Simon Coleman - Pilgrimage and Political Economy: Translating the Sacred

Edited by

Simon Coleman and John Eade

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.

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

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

Simon Coleman and John Eade

Mathieu Claveyrolas

David Geary

Rmy Delage

Maria Louw

Mario Kati

Anna Fedele

Patricia Fortuny Loret de Mola

Carlos Alberto Steil

Dionigi Albera

Introduction to a Research Agenda

Pilgrimage has always followed, and sometimes helped to create, trade routes and markets. Victor and Edith Turners 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 Webers 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 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 Kati 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 nations economic, political and legal structures affect its religiosity, but also how religiousness may influence economic performance. Such considerations encourage the use of analytical paradigms that transcend older secularization/post-secularism epistemes, as Gauthier et al. point out (2013: 26162).

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-Lger 1999) at the level of participation in established churches, shared forms of cultural identification, and popular understandings of belonging to particular territories.