Geography of pilgrimage

Tilcayo Cats original · British Bees · Sources and editorial assessment · Originals retention rule

The geography of pilgrimage is the study of where pilgrimage happens: not just at a shrine, but along routes, across regions and between networks of sacred places. The anthropologist Simon Coleman argues that pilgrimage is spread out over space and time, with bursts of energy and long quiet spells, so researchers have to decide where to look.

From the shrine to the web

Early studies watched ritual at one site, as Robert Hertz did in his 1913 study of the cult of St Besse. Later scholars came to see single-site study as short-sighted. Jill Dubisch, studying the Greek Orthodox shrine of the Panagia Evangelistria on the Aegean island of Tinos, treated it not as a bounded place but as "a web" whose strands are spun out by pilgrims, the media, the church and national politics. The building stays put; its people and meanings keep shifting. Ann Gold, working in a Rajasthan village, studied pilgrimage from the home end, treating pilgrims first as householders and following them from small local shrines at water tanks and pastures to distant ones such as Hardwar on the Ganges. Hillary Kaell followed American Christians before and after their trips to the Holy Land, including the ordinary places where they prepared and remembered.

Catchment areas and shrine hierarchies

The cultural geographer Surinder Bhardwaj, in Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India (1973), ranked shrines by their catchment area: "higher-level" shrines draw pilgrims from further away. Later he followed Hindus to the United States, where home altars and new temples built a sacred geography abroad; in Pittsburgh the meeting of rivers was read as an equivalent of the Ganges, a "remarkable transformation of the Steel City to a sacred centre".

Bhardwaj insisted that no pilgrimage landscape is fixed. Shrines grow, change and decline: Sikhs and Hindus once shared sites, but by the late 1990s few Hindus visited the Golden Temple at Amritsar. He compared a pilgrimage system to a living body kept alive by circulating blood, and borrowed from chaos theory the idea of hidden patterns behind apparent randomness. Other scholars have used complexity theory in a similar way, describing small or new shrines that echo a major one like fractals.

Networks and palimpsests

In a 2019 study, Loustau and DeConinck criticise "singularism", the habit of studying one shrine or route at a time. They stress pilgrims who visit many sites, such as those of the European Marian Network, which links Catholic shrines with millions of visits a year, and they use the image of a palimpsest, a manuscript with older writing still showing beneath the new. In Coleman's own work on English cathedrals, one Canterbury visitor described a personal circuit linking St David's on its wild coast, York as home and Canterbury as the church's centre.

What counts as pilgrimage?

Coleman argues that no single feature marks pilgrimage off from other religious behaviour. A simple definition such as "travel to a valued place" fails, because it would include going to church on Sunday. Instead he uses Rodney Needham's "polythetic classification", based on the philosopher Wittgenstein's idea of "family resemblances": a class defined by a cluster of features, none of which every member needs. Candidate features include sacred space, vows, founding stories, marked movement of people and objects, links to institutions and the possibility of transformation. Coleman's own lens is "articulation": how pilgrimage both separates places and people and connects them.

See also

• Pilgrimage
• Economics of pilgrimage
• Camino de Santiago
• Sacred landscape of Delphi
• Eleusis and the Sacred Way