places of pilgrimage have turned more into tourists spots . They are having their importance and grace thereby disturbing nature too.write an article on maintain the grace of pilgrimage
Answers
Answer:
Pilgrimage occupies a special place in the literature on tourism and mobility, and is fraught with contradictions that make it difficult to define. Along with warfare, it is one of the oldest forms of human mobility and a fundamental precursor to modern tourism (Di Giovine & Elsner, 2016, p. 722). Although individually experienced, it is frequently undertaken in groups at specified times of year; the Islamic hajj to Mecca, the Shia pilgrimage to Karbala, Iraq (site of the martyrdom of their recognized successor to the Prophet), and the Kumbha Mela in Allahabad, a festival that entails ritual bathing in the Ganges, all move tens of millions of people at a time, providing economic, political, and social benefits as well as notable social pressures, marginalization of locals, and sometimes economic losses. Since nearly every major religion counts some institutionalized tradition of travel (Cohen, 1998; Kaufman, 2005; Reader, 2014; Terzidou et al., 2018), and indeed, the first widely read English usage of the word ‘religions’ was in a seventeenth-century monograph entitled Pilgrimage (Purchas, 1613; see Smith, 1998, pp. 271–272), many scholars have characterized pilgrimage as a fundamentally religious journey (Coleman & Eade, 2004; Rinshede, 1992; Turner, 1987; Vukonić, 1996), though more recently others—particularly those employing emic, or bottom-up analyses—point out that the term is often used by travelers to denote important, transformative journeys that may be secular or non-religious in nature as well (Dubisch & Winkelman, 2005; Gammon, 2004; Margry, 2008; Morinis, 1992; Reader & Walter, 1993). Self-described pilgrims may make pilgrimages to memorials and other sites of loss, to their imagined homelands and heritage sites, to parks and landforms, and to other places that hold particular importance to the individual.
This special issue examines the multiple ways in which pilgrimage engages with sacredness, delving beyond the officially recognized, and often religiously conceived, pilgrimage sites. While most of the articles in this issue deal in some way with religious or spiritual centers of devotion, they all share a sensitivity towards understanding pilgrimage from the bottom up, that is, outside of institutional power structures and officially recognized practices. Whether addressing massive pilgrimage sites to religious centers of power such as Vatican City, personal literary pilgrimages seeking transcendence at Walden Pond, or gambling journeys filled with rituals and devotional practices aimed at earning meritorious boons in Macau, they all problematize taken-for-granted definitions of pilgrimage, and focus on the ways in which the sacred is evoked, engaged with, and negotiated. In this special issue, and in this introduction, the sacred is the operational category of analysis for pilgrimage, and it manifests itself semiotically and performatively, through discourse and practice, inside and outside the realm of religious or temporal authority. Collectively delving ‘beyond the officially sacred,’ this special issue examines the interplay of a transcendent sacred for pilgrims and tourists so as to provide a blueprint for how work in the geography of religion and the field of religious tourism may move forward.
Pilgrimage, religion, and the sacred
Sacredness is a notoriously slippery word. While frequently conflated with notions of the religious or the supernatural, it is important to distinguish the two. Religion is a Western category of thought that denotes some sort of organized practice concerning the divine or spiritual; etymologically stemming from the Latin ligare, which means to bind (people) together as a book, in earlier times it was employed to discuss the proper (or authorized) enactment of ritual (see Smith, 1998, p. 269). By the colonial era, ‘religions’ became used by Western colonial powers to describe a category of belief systems that appeared to be parallel (yet subordinate to) the Christian tradition, despite the fact that such categories are not always indigenous (Smith, p. 270, pp. 275–281). Contemporary anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz (1993[1966]) and Talal Asad (1993) emphasize that religion is an anthropological category of analysis, rather than necessarily a lived experience, and one that exposes the power of the analyst to interpret indigenous practices. For this Introduction’s purposes, religion thus references an intensely social institution that operates in daily life.