Pilgrimage and Religious Mobilization in the World

Dear Colleagues,

Following the previous successful Special Issue on pilgrimage and religious mobilization in Europe, this call invites papers with a global focus as well as a focus on any specific area worldwide. Mega-sites and globalization events include places of pilgrimage and religious mobilization from Allahabad to Mecca, and from Jerusalem to Guadelupe and Rome, but smaller sites are also of importance for regional and local landscapes of pilgrimages in many areas of the world.

From the global perspective, religions typically possess a public dimension of social gathering, debate, and worship. The ritual of pilgrimage constitutes, in many religions, an important expression of this public dimension.

Pilgrimage has dimensions beyond the religious experience. Pilgrimages can spill over into various methods of religious mobilization with social, political, and economic impacts. When religious experiences combine with cultural landscapes and economic interests, questions of political power begin to arise. Different varieties of pilgrimage, from spiritual tourism to religious protest, shape the public dimension of pilgrimage and have an impact on various levels of European societies.

Pilgrim Studies is an emerging interdisciplinary field that takes these various sociological, cultural, geographical, economic, and political implications into account.

As with the first Special Issue which focused on Europe, this second Issue, with a worldwide focus, seeks to continue and elaborate on the existing research agendas and to establish a forum for new approaches, historical traditions, current trends, comparative approaches, conceptual developments, and methodological questions. Whose frames guide the pilgrims? Who profits from the pilgrims’ decisions? What kind of identity emerges when pilgrims depart and return?

This Special Issue invites contributions from the fields of political science, history, geography, theology, sociology, religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, media studies, literature studies, tourism and travel studies, and the whole range of humanities and social sciences. The submission of a broad range of papers from disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary perspectives, in order to elaborate on the empirical and theoretical aspects of all forms of pilgrimage and related religious mobilization in the world, is encouraged.

Prof. Dr. Mariano P. Barbato
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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