In this English translation, Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom powerfully described how he readied himself for his final approach to the famous Catholic pilgrimage site of Santiago de Compostela:

There is no one to be seen on that high mound, nothing at all, a somewhat bare field, a closed chapel, a few boulders. I climb onto one of them and stare into the distance, and then, slowly, as if a veil is lifting, I discover the cathedral, almost hidden behind a ripple of green hills and a transparent screen of trees, three fragile towers drawn in infinitesimal detail, a vision in...

Over the past thirty years, Native American and Hispanic Catholics have made an annual pilgrimage to the shrine of El Santuario de Chimayo, located in a small village in northern New Mexico. Groups of pilgrims converge on the shrine of Chimayo in the month of June, after having walked over one hundred miles from five different directions. Chimayo is host to pilgrims and tourists year-round. Each year, especially during Holy Week, millions journey thirty miles north of Santa Fe to El Santuario de Chimayo, an adobe church built by the Spaniards in the 1800 s near a sacred Tewa Indiansite....

Over the past century, the rural English landscape has become a wide-spread national symbol of an apparently unchanging and ancient heritage. Hastrup and Olwig are surely correct to assert that the only place such landscape actually remains untouched by trusts, tourists, and tea shops is on canvas (Hastrup and Olwig 1997, 8 ), but it still embodies a resonant countryside aesthetic (Harrison 1991 ) produced for, and to some extent by, the romantic gaze of urbanites in search of renewal and inspiration (Urry 1995, 213; Okely 1997, 194; see also Darby, 2000 ). Furthermore, the very notion of Englishness is...

On November 20, 1995, the Council of Ministers of the European Union decided that the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela would be one of nine locations to share the honor of being named a “European City of Culture” in the year 2000.¹ To many Europeans, Santiago de Compostela was not a surprising choice, given that it is a prominent Christian pilgrimage site and has thus been a favored destination for travelers since the early Middle Ages. However, since its inception in 1984 , the competition to be named a European City of Culture has been fierce, as cities vie...

In this chapter, I focus on the return journey as an important and understudied arena of human movement and provide a model for its study based on my research on the contemporary Camino de Santiago pilgrimage (the “Camino”). The following statement by sociologist Judith Adler guides the theoretical approach of this chapter:

The broad theoretical concern shared by those who hope to understand modern forms of travel glossed as “tourism” as well as modern and earlier styles of travel glossed as “religious,” is with humanmobility‚deliberately shaped with expressive and communicative, rather than simply instrumental purposes in mind. All...

This chapter discusses the successful promotion of tourism for the ritual of Holy Week in the city of León, in northwest Spain. I focus on this promotion during the early 1980 s through the activities of a penitential confraternity, El Dulce Nombre de Jesús Nazareno, which performs a procession each year on Holy Friday.

Most of the first part of this chapter examines the contents of an application submitted by that confraternity to the Office of the Secretary of State for Tourism in 1983.¹ I show how the confraternity identifies its own procession as a worthwhile experience for tourists for...

This chapter focuses on contemporary tourism at the old cultural capital of Japan, Kyoto. The magnificent old temples and shrines are the major attractions for the more than 40 million annual tourists, who supply over 25 percent of the income for today’s city. In 1985 the city government asked the major temples and shrines to collect a small head tax to fund repairs and restoration of Kyoto’s historical buildings, including religious sites. The Buddhist Association refused to comply, claiming that visitors to shrines and temples were pilgrims, not tourists; some temples stopped charging entrance fees, and others closed their gates....

In 1871 , two London Missionary Society evangelists, the Reverend A. W. Murray and the Reverend Samuel MacFarlane, set out by boat to scout the Torres Strait Islands between Australia and New Guinea in order to find suitable locations for the establishment of mission stations. Their purpose was to create a series of “stepping stones” on the Torres Strait Islands, with the eventual goal of establishing a mission within New Guinea itself. The mission to New Guinea was conceived to be part of a sacred quest. As Murray proclaimed in 1872 , when the first chapel was built on Darnley...

Victor Turner (1974a, 263 ) once urged students of religion to take note of the genre of science fiction, for in science fiction could be seen futuristic frameworks expressing mythic and liminal states and concerns. More recently, anthropologist Michael Jindra (1994, 28 ) has argued that the popularity of the science fiction television seriesStar Trek“is one location in which to find religion in our society.”¹ These observations, linked to the suggestion of Turner and Turner (1978, 20 ) that “a tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist” and to the argument that secular...

“Religion is the quest, within the bounds of the human, historical condition, for the power to manipulate and negotiate one’s ‘situation’ so as to have ‘space’ in which meaningfully to dwell” (Smith 1978, 291 ). This definition, formulated by Jonathan Z. Smith, one of the foremost contemporary scholars of comparative religion, is particularly apposite to an examination of the symbolic significance of travel. For Smith, religious thought and action constitute a process of mapping the social and natural cosmos. Maps are key to all journeying, spiritual and intellectual as well as physical. In this short concluding chapter, I seek to...