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personal Dimensions of the Sacred Journey: What Pilgrims Say

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Barbara Nimri Aziz
Affiliation:
New York, USA

Extract

A decade has passed since Victor Turner published his long and important paper defining pilgrimage as a ritual process. There and in his earlier article ‘The Centre Out There’, which appeared a year earlier, Turner provided a social explanation for the ubiquitous and still expanding phenomenon of pilgrimage. His simple model, developed from Van Gennep's ‘rite de passage’ seemed profound; it offered us a means for comparing the sacred journeys of one people with those of another, and for comparing pilgrimage with other kinds of ritual processes. Moreover, a vast amount of sociological data having to do with class, age, caste, and status of pilgrims could be usefully mobilized within this model. It continues to have some value although subsequent studies have shown that often pilgrim-groups are not as coherent or homogenous as Turner's model suggested they would become as they moved ever closer to the sacred centre of their shared faith.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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References

page 247 note 1 Turner, V., Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974). Chapter 5, pp. 166230.Google Scholar

page 247 note 2 Turner, V., ‘The Centre Out There: Pilgrim's Goal’, History of Religions, XII (1973), 191230.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 247 note 3 For example, see B. Pfaffenberger's paper about the Kataragama pilgrimage of South India, Journal of Asian Studies, XXXVIII (1979)Google Scholar, and Sallnow's, M. reconsideration of ‘communitas’ in the sociology of an Andean pilgrimage, Man, XVI, new series (1981).Google Scholar

page 247 note 4 In his now classic, early study, The Myth of the Eternal Return, Mircea Eliade brilliantly explored the relevance of cosmogonie myths for history. He distinguished between ‘historical (modern) man’Google Scholar and an anhistorical archetype associated with traditional (agricultural) societies. According to his model, the latter would be more inclined to pilgrimage and these would include those I describe below. At this time however, my purpose is not to test that distinction or to test the survival of the myths of return, although the continuing power of these archetypes is very much evidenced by my examples. See Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History, translated by Trask, W. (Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series XLVI, 1954)Google Scholar

page 249 note 1 Karve, Irawati, ‘On the Road: A Maharashtrian Pilgrimage’, Journal of Asian Studies, XXII (1962), 1330.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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page 253 note 1 This is illustrated in Aziz, B. N., ‘Sacred Encounter at Amarnath Cave’, Natural History, XCII, 7 (1983), 4451Google Scholar

page 254 note 1 Ibid. and Aziz, B. N., ‘A Pilgrimage to Amarnath’, Kailash, IX (1982), 23.Google Scholar

page 254 note 2 By personal communication with B. N. Saraswati of Banaras. Over the years I have greatly benefited from my talks with B. N. Saraswati who possesses a deep understanding of Hindu pilgrimage and is himself engaged in a long-term study of Banaras religious history and culture.

page 256 note 1 Hunt, E. D., Holy Land Pilgrimage and the Later Roman Empire AD 312–480 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), p. 74.Google Scholar

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page 258 note 1 Tolstoy, L., ‘Two Old Men’, in Master and Man (London: Everyman's, 1910), p. 156.Google Scholar Thanks to Herbert Menzel for directing my attention to this story.

page 259 note 1 Crapanzano, V., Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (Chicago University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

page 260 note 1 Cf. Turner, and Turner, (1978), op. Cit. pp. 104–39.Google Scholar