrines such as Lourdes, pilgrims, especially those from immigrant backgrounds, are able to create new landscapes of belonging (see Notermans 2012; Kozlowski 2008). In a similar way, reference to energy has allowed the pilgrims to feel finally at home in the context of contemporary Western societies where they often feel isolated and disoriented. They expressed these changes not only during the pilgrimage but also during follow-up interviews. One of the main problems they described during their journeys was their difficulty in feeling ‘grounded’ and ‘rooted’ (Fedele 2013a: 59–82), or, in other words, in feeling that they belong to a specific place and are supported by their environment. They saw this problem as the consequence of living in a patriarchal and secularized world where humans perceive their environment as disenchanted and increasingly technologized, have lost their connection with Mother Earth and no longer follow nature’s rhythms.21 Through their energy grammar they acquired both a worldview and a set of techniques that allowed them to feel nurtured and rooted and, therefore, ‘at home’ in sites they identified as power places. In a world where the threat of an ecological disaster is constantly present (Giddens 1991; Taylor 2010), energy pilgrimages become a way of healing oneself but also of contributing to the creation of a more positive relationship with the planet (Fedele 2014a). Through their energy grammar, these pilgrims bridge the dichotomy between both local and global and secular and religious because they count among their places of power not only churches or sites considered sacred by other civilizations, but also places of natural beauty (mountains, caves, etc.) or heritage sites, such as Cathar fortifications, or sites of cultural interest, such as Place de la Concorde in Paris or the Louvre (Brown 2003). Energy pilgrimages are proving increasingly attractive because they do not compete with existing religious or secular discourses. Although energy pilgrims apparently criticize monotheistic religions (especially Christianity) and refuse secularism as an extreme form of disenchantment

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with the world, they do not discursively oppose secular or religious assumptions and institutions, but rather articulate with them, through the use of their energy grammar.22 This grammar allows them to reinterpret and co-opt pre-existing religious sites and symbols and offers a transnational language that is acceptable for many religious and secular institutions because it uses terms that are not clearly marked as belonging to any precise religion (see for instance the terms used by people describing their labyrinth experience on the Veriditas website23). Energy grammar is not exclusive to these pilgrims but represents a central element of those forms of contemporary spirituality that are becoming more and more popular in Western culture (Heelas and Woodhead 2005; Pike 2004; Fedele and Knibbe 2013a) and are gradually finding their way into secular institutions (e.g. Griera and Clot-Garrell 2015). One example we have briefly examined here is that of the movable labyrinths, which are being used in Christian churches in the US and Canada but also in hospitals, prisons and schools.

Conclusion ‘Energy pilgrims’ revitalize medieval Catholic pilgrimage sites like Chartres and Vézelay and create alternative narratives about their ‘authentic’ meaning and function. Considering these sacred sites as power places situated on a transnational, transreligious ‘web’ that are particularly apt to receiving and releasing energy and that have been unjustly monopolized by the Church throughout the centuries, the pilgrims often contest the way in which the Catholic authorities in charge of the sites organize and control them. The local authorities in charge of the shrines analysed here, but also of other Catholic shrines in Europe and the Americas, have developed different ways of coping with this kind of visitor, torn between their wish to attract more people and the necessity to preserve the shrine’s religious authenticity (Reader 2014). Some try to prevent ‘energy pilgrims’ from performing their own rituals, while others allow these rituals under specific circumstances or even incorporate elements that are attractive for these pilgrims. These conflicts over meaning, access and control of pilgrimage sites are not new and have been analysed by religious historians and social scientists in the past and present (e.g. Christian 1996; Eade and Sallnow 1991; Coleman and Elsner 1998; Claverie 2003; Jansen and Notermans 2012). What is new is the kind of energy grammar that the pilgrims use to reinterpret the meaning of Catholic shrines in particular and power places in general. This grammar is widely shared because although the pilgrims

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may belong to different spiritual movements, they tend to read similar texts (Fedele 2013a), express common sensibilities and share similar ideas. Through the ethnographic examples discussed here, we have seen that although ‘energy pilgrims’ criticize established religions as well as secularism, the grammar they employ provides them with a worldview that does not oppose existing religious or secular discourses but articulates with them, providing a reinterpretation of Christian sites and figures and making them feel that they are not embracing an established religious tradition but creating personal forms of spirituality that they have tested and found effective. Rather than dismissing ‘energy pilgrimages’ as simply reproducing neoliberal trends, and energy pilgrims as naïve and simplistic middle-class people who accept without any criticism what they read in books or hear from their spiritual leaders (e.g. Carrette and King 2005), scholars should pay attention to the scientific literature that already exists about these pilgrims, and about contemporary spiritual practitioners more generally. As scholars such as Salomonsen (2002), Trulsson (2010), Fedele (2013a, 2014b), Fedele and Knibbe (2013a) and Bender (2010) have shown through the analysis of ethnographic data rather than drawing on surveys or texts, spiritual practitioners tend to both take a pragmatic approach towards spiritual theories and practices and test their efficacy before adopting them. Such an ethnographically grounded approach allows us to consider ‘energy pilgrimages’ in a perspective of continuity rather than rupture that acknowledges the transhistorical ‘interweaving of commerce and pilgrimage’ (Reader 2014: 11). This perspective of continuity does not imply that ‘energy pilgrimages’ have no new and time-specific characteristics compared with previous forms of pilgrimage. In a historical moment where ‘the global begins to replace the nation-state as the decisive framework for social life’ (Featherstone, Lash and Robertson 1995) and social actors are confronted with ‘global risk parameters’, such as ecological disaster (Giddens 1991), energy grammar translates Catholic pilgrimage sites, but also sacred places belonging to other religious traditions, into power places across the globe that allow visitors to feel at home while contributing also to the development of an ecological awareness. Energy grammar is not exclusive to these pilgrims but represents a central element in those forms of contemporary spirituality that are becoming more and more popular in Western culture. During recent fieldwork at the Marian shrine of Fatima, I found that Catholic pilgrims were increasingly speaking about spirituality (as different from religion) and sometimes described their religious experiences using an ‘energy grammar’. At a historical moment when ‘energy pilgrimages’, as well as

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contemporary forms of spirituality, are becoming more and more popular and ‘spirituality’ has now gained its place in academic settings as a third term alongside ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’, religious scholars should pay more attention to the role played by ‘energy pilgrims’ and to the ways in which their grammar works at transnational scales and may also influence different religious communities.

Acknowledgements Research for this chapter was funded by FCT/MCTES (the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) as part of the strategic research plan of the Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia (UID/ ANT/04038/2013) and as part of my activities as an FCT investigator (IF/01063/2014). I would like to thank William A. Christian, Élisabeth Claverie, Simon Coleman and John Eade for their attentive reading and useful suggestions. Anna Fedele is a senior researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology of the Lisbon University Institute (CRIA, ISCTE-IUL), whose research focuses on the intersections of lived religion, gender and corporeality. Currently she is coordinating a research project on pilgrimage and lived religion at the Marian shrine of Fatima in Portugal. She is the author of the award-winning Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France (Oxford University Press, 2013) and co-editor of Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality (Routledge, 2013) as well as Encounters of Body and Soul in Contemporary Religious Practices (Berghahn Books, 2011). Anna is cofounder of the Network for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and co-editor of the Routledge book series ‘Gendering the Study of Religion in the Social Sciences’.

Notes  1. The term ‘energy pilgrims’ was never explicitly used by my informants. However, the reference to ‘energy’ is one of the main things these travellers have in common and therefore I chose this term to describe them (Fedele 2014a). The pilgrims I accompanied

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 3.  4.  5.  6.  7.  8.  9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

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during research for my dissertation about alternative pilgrimages to French Catholic shrines dedicated to saint Mary Magdalene or holding dark Madonna statues (Fedele 2013a) referred to energy not only to describe their worldview and spirituality but also to make sense of their journeys. In an edited volume with Kim Knibbe, we have explored through an ethnographic approach what might be included in the category of ‘spiritual’ and how it sometimes overlaps with religion, but sometimes emerges as a distinct category in relation to religion. We have argued that what people mean by ‘spiritual’ and ‘religious’ can only be understood considering the specific cultural and social context in which these definitions occur. Following Asad’s approach (2003, 1993) we have proposed to see the categories of spirituality and religion not as universal and analytical categories but as the outcome of a historical process and of cultural dynamics. Like the distinction between religion and secularity analysed by Asad, religion and spirituality emerge as an influential dichotomy that deserves to be studied as a topic of research (Fedele and Knibbe 2013a: 5–7). In a forthcoming volume, we develop this approach further, examining the relationship between spirituality, religion and the secular through the lens of gender. References to the importance of energy can be found, for instance, in Weibel 2005; Ivakhiv 2001; Rountree 2002. See Fedele 2013a: 84–92 for a detailed analysis of energy techniques. For a discussion of the theories about ley lines, see Ivakhiv 2001. Fulcanelli is the name used by a mysterious French author whose identity is still debated, to publish esoteric texts in the 1920s. Regarding non-Catholic rituals at Catholic shrines, see also Coleman and Elsner 1998 and Harris 2013. About the controversy related to Mary Magdalene’s relics, see Jansen 2001: 327–32 and Saxer 1959. See Fedele 2013a: 35–37 for more details about Celso and his group. This ritual, also called by the Quechua term of ‘karpay ayni’, belongs to the ‘Andean tradition’ related to the teachings of the Peruvian anthropologist Juan Nunez del Prado, who had been Celso’s teacher. See Fedele 2013a: 79–82 and Galinier and Molinié 2006. For a detailed analysis of Mary Magdalene’s importance for the pilgrims and the meanings ascribed to her within contemporary spirituality, see Fedele 2013a and Badone 2008. For a detailed discussion of labyrinths, see Matthews 1970. On the changing meanings of dark Madonna statues throughout history, see Scheer 2002. On their meaning within contemporary spirituality, see Begg 1985 and Fedele 2013b. About the statue revered in the crypt of Chartres and other dark statues relevant for ‘energy pilgrims’, see Fedele 2013a: 217–42. See also a recent article in The New York Times about the controversial restoration of one of the ‘Black Madonnas’ of Chartres: Benjamin Ramm, ‘A Controversial Restoration that Wipes Away the Past’, The New York Times, 1 September 2017, retrieved 4 November 2017 from https://www. nytimes.com/2017/09/01/arts/design/chartres-cathedral-restoration-controversial. html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0. See Charpentier 1966, Markale 2004 and Strachan 2003 for further details about the esoteric meanings associated with the stained glass windows, the Black Madonna, the well in the crypt and also other elements of the cathedral. However, Beaman (2006: 89) comments that the accessibility of the labyrinth on Fridays could not always be taken for granted. Beaman (2006: 89) reports hearing an elderly French lady saying ‘sacrilege’ while observing people walking along the labyrinth.

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17. ‘Our Labyrinths’, Grace Cathedral, retrieved 4 November 2017 from https://www. gracecathedral.org/our-labyrinths/. 18. ‘About Veriditas’, retrieved 12 January 2016 from http://www.veriditas.org/about. 19. ‘Staff & Contractors’, Veriditas, retrieved 4 November 2017 from https://www.veriditas.org/staff. 20. ‘About Veriditas’, retrieved 12 January 2016 from http://www.veriditas.org/about. 21. See William’s (212–14) and Leonard’s (263) comments as well as chapter 2 in Fedele 2013a. 22. On the articulations between secularism and spirituality, see van der Veer 2009 and Fedele and Knibbe forthcoming. On the relationship between spirituality and lived or folk religion, see Sutcliffe and Bowman 2000; Bowman and Valk 2012; Fedele and Knibbe 2013b. On the relationship between spirituality and Christianity, see Woodhead 2011; Fedele 2013a; Fedele and Knibbe 2013b. 23. ‘About Veriditas’, retrieved 12 January 2016 from http://www.veriditas.org/about.

References Ammerman, N. 2013. ‘Spiritual but not Religious? Beyond Binary Choices in the Study of Religion’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 52: 258–78. doi:10.1111/jssr.12024. Artress, L. 1995. Walking a Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Tool. New York: Riverhead Books. Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, NJ: Johns Hopkins University Press. Asad, T. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Badone, E. 1991. ‘Ethnography, Fiction and the Meanings of the Past in Brittany’, American Ethnologist 18: 518–45. Badone, E. 2004. ‘Crossing Boundaries: Exploring the Borderlands of Ethnography, Tourism and Pilgrimage’, in E. Badone and S. Roseman (eds), Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 180–89. Badone, E. 2008. ‘Pilgrimage, Tourism and The Da Vinci Code at Les-Saintes-Maries-de-laMer, France’, Culture and Religion 9(1): 23–44. Badone, E. and Roseman, S. (eds) 2004. Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Beaman, L. 2006. ‘Labyrinth as Heterotopia: The Pilgrim’s Creation of Space’, in W. Swatos Jr. (ed.), On the Road to Being There: Continuing the Pilgrimage-Tourism Dialogue. Leiden: Brill Academic Press, pp. 83–103. Begg, E. 1985. The Cult of the Black Virgin. London: Penguin Books Arkana. Bender, C. 2010. The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bowman, M. 1993. ‘Drawn to Glastonbury’, in I. Reader and T. Walter (eds), Pilgrimage in Popular Culture. London: Macmillan, pp. 29–62. Bowman, M., and Ü. Valk. 2012. Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life: Expressions of Belief. London: Equinox Publications. Brown, D. 2003. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Pocket Star Books. Carrette, J., and R. King. 2005. Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. London: Routledge. Charpentier, L. 1966. Les Mystères de la Cathédrale de Chartres. Paris: Robert Laffont. Christian, W. Jr. 1972. Person and God in a Spanish Valley. New York: Seminar Press.

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Christian, W. Jr. 1996. Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Claverie, E. 2003. Les guerres de la Vierge: Une anthropologie des apparitions. Paris: Gallimard. Coleman, S., and J. Elsner. 1998. ‘Performing Pilgrimage: Walsingham and the Ritual Construction of Irony’, in F. Hughes-Freeland (ed.), Ritual, Performance, Media. London: Routledge, pp. 46–65. Davis, B. 2015. ‘A Different Kind of Pilgrimage That Can Change Your Life’, The Huffington Post. Retrieved 14 January 2017 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-davisphd/silent-retreat_b_3085702.html. Di Giovine, M., and D. Picard (eds). 2015. The Seductions of Pilgrimage: Sacred Journeys Afar and Astray in the Western Religious Tradition. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Dubisch, J. 2015. ‘The Seduction of the Past in New Age Pilgrimage’, in M. Di Giovine and D. Picard (eds), The Seductions of Pilgrimage: Sacred Journeys Afar and Astray in the Western Religious Tradition. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 145–168. Eade, J., and M. Sallnow (eds). 1991. Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage. London: Routledge. Featherstone, M., S. Lash and R. Robertson (eds). 1995. Global Modernities. London: Sage Publications. Fedele, A. 2009. ‘From Christian Religion to Feminist Spirituality: Mary Magdalene Pilgrimages to La Sainte-Baume, France’, Culture and Religion 10(3): 243–61. Fedele, A. 2013a. Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity at Catholic Shrines in France. Oxford Ritual Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Fedele, A. 2013b. ‘“Black” Madonna versus “White” Madonna: Gendered Power Strategies in Alternative Pilgrimages to Marian Shrines’, in A. Fedele and K. Knibbe (eds), Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches. New York: Routledge, pp. 96–114. Fedele, A. 2014a. ‘Energy and Transformation in Alternative Pilgrimages to Catholic Shrines: Deconstructing the Tourist/Pilgrim Divide’, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 12(2): 150–65. Fedele, A. 2014b. ‘Creativité et incertitude dans les nouveaux rituels contemporains’, Social Compass 61(4): 497–510,  doi:10.1177/0037768614546999. English version available at: http://annafedele.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Anna-Fedele-SocialCompass-English-version.pdf. Fedele, A., and K. Knibbe. 2013a. Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches. New York: Routledge. Fedele, A., and Kim Knibbe. 2013b. ‘Introduction: Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality’, in A. Fedele and K. Knibbe (eds), Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–27. Fedele, A., and Kim Knibbe (eds) (forthcoming). Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves? Gendering the Overlaps and Boundaries between Religion, Spirituality and Secularity. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Frey, N. 1998. Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago, Journeys along an Ancient Way in Modern Spain. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fulcanelli. [1929] 1964. Le Mystère des Cathédrales et l’interprétation ésotérique des symboles hermétiques du grand œuvre. Paris: Jean Jacques Pauvert. Galinier, J., and A. Molinié. 2006. Les néo-Indiens: Une religion du IIIe millénaire. Paris: Odile Jacob. Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Griera, M., and A. Clot-Garrell. 2015. ‘Doing Yoga Behind Bars: A Sociological Study of the Growth of Holistic Spirituality in Penitentiary Institutions’, in I. Becci and O. Roy (eds), Religious Diversity in European Prisons. Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 141–57.

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Hanegraaff, W. 1999. ‘New Age Spiritualities as Secular Religion: A Historian’s Perspective’, Social Compass 46(2): 145–60. Harris, A. 2013. ‘Lourdes and Holistic Spirituality: Contemporary Catholicism, the Therapeutic and Religious Thermalism’, Culture and Religion 14(1): 23–43. Heelas, P. 1996. The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity. Oxford: B. Blackwell. Heelas, P., and L. Woodhead. 2005. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Hill, M. 2008. ‘Inca of the Blood, Inca of the Soul: Embodiment, Emotion, and Racialization in the Peruvian Mystical Tourist Industry’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76(2): 251–79. Ivakhiv, A. 2001. Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Jansen, K. 2001. The Making of the Magdalene. Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Jansen, W., and C. Notermans (eds). 2012. Gender, Nation and Religion in European Pilgrimage. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Kozlowski, V. 2008. ‘The Land of the Virgin Mary: A Greek Catholic Ukrainian Pilgrimage to Lourdes’, in S. Mahieu and V. Naumescu (eds), Churches In-Between: Greek Catholic Churches in Postsocialist Europe. Münster: LIT Verlag, pp. 319–32. Lovelock, J. 1979. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Margry, P.J. (ed.). 2008. Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World: New Itineraries into the Sacred. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Markale, J. 2004. Cathedral of the Black Madonna: The Druids and the Mysteries of Chartres. Rochester, NY: Inner Traditions. Matthews, W. 1970. Mazes and Labyrinths. New York: Dover Publications. Norman, A. 2011. Spiritual Tourism: Travel and Religious Practice in Western Society. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. Notermans, C. 2012. ‘Interconnected and Gendered Mobilities: African Migrants on Pilgrimage to Our Lady of Lourdes in France’, in W. Jansen and C. Notermans (eds), Gender, Nation and Religion in European Pilgrimage. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 19–36. Pike, S. 2004. New Age and Neopagan Religions in America. New York: Columbia University Press. Reader, I. 2014. Pilgrimage in the Marketplace. New York: Routledge. Rountree, K. 2002. ‘Goddess Pilgrims as Tourists: Inscribing the Body through Sacred Travel’, Sociology of Religion 63(4): 475–96. Rountree, K. 2006a. ‘Performing the Divine: Neo-Pagan Pilgrimages and Embodiment at Sacred Sites’, Body and Society 12(4): 95–115. Rountree, K. 2006b. ‘Journeys to the Goddess: Pilgrimage and Tourism in the New Age’, in W. Swatos Jr. (ed.), On the Road to Being There: Pilgrimage and Religious Tourism in Late Modernity. Boston, MA: Brill, pp. 33–60. Salomonsen, J. 2002. Enchanted Feminism: Ritual, Gender and Divinity among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco. London: Routledge. Saxer, V. 1959. Le culte de Marie Madeleine en occident des origines à la fin du Moyen Age. Paris: Cahiers d’Archéologie et Histoire. Scheer, M. 2002. ‘From Majesty to Mystery: Change in the Meanings of Black Madonnas from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries’, American Historical Review 107(5): 1412–40. Sointu, E. and Woodhead, L. 2008. ‘Spirituality, Gender, and Expressive Selfhood’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47, 2: 259–276. Strachan, G. 2003. Chartres: Sacred Geometry, Sacred Space. Edinburgh: Floris Books. Sutcliffe, S., and M. Bowman (eds). 2000. Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Chapter 7

A Pentecostal Shrine in Mexico Ethnography of Migration and Pilgrimage Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola

Why are we going to Guadalajara? We are not going for fun, or to see our families …; we are going to build up our memory. The Santa Cena allows us to get together and renews our covenant.

Introduction The above quote comes from a pastor in Houston, Texas, of a Mexicanbased Pentecostal Church, La Luz del Mundo (The Light of the World or LDM), whose Santa Cena ceremony (referred to below as the Holy Supper) in Guadalajara, Mexico, attracts thousands of its followers living in the United States. This is a pilgrimage that fits neatly into the first type of pilgrimage detected by Victor and Edith Turner (1978: 17, 18), i.e. ‘established by the founder’ of a religious community. Both Church authorities and ordinary members frequently legitimate and emphasize the religious character of the pilgrimage, but careful attention needs to be paid to the shrine’s place within the wider transnational political economy. The shrine is the focus of a cyclical movement of migrants, who continually cross the border between the USA and Mexico, and these journeys involve not only religious networks and rituals but also transnational economic, political and social activities. This Pentecostal pilgrimage helps us, therefore, to gain a better understanding of a religion that was ‘made to travel’ Notes for this chapter begin on page 151.

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(Coleman 2014: 281), where secular processes are just as important as the sacred dimension. Following Albera’s recommendation in the Afterword of this volume, I approach pilgrimage as both a study of and a study through pilgrimage. Even though at times my main objective is the study of pilgrimage, I have also sought to look beyond religious issues. Along with Coleman (2014), this is an approach which the Turners themselves advocated: We insist, as anthropologists, that we must regard the pilgrimage system, whenever the data permit us so to do, as comprising all the interactions and transactions, formal and informal, institutionalized or improvised, sacred or profane, orthodox or eccentric, which owe their existence to the pilgrimage itself. (Turner and Turner 1978: 22)

Migration and mobility between Mexico and the United States have been shaped by the geographical proximity between the two countries and the long-standing nature of transnational ties. These ties were explored in pioneering studies undertaken by Paul Taylor ([1928] 1970) and Manuel Gamio (1930) and contemporary studies have confirmed their continued existence (see Durand 1996; Kearney 1986, 1991, 1995; Rouse 1991; Roberts, Reanne and Lozano-Ascencio 1999). This research supports my focus on the many structural interests that drive Mexican immigrants to return to their place of origin, even though people tend to emphasize the religious aspects of this return migration. In Mexico and other Latin American countries, religious pageants are still widely considered to be expressions of the ‘popular Catholicism’ prevailing among indigenous peoples, peasants and lower-class residents of rural areas and cities. The Pentecostal sacred pageant held annually in Guadalajara in February and August is in many respects similar to the typical patron saint fiestas celebrated in thousands of localities throughout Mexico, as well as in many other Catholic countries around the world.1 The term ‘popular’ is used to refer to the social composition of the religious community under study – in this case, a Church whose membership consists largely of people from Mexico’s lower-class sectors and, to a lesser degree, its middle classes. Another important group includes working-class Mexican migrants based in the United States. Socio-demographic studies conducted in recent years demonstrate that a large proportion of these (regular or irregular) immigrants occupy the lowest sectors of the American labour market and social structure, but back in Mexico they free themselves from those positions in both social and economic terms. In other words, through ‘transnational processes and connections’ (Glick Schiller 2009: 17), migrants make a significant economic impact on the localities from which they have migrated.

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One particularly important characteristic of the Church’s members who reside outside their places of origin, especially those born in the state of Jalisco, is that while they live in one place, their intense desire and yearning is to return to that other ‘home’, which they remember and dream about fondly. They share a common history of social and cultural uprooting combined with myths and memories of their ‘spiritual nation’. They feel that the Hermosa Provincia (hereafter HP) neighbourhood of Guadalajara is a Promised Land – a place to which they all long to return, be it temporarily or permanently. Since ethnographic studies of popular religion in Mexico have focused primarily on Catholicism,2 when we set out to analyse Protestants we face difficulties in form and substance. The anthropological study of pilgrimage has paid less attention to Protestantism and/or Pentecostalism than Catholicism, and has thereby excluded the former from wider theoretical analysis (see Coleman 2014). For example, in order to name, define and classify the diverse elements that come together in a particular religious fiesta, we often encounter the need to reinvent terms so that they can be free of any association with traditional Catholicism. While categories are commonly utilized to designate what appear to be novel phenomena, they actually rest upon and are derived from the traditional customs and lifestyles of towns and the population in general. They are part of a common vocabulary disseminated by both the mass media and those who study religious phenomena, since Catholicism in countries such as Mexico is not only the dominant religion but is also embedded in the cultural ethos of the wider society. There are specific expressions – such as peregrino in Spanish or pilgrim in English – that are closely associated with this cultural ethos, and these terms may not be applicable in the context of evangelical churches. Attending the Holy Supper ceremony implies a religious pilgrimage, although the participants do not see themselves as pilgrims. It is similar in terms of meanings and symbols to the procession that takes place in Guadalajara annually on 12 October to venerate the Virgin of Zapopan.3 It is also equivalent to a spiritual journey because believers travel from places both near and far, indeed from beyond Mexico’s borders, to visit the most sacred site of their faith. It is a voyage that awakens in them sentiments and emotions similar to those that shrines evoke among devout Catholics. The theoretical model of popular religion has long been based on the idea that certain typically Catholic practices were deviations from, or re-creations of, official ecclesiastical norms, and that they emerged from a process of syncretism between Spanish Catholicism and indigenous pre-Hispanic worldviews (Giménez 1978). However, when analysing the

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LDM Church, we must adapt this model because it was created entirely by lay people (including its leader), who rebelled against the dominant, mainstream religion and, in so doing, contributed to the formation of diverse values, including solidarity and social and cultural resistance. Most often, this process has revolved around a symbolic dimension that included popular sectors in Mexico and other countries, mirroring the efforts of the Church’s founder during the movement’s initial phases. In this chapter, I first give a brief overview of the history of the Church and then explain the pilgrimage’s relevance in the eyes of believers. In the following section, I illustrate some of the ritual events that are orchestrated by the Church and I then explore the underlying processes that transcend religion and/or anything related to the sacred realm. I will focus here mainly on the secular outcomes, which take place in space and time within the Holy Supper ceremony4. Finally, I address certain conclusions that can be drawn from this case study.

Brief History of the Church In Mexico, La Luz del Mundo (LDM) is the second largest religious body after the Roman Catholic Church, with approximately 1.5 million adherents. It is also the largest (non-Catholic) minority church in Guadalajara, with around fifty thousand worshippers living in twenty neighbourhoods. At the very centre of the city’s Hermosa Provincia neighbourhood (HP) stands the largest church of all, in terms not only of size but also symbolic meaning for the group. Beyond acting as the central symbol of this religious group, the church also hosts a local congregation. The international headquarters of the Church, including the central offices connected with congregations all over the world, are located just across from the main church in the HP neighbourhood (Fortuny Loret de Mola 2002). The LDM was founded in the late 1920s by Aaron Joaquin Gonzalez, a man of peasant origin, who came from the western region of Mexico. After the Revolution (1910–20), and during the years of the Great Depression in the United States, many poor Mexican migrants left the USA and returned to Mexico. Aaron recruited his first followers from among such poor displaced people and established his Church in a region of Mexico characterized by its strong Catholic presence. Since colonial times, Guadalajara and Zamora in Michoacán have produced the highest number of priests, not only for Mexico but also other Latin American countries. The rise of the LDM movement also coincided with a revival of Pentecostalism in the United States (1920s to 1930s), which in turn was exported to Mexico via returning migrants. Like most Pentecostal leaders, Aaron did not enjoy

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any previous sacred legitimation; he propagated a Bible-based Protestant religion in a context dominated by an all-embracing, intransigent, anti-Protestant Catholicism that did not favour the use of the Bible. He represented a counter-ideology that was attractive to people who possessed little and were dissatisfied with their social condition. One of the main achievements of Aaron’s new faith was to break the Catholic clergy’s monopoly over the production and distribution of sacred goods. Between 1926 and 1944, the new gospel was passed on through personal testimonies. Aaron preached in prisons, hospitals, markets, parks and many other public places. Around the mid 1950s, he went to Los Angeles and then travelled to San Antonio, Texas, during the early 1960s to evangelize. He went first to the United States rather than to Central America, so geographical proximity between Jalisco and Texas can only partly explain his choice. More important was the migration of those from the western states of Mexico to the USA, which had been in operation since the end of the nineteenth century. The growth of LDM congregations in the United States was very steady during the 1960s and 1970s, but sharply increased in the 1980s and 1990s. This was precisely the same time that Mexican immigration rocketed due to the 1986 Immigration and Reform Act, which allowed more than three million Mexican immigrants to become legal residents. Aaron died in 1964 and his son, Samuel (Joaquin Flores), succeeded him.5 He undertook a new stage in the Church’s development. The expansion and educational advancement of the membership continued, hierarchies were redefined, relations of cooperation and negotiation with the Mexican government were formalized, and a majestic church was erected (between 1983 and 1991) in Guadalajara to serve as the international headquarters. Under Samuel’s leadership, the LDM became more of a global Church. Naasón succeeded his father Samuel on 14 December 2014, and the new ‘Servant of God’ – as the faithful call their spiritual leaders – seems to follow his father in pursuing two roles, a secular one as the international head of the Church and a sacred role as the new Apostle of this religious community.6

Religious Ceremonies: Public and Unrestricted The feeling of being in a place packed with people has a deep impact. The neighbourhood of HP is small, with narrow streets, and during religious services (which take up a great part of the day) it shrinks even more as the streets turn into an extension of the church. During these days every spot outside the church teems with children playing, and adults praying,

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listening, eating, resting and talking among themselves, as we shall see in more detail below. Attending the Holy Supper ceremony involves a displacement from one place to another, a transition that means time outside of time. It is also ‘the great liminal experience of the religious life’ (Turner and Turner 1978: 7), where ‘individuals leave voluntarily the structures and patterns of normal life and change them with a sacred landscape pervaded by the unusual’ (Shadow and Shadow 1994: 25). This ceremony constitutes the central ritual of the liturgical calendar, although the ‘sacred time’ as such extends over seven to ten days, starting at the beginning of August and ending on approximately the 15th.7 During this time a great number of services take place; some have more civic than religious character, while others involve rites of passage, such as the blessing of babies, baptisms (for fifteen-year-old new members), weddings and clergy anointments. Several rituals include the entire community, while a great number of them are rather small and limited to relatives, and each particular congregation generally has its own prayer time. Every year throughout late July and early August, thousands of believers arrive in Guadalajara. In 1999, there were around 300,000 and in 2015 this increased to half a million. During their interviews, followers emphasized the strong feelings and emotions that impelled them to constantly cross the hazardous border between Mexico and the United States. Susana in Houston, for example, told me that two months before the great journey, ‘we started counting the days; the time is getting closer and closer’. Angelina, a sixty-five-year-old woman, also explained: ‘To me, it [the festival] means something very special and spiritual as we are celebrating Jesus Christ’s death or our salvation as He is the means of salvation’. Jesus, a man in his forties, replied: ‘This is a fundamental fiesta because here we remember Jesus Christ’s Ten Commandments. We are doing this celebration in his memory’. He added: ‘We have great spiritual enjoyment here because we know that Jesus Christ died to save our souls. We enjoy seeing everybody here from different places in the world’. Magda, a fortyyear-old woman, responded: ‘We come here to reinvigorate our strength, to stimulate our faith, and to thank God for having redeemed us’. Arely commented that during these special days she stayed (with her husband and baby son) in her parents’ house. She took advantage of her younger sisters being able to look after her son so she could attend the services more frequently. Sonia, a married woman in her thirties, explained: ‘We come here to learn more of the doctrine. We take advantage of these days to get in as much as possible. We try to record every sermon so when we are back in Houston we can listen to the tapes again. The numerous rituals taking place in August help us to become spiritually stronger’.

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Churchgoers could listen not only to the best church preachers but also to their great living Apostle, Samuel. In fact, the days leading up to 14 August are replete with religious activities designed to prepare the faithful to spiritually participate in the great moment. In 1999, religious services were performed not only in HP but also in the other six local LDM churches.8 Hence, people were constantly on the move, with some new groups arriving and others leaving for diverse religious events. There were five prayers daily, starting at 4.30 a.m. and finishing at 8.00 p.m. There was also a printed programme with the necessary details of the services, such as the ministers’ names, the topic of doctrine to be discussed, and the churches where the services were held. Several buses ran throughout the day to transport people to the nearby churches, and one afternoon we took one of them to attend a service in the Bethel neighbourhood where a choir from the United States would be singing. This choir was assembled from choruses in various American cities so it became a massive group with around five hundred members. At any opportunity, believers expressed their pride and self-importance in showing off to the ‘world’ the greatness they had achieved as a minority religious group. The huge contingent from the United States, composed of successful Mexican immigrants, was seen as providing a very good example for both the institution and the people. Besides the official services there were also prayers at many other sites. At the house where we stayed, eighty men belonging to a congregation from Chilpancingo, Guerrero, held their own services every evening before they went to sleep. I was informed that one of the Houston congregations also prayed on the roof of a house somewhere else in HP, with their pastor’s guidance. Jesus told us that the faithful staying in the local hotels also invited ministers so they could hold their evening prayer. Every day from 4.30 in the morning, I was able to listen to the sermons from my own room as there were loudspeakers surrounding the main church. Anybody walking around the streets could hear the hymns or the preaching going on inside the church. The testimonies above, as well as the numerous religious practices described in the previous paragraphs, exemplify what Albera points out in the Afterword: ‘the “true” pilgrimage is interpreted as a spiritual journey. It may take the form of a physical pilgrimage but the body has to serve inner, transcendental aims’.

Welcome Ceremony The Welcome Ceremony is considered by the LDM as a civic act rather than a religious rite. In 1999, it took place on Monday, 9 August, and lasted

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from nine til twelve in the morning. From a balcony, we saw the colourful parade of all the delegations,9 which began with the majestic entry of Samuel followed by his ministers and the playing of trumpets to intensify the moments of the Apostle’s absolutely grandiose spectacle, the ‘dominant symbol’ of the Church. Samuel talked for more than two hours, naming every country as well as the number of churches and missions in every single city or country. When the parade was over, he asked the faithful to give each other a hug and every member hugged their neighbour. This act was extremely emotional and we saw men hugging each other, despite Mexico’s high degree of machismo. The embrace meant that every single brother (or sister) would welcome another brother (or sister) independently of race, country of origin or language. The public physical embrace involved an intense collective cry that permeated the atmosphere with a sort of tension and delight. This was also the very first time that Samuel showed himself to the crowds.

The Holy Supper Ceremony On the morning of 14 August, there was a thick atmosphere of tension and high expectations; prayers started at 8.30 rather than 4 a.m. At midday there was a special service called ‘Time of Meditation and Preparation for the Supper’. The streets appeared to be more crammed with the faithful than usual. It was impossible to go into the church as it was packed with members. We were standing outside when, all of a sudden, a general lament started, and all the female members got down on their knees and prayed. The lament was very intense and loud, and we were unsure how or what to observe. We were unable to participate in this liminal moment because we were merely observers and not believers. However, the powerful collective lament affected us as we were physically very close to women who were entering into altered states or experiencing glossolalia. Later on, the streets became deserted; members were getting ready for the ceremony. By three o’clock in the afternoon, adults, youngsters and children were all dressed up for the occasion. There were lines of people everywhere and large and small groups were taking their places on terraces, front gardens, balconies, roofs or any available space. The Santa Cena started at four and finished at ten in the evening. From four to six, various ministers conducted the service while we were waiting for Samuel’s arrival. He had gone to the Bethel church to bless the bread and wine. Many of the Mexican and foreign congregations sang hymns, and many individuals gave their testimonies. At six o’clock, Samuel made his spectacular entry into the church, walking briskly followed by most church ministers and accompanied by the sound of six trumpets; the group were all dressed

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in dark suits. From that moment onwards, the ‘Servant of God’ headed the ceremony. Firstly, he anointed the new deacons and pastors; he named them all and informed the congregation which congregations they had been assigned to. Following the anointments, Samuel blessed the bread and wine, which the ministers distributed among the thousands of participants in HP as well as in the other churches belonging to the religious community in the city. Samuel proudly announced the turn of the United States choir and asked them to sing in English since God understands all languages. At around eight o’clock, when everybody had their blessed bread and wine, Samuel had his. By nine o’clock the ceremony had started to lose its original enthusiasm, and just before ten, in order to close the rite, Samuel thanked everyone for coming and said he hoped to meet them all again next year. The ceremony was televised so we were able to see Samuel inside the church for a few minutes. That evening, I overheard conversations among the Chilpancingo members who were sleeping close to us in the same house. They sounded relaxed, but they must have been emotionally and physically tired, just as we were. I could hear conversations regarding daily life. All of them were peasants from rural areas in the state of Guerrero and probably felt anxious to get back to work their land. This scenario, which I observed many years ago and recorded in my field notes, is closely related to the comment by Victor and Edith Turner: ‘When he returns, so travelers’ accounts repeatedly inform us, his aim is to reach home as swiftly as he can, and his attitude is now that of a tourist rather than a devotee. He has sloughed off his structural sins; he can relax and enjoy himself’ (1978: 22).

Much More than Just a Religious Shrine I now want to place these events in a wider structural context. A local newspaper, El Informador (9 August 2016), claimed that in 1999, ninety million dollars had been spent during the Santa Cena, mostly by migrants, in the city of Guadalajara and its surroundings. The newspaper also reported on 9 August 2016, that according to the Church’s representatives, the amount of money channelled into the regional economy by pilgrims would come to around 100 million dollars.10 It is important to add here that in the last few years local government agents, such as the mayor of the city, have not only attended some of the services in HP, such as the Welcome Ceremony, but they have also organized official schemes to control, protect and provide services to the thousands of visitors.

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Pilgrims and migrants in the US from Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia and other countries from Central and South America are not only attending a religious event in the city of Guadalajara. They are acting as active economic agents connecting different places and transforming them at local, national and global levels. In the following paragraphs I will show how these pilgrims contribute to ‘the contemporary restructuring of capital’ and their influence on particular places.11 The statements presented in the above pages are strong evidence that believers define and think of their journey to Guadalajara as mainly spiritual. However, more than just a shrine is involved. As Coleman states when reflecting on the approach taken by Victor and Edith Turner, ‘pilgrimage becomes a frame for several time dimensions but also a phenomenon that needs to be understood in relation to much larger histories’ (Coleman 2014: 284). Mexican American faithful, as I have mentioned above, have become the most important set of believers within HP, which is why the five hundred-strong choir from different American towns, cities and rural areas is given a special chronotrope in the ritual and in the main church. They have also brought with them their material progress and the higher status this gives them within the religious community. Furthermore, these singers are neither tourists nor foreign visitors, nor are they simply pilgrims enjoying their most sacred shrine; they are also strengthening their family networks, usually by developing businesses of varying size and geographical reach.12 The making and reinforcing of networks is vital among the participants in the HP ceremonies, not only between members in general but especially those from America. These networks are linked to various profitable activities going on outside the sacred realm, such as importing cheap American cars in order to sell them at a better price in Mexico. Members also take advantage of their ‘holy travel’ to meet old friends, make new ones, get married, have family reunions and, if they can afford it, spend some days at the beach. In fact, August and February seem to be the right times in HP to come across new people, and many of the interviewees found their life partners there during these months. For example, Mary, from Guadalajara, explained that she was getting married next February, when three of her siblings who live in San Antonio, Texas, as well as two other siblings who live outside of Jalisco, would be arriving to attend Samuel’s birthday on the 14th. Arely also met Virgil, an Anglo member of the Church from El Paso, Texas, in February 1996 when they attended the same ceremony in HP. They met there again in August and finally got married the year after in Guadalajara, and afterwards went to live in Houston.

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Another example was provided by Eliezer, a high-ranking church authority, whose parents had met one August and had married the following February. Indeed, years later, Eliezer was born on 15 August in HP when his parents had come to celebrate Santa Cena. In August 1999, Eliezer’s extended family gathered for breakfast at the Quinta Real hotel to celebrate the encounter. In a final example, Abigail and Efrain, a Tapatio13 with residence status in the United States, had met during the February fiestas in 1997 and during the following summer Abigail went to spend a few weeks in Houston with her married sister, Erika, so that she could get better acquainted with Efrain, who was then working in Houston. They got married the following August in Guadalajara. The public relations office informed us in 1999, that there had been around twenty weddings in the church. This high number of ceremonies seems to be a consistent pattern during the annual pilgrimage. As noted above, besides attending and organizing several rites of passage, families take advantage of being together during this time.14 Family gatherings in expensive and luxurious hotels like La Quinta Real, as well as celebrations of weddings, birthdays, quinceañeras (fifteenth birthday celebrations), newborns and the like, entail spending large amounts of money on services, food, renting special halls, and buying new and suitable attire for the occasion, and this clearly has an impact on both the local and regional economy. Some families own vans or bus companies that are used to transport the Mexican Americans to Guadalajara. The Church leaders, such as pastors, also travel throughout the year for meetings or other institutional commitments, while many members talked about visiting more distant parts of the country or engaging in other types of economic activities, such as buying special accessories in Mexico for use in diverse American festivities. This last venture is very common among the faithful, not only because the prices are always better since they buy in Mexican pesos instead of dollars, but also because the merchandise can be of better quality. A dress for a quinceañera, for example, would be made by hand and there are all sorts of handmade craftware that can be used either for special occasions or for decorating their homes back in America. Hence, there is a constant, small (and sometimes larger) array of activities that move substantial amounts of money and products across borders. These economic activities are clearly facilitated by the migrants’ networks and connections in Mexico and the USA and, sometimes, in more than these two nation-states. Shrines like the one discussed here are capable not only of moving and renewing souls and spirits but also distributing capital, goods and investments and stimulating the growth of business ventures in many localities.

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Shelters, Mobile Market and Local Business Probably 90 per cent of those arriving in Guadalajara at the beginning of August come from lower-class backgrounds (indigenous, peasant or working class). They travel with their extended families or in larger groups from the same congregation of the same town or city, and most cannot afford to pay for even a very cheap motel or for meals in restaurant or cafes over a week or more. To solve this problem every year, a Church committee organizes accommodation for these visitors. In HP and in Bethel neighbourhood, most poor people are given rooms, schools, stadiums and other public buildings in which to stay for the whole week, where they can cook, wash and sleep while they attend the rituals. The residents of HP provide shelter to as many pilgrims as possible.15 The Church has also created special places to be used during the festivities and repaired old buildings. In 2016, close to fifteen thousand homes were prepared beforehand for members to stay in during rituals.16 In addition, the various congregations of the United States not only managed to obtain enough food but also prepared and served it to those who could not afford to pay for their meals. For example, members of the California congregation’s dining hall distributed 1,600 meals three times a day during the week between 8 and 14 August , as did the congregations from Dallas, San Antonio, Houston and other Texan cities. The economic impact of transnational migration has transformed the Santa Cena into a great regional event, compared with the 1950s when the Church’s founder inaugurated this tradition. During the holy week, a mobile market sets up in the streets surrounding the HP neighbourhood. The market has stands selling veils for women,17 clothes, household appliances, shoes, toys and the like. The market is vital for visitors as it provides cheap meals all day long and is very conveniently located. Without leaving the area, believers can feed their spirit by attending the religious activities as often as they wish, and to please their more worldly desires they can also visit the marketplace. In the restaurants there are women wearing veils and people having fervent and or solemn conversations; there are very few outsiders or ‘infidels’. According to one Church member, around 60 per cent of these restaurants belong to different congregations in Mexico, and the vast majority of the owners are Church members. The profits generated help to pay for the construction of their own churches. We had dinner at one of the Tex-Mex restaurants, where we met members from different states in the USA. Young members of both sexes were talking with each other, mostly in English, and not always mixing with local Mexicans. Mexican American girls wore long dresses and long hair,

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but their style was somehow different from the local girls; they were more modern, less modest and formal. Mexican American members had their own groups and many friends from different places in Mexico whom they meet here each year. It provided an opportunity to comment on who had a new girlfriend, who had got married and so on. Countless local members take advantage of the massive number of visitors during Church annual events, and open up temporary small clothes stalls or food shops in their garages or outside their houses. For example, Noemi’s sister was selling children’s clothes and veils outside her house, while one of her siblings had a tiny stand where he was selling photos he had taken during the Welcome Ceremony. Many women transformed their front doors into little shops and offered bottles of water, refreshments and snacks at very good prices. Others traded tapes containing hymns, old sermons given by Samuel, or songs from other congregations around the world. Several members were able to make a profit selling a great variety of products in this open marketplace with its thousands of potential consumers. The streets of the HP neighbourhood were full of stands made from small tables or improvised trolleys, selling Bibles, notebooks, hymnbooks, journals and other literature from the Church. Several choirs from different town congregations were singing. The choir members (men and women) were dressed in matching colours. People of all social classes were stylishly dressed, and the women were usually very elegant and wearing high heels. Even though the majority of members of the religious community were poor, they had saved up and spent money on being smart for the celebrations. In other words, small and large economic activities took place at the same time as the religious events. Even though these activities were not seen to be as important as spiritual deeds, this Pentecostal shrine does have more general stories to tell than those solely related to the sacred realm.

Ludic Activities In his Afterword, Dionigi Albera goes back to the fourth century ce in order to discuss the dangers and risks involved in Christian pilgrimage. He notes that the journey ‘implied a measure of independence for pilgrims, who were often outside the reach of the Church’s spiritual guidance and could yield to temptation’ (my emphasis). It is within this framework of the genealogy of the ‘true’ pilgrimage that I develop the description of some of the activities observed during the Santa Cena that cannot be categorized as a pure spiritual journey.

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Earlier studies by Fortuny Loret de Mola (1995, 1996) and De la Torre ([1995] 2000) have demonstrated that the LDM Church has been constructed and de-constructed historically in opposition to the mainstream Catholic institution. During the fiesta described here, we witnessed ludic activities never mentioned before that include multiple features derived from the Catholic tradition of western Mexico, the area of origin of the church’s founders and the region where the vast majority of Mexican believers were born. However, the contents of these ludic actions are continuously transformed, and proselytizers do not recognize them as a cultural legacy (Fortuny Loret de Mola 2005). Large numbers of young Pentecostals can be seen walking, standing in the streets or at the eating posts, chatting and greeting each other. On many occasions, I overheard the beginnings of conversations: ‘When did you arrive? When are you leaving? Where are you staying? Have you seen such and such a person?’ If I were to divide the August event between sacred and secular times, it was during the evenings that the latter predominated, particularly in the neighbourhood’s main square. Every evening, when the last prayer was over, the atmosphere at the roundabout outside the church became very joyful and lost the solemnity that had characterized the day. It took on the character of a plaza in a rural Mexican town. Some of the youngsters walked in one direction while others walked in the opposite direction, reminding me of an old tradition practised in most rural parts of western Mexico on Saturday or Sunday evenings. Less than a decade ago, this tradition, known in Spanish as Serenata, was practised in Jalisco’s towns and represented a parody of young men and women looking for their future spouses. Just a few years ago in Jalostotitlan (a town located in the highlands of Jalisco province), for example, a young man would choose the girl he liked and offer her a flower; if she accepted it, the relationship could become serious. While youngsters walked around a park or a plaza, their parents sat close by and watched them, so they could approve or disapprove of their children’s potential spouses. This cultural practice, performed in the Guadalajara neighbourhood at the end of the twentieth century, should not be considered too surprising, therefore, given its practice in western Mexico both previously and even still today in some places. Perhaps HP provides the appropriate space and time for this informal, unstructured and secular parade, where young Church members can meet their future life partners. However, this type of activity and its consequences are usually not discussed within the public space. Church leaders ignore the practice because they do not consider it a spiritual activity. Yet, as we can see, it still performs an important social function for many members of the Church.

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Conclusion The LDM operates, de facto, as a religious minority due to its social composition in Guadalajara and in Mexico more generally. This particular fiesta is a privileged space for a spiritual community, made up mainly of lower-class people, because it gives them the opportunity to raise their voices against the wealthy. Here, members of this Church of the ‘poor and vulnerable’, who oppose the Catholic majority, can become the centre of attention. The HP neighbourhood is located in the far eastern sector of the city (Walton 1978; De la Torre 1998). This is the least developed part of Guadalajara and aesthetically much less attractive than other sectors of the city, but it also has important symbolic connotations as it is where the so-called ‘vices and immorality of the lower classes’ are concentrated. The dominated and dominant are divided by an ‘imaginary border’, which separates the Pentecostal Tapatíos from the ‘city’s hegemonic bourgeoisie’.18 The vast and spectacular pageantry, displayed every February and August in HP, gives the members of the Church on the ‘other side’ of the city the opportunity to transform the marginal and invisible into something central and visible. Church authorities tend to contrast the control and order prevailing during the Santa Cena with the disorder and unruliness that characterize the Catholic celebration of the Virgin of Zapopan on 12 October. As a religious minority, LDM believers have to show to the Catholic majority that they are capable of celebrating their religious fiestas without incidents or conflicts associated with the consumption of large amounts of alcohol. The ritual thus entails both solidarity among members and a challenge to the existing social order, one that subordinates their Church to the dominant Catholic institution and keeps most of its believers in conditions of marginalization. As De la Peña has noted, ‘Guadalajara society characterizes itself as Creole, even Spanish’ (1998: 88), but LDM is openly proud of its founders’ mestizo origins and utilizes the grandeur of this festival to impugn the dominant, oppressive Creole/Spanish class. The ability to attract crowds that the community now enjoys, and makes so clearly visible on these festive days in the capital of the state of Jalisco, has special significance for believers. The content of their fiesta is evidence of the success that this entirely mestizo evangelical organization has achieved in a mostly Catholic society that clings to its supposedly Creole heritage. This is why the display of visible forms of power inside the community is so important and necessary: the Apostle’s power embodies and represents that of their subjugated followers in relation to other sectors of society.

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As we have seen throughout this chapter, Guadalajara becomes the centre of power where systems of ideas (ideology) are produced and reproduced. These ideas flow to different congregations in the US. In this sense, LDM contradicts the conventional unilateral paradigm in which the origin of the movement starts at the centre (the empire or the developed nation-states) and is directed towards the periphery (Third World). This Mexican evangelical Church also demonstrates how cultural flows are activated simultaneously in multiple directions; while doctrine and ritual norms flow from Guadalajara and are transmitted to congregations scattered in several cities around the world, Phoenix or Houston send back to the international headquarters of the Church modern technological knowledge as well as electronic equipment. This circulation of products and ideas shows another facet of LDM. It is a religious organization that has the ability to use advanced technological and logistical mechanisms in order to spread its religious culture to a variety of audiences that are part of the same circuit (Appadurai 1996). While the Santa Cena takes place in Guadalajara, those parishioners who are unable to travel to the headquarters have the opportunity to ‘participate’ in the ceremony via satellite in innumerable churches. This possibility is also extended to other countries, including Colombia, Argentina and Central America. Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola is a Research Fellow at the Centro de Investigationes y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social, CIESAS Peninsular, Yucatan, Mexico. She completed a PhD in Social Anthropology at University College London in 1995, with a dissertation entitled ‘On the Road to Damascus: Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons in Mexico’. Her recent publications include articles in Desde el Sur, Latin American Research Review and Alter/Natives, and she is co-author of the chapter ‘Neither Catholics nor Protestants: Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists, and La Luz del Mundo’, in The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Notes  1. According to a survey conducted by the Mexican Migration Project (Durand and Massey 1996), of thirty localities in Mexico, twenty-six maintained strong links between the place of origin and migrants through massive returns by the townsfolk for the Patron Saint Festival. ‘In 24 of the 30 communities surveyed, a special Mass is celebrated for the so-called “absent children” (hijos ausentes)’ (Espinosa 1999: 377).

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 2. The book Cultura Popular y religión en el Anáhuac by Gilberto Giménez, published in 1978, contains a classic sociological analysis of popular Catholicism in Mexico.  3. The fiesta of the Virgin of Zapopan, Jalisco, gathers thousands of people from the surrounding small and big towns of Guadalajara and is considered the most important traditional Catholic pageant in the region. It has become an official holiday and all schools and universities, private and public, are closed.  4. Members cited here come from Guadalajara, but were living in Houston, Texas, where I spent a few months doing ethnography between 1999 and 2000. I have been researching LDM in Guadalajara since 1989 (Fortuny 1995a, 1995b). In 1999, in order to do ethnographic work, I stayed in one room in the heart of Hermosa Provincia without leaving its confines for two weeks. Anthropologist Celia Magaña and I shared the room and her company provided invaluable emotional and professional support, this is why I use the pronouns us and/or we instead of I in some cases within the chapter.  5. He was born in Guadalajara on 14 February 1937, completed elementary and secondary school, and was baptized at his father’s church. A year later, when he was sixteen years old, he was sent to help the pastor first in the city of Tepic, Nayarit and later in the state of Veracruz. He got married at the age of twenty-five to Eva Garcia, and they had eight children. Samuel was only twenty-seven when he took control of the Church in 1964. He had not even reached the rank of pastor when his father died.  6. This section on the history of the church is taken with a few changes from a previous publication online, ‘Profile of La Luz del Mundo Church’, part of the World Religions and Spiritualities project of the Virginia Commonwealth University, founded and directed by D. Bromley. Retrieved 20 October 2017 from http://wrldrels.org/profiles/ LuzDelMundo.htm.  7. In 1999, I participated in the Holy Supper from a marginal position, sitting on one of the balconies that overlook the church. I was able to view the participants standing in the streets, as well as their reactions towards Samuel when he passed by and greeted them. I observed the apex of the ritual when the blessed bread and wine were distributed. In the following years when I attended the ceremony, I sat inside the church, in the spot designated for the press and special guests. This privilege allowed me to see Samuel very closely, as well as the ministers, the choirs located at the forefront and the remaining fortunate members who have obtained a seat in the main church.  8. In 2000, besides HP, followers of the LDM mainly inhabited six other neighbourhoods in Guadalajara: The Bethel, La Presa, Maestro Aaron Joaquin, Santa Cecilia, 12 de Octubre and Parque Solidaridad. The five daily services were celebrated simultaneously in the five churches, and different ministers preached on the same doctrinal topic. For example, on Thursday 12th at the 4.30 a.m. service, the sermon was entitled ‘Has the doctrine changed?’  9. Thirty-two countries participated in the parade. The smallest contingent in the parade came from Europe, i.e. Spain (the largest European contingent), Italy, the UK, France and even Moldava (with just one representative). The European contingent was followed by the only African country, Nigeria, and those from the USA, who comprised the largest contingent overall. Behind the USA contingent came those representing Central American countries, the most numerous hailing from El Salvador. Many of the South American nations took part in the Welcome Ceremony and of these the largest contingent came from Colombia. The last group consisted of delegations from all of Mexico’s thirty-three states. 10. In 2016, many of the small rituals took place in sixteen different localities across the municipalities of Guadalajara, Tonala, Zapopan and El Salto (El Informador, 7 August 2016).

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11. Glick Schiller suggests that migration scholars should not approach migration as a unit of analysis but, instead, focus on ‘the movement of people across space in relationship to forces that structure political economy’ (2009: 18). 12. Travelling for spiritual reasons can release ‘communication networks and contractual relations’ that can generate ‘mercantile and industrial capitalism’, according to Turner and Turner (1978: 17). 13. Tapatio is the demonym for the inhabitants of Guadalajara. 14. We are talking of transnational families here, who get to see kin who live in the United States, outside of Guadalajara or further away from the state of Jalisco. 15. After a few days of fieldwork, we noticed that the houses we visited had a particular construction pattern. The houses have two levels, with a kitchen and bathroom on each floor. Every August, members of the family who own the house stay on the upper floor, leaving the ground floor for visitors. Houses were overcrowded, as they hold not only visitors from outside the family, but also relatives who do not live in Guadalajara. Sara’s family hosted people from Acapulco, Guerrero, while Pablo Valdez’s family shared his home with Church members from the state of Veracruz, Mexico. We saw signs outside almost every house with information concerning the place of origin of the pilgrims staying there. 16. In 2016, the government agreed with LDM that sixty public schools in the area, as well as other public spaces, could be used as shelters for members who could not afford to stay in hotels. However, there were still more than thirty hotels occupied by pilgrims in different sectors of Guadalajara and three other smaller cities (El Informador, 7 August 2016). 17. Female believers wear veils during religious services, when praying, before they eat, or at any time. It is an implicit rule for them to dress in full-length skirts and long sleeves. They are not allowed to wear earrings or rings. 18. De la Torre (1998) explains the history of the formation of the city divided by an avenue and the consequential meanings of this division, which still remain vivid among the inhabitants of each half.

References Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press. Coleman, S. 2014. ‘Pilgrimage as Trope for an Anthropology of Christianity’, Current Anthropology 55(10): 281–91. De la Peña, G. 1998. ‘Cultura de Conquista y resistencia cultural: apuntes sobre el festival de los Tastoanes en Guadalajara’, Alteridades 15: 83–89. De la Torre, R. 1998. ‘Guadalajara vista desde la calzada: fronteras culturas e imaginarios urbanos’, Alteridades 15: 45–55. De la Torre, R. [1995] 2000. Los hijos de la luz: Discurso, poder e identidad en la Luz del Mundo. Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara/ITESO/CIESAS. Durand, J. 1996. El Norte es como el mar: Entrevistas a Trabajadores Migrantes en Estados Unidos. Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara. Durand, J., and D. Massey (eds). 1996. Crossing the Border: Research from the Mexican Migration Project. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Espinosa, V. 1999. ‘El día del migrante y el retorno del purgatorio: Iglesia, migración a los Estados Unidos y cambio sociocultural en un pueblo de Los Altos de Jalisco’, Estudios sociológicos XVII (50): 375–419.

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Fortuny Loret de Mola, P. 1995. ‘On the Road to Damascus: Pentecostals, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses in Mexico’, Ph.D. dissertation. London: University College London. Fortuny Loret de Mola, P. 1996. ‘La Luz del Mundo: una oferta múltiple de salvación’, Estudios Jalisciences 24: 33–47. Fortuny Loret de Mola, P. 2002. ‘The Santa Cena of the Luz del Mundo Church: A Case of Contemporary Transnationalism’, in H. Ebaugh and J. Chafetz (eds), Religion across Borders: Transnational Religious Networks. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, pp. 15–50. Fortuny Loret de Mola, P. 2005. ‘Una iglesia tapatía: evangélica, popular y transnacional’, in P. Fortuny Loret de Mola (ed.), Los ’Otros hermanos’: Minorías religiosas protestantes en Jalisco. Guadalajara: Secretaría de Cultura del Gobierno del estado de Jalisco, pp. 169–209. Gamio, M. 1930. Mexican Migration to the United States. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Giménez, G. 1978. Cultura Popular y religión en el Anáhuac. Mexico: Centro de Estudios Ecuménicos. Glick Schiller, N. 1999. ‘Transmigrants and Nation-States: Something Old and Something New in the US Immigrant Experience’, in C. Hirschman, P. Kasinitz and J. De Wind (eds), The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 99–119. Glick Schiller, N. 2009. ‘A Global Perspective on Migration and Development’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 53(3): 14–37. Kearney, M. 1986. ‘From the Invisible Hand to Visible Feet: Anthropological Studies of Migration and Development’, Annual Review of Anthropology 15: 331–61. Kearney, M. 1991. ‘Borders and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of Empire’, Journal of Historical Sociology 4: 52–74. Kearney, M. 1995. ‘The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 547–65. Roberts, B., F. Reanne and F. Lozano-Ascencio. 1999. ‘Transnational Migrant Communities and Mexican Migration to the US’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 22(2): 238–66. Rouse, R. 1991. ‘Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism’, Diaspora 1: 8–23. Shadow, R., and M. Shadow. 1994. ‘La peregrinación religiosa en América Latina: enfoques y Perspectivas’, in C. Garma Navarro and R. Shadow (eds), Las peregrinaciones religiosas: una aproximación. Mexico: UAM, pp. 153–167. Smith, M.P. 1994. ‘Can You Imagine? Transnational Migration and the Globalization of Grassroots Politics’, Social Text 39: 15–33. Taylor, P.S. [1928] 1970. Mexican Labor in the United States, vols. I and II. New York: Arno Press. [1st edition, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press]. Turner, V., and E. Turner. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Walton, J. 1978. ‘Guadalajara: Creating the Divided City’, in W. Cornelius and R. Van Kemper (eds), Metropolitan Latin America: The Challenge and Response. Latin American Urban Research, VI. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publication, pp. 25–50.

Chapter 8

The Paths of Saint James in Brazil Body, Spirituality and Market Carlos Alberto Steil

I

n this chapter I explore the translations of the sacred into the languages of tourism and the market, and vice versa, taking as a background the empirical context of the Paths of Saint James that started to appear in Brazil in 2000 and involved local councils, the Catholic Church, tourist agencies, companies, universities and civil society organizations, especially the Association of Friends of the Way of Saint James. I set out from the premise that what these paths have in common is their mediating role in the translation from a ritual dating back centuries, shaped in the world of traditional Catholicism, to another religious language that incorporates a New Age spirituality.1 In referring to New Age spirituality, I mean something similar to what Fedele, in her chapter in the present volume, calls ‘energy grammar’. Rather than seeing New Age as a religious movement, I approach it as a particular way of relating to the sacred that differs from the hegemonic form disseminated by the religions of transcendence in the West. New Age spirituality is similar to that which characterizes energy grammar: ‘it is not exclusive to the pilgrims, but provides a transnational lingua franca for the increasing number of people in the West who refuse to form part of an established religious tradition, preferring to identify themselves as “spiritual” rather than religious’ (Fedele, this volume). In my opinion, it is this extension beyond the new grammar of the sacred disseminated in the West that makes the Paths of Saint James in Brazil an ideal space to think about the transformations being experienced by society and religion

Notes for this chapter begin on page 170.

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today. Hence, I aim to show how, in terms of the relationship between society and religion, we are living another condition, one that I shall denominate postmodern, insofar as it differs from the relation hegemonic under modernity. This movement presents two vectors: on the one hand, the porosity of the boundaries between the established (institutionalized) religions and the ‘religions of the self’;2 on the other, the complexity of the relations between the sacred and the secular, expressed in the tension between the fields of pilgrimage and tourism. Pursuing this theme, I shall emphasize the points of contact, encounters and possibilities for exchange between these fields, created by the new agents entering the field of spirituality, such as local councils, municipal tourism and culture offices, tourist agencies and private companies. I also wish to draw the reader’s attention to the multiple intersections, the points of convergence and divergence, existing between Catholicism and the religions of the self within the wider transformations of the religious field and the very conception and model of religion in contemporary society. These intersections will be contextualized through the wider framework of what have become defined as hybrid processes responsible for translating the elements of one religious regime into another. This is a hybridization that – to use a category from postcolonial studies – occurs not only in the modern condition, under the sign of identity and opposition, but in the condition of ‘postmodernity’, characterized by the ‘narrative ambivalence of disjunctive times and meanings’ (Bhabha 1994: 139–170). Drawing on the embodiment paradigm, I will examine the transformations in the concept and experience of the sacred occurring within the context of the Paths of Saint James in Brazil. By adopting a phenomenological approach to the analysis of the ethnographic data compiled through this new model of pilgrimage, I do not intend to ignore the contribution of other perspectives such as hermeneutics. On the contrary, I look to establish a productive dialogue between these different approaches in order to enhance our understanding of the phenomenon. Hence, I emphasize the dimensions of experience and meaning in equal measure − central concepts in the embodiment and hermeneutic approaches, respectively. Thus, while a hermeneutic approach allows us to perceive the plurality of meanings that converge and configure pilgrimages over time, the focus on embodiment provides us with access to the processes of subjectivization and reflexivity that shape the experience of pilgrims on the Paths of Saint James in Brazil. In sum, then, I propose that the experience of pilgrimage should be interpreted by incorporating multiple meanings and diverse possible

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combinations between the millenary event of the pilgrimages, propagated and maintained by the Catholic tradition, and the experiences that emerge in the shift from the mediation by this religious institution to that of tourist agencies, the market and the state. I want to draw attention to the porosity of the boundaries that separate the experience of the sacred and secular spheres of modern life. This porosity shows that the motives for setting foot on these paths no longer fit within pre-established frameworks that seek to confine tourist and religious experiences within separate domains. I agree, therefore, with the critique made by Coleman and Eade of the tendency found in US studies to establish fixed boundaries between religion and economy. This approach ends up interpreting any mixture of these spheres, including in the analysis of pilgrimages, as an aberration (Coleman and Eade, this volume). In this sense I also believe that it is precisely the ambiguities and hybridities, tensions and contradictions, patterns and misunderstandings that imbue pilgrimages with vitality, including the reinventions of the Paths of Saint James in Brazil.3 Seen overall, these paths both institute the conditions for actualizing the meanings and motivations associated with historical experiences of pilgrimage, and introduce a horizon for new meanings and motivations capable of producing unpredictable and creative outcomes in relation to the past.

The New Pilgrimage Paths in Brazil Since the start of the 2000s, a significant number of people have travelled from different parts of Brazil to undertake pilgrimages along the Path of the Light (Minas Gerais region), Path of the Sun (São Paulo state), Path of Faith (São Paulo state), Path of the Missions (Rio Grande do Sul state) and Footsteps of Anchieta (Espírito Santo state). These new pilgrimage paths have emerged as both a recent invention, like the Path of the Sun, and a reinvention of older tourist or religious centres, such as the Path of the Missions and the Path of Faith. These last two paths have been given new meanings through the incorporation of New Age ideology and the mediation of new agents from the private sector, represented by tourist agencies, and from the state, represented by local councils and by cultural and tourism offices. These new pilgrims, who also refer to themselves as walkers (caminhantes), undertake these walks motivated by the ideal of inner transformation and personal improvement. In response to these events, we published the book Caminhos de Santiago no Brasil: interfaces entre turismo e religião (Steil and Carneiro 2011), which emerged from an extensive study of five Brazilian pilgrimage routes that have grown in popularity over recent years and that have in common the

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fact that they are modelled on the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage.4 As explained earlier, our intention was to understand how tourist and religious meanings are elaborated and become enmeshed in the social construction of these modern pilgrimages. We approached these events as rituals that project themselves beyond the limits of their specialized fields – religion and tourism – enabling us to inquire deeper into various questions that we considered important concerning the sacred in contemporary society. On the other hand, in detaching themselves from their specialized fields, the Paths of Saint James in Brazil seem to indicate the emergence of a new model of pilgrimage whose specificity is marked by an inversion in people’s quest to experience the sacred. In emphasizing spiritual experience as the outcome of a personal process of encounter with an immanent form of the sacred, one that resides within each person, the Paths of Saint James in Brazil are redefining the traditional meaning of pilgrimage. In other words, it no longer involves undertaking a movement towards a sacredness externalized in a physical image or object located within the space of a sanctuary.5 In this sense, we can affirm that these events are not only adding new meanings to the pilgrimages, they are radically transforming them. This transformation follows the more general trend towards spiritualities centred on the individual, which dilute the territorial model of the traditional Catholic pilgrimages, the destinations for which are typically sanctuaries as spatially demarcated places of worship. Running counter to this tradition, the pilgrimages studied here emphasize mobility and wandering, which make their destinations ‘products of interactions between pilgrimage activities through time and the particular physicalities of a place’ (Bajc, Coleman and Eade 2007: 322). In linguistic terms, it should be observed here that the Paths of Saint James in Brazil are adding a new synonym to pilgrimage/pilgrim, namely path/walker (caminh/caminhante). In Portuguese, there is a common synonym for peregrinação/peregrino, namely romaria/romeiro. However, while the term peregrinação (peregrination) designates an experience that comes from a personal decision and refers to the history of the great pilgrimages of world Catholicism, romaria has a group and collective connotation and refers to the traditional popular Catholicism that in Brazil became one of the pillars of its reproduction and dissemination until the mid nineteenth century.6 The romarias are generally associated with a particular devotion and are organized in the places of origin of the romeiros by popular leaders, who charge for the price of the bus fares, the hire of a private coach and the renting of a place for the romeiros to stay at the site of destination where the sanctuary or object of worship is located. What is worth highlighting here is that the term peregrino (pilgrim) can be used as a synonym for both

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romeiro and caminhante (walker), but the term romeiro is never used as a synonym for caminhante. In this semantic interplay, we can see that the personal connotation of pilgrimage is accentuated through the emergence of the Paths of Saint James in Brazil, at the same time that its reference to Santiago de Compostela, one of the major pilgrimages of world Catholicism, links the experience of the walkers to a global movement. On the other hand, the incompatibility of the term romaria with the experience of those walking along the paths reveals a distancing of the meanings and connotations associated with these routes from the popular and devotional Catholicism practised especially at Brazil’s main sanctuaries.7 The events referred to here not only reveal the invention of new pilgrimages where pilgrims incorporate tourism as a way of mediating the experience of the sacred, but also point to the transformation of tourist agencies into mediators of the sacred. Hence, significant changes can be observed in the religious and tourist fields alike. Here we can gain some insight by turning to excerpts from the online presentations of the various Paths of Saint James in Brazil, taken from their official websites: The Path of the Sun was born with the principal objective of offering lovers of walking a pleasant environment, with almost the entire route passing through rural areas, where people can search for introspection and material renunciation. (http://www.caminhodosol.org.br/) The Path of Faith provides moments of reflection and faith, physical and psychological health, and interaction between man and nature. By closely following the yellow arrows, the pilgrim strengthens his faith, observes privileged nature, and overcomes the obstacles along the path which is a synthesis of life itself. Discover the few things that you need in your rucksack and strip away the superfluous. (http://caminhodafe.com.br/ptbr/) The Path of the Missions is a mystical-cultural-historical route of walks through the 7 Peoples of the Missions. A fine option for encountering oneself and at the same time the rich history of the gaucho people. The walk is marketed through individual packages. However, the objective of this marketing in the form of these packages is to link up with the local community and enable the pilgrim to walk without carrying any money. (http://www.caminhodasmissoes.com.br/) The Footsteps of Anchieta is the first Christian route in the Americas and revives the path taken by the Apostle of Brazil in his final years. In reliving the route, you come face-to-face with the landscapes that inspired a giant of faith and will find yourself in the reflections that the journey offers, discovering another path, the path of the heart. (http://www.abapa.org.br/)

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The Path of Light is a path of religious, ecological and historical pilgrimage. Much more than a simple regional tourist project, it is a pilgrimage path energized by the walkers and introspective due to the telluric force of the mountains, which provokes in men greater possibilities for immersing themselves in the depths of their existence. The Path is magical! Not only because of the innumerable natural beauties that it possesses, but also because of the magic of the region’s people, who came to respect the Path and take pride in being part of what has everything to become one of the biggest or the biggest pilgrimage route in Brazil. (http://www.caminhodaluz.org.br/)

These website presentations reveal how religious and secular meanings are interwoven in the constitution of the paths. Well beyond the notion of liminality and its opposition between sacred and profane, religious and secular, the paths evince ‘the encounters between religious, ethnic, political, economic, national and transnational frames of reference’ (Coleman and Eade, this volume). A constant oscillation can be observed in the perspective of the route’s creators – namely the professional tourist agents and local administrator involved – who aim to translate religious events into tourist events and also to transform tourist events into religious events. In other words, we can detect a two-way flow involving the ‘sacralization’ of the profane and the ‘secularization’ of the sacred. In this sense, the paths presented here are both a spiritual version of a tourist phenomenon and a tourist version of a religious phenomenon. This double movement, constitutive of the paths under analysis, becomes more clearly evident in empirical accounts gathered in my field research. For the creation of the Path of the Sun, an image was brought from Santiago in Spain that was ‘enthroned’ in the town’s forest garden, the end point of the pilgrimage. At first sight we might presume that the aim was to construct the idea of the arrival of a sacred locus, as would be the case of the pilgrimage to Santiago, whose objective is to reach the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. However, the explanation given by the creator of the Path of the Sun, by the local council and by the local priest, was that since the town of Águas de São Pedro was founded on 25 July, the same day that the birth of Santiago (Saint James) is commemorated, the latter came to be considered – through a process of reinvention led by the path’s promoters – the patron saint of the city. On the Path of the Missions, the route of the walk passes along the old missionary roads that linked the Jesuit Guarani missions (reduções). Along this trajectory are located three places named as world heritage sites by the state agencies: the archaeological sites of São Nicolau (in the municipality of São Nicolau), São Lourenço (in São Luiz Gonzaga) and São Miguel Arcanjo (in the municipality of São Miguel das Missões).8 Since these locations are normally presented as ‘sacred’ and filled with ‘energy’, very

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often the pilgrims are invited to place their hands on the ruins in order to receive ‘good fluids’. On these two paths we were able to observe that the development of the routes and the points of support and arrival involved careful preparation by their creators and promoters. This was a project that brought together private sector investment, government funds and engagement with the region’s inhabitants. The latter were incorporated into the project through both their participation in its development and execution and their role as hosts for the pilgrims. From the political viewpoint, the creators and promoters of the paths sought to present them as mediators of public policies for regional development, culture, agriculture, tourism and leisure. In their implementation, therefore, the initiative of entrepreneurs and the local population was combined with the participation of companies from the tourism sector, religious institutions, non-governmental organizations and state agencies.9 However, the formats of the paths discussed here had certain nuances in their design and differences in the emphasis given to each of the agents. Hence, while tourism is a constant feature in the Paths of Saint James in Brazil, along the Path of the Missions it acquires a centrality not found on the other routes. In order to undertake the Path of the Missions, the walker needs to buy a ‘package’ from a tour operator. In the case of the Path of the Sun, on the other hand, people can register via the website or by telephone, where they receive all the information necessary, although they are also encouraged to take part in a talk given by the creator before departure. In the case of Footsteps of Anchieta, the big moment is the annual pilgrimage that occurs on the Corpus Christi holiday, which brings together more than two thousand people over the four days of the walk. In this case, the local population, the local councils and the culture and tourist offices support and, directly or indirectly, participate in organizing the event, which requires the mobilization of a substantial infrastructure with a direct impact on the life of the local population and the network of hotels and guesthouses.

New Paths, New Mediators One of the features shared by all the paths presented here is the secondary role played by the Catholic Church, even though both the Missions and Faith paths terminate at the door of a church and almost all include Catholic rituals performed specifically for the pilgrims. However, in all cases it is the lay creators and organizers who take on the central role. They are the ones responsible for structuring, organizing and proposing

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the activities offered to the pilgrims. Consequently, the experience of pilgrimage, translated into the terms of the market of symbolic goods, ends up stretching the boundaries of the market itself, incorporating spirituality – traditionally seen as contrary to the market – as one more product offered up for consumption. Pilgrimage, therefore, has become included in the list of activities offered by specialized tourist agencies. The oscillation between tourist product and mystic experience in how the paths are regarded can be seen in the presentation of the respective paths on their official websites, and also in the publicity materials and folders typically distributed at tourist fairs. As economic mediators, tourist agencies are transforming pilgrimage – expressed in Brazil in the form of the Paths of Saint James – into a symbolic product sold on the market as a ‘mystical journey of tradition, leisure, research, self-knowledge and sport’ (Path of the Missions), ‘the integration of man with nature’ (Faith and Light), ‘physical and psychological health’ (Faith) or even ‘introspection and material renunciation’ (Sun). In some cases, however, as in the Path of the Missions and in the Footsteps of Anchieta, it is especially as consumers of tourist packages that the pilgrims are positioned, thereby reinforcing the distance in relation to the traditional pilgrimages, mediated by the Catholic Church, where personal sacrifice and penitence are reinforced by Catholic ideology. Although suffering and pain are positively valued in both the traditional Catholic pilgrimages and the innovative experience of the Paths of Saint James in Brazil, the meanings and the form in which these elements are integrated into the life and existential narrative of the walkers are very different. The new pilgrimages appear to incorporate a wide spectrum of motivations that simultaneously reconcile tourist, mystical, cultural, historical and ecological interests, among others. Their plausibility and the strength of their attraction, however, are rooted in the wider context of an immanent postmodern spirituality that has been affirming itself in opposition to the regime of the traditional religions of transcendence that prevailed under modernity. The conjunction between contrasting motivations is not seen as strange by those involved in the paths, since the boundaries between different interests have become porous. In particular, the relationship between religion and the market seems to acquire space and legitimacy in the postmodern condition, in contrast to modernist approaches where religion is assumed to be a private issue for people. The ethnographic data also point to a permanent ambivalence, expressed by the pilgrims in narratives and practices, towards assumptions that tourism and market relations are either beneficial or eminently ‘impure’, contaminating the ‘authenticity’ of the pilgrimage experience. This ambivalence may be seen in the walkers’ testimonies, in which they

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frequently express a clear distinction between pilgrim and tourist which is belied in practice. In this sense, the categories of pilgrim and tourist operate more like ‘ideal types’, which are good to think with, rather than as real subjects who may be found or described empirically. Generally speaking, the greater the walker’s immersion in the event, the closer they are to pilgrimage and vice versa. Hence the figure of the pilgrim has been associated above all with the experience of material renunciation, as one of the walkers on the Path of the Missions recounts. Being a pilgrim, he says, ‘is to think that everything you need can fit in a rucksack’. In contrast, the figure of the tourist is seen to relate to consumption, well-being and commodities.

The Paradigm of Corporeality and the Experience of the Pilgrims in the Paths of Saint James in Brazil The empirical data gathered on the Paths of Saint James in Brazil during our field observations and from the statements taken from pilgrims indicate the need to move beyond a strictly semiotic approach to an analysis of these events. There is more to say about them than simply what is revealed by interpreting what it means to be a pilgrim or a tourist in the context of these routes. The engagement between embodiment paradigm and semiotics seems to me a fertile path for deepening our knowledge and expanding the limits of our understanding of pilgrimage. By locating the object of analysis within the field of embodiment, we are led away from the field of representations towards experience, from the mind towards the body, and from thought to the lived. In turn, this theoretical shift helps us to focus on the accounts of the walkers themselves concerning their experiences and feelings; it allows us to close the gap between academic reflection and the thoughts of our interlocutors. The reflection pursued here engages especially with the work of Thomas Csordas, who has contributed significantly to anthropological studies of religion through a phenomenological approach (1994a, 1994b, 1997, 2002). In his view, meanings are not simply added to experience, like an item of clothing covering the lived world or a mental representation; they emerge from the projection of bodies that move towards the world. The embodiment perspective articulates an important methodological viewpoint, therefore, where bodily experience is understood as the existential basis of culture and the self. ‘“Being-in-the-world” is fundamentally conditional, and hence we must speak of “existence” and “lived-experience.” In general terms, the distinction between representation and being-in-the-world corresponds to that between the disciplines

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of semiotics and phenomenology’ (Csordas 1994a: 10). From a phenomenological viewpoint, therefore, the Paths of Saint James in Brazil comprise a privileged locus for observing various implicit dispositions that allow us to understand certain social processes responsible for engendering styles and modes through which religion is being configured in contemporary society. There is a constant movement of bodies, ideas, values and conceptions that brings together the pilgrims of the diverse Paths of Saint James in Brazil, allowing us to speak of a community of mutual practice and recognition established among these walkers. However, while in the majority of communities people imagine themselves to be part of a whole based on the belief that their blood, historical or ideological ties forge their common identity, for our interlocutors it is above all the bodies in movement that connect them and create their imagined community.10 Hence, rather than an intersubjectivity established in the everyday coexistence of subjects who find themselves embedded in structures, what we observe along the paths are sporadic and intense shared experiences where the movement of bodies over long treks occupies a central place in the configuration of an intercorporeality which brings the pilgrims together through relations that very often dispense with the need for language and meanings. Combining Marshall Sahlins and Victor Turner, we could affirm that, just as Sahlins detects a ‘structure in the conjuncture’ as a social dynamic, in the case of the pilgrimages we can identify a ‘structure in communitas’, where the opposition between ‘structure and anti-structure’ proposed by Turner loses much of its heuristic force (Sahlins 1981: 38; Turner 1969). In the social dynamic of the Paths of Saint James in Brazil, we can observe a movement that seeks to collapse the body/mind dichotomy through physical activity, which presents itself as a gateway to a dimension involving the subject as a whole. In this sense, the recurrent theme in pilgrimage research between the opposition between outer journey, experienced through the physical movement of the body, and inner journey, experienced in the mystical movement of the soul, seems to become diluted in the lived experience of these new pilgrims.11 This collapse – observed in the narratives of the walkers, as I have aimed to show – has had repercussions at the theoretical and methodological levels of the social sciences, which have proven increasingly critical of analyses that reinforce binary oppositions between subjectivity and objectivity, structure and action, nature and culture. From the perspective of the pilgrims and of corporeality, therefore, as Thomas Csordas asserts, ‘the body is not an object to be studied in relation to culture, but is to be considered as the subject of culture, or in other words as the existential ground of culture’ (2002: 58).

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The body in movement thus presents itself as the central locus for the pilgrim’s experience of the world, while simultaneously instituting an imagined community of walkers who share a common habitus. As Bourdieu states, the latter operates as ‘a principle generating and unifying all practices, the system of inseparably cognitive and evaluative structures which organizes the vision of the world in accordance with objective structures of a determinate state of social world: this principle is nothing other than the socially informed body’ (1977: 124). We can observe, therefore, a channel of communication between methodological approach and sociability in action. Meanings are produced and deployed not only as possibilities for explaining or inscribing pilgrimage in culture, they also constitute – along with feelings, emotions and intuition – the existential field where bodies move towards the world, towards other bodies and towards objects that form the landscape in which the experience unfolds. This leads me to think of the historical, cultural, religious and tourist dimensions of pilgrimage not as a composite assemblage of meanings that combine in the configuration of this singular event, but as ‘lived dimensions’, articulated in the body, that orient subjects in the world. This existential pilgrim space, which redefines the meaning and the place of the body in the experience of walkers and in anthropological analysis, also reformulates the concept of the sacred, very often expressed by the pilgrims as an ‘other’ that escapes the domain and control of consciousness. However, this is an other that shifts from the transcendence of a personalized God, conceived as a being existing beyond the world, to the immanence of a force or energy manifested in the inner being of the subject (see also Fidele, this volume). As Csordas states, ‘instead of the wholly other projected onto cosmic majesty, I want to turn our attention to the intimately other’ (2004: 168). Hence, the ‘majestic other’ is transformed into ‘an intimate other’, such that the totally other and the intimately other comprise two sides of the same coin. It is this structural alterity, founded in the body, which simultaneously presents itself as the subject of the perception and as one object among other objects in the world, which reappears in the experience of the sacred experienced by the pilgrims. If there is a hierophany in the Paths of Saint James in Brazil, this does not present itself as a manifestation of a divinity located outside the subject, a ‘sacred self’ personified in an object or image, but as an alterity that emerges continually in the intimacy of the subject as an existential aporia. Hence, the ultimate reason of pilgrimage becomes the search for a lost intimacy that wishes to collapse the divisions between subject and object, body and conscience, sacred and human. The aporia is revealed in the contradiction between the desire to collapse alterity and the impossibility of achieving it, given that this remains structural to the human being’s

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realization through objectivization in culture. In sum, the body appears in pilgrimage as the place par excellence of the interaction of this alterity between the human and sacred. Some excerpts from our ethnography on the Path of the Missions, published in Steil and Carneiro (2011), reinforce this dimension of the body as the site par excellence for reflecting on human experience that transcends the event of the pilgrimage per se. For the majority of pilgrims whom we interviewed, the Path is a metaphor for life. As Cláudio told us: I think, for me, a walk is more or less like a sample of life in which we carry on even in the face of difficulties, like rain, mud, exhaustion, blisters. But we have to resume our course every day in the effort to glimpse new horizons and achieve our objective. (Cláudio, entrepreneur)

The act of walking becomes an exemplary form of ‘apprenticeship in practice’, while the body’s steps act out the metaphor of living. ‘You have to do it to know’, through ‘feeling’ as Salete says. Walking, therefore, is what makes real the metaphor of life, its experiential and non-transferable side. I think that it signifies reflection. I think that in life we have to live riding a bicycle and observing the marvellous landscapes that life offers us. Although until yesterday the landscape has been gloomy, due to the rain I think, look how marvellous all this is: you have health, you have life. And look at these fields, all green, filled with cattle, I think that the meaning is precisely an invitation to reflection. (Júlio César, entrepreneur)

The pilgrim’s identity is delineated in the movement itself insofar as walking becomes an apprenticeship, a means of personal reflection and engagement in the world. In realizing this experience, marked by the emotional density of this learning process, a number of dispositions emerge focused on personal reflection, revealing the introspective dimension of the path. By living the conditions of space through walking, the subject discovers the ‘true’ meanings located beyond culture as a system of meanings. Ultimately, undertaking a pilgrimage signifies a return to what is ‘true’, contained in our bodies and accessible through the pilgrim’s physical and mental engagement with the path itself. In so doing, the pilgrim observes herself, reflecting on her condition in the world and integration within the landscape, diluting the boundaries between body, mind and environment. As one pilgrim told us, ‘everything around us … provides us with insight’. In sum, more than a metaphorical relation of the pilgrims with life, what proves central in the paths is the metonymic relation that establishes a radical continuity of the subject with the world.

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The Sacred in the Paths of Saint James in Brazil In situating the analysis of these paths in Brazil within the framework of the embodiment paradigm, we are confronted decisively with the indetermination with which the concept of the sacred is imbued. In other words, it is not a question of taking the binary opposition between sacred and profane as an explanatory principle for a process of secularization where modernity supposedly emerged as the inexorable destiny of human society. The transformation that we observe in how pilgrimage has been configured in the events studied here does not result simply from the loss of pertinence and plausibility of the sacred. On the contrary, what we detect is a significant change in the experience and conceptualization of the sacred, revitalized and re-elaborated in the paths. In this sense, the paradigm of corporeality orienting my analysis of the pilgrimages combines with others that, as can be observed in the chapters of this book as a whole, seek to overcome older secularization/post-secularism epistemes (Coleman and Eade, this volume). Accounting for experience of the walkers requires moving beyond the reification of these poles and thinking of the sacred as fundamentally a human experience that becomes delineated in the movement towards the world and the objects and beings that inhabit it. The ethnographies that we compiled in the book on the Caminhos de Santiago (Steil and Carneiro 2011) point to a profound change in the understanding of the sacred. As a consequence, the concept of religion becomes inadequate for expressing what is experienced by pilgrims who, generally speaking, reject the term, preferring to express this experience as a form of spirituality. In making this shift from religion to spirituality, the walkers not only redefine the rituals, practices and meanings that configure pilgrimage, they also elaborate another concept of the sacred that ends up throwing into question the dominant conception established under modernity. The Paths of Saint James in Brazil operate, then, as mediators between a sacredness expressed in the transcendence of a divinity beyond the subject and another form of the sacred revealed in the intimate immanence of each individual’s self. By reinforcing the immanent dimension of the sacred, the paths produce a structural shift in the very meaning of pilgrimage, transferring its emphasis from the arrival point to the movement itself. It is both in the walk and on the walk that the pilgrim, entering into contact with her ‘true self’, encounters the sacred residing deep within. In this movement, the rituals to a large extent lose their formalistic character and acquire greater spontaneity and improvisation, incorporating into their performance the cultural and environmental landscape encountered on

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the route. Another possible horizon of experience of the sacred opens up new ways of experiencing and configuring pilgrimages. In other words, in adopting this approach, we move away from the idea of the sacred as a unifying and explanatory principle in the emergence, configuration and dissemination of these events. Rather than signalling the nuances and differences with which the sacred manifests as an entity that unfolds in time, the aim is to explore the idea – so important to our research subjects – that the sacred is multiple and is continually redefining the lived experience and performances of the pilgrims.

Conclusion My interest in this chapter has been to seek to comprehend the transformations currently taking place in pilgrimages in Brazil through their insertion in the global context of pilgrimages that incorporate the model established by the Camino de Santiago in Spain. In this process, I have highlighted some of the elements that have played a determining role in shaping pilgrimages like the Paths of Saint James in Brazil. The first such element is the inversion of the place of institutional religious mediators traditionally associated with the pilgrimages, like the Catholic Church, by secular mediators in the form of tourist agencies and state bodies, for example. As I have sought to show, it is not a question of a simple substitution of religious actors by secular agents, matching a wider trend towards secularization, but involves complex arrangements between the sacred and profane, market and religion, public and private. Hence, although they express more general processes of reconfiguration of the sacred and the religious in contemporary society, the Paths of Saint James in Brazil are not only a reflection or a local or national translation of the global. By situating the analysis in the ethnographic field, I have looked to highlight the role of bodily experience in shaping the paths themselves and in the spirituality that this experience elicits for pilgrims. Yet this process is not limited to the particular phenomenon under study. Rather, what is experimented with and elaborated performatively and reflexively has a strong impact on pilgrimages in general and on the very shaping of the sacred in society. We have also seen that the Paths of Saint James in Brazil have emerged as one more modality of pilgrimage or tourism available to the individual among the myriad choices offered by the market of symbolic and religious products. This demand is associated with the Brazilian Catholic Church’s loss of hegemonic control over pilgrimages and the concept of the sacred. The religious plurality of Brazilian society has encouraged the making

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of multiple choices and modalities of religious engagement and spiritual experiences. This change, in turn, is inscribed in a cultural movement in contemporary society that affirms a diffuse spirituality, based on the individual, in opposition to institutional religion, based on rituals of devotion and directed at entities located beyond the subject. Although this movement can be identified as New Age, it is not confined to the frameworks defining this concept. On the contrary, I have sought to call attention to the transversal nature of the spirituality of immanence and embodiment that engenders new forms of belief and of experiencing the sacred, and traverses the religions of transcendence, giving rise to new practices that are incorporated into traditional systems, beliefs and rituals, as in the case of the pilgrimages. Hence, unlike the pilgrims who head to Brazil’s sanctuaries of worship, the pilgrims of the Paths of Saint James in Brazil do not need to be Catholic to take to the trail of the Paths of Faith, Sun, Light and the Missions or the Footsteps of Anchieta. What attracts them is not the destination, generally marked by the recognition of the hierophany of a sacred entity in relation to which the pilgrimage is presented as a ritual of worship and devotion, but the movement itself. This is inscribed in the cultural and environmental landscape through which the walkers trek to encounter their ‘true self’. Here, then, we find an inversion in the apex of the pilgrimage, which has shifted from the point of arrival to the journey itself. Thus, the movement ceases to be a means to reach a destination beyond the subject and becomes the very condition of the encounter with oneself and with the sacred, manifested in the intimacy of each person. If there exists some sanctuary to be attained, this is found in the heart of each pilgrim and will be achieved on the journey, in the internal movement of the incessant search for one’s own self. The physical-spatial sanctuary gives way, then, to the sanctuary of the flow that transcends spatial coordinates and locates the pilgrim in the inner psychic geography of the spirit. Put another way, in the case of the pilgrimages presented here, there is neither sacred place, nor relics or saints to be revered. What exists is the path itself and the route to be undertaken by each pilgrim in search of himself. In this sense, the Paths of Saint James in Brazil can be seen to be reinterpreting and reinventing the very idea of pilgrimage, translating the worship of saints from the Catholic tradition into the reflexive search central to the religions of the self. Carlos Alberto Steil is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social Anthropology and Department of Public Policy, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS-Brazil). His research interests and publications focus on the anthropology of pilgrimage and religious tourism,

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Catholicism and New Age, anthropological theories, and environmental politics. Relevant publications include O sertão das romarias (C.A. Steil, Vozes, 1996), Maria entre os vivos (edited with C.L. Mariz and M.L. Reesink, UFRGS, 2003), Caminhos de Santiago no Brasil (edited with S. de Sá Carneiro, Contra Capa, 2011), On the Nature Trail (co-authored with R. Toniol, Nova, 2015) and the chapter ‘Studies of Catholicism and Pilgrimage in Brazil’, in New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies, Routledge, 2017).

Notes   1. The history of Catholicism in Brazil is shaped by the structural presence of the peregrinations. Two major moments can be identified in this history up to the end of the twentieth century. The main protagonists of the first moment, which begins with colonization in 1500, were the hermits, who headed the sanctuaries in the country’s interior, and the Brotherhoods, who maintained the cult in the urban centres. The second moment begins in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the process of Romanization and the arrival of European religious congregations in Brazil, which vied with the hermits and Brotherhoods for control of the sanctuaries in the rural world and the churches in the city. This dispute was marked by considerable symbolic and physical violence against these lay church members and a profound transformation of the sanctuaries as they fell under the sway of the clergy. What we can identify at the beginning of the twentieth century is a new moment, where peregrinations acquire a new meaning under the direction of new agents who no longer articulate the discourse of traditional devotional Catholicism, or the clerical discourse of Romanization, but a New Age spirituality, whose points of anchorage are energy grammar and self-religion (see Steil 2017).   2. Religions of the self are understood here through the distinction proposed by Thomas Csordas between religions of people, ethnic and political in intent, and religions of the self, the ultimate objective of which is subjective transformation (1996: 52–53).   3. In the paths studied here, we can observe an approximation with the situation of the sanctuaries described by Eade and Sallnow, in the sense that the force of the sanctuaries, like that of the paths, stems not from being framed within a single religious tendency, but rather from its capacity to reconcile diversity. Citing the authors: ‘The power of a shrine, therefore, derives in large part from its character almost as a religious void, a ritual space capable of accommodating diverse meanings and practices’ (Eade and Sallnow 1991: 15).   4. Given the complexity of the themes and the localization of the distinct geographic areas of the events, and aiming to elaborate a general overview of these pilgrimages, we made contact with other researchers from different parts of the country who were already developing case studies on one of the routes. They joined our project and helped compile the book with the contribution of specific chapters on the different paths.   5. This shift from the point of arrival to the path itself as the motivation for the walks had already been observed by Nancy Frey in relation to the Routes of Saint James in Spain: the author argues that the arrival point appears an anti-climax compared to the route itself (Frey 1998). This same shift in emphasis from the point of arrival to the

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actual movement of the pilgrimages was also widely explored in the book Reframing Pilgrimage by Coleman and Eade (2004). The change in Brazilian Catholicism was initiated during the papacy of Pius IX (1846), with the Romanization movement, which spread globally to include the New World. Its main objective was to place local and national Catholicism under the institutional control of the Roman Curia. A more detailed examination of the semantics of the terms peregrinação and romaria can be found in the chapter ‘Peregrinação, romaria e turismo religioso: raízes etimológicas e interpretações antropológicas’ (Steil 2003). The reduções are the former indigenous villages organized and administrated by Jesuits on the American continent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the objective of civilizing and evangelizing the indigenous peoples in the south of the American continent. In the book On the Nature Trail, co-authored with Rodrigo Toniol, we undertook a detailed analysis of the state’s mediating role in the promotion of events linked to the paths analysed here (Toniol and Steil 2015). This shift in the meaning of community was explored by Leila Amaral in her article ‘As implicações éticas dos sentidos Nova Era de comunidade’, in which she counterposes a ‘strong sense of community’, perceived in terms of belonging to a substantial group situated in a space defined by geographical and ethical boundaries, and a ‘weak sense’ in which ‘the community is seen as a broad movement in the world towards personal and social transformation’ (Amaral 1996: 64–65). The empirical data used in her analysis relate to her research on New Age in the Rajneeshpuram communities in Oregon in the United States, and in the Findhorn community in the UK. This transformation, however, is not completed in the outer act of the pilgrim, but relates always to the ascetic dimension of the interior journeys of a mystical encounter with ‘the Other’. As Victor Turner writes, ‘For the majority, pilgrimage was the great liminal experience of the religious life. If mysticism is an interior pilgrimage, pilgrimage is exteriorized mysticism’ (Turner and Turner 1978: 7).

References Amaral, L. 1996. ‘As implicações éticas dos sentidos Nova Era de comunidade’, Religião e Sociedade 17(1–2): 54–74. Bajc, V., S. Coleman and J. Eade. 2007. ‘Introduction: Mobility and Centring in Pilgrimage’. Mobilities 2(3): 321–329. Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coleman, S., and J. Eade (eds). 2004. Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion. London: Routledge. Csordas, T. 1994a. Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Csordas, T. 1994b. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Csordas, T. 1997. Language, Charisma and Creativity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Csordas, T. 2002. Body, Meaning, Healing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Csordas, T. 2004. ‘A Symptom of the Ineffable: Embodiment, Alterity, and the Theory of Religion’, Current Anthropology 45(2): 163–85.

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Eade, J., and M. Sallnow (eds). 1991. Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage. London: Routledge. Frey, N. 1998. Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sahlins, M. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. ASAO Special Publications 1. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Steil, C. 2003. ‘Peregrinação, Romaria e Turismo religioso: raízes etimológicas e interpretações Antropológicas’, in E. Abumanssur (ed.), Turismo religioso: ensaios antropológicos sobre religião e turismo. Campinas: Papirus, pp. 29–51. Steil, C. 2017. ‘Studies of Catholicism and Pilgrimage in Brazil: Continuities and Ruptures over the Long Term’, in D. Albera and J. Eade (eds), New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies: Global Perspectives. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, pp. 162–80. Steil, C., and S. de Sá Carneiro (eds). and 2011. Caminhos de Santiago no Brasil: interfaces entre turismo e religião. Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa & Faperj. Toniol, R., and C. Steil. 2015. On the Nature Trail: Converting the Rural into Ecological through a State Tourism Policy. New York: Nova Publishers. Turner, V. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. Turner, V., and E Turner. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press.

Afterword

Going beyond the Elusive Nature of Pilgrimage Dionigi Albera

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his book proposes a widening of the perspectives pursued by pilgrimage studies. The contributors investigate how mobility associated with different forms of migration is reflected by, and articulated with, pilgrimage. They concentrate on political and economic dimensions that have often been undervalued in both theoretical debates and the substantive study of pilgrimage around the world. A clear diagnosis of this situation was formulated by Simon Coleman fifteen years ago in a seminal essay in which he recommended ‘that we do not fall into the trap of confining our work to a pilgrimage ghetto, a theoretical cul-de-sac where it is assumed that the only relevant points of debate relate to other studies that purport to focus on pilgrimage’ (2002: 363, emphasis in the original). It could be argued that a somewhat ‘protectionist’ attitude was probably inescapable at a time when pilgrimage studies was emerging as a sub-discipline. Advocating an approach that avoided treating pilgrimage as an autonomous, isolated realm of anthropological theorizing, Coleman argued that ‘sacred travel frequently overlaps with tourism, trade, migration, expressions of nationalism, creations of diasporas, imagining communities’ (ibid.). In recent years, there has been a move towards more wide-ranging perspectives, and increasing attention has been paid to the aspects mentioned by Coleman. Some outstanding monographs have contributed to this shift (e.g. Kaufman 2004; Thal 2005; Lochtefeld 2010). The debate on the relations between tourism and pilgrimage (see Badone and Roseman 2004,

Notes for this chapter begin on page 188.

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for example) has contributed to this shift, but perhaps the most focused stimulus has come from recent comparative work by Ian Reader (2014).1 In its turn, this volume invites the reader to move along a wide itinerary, exploring several pilgrimages from Asia to Europe to Latin America. A broad array of religious traditions is taken into account (Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Protestant and Roman Catholic) as well as new forms of spirituality. Several authors work in a non-anglophone academic environment and this intellectual diversity is perceivable in the linguistic variety of their bibliographies. Thus, as a whole, this volume is somewhat akin to the work that John Eade and I developed recently in order to break down the barriers between different streams of pilgrimage research and to question the hegemony of the anglophone research tradition and the preoccupation with Christian pilgrimage, which often functions as a (more or less implicit) prototypical model (Albera and Eade 2015, 2017). Within pilgrimage studies it is possible to draw a distinction between two different approaches: on the one hand, a study of something else (society, culture, etc.) through (the lens of) pilgrimage and, on the other, a study of pilgrimage in order to construct a comparative theory of this phenomenon. After pointing to ‘the risk of confining conversations about pilgrimage to those scholars who happen to like to talk about religion’, Coleman remarks: The logic of my argument leads me to conclude that the most valuable work in this area is that which looks outward, making points about human behaviour through using ‘pilgrimage’ as a case-study rather than focussing on the institution itself as a firmly bounded category of action. (Coleman 2002: 363)

As the quote clearly shows, Coleman was strongly recommending the first option, i.e. a widespread interdisciplinary conversation outside the strict realm of religious studies. On my part, I would argue that the ‘study through’ and the ‘study of’ are complementary rather than alternatives. In other words, a rigid centripetal attitude runs the risk of narrowing the field and producing a confined canon. Yet the centrifugal option presents in its turn the danger of diluting research on pilgrimage and losing the theoretical advances in this field. I therefore suggest that we should keep alive the two approaches in the hope that cross-fertilization between them will generate a cumulative theoretical construction. The widening of the field that is at the centre of this volume, by taking into account the interplay between religion, economics and politics in pilgrimage and the relation between the latter and other forms of mobility, is better suited for an approach based on a ‘study through’. In the following, I will present some preliminary thoughts concerning a number

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of epistemological issues involved in enlarging the scope of a theory of pilgrimage. I will primarily engage in reflecting on the categories through which pilgrimage studies construct their research object.

The Birth of a Notion Within pilgrimage studies, a Western word (and more precisely an English word) is used as a unifying label for a kaleidoscopic assortment of phenomena, variously defined in other languages (Albera and Eade 2015, 2017). Obviously, this is a rather general phenomenon in the social sciences, which are embedded in Western hegemony linked to global political processes occurring during the last centuries. However, Ian Reader notes that the notion of ‘pilgrimage’ as a unitary category expressed in English remains viable and serves as a vital means of enabling people from different fields (linguistic, cultural and specializing in different religious traditions, and so on) to talk to each other, share ideas, develop cross-cutting theories and be able to recognize that their particular field of work, religious tradition and so on, need not be ghettoized or studied in a vacuum. (Reader 2017: 194)

Nevertheless, the use of an international lingua franca is not without problems. Academic discussion superimposes an English gloss that somewhat distorts local meanings and nuances. If we cannot help but resign ourselves to a measure of Eurocentrism, we should also adopt a critical and reflexive attitude in order to limit, as far as possible, the restrictions of this posture.2 Directly stemming from the Latin peregrinatio, the word ‘pilgrimage’ seems to have had an extremely long existence lasting more than two thousand years. Yet its genealogy shows that this continuity is rather misleading and that pilgrimage ‘is a concept at once commonplace and curiously elusive’ (Dyas 2001: 2). During Roman times, words like peregrinatio and peregrinus designated the condition of aliens or of those travelling abroad, without a religious connotation. It is only during the Middle Ages that these words begin to be associated with journeys with a religious purpose. This semantic displacement was very gradual both in Latin and in the Romance languages. Until the early modern period, for instance, French pellerin (in its different spellings) also kept the generic meaning of stranger and traveller. At the same time, a wide assortment of other words was still designating the itinerant shrine-visitor, often referring to the name or the symbols of the shrine. Definitions of ‘pilgrim’ in the seventeenth

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and eighteenth centuries’ English dictionary are not yet univocal: in some cases, the religious aspect is absolutely predominant, in others the meaning of traveller and wanderer is still prevalent (Edwards 2005: 20). The contemporary European vocabulary concerning pilgrimage is the result of a protracted historical process of conceptual amalgamation in Western Christianity. The single label of ‘pilgrimage’ covers a heterogeneous set of devotional manifestations, whether one visits Jerusalem, Lourdes or a minor sanctuary in the countryside. A very different tendency has characterized other religious traditions. For instance, Islam draws a rigid distinction between the ‘institutional’ pilgrimage to Mecca (Haij or umrah) and the visiting of other shrines (ziyara, safar). In several areas of the world, the words translated in English as ‘pilgrimage’ are linked to specific places or types of travel, or to the rites performed at the shrine. Often they do not imply a distinction between pilgrimages and other types of journey and gatherings of people. Hence, we must recognize that the unification of pilgrimage terminology in Western tradition establishes a commensurability between different forms of religious mobility that are kept distinct by other traditions or merged with non-religious phenomena. Scholars need to be aware of the historically located matrix of this conceptual tool and pay attention to other grids of classification of religious travel. This is crucial in order to grasp some subtle biases induced by the categories embedded in Western Christian history, especially from a connotative point of view, as I will seek to show in the following sections.

A Genealogy of ‘True’ Pilgrimage Ian Reader has successfully challenged ‘the tendency in pilgrimage studies to portray the dynamics of the marketplace as disjunctions from pilgrimage’s “true” and sacred nature’. By collecting an impressive amount of empirical evidence where pilgrimages are promoted in order to increase their clientele and are embedded in issues of consumerism, he has shown that these dynamics ‘are not antithetical to pilgrimage (or to “religion”), but crucial to its successful functioning, development, appeal and nature’ (Reader 2014: 14–15). What are the reasons for the amnesia that pilgrimage studies has displayed concerning these ‘material’ aspects? In an inspiring article exploring the relation between pilgrimage and tourism, Ellen Badone (2004: 185) has pointed to the existence ‘of a set of implicit oppositions in Western thinking that are themselves the product of the Judeo-Christian and classical heritage’. Pilgrimage is popularly associated with spiritual issues,

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asceticism and poverty, while tourism is related to material issues, money and consumption. Coleman and Eade in this volume have pointed to EuroAmerican, post-Enlightenment tendencies that draw boundaries between religion and the economy, and reflect ‘the post-Reformation, Christianinflected biases within social scientific theory’. It is possible to pursue the matter further by asking to what extent some connotative elements incorporated in the Western category of pilgrimage have encouraged these boundaries and hindered the understanding of how the market and the sacred interweave. The roots of the Christian vision of pilgrimage go back to Greek and Latin antecedents, and are not related to the description of a physical movement towards a shrine. Some crucial New Testament passages used Greek words meaning ‘to be a stranger, exiled’, or ‘go or be out of the country’ to describe the human condition, seen as a land of exile, where the believer is provisionally dwelling as a stranger in this world, waiting to reach his true heavenly homeland (II Cor 5:6–8; Hebrews 11:13 and 1 Peter 2:11). The ideas expressed in these passages exerted an immense influence through the centuries, crucially contributing to defining the conception of Christian life. Several authors developed the vision proposed in the aforementioned texts, and Latin Fathers of the Church rendered these ideas by having recourse to the noun peregrinus and the verb peregrinor. Already in the third century, Tertullian and Cyprian of Carthage employed these expressions drawing on Paul and Peter, to make clear the detachment that the Christians should manifest towards earthly affairs because they are simply exiles in this mundane life. In his turn, St. Augustine clearly states that Christians are transient guests in the world, peregrini in the earthly city, and must aim instead for their true homeland that awaits them, the divine city. The Vulgate translation of the New Testament in the late fourth century confirmed the theological success of the terms peregrinus and peregrinor in expressing this key aspect of Christian anthropology. Therefore, the Christian theology of pilgrimage was already defined even before pilgrimage developed as a practice. During the first centuries of Christianity, journeys to a holy site were extremely rare. Christian authors stressed the ubiquitous presence of God and contested the privilege attributed to particular places. It was only after Constantine that these visits started to expand and were later defined as ‘pilgrimages’, absorbing theological meanings already associated with this term. In an insightful book, Dee Dyas (2001) proposes a useful distinction between life-pilgrimage (life conceived as a pilgrimage towards a heavenly homeland) and place-pilgrimage (the journey to sacred sites). She makes clear that life-pilgrimage is the primary meaning (not only chronologically)

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of pilgrimage within Christian thought, while place-pilgrimages form but a part of a longer eternal journey. Thus, Dyas suggests a reversal of the familiar idea that life-pilgrimage is a metaphor based on material journeying. Within the Christian elaboration of the idea of pilgrimage, the journey of the soul towards union with God in the afterlife is the reality, while the physical journey to a sanctuary is a metaphor. This process is far from being exceptional within Christianity, since there has been a recurrent tendency to posit theological abstractions as the reality and worldly phenomena as mere images of it. For instance, the development of a sacramental conception of marriage was founded on the idea that concrete union between a man and a woman was a metaphor for the union between Christ and the Church. Over the centuries, place-pilgrimage was progressively included in the repertoire of Christian practices as ‘a miniature version of that longer, more complex journey which every soul must choose to undertake’ (Dyas 2001: 246). However, even in this formulation it was challenged by several authors, who asserted the ubiquitous presence of the sacred, a position powerfully expressed in several canonical texts. Even if pilgrimage developed as a powerful pastoral instrument in the hands of the Church, acceptance of travel to shrines was often reluctant. Place-pilgrimage was seen as presenting several dangers. For example, at the end of the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa condemned travel to the Holy Land for the moral dangers it created for pilgrims, both during the journey and while residing in the ‘sin city’ of Jerusalem (a ‘populous city with court and garrison, with prostitutes, play-actors and buffoons’, as Jerome described it in the same period).3 The physical journey implied a measure of independence for pilgrims, who were often outside the reach of the Church’s spiritual guidance and could yield to temptation. This problem primarily concerned the discipline of the body, and above all the correct conduct of women. Interior pilgrimage, on the other hand, was encouraged on the grounds that it involved an inner journey towards the divine and was modelled on the contemplative life of monks and mystics. Another sedentary alternative to geographical displacement towards shrines was moral pilgrimage, conceived as daily obedience to God in the place of one’s everyday life (Dyas 2001: 6). Within Christianity, the notion of pilgrimage has drawn on an extremely rich and stratified semantic field, made up of theological writings, doctrinal debates, ambivalent opinions, misleading translations, allegorical interpretations, literary and artistic expressions. So ‘pilgrimage’ is at the centre of a cluster of associated ideas, such as exile, strangeness, spirituality, regeneration, elevation towards God and so on. All these elements put the accent on the spiritual dimension of the journey. The body may enter

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this semantic field only as a suffering body, enduring the asperities of the journey in an attitude of expiation (which was exalted by the penitential pilgrimage). Overall, the ‘true’ pilgrimage is interpreted as a spiritual journey. It may take the form of a physical pilgrimage, but the body has to serve inner, transcendental aims. Pilgrimage as an objective social category is the inheritor of this immense history and carries the meanings and ambivalences accumulated along the centuries. This tendency affects the way Christian pilgrims experience pilgrimage as a subjective social category and encounter the difficulty of situating their practices in the realm of ‘true’ pilgrimage. Moreover, this semantic field also exerts a crucial influence on the scientific construction of ‘pilgrimage’ as an etic category. The partial and biased way through which Christianity has conceived the journey to visit a shrine works as an obstacle to the consideration of material elements in any theory of pilgrimage. These biases also influence scholarly debates about non-religious pilgrimages. Several authors have questioned the boundaries between pilgrimage and other forms of mobility and have expanded the meaning of pilgrimage to journeys that lack a religious purpose. In particular, relations with tourism have been explored, with the creation of intermediate categories such as ‘root tourism’ and ‘secular pilgrimage’. In contrast, some authors such as Margry (2008) maintain that the phenomena designated as pilgrimages should have a specific religious content. For him, the category of secular pilgrimage is a contradiction in terms. At the other extreme, there is the open position asserted by Badone, who distinguishes between conventional pilgrimages, i.e. travels to sites connected with religious institutions, and unconventional pilgrimages, i.e. journeys ‘to sites not associated with established religious traditions’ (2014: 8). In the latter category she lists a vast array of phenomena, including sunbathing at a Caribbean resort, American Anthropological Association meetings, and various modes of postmodern mobility that generate what Urry and Larsen (2011: 21) define as ‘intermittent moments of physical proximity’, such as festivals, conferences, holy days, camps, seminars and sites of protest. Badone is clearly advocating a Durkheimian perspective and is looking for those moments in the contemporary world where gatherings of people experience the sacred, conceived as a heightened moment of sociability. For Badone, religion ‘is not restricted to the domain of the divine, the supernatural, or to any particular moral code’ (2014: 9). She also draws on the Christian vision of pilgrimage, since she sees pilgrimage as a metaphor for other types of travel, with the elements that she identifies through this metaphor deeply linked to the Christian spiritual pilgrimage. Hence,

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unconventional pilgrimages are inserted into the wider case of ‘pilgrimages’ in as far as they express existential anxiety, desire for an authentic identity, self-transformation, research of meaning and self-transcendence (ibid.: 27–31). Other widespread elements that characterize the experience of pilgrims in various parts of the world, such as healing, requests for material benefits and amusement, are absent. Much of the literature on the relationship between pilgrimage, tourism and other postmodern forms of mobility appears oriented towards Western examples and, once again, runs the risk of evolving unconsciously in a semantic field conditioned by the Christian vision of pilgrimage. I would maintain that there is still a great amount of work to do in order to construct a more comprehensive international and transcultural comparative perspective on what Badone calls conventional pilgrimages.

Pilgrimage as a Comprehensive Choreography So far, I have examined broad issues linked to the theoretical and cross-cultural construction of the category of ‘pilgrimage’. As we have seen, this term is embedded in Western history and its use is inscribed in an inescapable asymmetry of scientific discourse, whose vocabulary reflects centuries of imperial domination. I have argued that the Christian construction of the category of pilgrimage has facilitated the comparative task of academic research from a denotative perspective, by unifying a vast set of religious travels under a unique label. However, the Christian model poses considerable interpretative problems from a connotative point of view, since it excessively narrows the range of practices, feelings and aims that are considered appropriate for a ‘true’ pilgrimage. Pilgrimage implies the movement not only of ‘souls’ (however understood) but also, above all, of bodies, which must be transported, nourished, sheltered and restored. It involves human beings in their entirety, with desires, needs and temptations that go beyond purely devotional dimensions. Pilgrims need assistance and are often willing to pay for it, hence the development of infrastructures along itineraries. ‘Temple merchants’ are always in the vicinity of the shrines, since they are one of the fundamental supports of the pilgrim’s experience. They offer devotional objects and services of different kinds, including amusement and entertainment. Even within the Christian world, lay and clerical entrepreneurs operating in the pilgrimage marketplace have always been deeply aware of the importance of these aspects when creating their strategies in order to enhance shrine visits. Yet these material dimensions have an uncertain

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religious status if conceived on the model of the spiritual journey. As I have suggested, this disjunction has also infiltrated recent academic research, which has unconsciously replicated several tropes developed through the millennia by Christian elaborations of pilgrimage. This point may help to explain why, in spite of their sensitivity to the entanglements of religion, politics and economy in pilgrimage, many authors have been reluctant to attribute the latter two categories full status within the pilgrimage arena. For instance, the Turners were profoundly conscious of the many factors involved in each pilgrimage, which lay well beyond the religious sphere. They conceived pilgrimage as a system forming a field in space-time but they envisaged it through an opposition between organism and environment, where the ‘organism’ comprised all the sacred aspects of the pilgrimage while the network of mundane ‘servicing mechanisms’ formed the ‘environment’ (Turner and Turner 1978: 22–26). The theoretical shift advocated by this present book implies a movement towards eliminating such a distinction between organism and environment; all the elements that the Turners placed in the environment are seen here as inherent dimensions of the overall phenomenon. In some respects, the French historian and anthropologist Alphonse Dupront may be considered a forerunner of this broadening of perspective. He maintained that pilgrimage contains a triad of elements, constituted by sacred ritual, festival and fair. He identified this tripartite schema within medieval Europe, but also suggested that it could be a more general trait of pilgrimage during other periods and in other parts of the world (Dupront 1987: 408–9). Contrary to the Turners, Dupront did not establish a sharp separation between sacred and mundane aspects, but sought to bring them together in his analysis. The widening of perspective that characterizes recent works, including this volume, may be worked through in various ways. Reader (2014) provides a comparative study that focuses on the interplay between religious and non-religious components in order to explain the emergence and the attraction of pilgrimage sites, and the construction of what Mario Katić defines as ‘pilgrimage capital’. However, a second direction is particularly relevant for this volume and is clearly stated in the introduction: it consists of studying the impact of pilgrimage in social, economic and political realms. A third direction could also concentrate on the practices of pilgrims and the symbols that are handled by them without establishing a distinction between sacred and mundane realms. Pursuing this latter approach poses several methodological problems, especially if we examine the experience of pilgrims not only at shrines but also before they leave, during the journey and once they reach home. In the following I will propose some preliminary reflections about how such a perspective could

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be developed, in which I will confine myself to a place-focused approach towards collective pilgrimages. Let me briefly refer to a pilgrimage that I have studied personally (Albera 2012). Every year on Ascension Day, thousands of ‘pied-noir’4 pilgrims attend the sanctuary of Our Lady of Santa Cruz in a poor, stigmatized neighbourhood of Nîmes (southern France) that contains a substantial number of immigrants from North Africa. In 1962, nearly a million ‘pieds-noirs’ had to leave Algeria under chaotic conditions; most went to France and settled principally in the south of the country. Emergency measures were taken to build houses for the displaced newcomers and this is how the district of Mas de Mingue, located about five kilometres from the city centre, first developed. Most ‘pieds-noirs’ in Mas de Mingue came from the Oran region, and by 1963 a neighbourhood association called the Friends of Our Lady of Santa Cruz had already been created. Two years later, one of the statues of the Virgin from the city of Oran was transferred to Nîmes and in 1966 the first pilgrimage on Ascension Day (the same day of the original pilgrimage in Oran) saw a huge participation by the ‘pieds-noirs’. A sanctuary was gradually developed on a hill near the neighbourhood and the numbers of pilgrims increased, reaching 100,000 in the 1980s, but the disaffection among younger ‘pieds-noirs’ has led to a decline in the number of participants over the last twenty years.5 Most of the ‘pieds-noirs’ families, including the leaders of the sanctuary’s neighbourhood association and the organizers of the pilgrimage, left the Mas de Mingue during the 1970s and 1980s, often moving into more comfortable residential areas in the surrounding region. Low-income families moved into local affordable public housing, and this departure of the middle class has led to the creation of a ghetto similar to those in other French banlieues. About half of the population is of foreign origin, mainly from the Maghreb (Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians). On Ascension Day the pilgrims carry out an incessant back and forth movement between the sanctuary and the neighbourhood. Throughout the morning, several Masses are celebrated in the sanctuary, beginning at 7 a.m., while crowds invade the impoverished centre of the neighbourhood. At the other end of the neighbourhood is a market where dozens of itinerant vendors sell mostly North African food, and in this locale, which is much frequented by pilgrims, the flavours and smells remind one of the Maghreb. During the day, pilgrims circulate back and forth between the two poles of the sanctuary and the market, along the main street of the neighbourhood. They stop and meet friends and acquaintances with hugs, kisses, laughter and loud verbal exchanges. This movement occurs in a space that is heavily invested with the memory of Oran and the symbols

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of ‘pied-noir’ identity. The toponomy of the Mas de Mingue also reflects the traces of the ‘pieds-noirs’ who have lived here, and so there are frequent references to Algeria, especially to Oran. Walking in the neighbourhood implies, therefore, a kind of journey into a past ‘pied-noir’ life. Another element that marks the temporary appropriation of the neighbourhood by ‘pied-noir’ pilgrims is the huge quantity of placards with Oran street names or the names of that region’s villages and towns, placed about the area and displayed on walls or trees. These placards, which indicate the meeting points for those who once lived in these places in colonial Algeria, create an additional ephemeral toponomy. Even the sound dimension has powerful connotations: songs that describe the experience of ‘pieds-noirs’ echo in the market space, while the church chants resonate through loudspeakers placed throughout the area, penetrating even the houses, when the procession moves from the church at the centre of the neighbourhood towards the sanctuary. Hence, for one day each year, the pilgrimage at Nîmes operates as a kind of ephemeral reterritorialization of the Oran ‘pied-noir’ community, whose identity is fictionally recreated through a performative process. In Michel Foucault’s terms (2001), the complex of the sanctuary and the neighbourhood can be defined as a heterotopia, a space of otherness that is simultaneously physical and mental. From this perspective, the sanctuary and the neighbourhood are closely related multivocal and ambiguous symbols. The presence of an Arab Muslim population living in the neighbourhood generates additional symbolic dimensions. Along the main street, several women and children sell drinks and homemade cakes, while some bars and restaurants are operated by individuals or neighbourhood associations for which the pilgrimage is an important source of funding. To match the demand for goods and services provoked by nostalgia among ‘pieds-noirs’, products sold on Ascension Day evoke the Maghreb (hence the profusion of couscous, mint tea and North African cakes). Yet for pilgrims these items conjure up an image of a neighbourhood more universally Arab than it is in actuality. This Arab presence, underlined by the traditional dress of many women, contributes to the reterritorialization process of a North African past that is embedded in the pilgrimage itself. And the asymmetry of the positions – with the ‘Arabs’ in the role of providing services to the pilgrims, who have superior economic power – is reminiscent of the colonial past. Another element complicating the pilgrimage framework involves the acts of devotion to the Virgin Mary expressed by many Muslim women from the neighbourhood. These women visit the shrine throughout the year, bringing candles, flowers or packets of henna, or inserting folded papers with requests and prayers. They repeat their visits during Ascension

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Day, and at different times of the day they climb up to the sanctuary where they mix with Christian pilgrims, light candles and pray before the various statues of the Virgin. It is possible, then, to see this pilgrimage as a ‘global semiotic set’ in which ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ elements compose a common idiom. Its choreography has been progressively built up over time through the intervention of several local actors, with the Church only peripherally involved. The various elements have been arranged with a certain degree of serendipity. In 2017, owing to constraints imposed by a state of emergency in France, the pilgrimage was confined to the area of the sanctuary for the first time. There was no market and the procession did not start from the neighbourhood, much to the obvious disappointment of the great majority of the pilgrims. The Nîmes example suggests a number of comparisons with established French Marian pilgrimages, where the interplay between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ spaces comprises a vital dimension in the experience of pilgrims. Since the nineteenth century, the popularity of Lourdes, for example, has been linked to a complex interplay of economic and political forces. The action of interest groups, the presence of railway infrastructures and an early consumerist emphasis were decisive factors in the shrine’s growth. Yet while Lourdes’ commercial orientation has been just as important as the spiritual magnetism of the grotto, its apparitions and the miracles, it has often been criticized. In 1870, Henri Lasserre, who had just published a bestseller on Lourdes, wrote a memoir addressed to the Vatican denouncing the venality of the clergy in charge of the sanctuary, accusing them of exploiting its resources (for instance, selling ‘holy water’) and permitting the sale of rosaries, candles, photographs and medals (Harris 1990: 191). In his novel on Lourdes, Zola (1897: 83) wrote that ‘the triumph of the Grotto had brought about such a passion for lucre, such a burning, feverish desire to possess and enjoy, that extraordinary perversion set in, growing worse and worse each day, and changing Bernadette’s peaceful Bethlehem into a perfect Sodom or Gomorrah’. In his fieldwork notes he also reports information concerning the presence of prostitution in the town (Zola 1968: 432–3). With the growth of national and diocesan pilgrimages since 1870, the sanctuary was increasingly characterized by the development of a choreography based on the display of the suffering bodies of thousands of patients, assisted by volunteers, a permanent feature of Lourdes’ pilgrimage up to the present. This development contrasted with a more joyful atmosphere in other sectors of the town. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1906: 299) concisely captured this dual nature: ‘Lourdes is like an immense St. Louis hospital, poured into a gigantic

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Neuilly festival. It is an essence of horror drained in a ton of fat joy. It is both painful and buffoon-like and churlish’.6 In an insightful essay, first published in 1958, Alphonse Dupront (1987: 340–65) developed some important reflections on Lourdes, seen as an assemblage of collective piety and merchandise. He deals with what he defines as the shrine’s ‘permanent scandal’ where there is a strong tendency to exploit the pilgrims throughout their stay. In his view, Lourdes could not be confined to its religious dimension: the pilgrims’ movements between the sanctuary and the city market constituted the structural elements of their involvement. Lourdes was not simply a clerical creation, therefore, but bore the mark of all those who made it, both exploiters and exploited. If we compare the Nîmes and Lourdes pilgrimages, we notice different articulations between religious and non-religious aspects. What operates in Lourdes is mainly a grammar of opposition between devotional activities, centred on the suffering body at the sanctuary, and hedonistic activities in the town. In Nîmes, on the contrary, there is continuity from the marketplace to the sanctuary, where all the practices rely on the common ground of a symbolic register based around memory and nostalgia. These two examples suggest a possible way of developing a comparative perspective through an exploration of how, in different contexts, pilgrimages are constructed as choreographies that operate distinctive relationships between the various facets of the pilgrim’s experience, both sacred and mundane. Research on non-Christian pilgrimages may offer fascinating comparative elements from this point of view. Here I provide two suggestive examples. Sarah Thal’s study of the pilgrimage shrine complex of Konpira on Mount Zōzu in Shikoku (Japan) shows that in the seventeenth century the priests simultaneously developed the attractions of both the shrine and the town, with its markets and entertainments. In this way, ‘performances, prostitution, and gambling proved as integral to the growth of the site as amulets and worship’ (Thal 2005: 74). During the second half of the same century, in accordance with shogunate policy, the priests started issuing bans on gambling and prostitution, and these pronouncements were reiterated during the eighteenth century, apparently without success. Prostitution, in particular, continued to be central to the pilgrimage business. Finally, in 1824 the priests officially recognized that prostitution played a vital role in the town and formally permitted it with only certain restrictions. This attitude contrasted with the policy of shogunate officers who repeatedly attempted to halt prostitution during this time (ibid.: 103–4). Theatrical performances were also important, as well as drinking, and helped to generate ‘a bustling, at times chaotic revelry as hundreds of thousands

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of people visited the mountain to pray, pay, and play at the site of the deity’ (ibid.: 114). Similar features appear in Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen’s study (2004) of the pilgrimage of Tantâ (Egypt) from the Middle Ages to the present. For several centuries this pilgrimage (mawlid) was one of the most important in the Muslim world and sometimes attracted even more people than Mecca itself. It was linked to the figure of a Sufi saint, Sayyid al-Badawî, who died here during the thirteenth century. Shrine and pilgrimage were managed by a Sufi brotherhood, which maintained a complex relationship with both the representatives of ‘official’ Islam, such as the ulema, and different officials and political leaders. From the fifteenth century the pilgrimage was known for sexual transgression, and for this reason a group of ulema tried to halt it in 1447, their success being limited only to that year (Mayeur-Jaouen 2004: 129–30). From the eighteenth century Tantâ developed a strong commercial character and the pilgrimage coincided with the largest fair in Egypt (ibid.: 139), attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors from other Near Eastern countries. During the nineteenth century Tantâ reached its apogee as a pilgrimage, a festival and a fair. Crowds of pilgrims camped around the town and spent several days in a vibrant atmosphere where Sufi prayers and songs alternated with entertainment from dancers, jugglers and storytellers. The saint had the reputation of helping fecundity, and sexual effervescence has often been described for this gathering of people. Female (and sometimes also male) prostitution was a notable feature of the pilgrimage, and prostitutes joined the final day procession through the town. The procession also included masquerades and carnivalesque elements.7 In order to avoid the reduction of the field to the narrow ‘spiritual’ domain suggested by a Christian vision, it is crucial to take into account the bodily experience of pilgrims, therefore. Approaching pilgrimage in terms of choreography means conceiving it as an art form through which the performative sequences of physical bodies are organized. The repertoire of pilgrimage practices may include − besides travel, processions, worship, prayers, self-mortification, fasting, ecstasies, rituals, apparitions, miracles, healing, spiritual elevation and so on − the consumption of food, alcohol and drugs, as well as entertainment, parades, carnivalesque inversion, consumerism, courtship and prostitution. Religious institutions try to impose an overall design on this choreography but they rarely have a monopoly. Nor is the attitude of religious entrepreneurs monolithic. It may change with time and there are often discrepancies, concurrences and oppositions within the same religious field. In other words, there is no single authorship. Not only do several agencies regularly contribute to organizing the stage, but the enactment of the ‘script’ by the pilgrims is also

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frequently creative and may generate feedback for the entire conception of the choreography. It is this field, therefore, that constitutes the semantics of a pilgrimage and which should be taken into account as a whole. Following Dupront’s classification, we should find a way of thinking together about the semiotic implications of the sacred ritual, the festival and the fair. Drawing on intellectual tools elaborated in linguistics by authors such as De Saussure and Jakobson, in psychoanalysis by Lacan, and in anthropology by Lévi-Strauss, I suggest that, like all symbolic activity, pilgrimage articulates the mechanisms of metonymy and metaphor. The examples I have just examined indicate that the basic orientation is metonymy, which operates through the articulation and combination of different elements in the spatio-temporal framework of the pilgrim experience. This creates a context that links contents which are closely associated, while often being dissonant. Metonymy is thus the art of orchestrating disparate elements that are found in praesentia. These contents are situated on what De Saussure called a syntagmatic, horizontal axis. In contrast, metaphor does not proceed step by step but operates a gap. It performs a substitution in absentia, while identifying a similarity, and is located on a paradigmatic, vertical axis. Metaphor and metonymy are interdependent and, as Lacan (1981: 259) has suggested, metonymy makes the metaphor possible. In this way, during pilgrimage deeply personal and embodied experiences are intertwined with more abstract, general meanings that are crucial for substantiating imagined religious or political communities. This process operates a shift from ‘experience-near’ to ‘experience-distant’ concepts, to adopt a distinction formulated by Clifford Geertz (1983: 57; see also White 1997: 9; Niedźwiedź 2014). As we have seen, the Christian conception of pilgrimage operates a reverse orientation, by positing metaphor as primary. This approach has narrowed the metonymic possibilities of the repertoire of what is considered as ‘true’ pilgrimage. In the most radical option, the Christian vision denies the legitimacy of pilgrimage itself, if conceived as an array of heterogeneous performances orchestrated through a metonymic logic in a spatio-temporal setting. This radical vision proposes instead a purely interior journey or fuels the destructive Protestant critique of pilgrimage. Dionigi Albera is a CNRS Director of Research at the Institute of Mediterranean, European and Comparative Ethnology, University of Aix-Marseille. His research interests and publications focus on anthropological theories concerning pilgrimage and on the mixing of religious devotional beliefs and practices, especially in the context of shared shrines. Publications include Sharing Sacred Spaces in the Mediterranean: Christians,

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Muslims and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries (edited with M. Couroucli, Indiana University Press, 2012), International Perspectives on Pilgrimage Studies (Routledge, 2015) and New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies (Routledge, 2017), both of which he co-edited with J. Eade.

Notes  1. This broadening of perspective is not confined to anglophone milieus. For instance, the volume edited by Sylvia Chiffoleau and Anne Madoeuf (2005) brought together various contributions concerned with economic and political aspects of pilgrimages in the Maghreb and the Middle East. Another collection published in Italy (Albera and Blanchard 2015a) is also akin to this volume and is devoted to the exploration of the imbrications of contemporary pilgrimages with political and economic dynamics in the Mediterranean region, with particular attention to different forms of mobility (Albera and Blanchard 2015b).  2. This attitude may find inspiration in Ernesto De Martino’s conception of ‘critical ethnocentrism’, by which ‘the Western (or Westernized) ethnologist assumes the history of his own culture as the unit of measurement of alien cultural histories, but at the same time, in the act of measuring he becomes conscious of … the limits of his own system of measurement and thus is opened to the task of reforming the very categories of observation that he started out with’ (De Martino 1977: 396–97). See also Saunders (1993).   3. Criticism of pilgrimage to the Holy Land and of the citizens of Jerusalem is developed in Gregory’s Letter 2 and Jerome’s Letter 58. For a discussion of these positions see BittonAshkelony (2005) and Brazinski (2015). For an English translation see http://www.tertullian.org/fathers2/NPNF2-05/Npnf2-05-33.htm#P2974_2009392 and http://www. tertullian.org/fathers2/NPNF2-06/Npnf2-06-03.htm#P2809_736633.  4. This term refers to French citizens of various origins who lived in Algeria prior to its independence.   5. For a comprehensive account of the history of this pilgrimage see Baussant (2002).  6. The hospital of St. Louis was a well-known clinic in Paris. The expression ‘Neuilly festival’ makes reference to one of the most important fairgrounds attracting the inhabitants of the French capital at that time.  7. These aspects are not only present in Tantâ’s mawlid. In Egypt the word mawlid designates an annual or seasonal pilgrimage to a holy place linked to a saint. This word also evokes disorder, debauchery and sexual licence, and can be employed in a generic way to mean an agitated crowd. Moreover, the term mawâldiyya (people of the mawlid) indicates both members of Sufi confraternities, who usually frequent these pilgrimages, and fairground stallholders and entertainers (Mayeur-Jaouen 2005: 21).

References Albera, D. 2012. ‘The Virgin Mary, the Sanctuary and the Mosque: Interfaith Coexistence at a Pilgrimage Centre’, in W. Jansen and C. Notermans (eds), Gender, Nation and Religion in European Pilgrimage. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 193–208.

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Albera, D., and M. Blanchard (eds). 2015a. Pellegrini del nuovo millennio: Aspetti economici e politici delle mobilità religiose. Palermo: Mesogea. Albera, D., and M. Blanchard. 2015b. ‘L’economia politica dei pellegrinaggi’, in D. Albera and M. Blanchard (eds), Pellegrini del nuovo millennio: Aspetti economici e politici delle mobilità religiose. Palermo: Mesogea. Albera, D., and J. Eade (eds). 2015. International Perspectives on Pilgrimage Studies: Itineraries, Gaps, and Obstacles. New York: Routledge. Albera, D., and J. Eade (eds). 2017. New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies: Global Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Badone, E. 2004. ‘Crossing Boundaries: Exploring the Borderlands of Ethnography, Tourism and Pilgrimage’, in E. Badone and S. Roseman (eds), Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 180–90. Badone, E. 2014. ‘Conventional and Unconventional Pilgrimages: Conceptualizing Sacred Travel in the Twenty-First Century’, in A. Pazos (ed.), Redefining Pilgrimage: New Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Pilgrimages. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 7–31. Badone, E., and S. Roseman (eds). 2004. Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Baussant, M. 2002. Pieds-noirs: mémoires d’exils, Paris: Stock. Chiffoleau, S., and A. Madoeuf. 2005. ‘Les pèlerinages au Maghreb et au Moyen-Orient: Introduction’, in S. Chiffoleau and A. Madoeuf (eds), Les pèlerinages au Maghreb et au Moyen-Orient: Espaces publics, espaces du public. Beirut: Institut francais du ProcheOrient, pp. 7–35. Coleman, S. 2002. ‘Do You Believe in Pilgrimage? Communitas, Contestation and Beyond’, Anthropological Theory 2(3): 355–68. De Martino, E. 1977. La fine del mondo: Contributo alle analisi delle apocalissi culturali (1960– 1965). Turin: Einaudi. Dupront, A. 1987. Du Sacré. Croisades et pèlerinages. Images et langages. Paris: Gallimard. Dyas, D. 2001. Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature: 700–1500. Cambridge: Brewer. Eade, J., and M. Sallnow (eds). 1991. Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage. London: Routledge. Edwards, P. 2005. Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. 2001. ‘Les espaces autres’, in Dits et écrits. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 1571–81. Geertz, C. 1983. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Harris, R. 1999. Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Huysmans, J.-K. 1906. Les foules de Lourdes. Paris: Stock. Kaufman, S. 2004. Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lacan, J. 1981. Le Séminaire, livre III: Les psychoses. Paris: Seuil. Lochtefeld, J. 2010. God’s Gateway: Identity and Meaning in a Hindu Pilgrimage Place. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Margry, P.J. 2008. ‘Secular Pilgrimage: A Contradiction in Terms?’, in P.J. Margry (ed.), Shrines and Pilgrimages in the Modern World: New Itineraries into the Sacred. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 13–38. Mayeur-Jaouen, C. 2004. Histoire d’un pèlerinage légendaire en islam: Le mouled de Tantâ du XIIIe siècle à nos jours. Paris: Aubier. Mayeur-Jaouen, C. 2005. Pèlerinages d’Egypte. Histoire de la piété copte et musulmane: XVe-XXe siècles. Paris: Editions de l’EHESS. Niedźwiedź, A. 2014. ‘Competing Sacred Places: Making and Remaking of National Shrines in Contemporary Poland’, in J. Eade and M. Katić (eds), Crossing the Borders: Pilgrimage, Politics and Place-Making in Eastern Europe. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, pp. 79–102.

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Reader, I. 2014. Pilgrimage in the Marketplace. New York: Routledge. Reader, I. 2017. ‘Breaking Barriers, Eroding Hegemony: Reflections on the Importance of Multilingual Studies of Pilgrimage beyond the Anglophone World’, in D. Albera and J. Eade (eds), New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies: Global Perspectives. New York: Routledge, pp. 181–198. Saunders, G.R. 1993. ‘“Critical Ethnocentrism” and the Ethnology of Ernesto De Martino’, American Anthropologist, New Series 95(4): 875–93. Thal, S. 2005. Rearranging the Landscape of the Gods: The Politics of a Pilgrimage Site in Japan: 1573–1912. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Turner, V., and E. Turner. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Urry, J. and J. Larsen 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: Sage. White, G.M. 1997. ‘Museum/Memorial/Shrine: National Narrative in National Spaces’, Museum Anthropology 21(1): 8–27. Zola, E. 1897. Lourdes. Translated by Ernest A. Vizetelly. New York: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers. Zola, E. 1968. ‘Mon voyage à Lourdes’, in Œuvres complètes. Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, T. VIII, pp. 401–470.

Index

A

Abe, Shinzo, 40 active economic agents, 145 Agrawal, Kedar Prasad, 49–50 Ajanta Ellora, 46, 57n5 Akihito (crown prince), 42 Ali (Shiite martyr), 69, 72n15 ambiguity, 11, 78, 157, 183 Anderson, Benedict, 81 Appanah, Nathacha, 28 Arabia, 10 Arab Muslims, in France, 183–84 Artress, Lauren, 124–25 Asad, T., 131n2 Austria-Hungary, 107 Austrian Croats, 107–8 avliyo (saint). See Uzbekistan

B

al-Badawî, Sayyid, 186 Badone, Ellen, 126, 176–77, 179–80 Bambi, Celso, 119–23, 131n10 Baraka (blessing power), 63, 75, 78, 85, 89n5 Baror, Imom Xoja Islamic conversion and, 77, 79 shrine of, 13–14, 75, 77–81, 84–88 Barro, Robert, 2–3 Basantrai, Dayanand, 32 Beaman, Lori, 124–25 Bedouin, 10 Benedict, Burton, 35 Bhojpuri, 27 Bhutto, Benazir, 65–66 Bhutto, Zulfiqar Ali, 65–67, 72n10 Black Madonnas. See dark Madonnas blessing power (Baraka), 63, 75, 78, 85, 89n5 Bobovac, 99, 101, 103, 106–7 contestation of, 100, 104–5

pilgrimage capital of, 100, 102 Bodh Gaya Japanese and, 12–13, 42, 47–56 transnational courting and, 50–54, 56 body in Christian pilgrimage, 178–79, 185 movement and, 164–67, 169, 170n5, 180 Paths of Saint James and, 163–66 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 14, 94, 97, 103 Catholic Church in, 98, 100, 104–6, 109–10 Central and Eastern Europeans in, 106–7 Bosniaks (Muslims), 97, 99–100 Bosnian Croats, 110 Bobovac pilgrimage of, 99–107 Kondžilo pilgrimage of, 14, 94–96, 106 Olovo pilgrimage of, 94, 106 Podmilačje pilgrimage of, 94, 96–105, 107–8 Bosnian Serbs, 14, 95–97, 104–5 Bourdieu, Pierre, 14, 110n1, 165 Brazil Catholicism in, 15–16, 155–69, 170n1, 170n6, 171n6 Paths of Saint James in, 155–69, 170n3, 171n9 Brown, Dan, 119 Buddhists, 57n1 India and, 12–13, 40–43 Japanese, 6, 13, 40–56 Bukhara, 76, 82–83, 89, 89n1 Bahouddin Naqshband and, 84–85 Imom Xoja Baror shrine of, 13–14, 75, 77–81, 84–88

C

Cabon, Marcel, 29, 37n2

Index

192

caminh/caminhante (path/walker). See walkers Caminhos de Santiago. See Paths of Saint James Caminhos de Santiago no Brasil (Steil and Carneiro), 157–58, 167 capital contemporary restructuring of, 3, 145–46 pilgrimage, 14, 93–95, 100–106, 109–10, 110n1, 181 spiritual, 64–66 capitalism, pilgrimage as antecedent to, 1 caretakers (khâdim), 66–67, 72n11 Carneiro, S. de Sá, 157–58, 167 Carsignol, Anouck, 24 category, pilgrimage as, 70 Christian construction of, 175–80 pilgrimage capital and, 93–94 Catholic Church, 161–62, 168–69 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 98, 100, 104–6, 109–10 energy pilgrimage and shrines of, 115–26, 128–30, 131nn15–16 Catholicism, 36 Bosnian Croats and, 94–109 in Brazil, 15–16, 155–69, 170n1, 170n6, 171n6 energy grammar and, 112, 114, 121, 128–30 LDM and, 138–40, 150 in Mexico, 137–38, 150, 152n3 New Age and sites of, 14–15, 112–13, 115 Chartres, 112–13 dark Madonna statue of, 123, 131n14 energy pilgrimages and, 117–18, 123–24, 128, 131nn15–16 labyrinth of, 122–26, 131n14 choreography, 184–87 Christianity pilgrimage vision of, 176–80, 188n3 in Uzbekistan, 90n13 chronotope, 83, 90n14, 145 Claveyrolas, Mathieu, 12 Clémentin-Ojha, C., 59 Coleman, Simon, 3, 173–74 commercialism, 6 communitas, 1–2, 28, 34, 86, 164 community, 164, 171n10 concept, of pilgrimage, 175–80 Contes de l’enfant Bihari (Cabon), 29, 37n2 contestation, 100, 104–5 contract, 71n1, 153n12

pilgrimage antecedent to, 1 Sufism and, 63, 72n11 control processes, 102–3 conventional, unconventional pilgrimages, 179–80 Creole Guadalajara as, 150 Mauritian, 23, 36 Crooke, William, 26 Csordas, Thomas, 163–64, 170n2

D

dark Madonnas, 113, 116, 123, 131nn13–14 dark waters (kala pani), 27–28 The Da Vinci Code (Brown), 119 Dayal, 31–32 De Martino, Ernesto, 188n2 Devi, Ananda, 28 diaspora, 21, 24–25 Discourses of the Vanishing (Ivy), 53 Doctor, Manilal, 24 domlo (teacher). See Sufism dreams, in Islam, 79, 81, 89nn7–8 Dupront, Alphonse, 181, 185, 187 Dyas, Dee, 177–78

E

economic impact. See specific topics economy. See specific topics Egypt, 186, 188n7 embodiment. See also body Paths of Saint James and, 156, 163–68 phenomenology, semiotics and, 163–64 energy grammar, 14–15, 125, 156, 170n1. See also Goddess movement; New Age Catholicism and, 112, 114, 121, 128–30 telluric energy in, 117, 119–20, 123, 126–27 as transnational lingua franca, 113, 116, 128–30, 155 energy pilgrimages, 112–14, 131n10. See also spiritual pilgrimage Catholic Church and, 115–26, 128–30, 131nn15–16 Chartres and, 117–18, 123–24, 128, 131nn15–16 in Vézelay, 117, 119–22, 128 environment, of pilgrimage, 4, 181 ethnocentrism, critical, 188n2 ethnography multi-sited, 4, 9, 71n4 strategically situated, 71n4

Index

etymology, of pilgrimage, 175–77, 180 Eurocentrism, 175–76

F

Fag’naviy, Xoja Mahmud Anjir, 81 fair Dupront on, 181, 187 in Egypt, 186 Sufi, 60–61 Fatima, shrine of, 129 Feldhaus, Anne, 9 festival Dupront on, 181, 187 of Neuilly, 185, 188n6 Sufi, 67 fetishization, 6–7 Foucault, Michel, 183 France Chartres in, 112–13, 117–18, 122–26, 128, 131nn14–16 Lourdes in, 104, 127, 184–85 Neuilly in, 185, 188n6 Nîmes in, 182–85

G

Gandhi, 24, 43 Ganga Talao, 12, 35, 37 Ganges and, 30–33 intra-Hindu conflict over, 36 Ganges, 30–33 gathering node, 105–6, 109 Geertz, Clifford, 187 genealogy, of pilgrimage, 176–80 geographical dowry, 52–54 Giddens, Anthony, 114 Glick Schiller, N., 153n11 Goddess movement, 115–16, 123–24 Gökceada (Greek Imvros), 108 Gonzalez, Aaron Joaquin, 139–40, 152n5 Gossagne, Giri, 30–31, 34 Gothic cathedral of Chartres, 122–26, 131n14 as power place, 116–17 Grace Cathedral (San Francisco, CA), 124–25 Grand Bassin. See Ganga Talao Green, Nile, 59–60 Guadalajara, Mexico, 153n13, 153n18 HP in, 138–40, 142, 145–50, 152n4 LDM and, 15, 136–40, 150–51, 152nn4–5 pilgrims in, 141–42, 144–51, 153nn15–16

193

H

habitus, 165 hagiography, 76, 78, 84, 88 Hajj, 10–11, 70, 81, 176 Hanafi School, 83 Harvey, David, 102 Hazareesingh, K., 27, 30 hermeneutics, 156 Hermosa Provincia (HP), 138–40, 142, 152n4 Mexican-Americans in, 145–48 pilgrims in, 147–50 Hinduism, 59, 71n1, 72n5 Mauritian, 12, 21, 23, 25–37, 72n18 in Sehwan Sharif, 62–64, 72n8 Hindu Maha Sabha (HMS), 30, 34 Hindutva/hindu-ness, 25, 25n1, 32–33, 36 HMS. See Hindu Maha Sabha Holy Supper (Santa Cena), 136, 138–39, 141, 143, 152n7 economy and, 144–46 ludic activities during, 148–49 Hotel Mahamaya, 50–51 HP. See Hermosa Provincia Hungarian Croats, 107 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 184–85

I

Imvros (Turkish Gökceada), 108 indenture Hinduism and, 26–27 in Mauritius, 12, 22–30, 35, 37 India, 5, 21, 64, 72n13 Buddhist pilgrimage in, 12–13, 40–43 Japanese Buddhists in, 42–56 Japanese development aid to, 43, 46–48, 55, 57n4 Mauritius and, 23–30, 35, 72n18 Inoue, Yuki, 50–52, 55–56 interior pilgrimage, 178 Islam, 13–14, 36, 89n8, 183–84 Hajj in, 10–11, 70, 81, 176 in Soviet Union, 80–81, 83, 90n9 Tantâ pilgrimage of, 186, 188n7 in Uzbekistan, 72n8, 75–89, 89n7, 89nn1–5, 90n9, 90nn11–12 Ismaili Shiism, 59 Ivy, Marilyn, 53

J

Jaffe, Richard, 42 Jalisco, Mexico, 138, 149–50, 152n3 Jansen, Katherine, 118

Index

194

Japan, 5, 10–11, 185–86 Buddhists of, 6, 12–13, 40–56 development aid of, 43, 46–48, 55, 57n4 tourism of, 43–46, 48, 57n3 Japanese Market Survey, 43–46, 53 Jerusalem, 176, 178, 188n3 Jesuit Guarani missions (reduções), 160, 171n8

K

kala pani (dark waters), 27–28 Kanwar pilgrimage, 8 Karimov, Islam, 82–84, 90n10 Kelsky, Karen, 55 khâdim (caretakers), 66–67, 72n11 Kitabatake Doryu, 42 Knibbe, Kim, 131n2 Kondžilo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 97, 104–5 Madonna of, 95–96, 100, 103 pilgrimage of, 14, 94–96, 106 Konpira (Japan), 185–86 Koyagi, Mikiya, 10

L

labour migration. See migration labyrinth, 122–26, 131n14 Lacan, Jacques, 187 Lachaier, Pierre, 59 Lasserre, Henri, 184 Latin America. See specific countries LDM. See La Luz del Mundo ley lines, 117, 123 life-pilgrimage, 177–78 Light of the World. See La Luz del Mundo lingam (phallic representation), 31–33 lingua franca energy grammar as, 113, 116, 128–30, 155 pilgrimage as, 175 Lourdes, France, 104, 127, 184–85 ludic activities, 148–49 La Luz del Mundo (The Light of the World, LDM), 152nn8–9, 153n12. See also Guadalajara; Mexico; Pentecostalism Catholicism and, 138–40, 150 Guadalajara and, 15, 136–40, 150–51, 152nn4–5 Holy Supper ceremony of, 136, 138–39, 141, 143–46, 148–50, 152n7 pilgrims of, 141–42, 144–51, 153nn15–17

M

Madonna dark, 113, 116, 123, 131nn13–14 of Kondžilo, 95–96, 100, 103 Mahabodhi Temple, 49 marketplace, 7–8, 15, 176, 180–81 energy pilgrimages and, 113–14, 125–26 Japanese Buddhism and, 6, 43–46, 53 Konpira shrine complex and, 185–86 labyrinth and, 124–25 Nîmes pilgrimage and, 182–85 of offerings, 67–68 Paths of Saint James and, 155, 157, 162, 168 Sufism and, 60–63, 66–69 Marx, Emanuel, 10 Mary Magdalene, 113, 116, 123, 125, 131n11 relic controversy of, 118–19, 131n8 in Vézelay, 117–22 Mas de Mingue. See Nîmes, France Mauritius Ganga Talao in, 12, 30–33, 35–37 Hinduism of, 12, 21, 23, 25–37, 72n18 indenture in, 12, 22–30, 35, 37 Islam of, 36 mawlid (pilgrimage), 186, 188n7 Mayeur-Jaouen, Catherine, 186 McChesney, Robert, 75 McCorriston, Joy, 9–10 McLeary, Rachel, 2–3 metaphor and metonymy, 187 Mexican-Americans, 145–48 Mexico Catholicism in, 137–38, 150, 152n3 migrants of, 15, 137, 139–40, 151n1 migration, 4 of Bosnian Croats, 94–96, 103–4, 109 Indo-Mauritian, 25–28 Mexican, 15, 137, 139–40, 151n1 movement and, 11, 15, 136, 153n11 Uzbek, 86–88, 90n15 minority religious group Bosnian Croats as, 109–10 LDM as, 139, 142, 150 Mirziyoyev, Shavkat, 90n10 mobility class, 112 mobility paradigm, 61–62 Mohajirs, 72n16 moral pilgrimage, 178 Mosco, Vincent, 102, 109 movement, 13, 82, 89, 89n8, 177. See also mobility paradigm

Index

body and, 164–67, 169, 170n5, 180 colonial and postcolonial, 12 migration and, 11, 15, 136, 153n11 in Nîmes and Lourdes pilgrimages, 182–83, 185 place-making and, 3, 16, 76 muftiyat (religious authorities), 82–83, 85, 90n9 musafir (traveller), 86 museumizing, 81, 83–85 Musulmonchilik (Muslimness), 83

N

Naasón, 140 Naqshband, Bahouddin, 84–85 nationalism, 9 Ganga Talao and, 37 Hindu, 21, 25, 32, 35–36 Indian, 24 Uzbek, 83, 85 Nepal, 40 Neuilly, France, 185, 188n6 New Age, 16, 171n10 Brazilian pilgrimage and, 155–58, 169, 170n1 Roman Catholic sites and, 14–15, 112–13, 115 Sedona pilgrimage site of, 6 New Testament, 177 Nîmes, France, 182–85 Nunez del Prado, Juan, 131n10

O

OECF. See Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund Olovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 106 Ottomans, 97, 99, 107 Our Lady of Santa Cruz (Nîmes, France), 182–85 Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund (OECF), 43–44, 46, 57n4

P

Pakistan, 72n16 Sufism in, 13, 60–70, 71n3, 72n4, 72n10, 72n12, 73n19 Sunni-Shia conflict in, 70, 72n17 Paths of Saint James, 15–16, 158–59, 170n3. See also walkers Catholic Church and, 161–62, 168–69 embodiment and, 156, 163–68 market and, 155, 157, 162, 168

195

New Age spirituality and, 155–57, 169 state and, 160–61, 171n9 Paul, Jürgen, 84 Pentecostalism, 3, 136–39 peregrinação (peregrination), 158, 170n1 phallic representation (lingam), 31–33 phenomenology, 1, 8, 156, 163–64 pied-noir pilgrims, 182–85 pilgrimage. See specific topics pilgrimage (mawlid), 186, 188n7 Pilgrimage in the Marketplace (Reader), 6 place-making, 3, 16, 26, 61, 76 place-pilgrimage, 177–78 plantation, in Mauritius, 22, 29 Ganga Talao pilgrimage and, 35 Hinduism of, 12, 23, 25–26 Podmilačje, Bosnia and Herzegovina. See St John of Podmilačje Polish Bosnians, 106–7 political economy. See specific topics postmodernity, 155, 162 power places, 116–17, 126 Prasad, Sudama, 50–52 prostitution, 52, 184–86 Puljić, Vinko, 99, 106, 108

Q

Qalandar, La`l Shahbâz, 13, 72n10, 72nn15–16 Bhutto dynasty and, 65–66 sanctuary of, 66–70, 71n3

R

Reader, Ian, 174–75 comparative study of, 181 on pilgrimage market, 6–7, 15, 176 reduções (Jesuit Guarani missions), 160, 171n8 religion. See also sacred energy grammar articulating secular and, 127–28 institutional, 156 popular, 137–39 spirituality and, 113–14, 116, 131n2, 155–56, 167 religions of the self, 156, 170n2 religiosity in Pakistan, 13, 72n16 political economy and, 2 religious authorities (muftiyat), 82–83, 85, 90n9 religious community (umma), 14, 76, 88

196

religious fairs Dupront on, 181, 187 Sufi, 60–61 religious firms, 60–61 Les Rochers de Poudre d’Or (Appanah), 28 Roman Catholic Church. See Catholic Church Roman Catholicism. See Catholicism

S

sacred, 187 Paths of Saint James and, 165–69 secular and, 157, 167 in Uzbekistan, 78 sacred transfer/translation, 16, 32–33, 37, 167 Sahlins, Marshall, 164 Said Ahmad Pobandi Kushod, shrine of, 81–82 saint (avliyo). See Uzbekistan Saint-Maximin basilica (France), 118–19 saints. See also hagiography in Brazil, 15–16, 155–69, 170n3, 171n9 in Mexico, 137 in Sufism, 13, 60–63, 66–67, 69–70, 72n10, 186 sajjâda nashîn (spiritual entrepreneurs). See spiritual entrepreneurs Sallnow, Michael, 1–2, 5, 6, 113 Samuel (Joaquin Flores), 142, 148 at Holy Supper, 143–44, 152n7 LDM leadership of, 140, 152n5 sanctuary Paths of Saint James and, 169 of Qalandar, 66–70, 71n3 sanctuary of the flow, 169 Santa Cena. See Holy Supper secular energy grammar articulating religious and, 127–28 sacred and, 157, 167 secular activity, 5 in Pentecostalism, 136–37 pilgrimage articulating with, 11–12, 185 secular outcomes, 139 secular pilgrimage, 179 Sehwan Sharif, Pakistan, 65, 71n3, 72n9, 72nn15–16. See also Sindh pilgrimage market of, 60–62, 64, 66–70 Shaivites, Hindus in, 62–64, 72n6, 72n8 self, pilgrimage and, 16, 156, 165, 167, 169. See also religions of the self

Index

semiotics, 163–64, 184, 187 Sen, Amartya, 47 Senegal, 72n7 Seven Pirs (Yetti Pir), 77–78, 81 Shaivites, 62–63, 72n6 Shiism, 13, 59, 69–70, 72n15, 72n17 Shinto, 10 shrine, 7, 89n3, 89n8, 170n3 Catholic, energy pilgrimage and, 115–26, 128–30, 131nn15–16 in Christian tradition, 178–79 in Islam, 75–76, 176 Islamic, in Bukhara, 13–14, 75–89, 89n1 market and, 185–86 Silk Road, 14, 75–76 Sinai, 10 Sindh, Pakistan, 67, 72n12 Singh, Vikash, 4, 8–9 sites body as, 166 of pilgrimage, impact and, 9 slavery, 12, 22, 27, 37 soft power, 10, 12, 25, 41 South Africa, 9 Soviet Union, 80–81, 83, 90n9 Spain, 160, 168, 170n5 spiritual entrepreneurs New Age, Catholicism and, 14, 112 sajjâda nashîn as, 63, 66–69 Sufi, 60–61, 63, 66–69 spirituality, 113–14, 116, 121, 131n2, 167 capital of, 64–66 Paths of Saint James and, 155–57, 169 spiritual magnetism, 6–7 spiritual pilgrimage, 113–14, 116, 121, 125, 129 state Paths of Saint James and, 160–61, 171n9 Sufism and Pakistani, 66–70, 73n19 in Uzbekistan, Islam and, 81–85, 90n9, 90nn11–12 Steil, C., 157–58, 167 St John of Podmilačje, 96–99, 103–4 Austrian Croats in, 107–8 new church of, 105 pilgrimage capital of, 100–102 Sufism, 72n14, 72nn6–7. See also Islam domlo in, 77, 79–82, 85, 88, 89n4 khâdim of, 66–67, 72n11 in Pakistan, 13, 60–70, 71n3, 72n4, 72n10, 72n12, 73n19 Tantâ pilgrimage of, 186, 188n7

Index

in Uzbekistan, 77, 83–84, 89n3 Sunnis, 13, 70, 72n17, 83

T

Tamils, 25, 29, 71n1 Tantâ (Egypt), 186, 188n7 teacher (domlo). See Sufism telluric energy. See energy grammar territory Hinduism and, 21 of Sufis, in Indus Valley, 64 Thal, Sarah, 185 tourism, 5, 114, 173–74, 176 Japanese, 43–46, 48, 57n3 Paths of Saint James and, 159–63 transnational courting, 55 Bodh Gaya and, 50–54, 56 Japanese development aid and, 42–48 transnational flows, networks. See migration transnational processes and connections Buddhist pilgrimage and, 40–42 of Croats, 106–9 energy grammar as, 112–14, 116, 128–30, 155 Indo-Mauritian, 36 of Mexicans, 15, 137, 145–46, 151, 153n14 traveller (musafir), 86 Turner, Edith, 1, 136, 144–45 on communitas, 86 on pilgrimage environment, 4, 181 on pilgrimage system, 137, 181 Turner, Victor, 1, 7, 136, 144–45, 171n11 on communitas, 28, 86, 164 on pilgrimage environment, 4, 181 on pilgrimage system, 137, 181

U

Udero Lâl, cult of, 64, 72n8 umma (religious community), 14, 76, 88 United States, 140, 145–48, 151

197

Usora, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 95, 103, 106 Uzbekistan, 13–14, 72n8, 89, 89n4, 90n13. See also Soviet Union avliyo in, 75–80, 83–84, 89nn1–2 emigration from, 86–88, 90n15 state and Islam in, 81–85, 90n9, 90nn11–12 Sufism in, 77, 83–84, 89n3

V

Vaishyas, 36 Veriditas, 124–25, 128 Vézelay, 112–13, 125 energy pilgrims in, 117, 119–22, 128 Mary Magdalene in, 117–22 Virgin of Zapopan, 138, 150, 152n3 visit, pilgrimage (ziyorat). See ziyorat Voice of Hindus (VOH), 35–36

W

Wahhabism, 82–83, 90n11, 90n13 walkers, 16 in Brazil, 158–68 of labyrinths, 123–25 Women on the Verge (Kelsky), 55

Y

Yetti Pir (Seven Pirs), 77–78, 81 Yo’ldoshev, Narzulla, 89n1

Z

ZCC. See Zion Christian Church Zia ul-Haq, 67 Zion Christian Church (ZCC), 9 Živković, Egidije, 107–8 ziyârât/ziyorat (visit, pilgrimage), 67, 75–77, 88 in dreams, 81, 89n8 post-Soviet popularity of, 84 Zola, E., 184