Wilde Lectures in Natural and Comparative Religion

Religion Refracted and in Motion: On Pilgrimage in Present Times

Simon Coleman, University of Toronto

The four lectures will take place on:

Wednesdays 1, 8, 15, and 22 May, 2024

From 5:15 to 6:45 pm

In the Harris Lecture Theatre, Oriel College.

Following the first lecture, there will be a reception in the Harris Seminar Room, Oriel College.

Series abstract Pilgrimage flourishes in post-secular conditions—as physical activity, as cultural metaphor, and as scholarly trope. Victor and Edith Turner’s Image of Pilgrimage (1978) became a foundational text for anthropologists and religious studies scholars during the latter part of the twentieth century. I remain in dialogue with the Turnerian Image throughout these lectures, but I argue for a new vision of the subject: one that is both expanded and refracted, highlighting the need to trace multiple mediations of movement, materiality, and religion across and beyond sacred sites. I explore pilgrimage less as set-apart activity than as permeator of social and cultural worlds, connecting and conjoining scales, rhythms, and material infrastructures of human action. While I range across comparative contexts in these lectures, my main focus is on two largely Christian pilgrimage contexts where I have carried out fieldwork in recent years. One is made up of urban cathedrals, which function as hosts for both worship and heritage tourism in contemporary England. The other is the rural pilgrimage site of Walsingham in North Norfolk. Both provide me with complex ethnographic lenses through which to view the full scope of a refracted image of pilgrimage in present times, and I show how they constitute not only comparable, but also contiguous and sometimes mutually reinforcing, places of pilgrimage. Underlying my approach is a further examination: one that traces resonances and tensions between anthropology and religious studies as disciplinary orientations to the study of religion.

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Lecture One

‘Trivial Religion?: From Liminal to Lateral’

[Wednesday 1 May, from 5:15 to 6:45 pm, Harris Lecture Theatre, Oriel College,
to be followed by reception in the Harris Seminar Room, Oriel College]

Two perspectives have dominated social scientific work on religion and ritual. One highlights transcendence, intensity, the spectacular. The other emphasizes immanence, banality, the everyday. I argue that studying pilgrimage suggests the generative possibilities of adopting another point of view: an exploration of initially glancing ritual encounters that may have wider consequences than first appears. Such an approach examines mutually constitutive articulations between backgrounds and foregrounds, ‘looser’ and ‘tighter’ behaviours, adjacencies and immediacies, in tracing how even apparently uncommitted people move through and respond to religious environments. In reflecting on these themes I introduce a key distinction between ‘lateral’ and liminal engagements with ritual practices.

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Lecture Two

‘Spirit and Blood: Between Communitas and Kinship’

[Wednesday 8 May, from 5:15 to 6:45 pm, Harris Lecture Theatre, Oriel College]

The Turnerian concept of existential communitas famously presents the pilgrim as temporary stranger to the world, disciplined within liminal or liminoid spaces to render the self open to universal and anonymized others. Blood yields to spirit, friendship to fellowship, presaging later anthropological concerns—especially in studies of both Christianity and modernity—over inherent conflicts between mediation and transcendence. In this lecture, I reverse these analytical polarities, emphasizing the significance of intimate intersections and calibrations between pilgrimage and kinship, the spiritual and the social, optation and obligation. Exploring blood as central metaphor of connectedness and flow as well as sacrifice, I present a vision of pilgrimage as ritualized, embodied refraction of relations among kin, whether living or dead.

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Lecture Three

‘Religious Real Estate: Properties of the Sacred’

[Wednesday 15 May, from 5:15 to 6:45 pm, Harris Lecture Theatre, Oriel College]

A persistent image of pilgrimage sites is that they act as ‘spiritual magnets,’ drawing others to them as a result of extraordinary events or miraculous properties of healing or revelation. This view occludes the significance of the multiple material infrastructures that facilitate access to and through a holy place, providing the bodily presences necessary to reinforce its image as locus of exceptional sacrality. In this lecture, I examine the affordances of resources that range from roads to real estate, and I highlight a category of person often ignored in studies of pilgrimage sites: those people—including but not just clergy—who regard sacred destination as ‘home’. I show how domesticity and the divine may become conjoined through miraculous narratives of acquiring and developing property. My focus on the materialities of both cathedrals and Walsingham as sacred places incorporates kitchens and cartographies, personal biographies as well as a wider biopolitics of religious encompassment. Drawing on anthropological work on hospitality and migration, I develop a model of the pilgrimage site as both generator and receiver of ‘vital signs’ of religious presence.

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Lecture Four

‘A New Pilgrimage Ethic: On the Secular and the Serious’

[Wednesday 22 May, from 5:15 to 6:45 pm, Harris Lecture Theatre, Oriel College]

Victor and Edith Turner consciously adapted Weberian imagery when they argued that a Pilgrimage Ethic, with its emphasis on the benefits of holy travel, helped to create the communications networks that would enable the development of mercantile and industrial capitalism. Themes of both materiality and secularity continue to haunt Euro-American images of religion in general, and pilgrimage in particular, often resulting in a seemingly endless and restless search for authenticity. In this final lecture, I present an alternative view of pilgrimage as moral action and affective stance, which considers its articulations with theories of mobility and political economy alongside the now extensive anthropology of ethics. I ask whether pilgrimage—manifested at contexts like Walsingham and the Camino, but also away from conventional experiences of travel—might be viewed as a refractive, transposable form of ‘seriousness’ as well as political action that goes beyond oppositions between the earnest and the playful, the authentic and the inauthentic, the religious and the secular.

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