From the Camino to the Hajj, the term pilgrimage evokes a range of iconic journeys, shrines, stories, and metaphors that speak to the spiritual heart of religious life. What accounts for the durability of pilgrimage as a cultural phenomenon as well as its current popularity in the contemporary world? As a central concept in religious studies, scholarship around pilgrimage has long been stifled by certain definitional constraints, linguistic trappings, and the continued animation of dominant tropes such as communitas and contestation. Whereas communitas draws attention to the transformative power of pilgrimage resulting from the temporary suspension of social hierarchies, norms, and distinctions among religious adherents, the emphasis on contestation evokes conflict, tensions, and power struggles that arise among pilgrim communities and various stakeholders at sacred shrines. Although these dominant theoretical tropes and organizational motifs have led to some productive debates and significant scholarly contributions over the last few decades, they have also limited the analytical scope of pilgrimage. This is especially the case when we consider how pilgrimage as a form of cultural and religious movement intersects with wider global and transnational flows of media, migration, and capital in the early 21st century.
Simon Coleman is a prominent cultural anthropologist who has long engaged with the interdisciplinary field of pilgrimage studies. In many ways, his latest book, Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement, reads as a summation of decades of research that provides a pathbreaking and critical clearing of the field—re-examining older works, discussing recent developments and patterns, and helping open new directions and insights, both methodological and theoretical. It is truly impressive in its scale and depth.
Throughout the book, Coleman provides a comprehensive synthesis of existing scholarship and juxtaposes a number of ethnographically rich case studies on pilgrimage with the goal of offering a productive new theoretical lexicon and critical framework that is “self-consciously expansive” (6). This entails decentering dominant Western assumptions of what religion is more broadly, and he does so with analytical sophistication, cutting through and challenging a number of prevailing dichotomies that have long saturated the field of study: center/periphery, sacred/profane, formal/ informal behaviors, home/shrines, pilgrims/clergy, separation/union, human/divine, and extraordinary/everyday. Focusing on some of the “less spectacular,” but equally important connections made between people, places and practices, Coleman (drawing on Stuart Hall) adopts the overall conceptual rubric of “articulation” to examine the variegated ways religious movement becomes linked, interwoven, and entangled in wider aspects of people’s lives in complex and “frictional” ways. This is not to deny the significance of more formalized, intense forms of “deep” ritual practice, but to encourage new ways of seeing interconnections with other forms of “ritualized and non-ritualized activities” at various scales of attention (6).
In tracing these varieties of articulation, the book is organized along thematic lines that help build the argument, moving from a critical engagement with seminal works and ideas in anthropology and religious studies, to more recent dynamic interfaces with global and transnational phenomenon, such as the political economies of mobility. Along this journey, Coleman introduces several concepts as part of this new analytical lexicon, such as: “laterality,” “penumbra,” “adjacency,” “porosity,” “transduction,” “entrainment,” and “loose and tight spaces.” While I do not have the space to review each of these productive new lines of inquiry, I particularly liked Coleman’s engagement with the Camino as a cultural model of sacred journeying, which he places in conversation with earlier critiques and tropes. In chapter 5, entitled “The Center Cannot Hold,” Coleman shows how the Camino attracts travelers who stress the importance of individualization, chronic “becoming,” and a “reflexive contemplation of mobility” that moves us away from seeing pilgrimage as a purely ritual form housed within traditional denominational and ecclesiastical frames (125). As a popular pilgrimage that is self-directed and affords a kind of “flexible spirituality,” the Camino provides an embodied and ethical orientation in line with many post-secular discourses that foreground the importance of slowing down and “cultivating experiences of journeying rather than arriving” (164).
Of course, as Coleman notes, in self-consciously adopting this flexible metaphor of articulation, one runs the risk of “expanding pilgrimage out of existence, to render it so vague and ubiquitous that it can no longer be discerned in any meaningful or useful way” (7). It is this notably multifaceted and polythetic approach to pilgrimage that may frustrate some readers looking for a more domesticated category situated within a comparative world-religion framework. Given its ambitious synthesis of scholarly literature and a multi-scalar analytical approach, the book is also notably thin on the actual experiences, stories, and voices of pilgrims themselves. However, as a theoretical and analytical toolkit for reimagining pilgrimage studies within a global arena, this book will serve as a critical resource for current and future pilgrimage scholars, helping to illuminate meaningful connections and new lines of inquiry beyond the reproduction of certain well-worn tropes within Anglophone studies. This is a refreshing and welcome invitation to enlarge the field of study and ensure pilgrimage remains a vital and productive category to think with (and through) the contours of socio-religious life in the early 21st century.
David Geary is an associate professor in cultural anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus.
David Geary
Date Of Review:
March 28, 2024
