Reflections on pilgrims' identity, role and interplay with the pilgrimage environment

Claudia Damari and Yoel Mansfeld

Current Issues in Tourism, 2016, vol. 19, issue 3, 199-222

Abstract: This article critically analyses the evolving concepts of the identities and roles of pilgrims as well as how their interaction with the pilgrimage environment contributes to a better understanding of the religious journey in the postmodern society. The article concludes that the predominantly theoretical paradigm framing pilgrimage as a tourism phenomenon might be limited and downplays the complexity of the pilgrims' experience nowadays. Alternatively, it proposes to explore the experience in terms of the pilgrims' evolving identity and role based on two universes. The first explores the impact of exposure to different levels of mundane dimensions in everyday life; and the second unveils the possible influences of the Ego–Alter (pilgrim–pilgrimage environment) relationship on pilgrims' identities and roles. The theoretical review and discussion on these reflections develops an alternative experiential spectrum that looks at these identities and roles. This proposed spectrum is constructed by four pilgrim typecasts stretching from the ‘traditional pilgrim’ up to and including the ‘post-postmodern’ one. This spectrum allows a better understanding of the cohabitation of different pilgrim typecasts experiencing the pilgrimage environment simultaneously but with varying levels of religious engagement.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13683500.2014.957660 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:rcitxx:v:19:y:2016:i:3:p:199-222

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rcit20

DOI: 10.1080/13683500.2014.957660

Access Statistics for this article

Current Issues in Tourism is currently edited by Jennifer Tunstall

More articles in Current Issues in Tourism from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().