The religions of humankind, from the great traditions of Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, to sectarian cults arid tribal religions, have all singled out spatial referents as places that embody or enshrine the religious ideals of the culture. These sacred referents and the complex web of logistics, demographics, economics, and related activities that associate with the visitation patterns to such sacred places are the subject of this book

Morinis, Alan

Stoddard, Robert

English

DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska

University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Geography Faculty Publications Geography Program (SNR) 1997 The Geographic Contribution to Studies of Pilgrimage: Introduction to Sacred Places, Sacred Spaces Robert Stoddard University of Nebraska - Lincoln, rstoddard1@unl.edu Alan Morinis The Mussar Institute, Vancouver, BC Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/geographyfacpub  Part of the Geography Commons Stoddard, Robert and Morinis, Alan, "The Geographic Contribution to Studies of Pilgrimage: Introduction to Sacred Places, Sacred Spaces" (1997). Geography Faculty Publications. 1. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/geographyfacpub/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Geography Program (SNR) at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Geography Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. INTRODUCTION The Geographic Contribution to Studies of Pilgrimage The religions of humankind, from the great traditions of Islam, Christian-ity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, to sectarian cults arid tribal religions, have all singled out spatial referents as places that embody or enshrine the reli-gious ideals of the culture. These sacred referents and the complex web of logistics, demographics, economics, and related activities that associate with the visitation patterns to such sacred places are the subject of this book. Sacred places and sacred journeys of pilgrimage exist in important forms throughout the world. This universality is illustrated in this book by settings in Europe (Nolan and Nolan), Arabia (Rowley), Malaysia (Din and Hadi), the United States (Prorok, Rinschede), Japan (Shimazaki), and India (Caplan, Karan, McCormick, Singh, and Sopher). The greater number of discussions about South Asian pilgrimage arises mainly from the religious variety in this region, as reflected by papers concerning Jain (McCormick), Sikh (Karan), and Hindu (Caplan, Singh, and Sopher) traditions. Even though these papers represent a variety of cultural settings and religious traditions, they focus on the basic contributions that the geo-graphic perspective makes to the field of pilgrimage studies. Because of its integrative nature, geography provides an important framework for studying the complex phenomenon of pilgrimages. Scholars who seek to understand spatial relationships - the focus of geography - necessarily incorporate phenomena that may also involve anthropological, sociologi-cal, economic, religious, and environmental topics. In addition to their integrative characteristics, geographic studies of-ten focus on the perception of places - a perspective that is especially im-portant in pilgrimage behavior. Pilgri,mages occur because people believe specific places are holy, and, thus, undertake religious journeys so they can worship at those places. What makes a particular place sacred in the eyes of believers? This is a fundamental question for pilgrimage scholars in gen-Sacred Places, Sacred Spaces: The Geography of Pilgrimages, edited by Robert H. Stoddard and Alan Morinis, 1997. Geoscience and Man, vol. 34, pp. ix-xi. Dept. of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70893-6010. ix x • Introduction eral, and especially for geographers interested in explaining the movement of pilgrims. An answer is not easy to discern, but McCormick, Nolan and Nolan, and Prorok all discuss aspects of this question in this volume. Also related to the topic of place perception is the attachment indi-viduals have to a specific place. Love of home and reluctance to travel else-where are feelings that vary tremendously among people and, therefore, must be incorporated into any geographic model that is designed to ex-plain spatial behavior. In pilgrimage studies, this attachment to place takes on additional meaning because, for some pilgrims, it adds to the sac-rifice of the religious journey. Pilgrimage, therefore, pertains to attraction of places: the secure place of home and the distant place of the divine. Pilgrimages invariably require spatial movements and, thus, involve the geographic concern with distance and its effect on behavior. The effects of distance are especially pertinent when contrasting pilgrimages with travel for economic goals. In contrast to the distance decay functions that apply to most human movement, where interaction between close places tends to be much greater than that between widely separated places, travel to pilgrimage sites may be expressed by contrasting spatial relationships. On the one hand, travel by pilgrims often does reveal the same effects of distance as movement for other purposes because, for many pilgrims, trav-eling is undertaken merely to get to a sacred place and long distances deter many potential travelers (as noted by Din and Hadi, for example, ). On the other hand, when movement itself is regarded as a form of worship or sacrifice, the role of distance may differ from the usual distance decay function. Distance is no longer regarded as a hinderance to travel, but instead, it becomes an opportunity because movement is something valued. The importance of movement per se is especially obvious in reli-gious processions and circumambulations, where the goal is certainly not to arrive at a distant place. The importance of the act of traveling is less clear in journeys that involve a long circuit to several pilgrimage sites, such as the one around Shikoku Island (Shimazaki). The trip can be regarded as only a necessity required to get from each holy site to the next in the series, or the movement may be interpreted as part of the total act of worship. Clearly, for some pilgrims, the act of traveling to a holy place has religious significance, with greater merit resulting from more sacrificial forms of movement (a result discussed by Din and Hadi and by Shimazaki). In addition to studying the effects of total distance on movement, ge-ographers often examine routes of movement. Understanding routes may depend on network analysis where paths that minimize distance between origins and destinations are compared to the volume of traffic on specific routes. When applied to the movement of pilgrims, however, an optimal route cannot be defined just by time-distance or cost-distance because the ideal approach may be defined by a path of sanctity. Certainly pilgrims Stoddard and Morinis • xi moving along a prescribed sacred way lined with shrines seldom follow a pilgrimage route that is the most direct line between origin and destina-tion. Geographic contributions to pilgrimage studies also include the ex-amination of nodal regions (catchment areas or pilgrimage fields) gener-ated by pilgrims (Caplan and Karan). Questions of relative sizes, hierarchical relationships, overlapping zones, and changes in each of these aspects of nodal regions are some of the topics that contribute to a better understanding of pilgrimages. One of the fascinating modifications to the normal nodal region is one having a mobile node, which occurs when pilgrims are attracted to a "place" that wanders. Situations where the pilgrims' destination varies spatially may occur when the sacred position is that occupied by a wan-dering saint (McCormick) or an image of veneration that is carried from place to place (Nolan and Nolan). These themes, as well as others addressed in this book, present a per-spective that is geographic and, thus, contribute an essential component to the body of literature produced by several disciplines. Scholars seeking to understand the complex phenomenon of pilgrimage can achieve success best by combining the observations and insights obtained from a variety of academic fields. Geographic research on pilgrimages may range from a focus on ac-tivities at a particular place, involving a specific religious tradition, to one concerned with more general characteristics of journeys to sacred places. The studies contained in this book incorporate aspects of both the general and the specific, which makes it difficult to organize the chapters in a se-quence that is entirely consistent. Nevertheless, the topics in this volume commence with those addressing pilgrimages in general (Section I) and then focus on those in Christianity (Section II), Islam (Section III), Hindu-ism (Section IV), and Jainism, Sikhism, and Buddhism (all in Section V). The volume closes with a treatise on the quest of place by Wagner (Section VI). We owe special thanks to two colleagues who contributed signifi-cantly to this publication: to Fred Clothy of the University of Pittsburgh, who kindly hosted the conference out of which this volume grew, and to Carolyn Prorok, who volunteered invaluable assistance with editing. Robert H. Stoddard Lincoln, Nebraska Alan Morinis Vancouver, British Columbia 

The Geographic Contribution to Studies of Pilgrimage: Introduction to \u3ci\u3eSacred Places, Sacred Spaces\u3c/i\u3e

UNL | Libraries

University of Nebraska - Lincoln 
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln 
Geography Faculty Publications Geography Program (SNR) 
1997 
The Geographic Contribution to Studies of Pilgrimage: 
Introduction to Sacred Places, Sacred Spaces 
Robert Stoddard 
University of Nebraska - Lincoln, rstoddard1@unl.edu 
Alan Morinis 
The Mussar Institute, Vancouver, BC 
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/geographyfacpub 
 Part of the Geography Commons 
Stoddard, Robert and Morinis, Alan, "The Geographic Contribution to Studies of Pilgrimage: Introduction to 
Sacred Places, Sacred Spaces" (1997). Geography Faculty Publications. 1. 
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/geographyfacpub/1 
This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Geography Program (SNR) at 
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Geography Faculty 
Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. 
INTRODUCTION 
The Geographic Contribution 
to Studies of Pilgrimage 
The religions of humankind, from the great traditions of Islam, Christian-
ity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, to sectarian cults arid tribal religions, have 
all singled out spatial referents as places that embody or enshrine the reli-
gious ideals of the culture. These sacred referents and the complex web of 
logistics, demographics, economics, and related activities that associate 
with the visitation patterns to such sacred places are the subject of this 
book. 
Sacred places and sacred journeys of pilgrimage exist in important 
forms throughout the world. This universality is illustrated in this book by 
settings in Europe (Nolan and Nolan), Arabia (Rowley), Malaysia (Din and 
Hadi), the United States (Prorok, Rinschede), Japan (Shimazaki), and India 
(Caplan, Karan, McCormick, Singh, and Sopher). The greater number of 
discussions about South Asian pilgrimage arises mainly from the religious 
variety in this region, as reflected by papers concerning Jain (McCormick), 
Sikh (Karan), and Hindu (Caplan, Singh, and Sopher) traditions. 
Even though these papers represent a variety of cultural settings and 
religious traditions, they focus on the basic contributions that the geo-
graphic perspective makes to the field of pilgrimage studies. Because of its 
integrative nature, geography provides an important framework for 
studying the complex phenomenon of pilgrimages. Scholars who seek to 
understand spatial relationships - the focus of geography - necessarily 
incorporate phenomena that may also involve anthropological, sociologi-
cal, economic, religious, and environmental topics. 
In addition to their integrative characteristics, geographic studies of-
ten focus on the perception of places - a perspective that is especially im-
portant in pilgrimage behavior. Pilgri,mages occur because people believe 
specific places are holy, and, thus, undertake religious journeys so they can 
worship at those places. What makes a particular place sacred in the eyes 
of believers? This is a fundamental question for pilgrimage scholars in gen-
Sacred Places, Sacred Spaces: The Geography of Pilgrimages, edited by Robert H. Stoddard 
and Alan Morinis, 1997. Geoscience and Man, vol. 34, pp. ix-xi. Dept. of Geography 
and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70893-6010. ix 
x • Introduction 
eral, and especially for geographers interested in explaining the movement 
of pilgrims. An answer is not easy to discern, but McCormick, Nolan and 
Nolan, and Prorok all discuss aspects of this question in this volume. 
Also related to the topic of place perception is the attachment indi-
viduals have to a specific place. Love of home and reluctance to travel else-
where are feelings that vary tremendously among people and, therefore, 
must be incorporated into any geographic model that is designed to ex-
plain spatial behavior. In pilgrimage studies, this attachment to place 
takes on additional meaning because, for some pilgrims, it adds to the sac-
rifice of the religious journey. Pilgrimage, therefore, pertains to attraction 
of places: the secure place of home and the distant place of the divine. 
Pilgrimages invariably require spatial movements and, thus, involve 
the geographic concern with distance and its effect on behavior. The effects 
of distance are especially pertinent when contrasting pilgrimages with 
travel for economic goals. In contrast to the distance decay functions that 
apply to most human movement, where interaction between close places 
tends to be much greater than that between widely separated places, travel 
to pilgrimage sites may be expressed by contrasting spatial relationships. 
On the one hand, travel by pilgrims often does reveal the same effects of 
distance as movement for other purposes because, for many pilgrims, trav-
eling is undertaken merely to get to a sacred place and long distances deter 
many potential travelers (as noted by Din and Hadi, for example, ). 
On the other hand, when movement itself is regarded as a form of 
worship or sacrifice, the role of distance may differ from the usual distance 
decay function. Distance is no longer regarded as a hinderance to travel, 
but instead, it becomes an opportunity because movement is something 
valued. The importance of movement per se is especially obvious in reli-
gious processions and circumambulations, where the goal is certainly not 
to arrive at a distant place. The importance of the act of traveling is less 
clear in journeys that involve a long circuit to several pilgrimage sites, such 
as the one around Shikoku Island (Shimazaki). The trip can be regarded as 
only a necessity required to get from each holy site to the next in the series, 
or the movement may be interpreted as part of the total act of worship. 
Clearly, for some pilgrims, the act of traveling to a holy place has religious 
significance, with greater merit resulting from more sacrificial forms of 
movement (a result discussed by Din and Hadi and by Shimazaki). 
In addition to studying the effects of total distance on movement, ge-
ographers often examine routes of movement. Understanding routes may 
depend on network analysis where paths that minimize distance between 
origins and destinations are compared to the volume of traffic on specific 
routes. When applied to the movement of pilgrims, however, an optimal 
route cannot be defined just by time-distance or cost-distance because the 
ideal approach may be defined by a path of sanctity. Certainly pilgrims 
Stoddard and Morinis • xi 
moving along a prescribed sacred way lined with shrines seldom follow a 
pilgrimage route that is the most direct line between origin and destina-
tion. 
Geographic contributions to pilgrimage studies also include the ex-
amination of nodal regions (catchment areas or pilgrimage fields) gener-
ated by pilgrims (Caplan and Karan). Questions of relative sizes, 
hierarchical relationships, overlapping zones, and changes in each of these 
aspects of nodal regions are some of the topics that contribute to a better 
understanding of pilgrimages. 
One of the fascinating modifications to the normal nodal region is 
one having a mobile node, which occurs when pilgrims are attracted to a 
"place" that wanders. Situations where the pilgrims' destination varies 
spatially may occur when the sacred position is that occupied by a wan-
dering saint (McCormick) or an image of veneration that is carried from 
place to place (Nolan and Nolan). 
These themes, as well as others addressed in this book, present a per-
spective that is geographic and, thus, contribute an essential component to 
the body of literature produced by several disciplines. Scholars seeking to 
understand the complex phenomenon of pilgrimage can achieve success 
best by combining the observations and insights obtained from a variety 
of academic fields. 
Geographic research on pilgrimages may range from a focus on ac-
tivities at a particular place, involving a specific religious tradition, to one 
concerned with more general characteristics of journeys to sacred places. 
The studies contained in this book incorporate aspects of both the general 
and the specific, which makes it difficult to organize the chapters in a se-
quence that is entirely consistent. Nevertheless, the topics in this volume 
commence with those addressing pilgrimages in general (Section I) and 
then focus on those in Christianity (Section II), Islam (Section III), Hindu-
ism (Section IV), and Jainism, Sikhism, and Buddhism (all in Section V). The 
volume closes with a treatise on the quest of place by Wagner (Section VI). 
We owe special thanks to two colleagues who contributed signifi-
cantly to this publication: to Fred Clothy of the University of Pittsburgh, 
who kindly hosted the conference out of which this volume grew, and to 
Carolyn Prorok, who volunteered invaluable assistance with editing. 
Robert H. Stoddard 
Lincoln, Nebraska 
Alan Morinis 
Vancouver, British Columbia 


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