pilgrimageframework. Ronald Grimes critically responds to Bell that ritual and per-
formance are substantively related but also significantly different.Further reading: Austin (1962); Bell (1992, 1997); Geertz (1973); Grimes (1990);
Tambiah (1990); Turner (1969)PILGRIMAGE
The prevailing implication of the notion pilgrimage is an interior or
external journey, or a combination of both types, to usually some place
considered sacred within a pilgrim’s religious tradition. Such a place
would be Jerusalem for Jews, Rome and any place visited by the Virgin
Mary, such as Lourdes or Fatima, for Christians, Mecca for Muslims,
any of seven sacred cities for Hindus, locations associated with the life
of the Buddha for Buddhists, or the Golden Temple in Amritsar for
Sikhs. As with the John Bunyan’s classic work The Pilgrim’s Progress,
the concept of pilgrimage is also used as a metaphor for a spiritual
journey. An interior pilgrimage is often connected with a personal search
for a person’s true self, God, meaning, or a combination of these items.
Many pilgrims journey to places associated with a cult of relics or a
place considered sacred by the religious tradition because of paradig-
matic historical events. Pilgrimage represents a break from ordinary life
and assumes a joyful festive spirit as depicted in Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales. Pilgrimage also often assumes the character of a rite of passage
in some religious cultures.
As the anthropologist Victor Turner argues, pilgrimage and its resem-
blance to a rite of passage exhibits liminality, a time of withdrawal from
normal modes of social action that represents a place and moment in and
out of time. This implies that pilgrims are transitional persons because
their character is characterized by ambiguity and paradox. Because pil-
grims are structurally invisible, they are at once no longer classified and
not yet classified. Being devoid of normal classification, pilgrims possess
nothing and have no status; they are invisible and compared to being
dead. According to Turner, pilgrimage exhibits a symbolic anti-structure
that is often expressed as an existential communitas, a spontaneous,
ephemeral community, even though normative communitas tends to
reign in pilgrimage, which simply suggests that the original existential
communitas is organized into a more enduring social system, such as
Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.