American Pilgrimage Landscapes

Juan Eduardo Campo

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1998, vol. 558, issue 1, 40-56

Abstract: In late-twentieth-century America, there is a surprisingly large and varied number of pilgrimage centers. This article organizes them into three groups (pilgrimages of organized religion, civil religion, and cultural religion) for comparative description. It includes descriptions of Catholic, Mormon, and Hindu pilgrimages, as well as the sites of Gettysburg, Mount Rushmore, and Graceland as pilgrimage centers. Modernity, rather than displacing pilgrimages, has actually been responsible for globalizing them, a process that involves their appropriation by expert systems, the fostering of diverse and sometimes contending interpretations of their significance, and the actual production of new pilgrimage landscapes. Drawing upon original fieldwork, published research, and resources on the World Wide Web, the author proposes that by placing pilgrimages in global perspective, we are better able to discern both the roles played by immigrant groups in the formation of American pilgrimage landscapes and the contours of American participation in pilgrimages abroad, such as the hajj to Mecca.

Date: 1998
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716298558001005 (text/html)

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:sae:anname:v:558:y:1998:i:1:p:40-56

DOI: 10.1177/0002716298558001005

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().