Sharf, Robert H. “Experience.” In Critical Terms for Religious
Studies, edited by Mark C. Taylor, pp. 94–116. Chicago,
- Sharf discusses the category of “experience” as it relates
to religious practices and the academic study of religion.
Smith, Valene L., ed. Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tour-
ism. 2d ed. Philadelphia, 1989. A collection of anthropologi-
cal essays on tourists and the people who inhabit tourist des-
tinations.
Stowe, William W. Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-
Century American Culture. Princeton, N.J., 1994. A histori-
cal and literary analysis of nineteenth-century American
tourists in Europe and how their travels and travel writing
contributed to personal and collective identities.
Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary
Societies. Newbury Park, Calif., 1990. A sociological study of
tourism that applies a Foucauldian understanding of “gaze”
to the social, historical, economic, and cultural implications
of touristic practices.
Warneke, Sara. Images of the Educational Traveller in Early Modern
England. New York, 1995. This book examines early modern
English travels to the European continent for educational
purposes; the conventions of educational travel served as a
historical precedent for later practices of tourism.
THOMAS S. BREMER (2005)
TOWERS. Strictly speaking, a tower is any architectural
structure that is high in proportion to its lateral dimensions.
Broadening that definition, tower here will be understood to
be any architectural structure whose religious meaning is re-
lated to its lofty vertical dimension. This entry will refer to
this quality as vertical aspiration, which, while inexact, at
least sets towers apart from merely massive structures. Tow-
ers have no single explanation but betray a variety of mean-
ings that show clearly the ingenious fertility of the religious
imagination and offer a challenge to the interpreter, especial-
ly in cases where there is a paucity of written sources. Their
meanings are not fixed but can change over time.
The Egyptian pyramid, one of the earliest examples of
tower building, is essentially a funerary monument used to
inter and glorify deceased pharaohs, yet the pyramid is not
simply a gigantic tombstone. Because of the divinization of
the ruler, it is also a structure that houses a sacred presence.
The obelisk, originally a monument to the sun god Re, later
became a popular architectural feature in Europe and North
America. The ziggurat of ancient Mesopotamia was a multis-
toried structure surmounted by a temple, where gods were
worshipped, annual rites were performed, and the authority
of the ruler was confirmed; it was a place of communication
between upper and lower worlds.
The Zarathushtrian dokhma, often translated as “tower
of silence,” has an entirely different meaning. These towers
are twenty- to thirty-foot cylindrical funerary structures that
continue to be used in the twenty-first century by the small
Parsi population of South Asia and Iran (e.g., Mumbai, an-
cient Yazd). Because earth, fire, and water are sacred and be-
cause the more common means of disposing of the dead
(burial, cremation, interment) would pollute these elements,
bodies of the deceased are placed over grates at the summit
of the tower, through which body fluids and rain can pass
until the vultures and sun leave nothing but bones. The tow-
ers therefore prevent pollution of the sacred elements, thus
protecting the living and also becoming passageways for the
dead from this life to eternity.
STUPA AND PAGODA. The basic form of the Buddhist stupa
was a hemispherical earthbound dome built to house the sa-
cred relics of the Buddha or his disciples and to be the focus
of ritual circumambulation or meditation by devotees. The
group at Sa ̄ñc ̄ı in central India remains the best surviving ex-
ample of this genre. Although stupas were not conceptually
towers in their original form, reliefs on Indian Buddhist
buildings already depict the stupa in the second to third cen-
turies CE with a vertical character. Early stupas in Nepal, such
as that of Carumati, show a towerlike elongation of the
harmika ̄ (the finial above the dome of the stupa). Generally
the vertical elongation took place as the stupa form crossed
central Asia, and by the time it entered China in the later
Han dynasty (25–220 CE) it had become a true tower.The Chinese Buddhist pagoda represents a culmination
of this development, becoming a multistoried building that
ascended at times to dizzying heights, as does the Fogong
monastery pagoda at Yingxian, built in 1056. At 550 feet it
is still the tallest wooden structure in the world. Since earlier
Chinese architecture was horizontal in character, with rare
examples of multistory buildings, the pagoda suggests an as-
piration for transcendence not found previously. Yet in its
original meaning the lofty pagoda signifies the same as its ar-
chitectural opposite, the earthbound stupa. It is a structure
built to house and honor the relics of the Buddha. At the
same time it acquired a wealth of new meanings over a long
history in China and elsewhere in East Asia. Built to house
the living presence of deity in the form of the Buddha’s re-
mains, it was at first the principal worship space in early Chi-
nese Buddhist architecture. The Yongning Temple at Lo-
yang, built in 516 CE, for example, had the pagoda sited at
the center of the temple complex. Later the pagoda shared
its centrality on the main axis of a monastic or temple com-
pound with the Great Buddha hall just behind it. As time
passed the Buddha hall became the main place of worship,
and the pagoda declined in importance and came to be situ-
ated outside and behind the monastic or temple complex.
Ritual circumambulation of the stupa was replaced by circu-
mambulation of the Buddha image.
The pagoda acquired other meanings, becoming an im-
posing sign of Buddhist presence in China, a demonstration
of the merit of the emperors and wealthy patrons who were
able to fund such a project, a “guiding tower” to lead pil-
grims toward their destination, and a funerary structure built
to house the ashes of cremated monks. Finally, the pagoda
was fully “domesticated” as a familiar element in the Chinese9264 TOWERS