The public prominence of religion has increased globally in recent years, while places associated with religion, such as pilgrimage centers, and famous cathedrals, temples and shrines, have attracted growing numbers of visitors and media attention. Such developments are part of a global process where different forms of travel – physical movement such as labor and lifestyle migration, tourism of various forms, the cultural heritage industry and pilgrimage – have become a major feature of the modern world. These translocal and transnational processes involve flows of not just people but also material objects, ideas, information, images and capital.
The public prominence of religion aligned to the modern growth of tourism (sometimes now claimed as the world’s single largest industry) has created a new dynamic relationship between religion, travel and tourism. It has been mirrored by expanding academic research in these areas over the last twenty years across a variety of disciplinary areas, ranging from anthropology, sociology, geography, history and religious studies to newly emergent areas such as tourism and migration studies. Such studies have also expanded exponentially in terms of the geographic spread of places, religions and regions being researched.
This series provides a new forum for studies based around these themes, drawing together research on the relationships between religion, travel and tourism. These include studies from global and cross-cultural perspectives of topics, such as:
Edited
By Dionigi Albera, John Eade
December 06, 2016
Although there has been a massive increase in the volume of pilgrimage research and publications, traditional Anglophone scholarship has been dominated by research in Western Europe and North America. In their previous edited volume, International Perspectives on Pilgrimage Studies (Routledge, 2015...
By Albertus Bagus Laksana
October 31, 2016
Exploring the distinctive nature and role of local pilgrimage traditions among Muslims and Catholics, Muslim and Catholic Pilgrimage Practices draws particularly on south central Java, Indonesia. In this area, the hybrid local Muslim pilgrimage culture is shaped by traditional Islam, the ...
By John Eade, Mario Katić
October 19, 2016
Since the beginning of the anthropology of pilgrimage, scant attention has been paid to pilgrimage and pilgrim places in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe. Seeking to address such a deficit, this book brings together scholars from central, eastern and south-eastern Europe to explore the ...
By Christopher A. Howard
August 02, 2016
Mobile Lifeworlds illustrates how the imaginaries and ideals of Western travellers, especially those of untouched nature and spiritual enlightenment, are consistent with media representations of the Himalayan region, romanticism and modernity at large. Blending tourism and pilgrimage, travel across...
By Kathryn Barush
June 23, 2016
The practice of walking to a sacred space for personal and spiritual transformation has long held a place in the British imagination. Art and the Sacred Journey in Britain examines the intersections of the concept of pilgrimage and the visual imagination from the years 1790 to 1850. Through a close...
By Ian Reader
December 18, 2015
The study of pilgrimage often centres itself around miracles and spontaneous populist activities. While some of these activities and stories may play an important role in the emergence of potential pilgrimage sites and in helping create wider interest in them, this book demonstrates that the ...