Lithuanian valuistic journeys: traditional and secular pilgrimage

The article deals with valuistic journeys from Lithuania. There are many reasons for undertaking valuistic journeys, the most important being personal values, personal and social identities, life experiences, lifestyle enhancement, spirituality and social and cultural influences. The two main types of Lithuanian valuistic journeys are presented in this paper: traditional religious and secular pilgrimages. The paper examines the most popular religious destinations for Lithuanians abroad and describes the most important secular destinations and events. The concept of organized valuistic journeys consists of the agreement between the identities of pilgrims and others, where social identities are marked by meanings and symbols. Valuistic journeys have overwhelmingly been structured by the desire to validate identities and reflect upon them during travel.     

Heritage complexity and tourism: the case of Lumbini,Nepal

Differences in values, interests, expectations and priorities among stakeholders, a major source of dissonance, may create conflict in heritage and can be a challenge for its preservation and management. This study uses Lumbini, Nepal, the birthplace of Lord Buddha, to examine heritage complexity and tourism. Lumbini, one of the most important Buddhist sites for the world's 500 million Buddhists, is surrounded by a population of different faiths, mainly Hindus and Muslims. Locals, who are predominantly non-Buddhist, see the local patrimony more as an economic resource than spiritual one, whereas the government uses the site for building national pride, garnering international support and promoting tourism. Furthermore, despite its potential for attracting Western, regional and domestic tourists and a growing trend in arrivals, the community and the region have not benefited well from tourism. Although Lumbini is currently experiencing “latent dissonance,” this can be reduced through communication, cooperation and collaboration among various stakeholders.     

Islamic tourism: an empirical examination of travel motivation and satisfaction in Malaysia

The objectives of this study are to test the relationship between tourism motivations and tourist satisfaction, and to test how ‘Religion’ moderates the relationship. The variable ‘Religion’ is represented by the availability of Islamic norms and practices relevant to tourism at the destination. The results of the partial least square indicate that tourism motivations are significantly and positively related to tourist satisfaction. The results also showed that Religion significantly moderates the relationship between pull motivation and tourist satisfaction. However, the moderating effect of Religion on the relationship between push motivation and tourist satisfaction was not supported.     

Faith,hope and love: doing family through consuming pilgrimage

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to explore the consumption of Lourdes, a Catholic pilgrimage site in France. Based on a three-year ethnography, our findings focus on respondents’ ‘Lourdes stories’. Discussing themes of faith, hope and love, we illustrate the importance of the family in consuming Lourdes. Family members act as influencing agents in the initial and sometimes continuous consumption of Lourdes. Our findings differ from consumer research to date in that rather than furthering discussion of family structure or furthering discussion on family identity we suggest a new focus is the actual building of intimate family bonds and relationships – the ‘doing’ of family or ‘familying’ – with the context of the Lourdes pilgrimage offering consumers a unique setting comprising faith, fun and family.     

From spots to themed sites – the evolution of the Protestant Holy Land

Christian theme sites are the latest stage in a process of sanctification of space in which historically embodied Protestant ways of seeing inscribe Protestant understandings on the Holy Land to produce a textualized sacred landscape. After sketching the evolution of Protestant sacred spaces in the Holy Land, attention is focused on two recent Christian theme sites, Nazareth Village and the Biblical Resources Museum. The sites reflect the interaction of contemporary processes, such as the salience of mediatized images, and the increased importance of sensory experiences with Protestant values and habitus. By demonstrating how global flows of tourism are subject to the constraints of religious ways of seeing, the article seeks to broaden understandings of tourism hereto dominated by the image of the hedonist pleasure-seeker.     

Visitors’ diversified motivations and behavior – the case of the pilgrimage center in Krakow (Poland)

The article presents the visitors’ motivations and behavior at the pilgrimage center in Krakow (Poland). Here, the relation between these elements, i.e. whether their motivations have a correlation with what buildings they visit, is emphasized for the first time. The most important motivations for visits were religious and tourist ones, often rated equally high by the same respondents. They visited religious, cultural and tourist buildings and facilities. The stay of visitors with religious motivations was not limited to religious practices, but was extended by tourist behavior. Similarly, visitors with tourist motivations visited religious buildings and participated in religious practices. However, they visit tourist and cultural facilities more often. Additionally, the three groups of respondents were categorized and, on the basis of importance of the religious and tourist motivations, three types were distinguished, i.e. pilgrims, religious tourists and tourists. Their characteristic has been expanded by the analysis of their behavior. Nowadays, visitors’ motivations and behavior at pilgrimage centers include those typical for pilgrims and tourists in the traditional meaning. In addition to their religious function, these sites offer cultural and tourist facilities. The article highlights the dedifferentiation approach to visitors’ motivations and behavior, and in respect of the spatial organization of pilgrimage centers.     

Dark tourism as/is pilgrimage

This research note posits that the time has come to re-examine our contemporary usage of terms in order to allow for broader interpretations of different phenomena in the field of tourism. Specifically, it deals with the relationship between “dark tourism” and “pilgrimage”, but also highlights a number of broader ideas regarding the current state of tourism research.     

Three poems on markets and consumption

This account reflects an effort to address the crisis of representation emerging from some of my recent fieldwork on pilgrimage in the postmodern era. Bracketed by the relatively dispassionate field note and the reasonably narcissistic journal entry, each of these particular poems is a liminal playground for the contest between introspection and exteroception. In these poems, I exploit the coincidence of the ethnographic and lyric moment to examine an anthropologist’s engagement with his craft. They address the experience of researcher ambivalence – in this case, the uncomfortable unwillingness to suspend the voice of judgment – occasioned by prolonged immersion in spectacular venues. Neither autoethnographic nor reflexive in any formal sense, these poems invite the reader to participate in the mixed emotions of a persona locked in the embrace of consumer culture, where to resist is to accommodate, and to accommodate, resist. The sites represented in the poems are, respectively, the flagship brand store American Girl Place, the Caribbean port of call Costa Maya, and the temporary autonomous zone of the Burning Man festival.     

Tourism at Khajuraho an Indian enigma?

The Hindu temple complex at Khajuraho in central India has become a major tourist site for Indians and international tourists only in the past twenty years. Built as a court nearly a thousand years ago, but abandoned two centuries later, Khajuraho remained a minor pilgrimage site into the present century. The distinctive features of Khajuraho include thousands of explicitly sexual relief carvings, much publicized throughout India. Westerners are direct in their examination of these features, which remain problematic to the majority of Indian tourists. In contemporary puritanical India, where journals and movies are highly censored, Khajuraho offers an opportunity for the loosening of such rules with highly philosophical efforts to “explain away” such “obscenities.” Yet communitas is incomplete: women are discouraged from close examination of the depictions, and men fail to communicate with their families about their content.