es. In the twentieth century, however, mass production of
automobiles, along with a trend toward shorter workweeks,
allowed greater numbers from all but the lowest socioeco-
nomic classes to indulge in regular, if infrequent, tourist trav-
els. Air travel has extended the range of the twenty-first-
century tourist to every continent on earth, and space travel
has even taken tourists even beyond the earth’s atmosphere.
From the very beginning of tourism’s history, tourists
have held a fascination with religion. Early travelers of the
European Renaissance regularly visited churches, cathedrals,
shrines, and other religious sites in their studies of the art,
architecture, culture, and history of the nations they visited.
On occasion, Renaissance travelers also condemned the prac-
tices of the religious people they encountered at such places.
In fact, the humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536) sig-
naled a pivotal moment between Christian pilgrimage and
the beginnings of religious tourism with his colloquy “A Pil-
grimage for Religion’s Sake,” which first appeared in 1526,
with an anonymous English translation appearing a decade
later as “The Pilgrimage of Pure Devotion.” Erasmus trav-
eled as a secular visitor to various pilgrimage sites where he
had little patience for traditional religious practices; indeed,
his observations and subsequent criticisms of pilgrims reflect-
ed the groundswell of intellectual, political, and religious re-
forms sweeping Europe at the time.
The tension between practices of the earliest tourists
and those of their pilgrim counterparts, as exemplified in
Erasmus’s essay, has continued into the twenty-first century.
In fact, pilgrimage sites remain favorite tourist destinations
even today. Nonreligious visitors frequent such popular
Christian pilgrimage destinations as Lourdes in France, San-
tiago de Campostela in Spain, and the Basilica of the Virgin
of Guadalupe in Mexico. In the Hindu tradition, Benares,
India, serves as a favorite destination of tourists, and Bud-
dhist stupas throughout Asia attract both religious and non-
religious travelers. In these auspicious religious places, pil-
grims become tourists even as tourists fancy themselves as
pilgrims. A cultural understanding of tourism, however, re-
veals that the appeal of religion as a desirable attraction for
tourist visitors extends beyond the confusion between tourist
and pilgrim. In fact, tourism as a modern cultural practice
transforms religious places, rituals, artifacts, and people into
objects for touristic consumption.
CULTURAL RELATIONS BETWEEN RELIGION AND TOURISM.
Tourism amounts to a set of cultural practices aimed most
often at aesthetically pleasing experiences of unfamiliar
places and peoples. Tourists encounter cultural otherness by
leaving their familiar surroundings, but touristic practices
tend to domesticate unfamiliar places and novel experiences
by making them into objects of consumption. In this regard,
tourism exemplifies modernity; in particular, its conven-
tions, habits, and discursive concerns rely on and respond to
the forces of modern capitalism, especially in its emphasis on
consumption, its tendency toward globalization, and its aes-
thetic proclivities. Put simply, tourists are practitioners of
modernity. Moreover, tourism has become pervasive in
modern life. Not only do modern people travel far more than
ever before, but as some commentators insist, they are tour-
ists most of the time, even in their own homes and commu-
nities. Indeed, touristic practices pervade the modern way of
life.
On the other hand, tourists rank among the most ma-
ligned of modern subjects. In fact, derogating tourists is a
part of being a tourist; Jonathan Culler (1981, p. 130) notes
the somewhat ironic fact that tourists gain esteem by denying
their status as a tourist; indeed, there is always someone else
less adept in the arts of modern travel whom one can dispar-
age as “tourist,” elevating oneself as something better than
a tourist. Consequently, maligning others conceals one’s own
touristic inclinations and practices, even as it makes one a
better tourist.
Being a better tourist, then, involves having only a dis-
creet engagement with touristic practices. At the most funda-
mental level, these practices rely on the technologies, net-
works, and discourses that constitute modern travel practices
in general. Travel practices can be defined as any practice,
discourse, or circumstance that either necessitates translocal
movements or that generates a desire for travel and encour-
ages people to travel; besides tourism, these practices also en-
compass migration, business and trade, military deploy-
ments, research excursions, family visitations, and many
other forms of and motives for travel. The practices them-
selves involve various modes of transportation, most com-
monly airlines, trains, buses, and automobiles. They also in-
clude communication networks that facilitate travel,
especially telecommunications and the Internet, but also
television and radio broadcast media, newspapers and maga-
zines, and other forms of mass communication. Other as-
pects of the modern practice of travel include banking net-
works that allow convenient and trustworthy currency
exchange; accommodations for lodging and food services;
and any other services or products that meet the needs and
desires of modern travelers.
Besides modern infrastructures and services that make
global travel possible, convenient, and comfortable, touristic
practices participate in modern discourses that make travel
desirable. Foremost among these is a discourse on experi-
ence. In fact, as a discursive category, experience serves tour-
ism as an epistemological mode of knowing the world in a
modern way. This includes equating authenticity with truth
and interpreting experiences as meaningful by aestheticizing
landscapes, cultures, events, cities, villages, and even entire
societies. In fact, touristic discourse attributes aesthetic quali-
ties to anything and everything that travelers might encoun-
ter. Indeed, tourists everywhere seek out and expect the most
authentic and aesthetically pleasing experiences possible.
The emphasis on experience in touristic discourse aligns
tourism with religion in the modern world. Robert Sharf
(1998, p. 95) points out that theologians and scholars of reli-
gion invoke the category of experience in dealing with two9262 TOURISM AND RELIGION