Pilgrimage, material objects and spontaneous communitas

Leighanne Higgins and Kathy Hamilton

Annals of Tourism Research, 2020, vol. 81, issue C

Abstract: Based on an ethnographic study of Lourdes, we contribute to tourism discussion on religious pilgrimage and communitas. Taking a material perspective, we prioritise spontaneous over normative communitas, and materiality over intangibility. We adopt the lens of tangible communitas to unpack the role of material objects in extending communitas beyond the spatial confines of the pilgrimage site. We explore how spontaneous communitas manifests in the material objects brought home from and left behind at the pilgrimage site. This reveals the portability of communitas and how it can be de-coupled from liminality and experienced in normative structure. The paper's focus on religious materiality also offers a renewed understanding of the extra-discursive importance of religious kitsch materiality.

Keywords: Pilgrimage; Communitas; Materiality; Kitsch; Ethnography (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160738319302129
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:anture:v:81:y:2020:i:c:s0160738319302129

DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2019.102855

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of Tourism Research is currently edited by John Tribe

More articles in Annals of Tourism Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().