Introduction : walking the world

Abstract

A woman carries a vial of water from the St Lawrence River to help transport herself back there in imagination; an African American preacher travels to England in the middle of the nineteenth century; an Indian poet uses nonsense language to turn his readers’ perceptions of the world upside-down. An exploration of the varieties of pilgrimage is itself a kind of journey - a journey that is rich and unpredictable. Pilgrimage studies as a discipline has changed and moved over time. Its early focus tended to be on pilgrimage as a religious or at least sacred rite. More recent work has focused on the difficulty of drawing boundaries between pilgrimage and other types of travel, like tourism, inward journeys and political protest. Other recent scholarship combines these two approaches by expanding and exploring the definition of 'pilgrimage' to incorporate secular experiences and yet still find some common elements. In this edition of the journal we share essays and stories from around the world in the hope of continuing the scholarly journey; re-framing the conception of 'pilgrimage' as a means to understand areas as diverse as literature, religion, identity, landscape, art, movies and leadership, looking at its changing forms in a global context and drawing out new insights from and for the field. We have organized these papers around three themes, although there is much overlap between them. The first is an exploration of the dividing line between “pilgrimage” and other kinds of movement through space. Some journeys are sacred in the popularly understood sense of this word, and yet throw light on the elusive boundaries of what 'sacred' means. The second is pilgrimage as a means to personal empowerment. The third is pilgrimage as metaphor.