Liminality Wanted. Liminal landscapes and literary spaces: The Way of St. James

Abstract

The term limen was introduced to anthropological studies following Van Gennep’s theories (1960) about liminality. Among them, Victor and Edith Turner (1978) defined pilgrimage as a liminal experience, as it implies being between two existential levels that, through rituality, favours reflection. In this sense, the case of The Way of St. James (Spain) is an interesting field or research as it is loaded with contemporary meanings. Its landscapes assume the nature of spiritual and therapeutic ones; here, the physical and built environment, social conditions and human perceptions produce an atmosphere favourable to spiritual healing. On the basis of these emotions, liminality is the essence of this pilgrimage experience, not only during the same, but especially afterwards. As a matter of fact, this spiritual journey involves the search for one’s self once back home, thus acting in the process of formation of the individual. Drawing on the need for improving researches on landscape perception approach in tourism studies, we pretend to singularise the pilgrimage landscape from a liminal perspective in order to point out the need for liminality before, during and after the pilgrimage. This is achieved by exploring perceptions and emotions expressed in a corpus of travel literary production. These narrative works are not limited to describe the pilgrimage experiences; rather they make liminality a literary theme to magnify their experiences. As a result, the concept of liminal literary landscape is used to refer to pilgrims’ desire to revive liminality through the pages of travel narratives, in order to continue enjoying these emotions and feelings. These travel narratives are producing new literary modes based on the geographical exploration of the landscapes of The Way in relation to human feelings.     

The Sunday morning journey to church considered as a form of ‘micro-pilgrimage’

Using mixed methods data, the social significance and narrative of local journeys to church on a Sunday morning are examined and reframed as a form of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage studies over the last 30 years have criticized the concept proposed by Turner and Turner of pilgrimage as entirely opposite and peripheral to social structures and relation. Recent literature has reinterpreted Turner and Turner’s terminology of ‘liminality’ and ‘communitas’, developing these ideas to identify the continuities that remain between much of everyday life and contemporary pilgrimage. Furthermore, there has been a shift in focus, prompted by interest in mobilities, from pilgrimage centres to recognize the significance of the journey to such centres. This paper advances the discussion further to argue that local scale journeys to church should be considered as a form of micro-pilgrimage: local journeys to church services that can form part of a break from daily social structures to be used to prepare oneself for the act of worship or immersion in the social relations based in the church. The concept of micro-pilgrimages therefore recognizes that these journeys can, like longer pilgrimages, contain qualities of liminality and communitas that combine social and religious significance and meaning for the pilgrim.     

Long‐Distance Pilgrimage and the Counter Reformation in France: Sacred Journeys to the Mont Saint‐Michel 1520 to 1750

In the Counter Reformation, a great upsurge in pilgrimage activity occurred across Europe. Much of this pilgrimage was to local shrines, often newly created. Another destination was Rome. Less well known is the post‐Reformation refashioning of ancient, long‐distance pilgrimages. This article examines the origins and nature of such revived pilgrimage, using the example of the Mont Saint‐Michel in northern France. In the Catholic Reformation, the traditional, distant centres of pilgrimage contributed to the devotional culture of individuals and groups who wanted to go beyond the local, to experience a challenge as part of their spiritual and social growth. At the Mont, revival of the shrine came from the universality of the cult of St Michael, his role in the struggle against heresy, and veneration tied increasingly to that of Christ through the Eucharist. While pilgrims continued to travel in search of, or in thanksgiving for, healing and other graces, there was also greater emphasis on spiritual healing and intimacy with God. Also, for many young men, they proved themselves and their Catholicity by undertaking this heroic journey. Through the pilgrimage to the Mont, reformed Catholicism spread many of its ideas and values around the cities and communities of northern France.     

Reframing and Reconceptualising Gambling tourism in Macau as a Chinese Pilgrimage

Abstract

While dominant discourses, media representations and corporate entities in China downplay the presence of Chinese mainland gambling in Macau, Beijing sanctions millions of its citizens to make the journey to Macau to gamble each year. While Macau’s success is often put down to the extent to which visitors are drawn to a secular destination with integrated resorts to engage in individualistic activities, our approach explores Chinese gambling tourists’ movements, rituals and behaviours along post-structuralist lines, so as to generate new insights. The analysis shows how the metaphor of pilgrimage is an important lens to address individual and communal practices amongst outbound Chinese gambling tourists and brings to light the hyper-meaningfulness, shared values, ritualization, play, risk, and liminal conditions that characterise the processes of their entanglements and the centrality of commercial and political interests. In particular, the analysis indicates the need to explore the significance of cultural, spiritual, economic and social dimensions of Chinese outbound tourism, as well as the unique discourses of power and control affecting their movement and practices. By reframing and reconceptualising gambling tourists as a Chinese pilgrimage, we account for manifestations of culture, governmentality and intentional ritualization as well as contribute an alternative construction of pilgrimage beyond euro-centric accounts, which in turn, will stimulate discussion on geographies of pilgrimage.     

中世纪西欧教会法对教会与国家关系的理解和规范

本文依据中世纪西欧《教会法大全》讨论当时教会与国家的关系。中世纪的教会法学家和教皇们有一种二元论的政治理论 ,认为世俗政权和以教皇为首的教会领导机构应该有各自不同的势力范围 ,前者负责国家的治理 ,后者负责宗教事务。他们以为这一理论有利于教会和国家保持良好的合作关系。为了划分清楚教会和国家的权威范围 ,教会法学家把教会法界定为独立的法律体系。在复杂的现实政治中 ,对世俗权力和宗教权力做这种区分是极为困难的。     

Remapping land and remaking culture: memory and landscape in 20th-century South Africa

This article considers landscape ideas in relation to culture, language and power. The discussion is placed in the context of current debates – both popular and theological – on the topic of prophets, poets, politics and cultural practice. I argue that over the course of the previous century in South Africa, ideas of landscape have shifted the ways in which language, culture and power found expression. My focus is on the role of key cultural players in remapping land and remaking culture in the region of KwaZulu-Natal. Specifically, I explore the landscape ideas of the prophet Isaiah Shembe, who founded the Nazarite church in 1910, and the romantic poet B.W. Vilakazi. Shembe evoked a sacred landscape marked by holy mountains and other sites of importance connected through the prophet's personal religious journey. This landscape transgressed the boundaries of colonial spatial divisions, and evoked meanings considered subversive by the state. Holy mountains were places of revelation for the prophet; his life and vision were commemorated through annual pilgrimages to the summits. The sacred landscape mapped through the texts and memorial practices of the church drew on biblical, romantic and traditional African ideas. This landscape imagery and the memories it evokes have allowed for the creation of religious community in the context of the hardships, contestations and dispossessions of apartheid rule, and more recently in the uncertainties of the post-apartheid era.     

Women as Pilgrims: Memoirs of Iranian Women Travelers to Mecca

A hitherto neglected aspect of the Iranian women's lives and activities is their traveling and travelogues. A number of Iranian women pilgrims to Mecca and the Shi'ite holy shrines of Mesopotamia during the past four centuries have left behind memoirs of their travels. They recorded interesting details about their spiritual experience as pilgrims to the holy lands of Islam and of the difficulties of the journey, especially the notoriously dangerous land route from Iran to Mecca through the Arabian Desert. This paper examines four examples of that genre, the oldest dating from the early eighteenth and the other three from the late nineteenth centuries. As expected, the authors were all members of upper class families: one was a princess, another a former queen, and the other two were also affiliated with the ruling families in one way or another. However, they shared the same goals with all other female, and male, pilgrims: to perform their Muslim religious duty of hajj and to do it right. They all wrote about their spiritual satisfaction but also of the disadvantages and the extra burden that a woman experienced in her pilgrimage journey, simply for being a woman.     

Modern and Medieval Approaches to Pilgrimage,Gender and Sacred Space

This article examines both modern ethnographical, and medieval hagiographical, constructs of sacred space in the context of female pilgrimage. Beginning with an overview of the ways in which anthropological theories of sacred space and gender have informed pilgrimage scholarship over the last fifty years, it focuses in particular on two conceptual models: that which argues that spatial practices employed by cult centres served to distance women from holy places, and that which contends that accommodation was reached between the devotional aspirations of female pilgrims on the one hand, and the institutional policies of the Church on the other. In turning to the Middle Ages, the second part of the article examines narrative representations of sacred space, and reveals that the spatial challenges posed by female pilgrimage in the medieval West were addressed and mediated in hagiography in surprisingly similar ways.     

Twelfth-century Italian confraternities as institutions of pastoral care

When studied through canon law and scholastic pastoralia produced in the universities in the thirteenth century and beyond, medieval pastoral care comes across as spiritual care, more specifically the administration of sacraments and preaching, provided by the clergy for the faithful. This article complicates that view by arguing that in the twelfth century, the laity alongside the clergy was active in the provision and organisation of pastoral care. The sources examined are the surviving statutes of five religious confraternities – along with the obituaries and sermons in two cases – in Italy that flourished in the twelfth century and before. Each of these confraternities was centred around a church, established after an apostolic ideal, included laymen and women and local pastoral clergy of all levels, met regularly to celebrate the Eucharist, prayed for the dead members and made public confessions. Members prayed for and attended to the corporal needs of each other in case of sickness. In the final analysis, these twelfth-century confraternities appear as transitional institutions between the early medieval monastic confraternities focusing on prayer and the late medieval and renaissance confraternities focusing on charity. Their study opens a window onto the lay expectations of and contribution to pastoral care in medieval Italy.     

The ‘Injunction of Jeremiah’: papal politicking and power in the Middle Ages

Throughout the Middle Ages, the ‘Injunction of Jeremiah’ (Jer. 1:10) was employed by countless ecclesiastical writers. Building on an established tradition, medieval contemporaries began applying the allegory of ‘uprooting and destroying, building and planting’ with an intentionally moral and political message. This article examines the Old Testament call narrative with a view to understanding how and why it served medieval popes and other high-ranked ecclesiastics as a political and rhetorical mechanism for legitimising ecclesiastical authority. It argues for a noticeable and deliberate shift in textual interpretation in the ninth century, after which period medieval popes and influential church figures alike marshalled the Injunction to help strengthen the centralising ideology of Rome and her bishop. The effect, it is concluded, contributed ultimately to reinforcing the papacy's claims to govern spiritual and temporal matters throughout Christian society.     

THE BYZANTINE CHURCH OF THE NUTRITION IN NAZARETH REDISCOVERED

Abstract

Although Nazareth has usually been seen by scholars as a relatively minor Byzantine pilgrimage centre, it contained perhaps the most important ‘lost’ Byzantine church in the Holy Land, the Church of the Nutrition – according to De Locis Sanctis built over the house where it was believed that Jesus Christ had been a child. This article, part of a series of final interim reports of the PEF-funded ‘Nazareth Archaeological Project’, presents evidence that this church has been discovered at the present Sisters of Nazareth convent in central Nazareth. The scale of the church and its surrounding structures suggests that Nazareth was a much larger, and more important, centre for Byzantine-period pilgrimage than previously supposed. The church was used in the Crusader period, after a phase of desertion, prior to destruction by fire, probably in the 13th century.     

The Wharram Research Project: Results to 1983

CONTINUING ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATION of the church, manor house, parsonage and peasant homes of a deserted medieval village has widened into a multidisciplinary enquiry into the evolution of the total landscape of the two parishes bearing the name of Wharram which once contained six villages, now reduced to two. The microtopography of the medieval site is related to its antecedents, and the post-desertion settlement pattern to renewed arable farming on the Wolds without the re-creation of villages.     

BUILDING URBANITY: SPATIAL ORGANISATION AS SOCIAL PRACTICE IN MEDIEVAL ODENSE

The article investigates the social practices of the inhabitants of the medieval town as it is expressed in the materiality of the urban landscape. It is argued that a practice‐based approach allows an understanding of how urbanity, defined as a specific set of social practices motivated by the shared space, developed in the medieval period. The town is seen as something more than a physical entity. The argument is developed through a diachronic and contextual analysis of the spatial organisation and layout of the medieval town of Odense in Denmark, as it is seen in the archaeological record of I. Vilhelm Werners Plads, representing the 9^th‐16^th centuries. The analysis demonstrates that from the mid‐12^th century, the organisation of the settlement plot and the interaction between town dwellers and townscape change. This change of practices is seen as related to a different mind‐set and perception of what it means to live in a town, that progressively has provided a sense of urbanity.     

Medieval food and colour

For medieval people, colour provided important information about the nature of objects, and that was no less true of what they ate than of anything else. On one level colour might expose moral and spiritual connotations; on another it might offer indications of characteristics of a foodstuff according to medieval humoral theories. Moreover, it was to form an important element in the elite cuisine that developed across Europe from 1200 and perhaps earlier. Display was a crucial part of this cuisine, and this paper demonstrates how and why it was employed, and the ways in which these culinary practices were emulated elsewhere in society. There were general cultural associations between colours and culinary preparations, and some types of dish show common patterns of colouring. However fleeting the colours of foodstuffs, they offer a further dimension to our understanding of meals, the material culture of dining and medieval mentalities.     

The West Saxon boundary clause in context: Celtic and Continental connections

The perambulatory boundary clause in England originated as a West Saxon phenomenon in the eighth century, most likely through connections with the early Celtic church, and spread with the rise of the West Saxon kings. Vernacular perambulatory charter bounds occur throughout England after the tenth century – but before 800, they appear only in Wessex, and on the Continent where West Saxons were initially installed as missionaries, in an early Latin–vernacular form. The West Saxon roots of Boniface and his followers may thus explain the presence of early perambulatory bounds in Frankish archives.     

MASTER AND APPRENTICE, KNIGHT AND SQUIRE: EDUCATION IN THE 'CELTIC' IRON AGE

Summary. The role of education and agency of children as factors in the formation of Iron Age culture is addressed. Historical sources on education from Iron Age Gaul are compared with later 'medieval Celtic' practices. Fosterage, common Celtic *altros, may have been the evolutionary precursor of apprenticeships and knight–squire relationships, as developed in the feudal states of medieval Europe. Fosterage establishes artificial kinship, strengthens kinship alliances by providing hostages, helps to forge strong emotional bonds between foster parents, children and siblings, and helps to confirm social hierarchies, while providing specialized education. Professional specialists gain increased security outside their own group. It gives children a role in the tradition of culture, and allows them to blend artistic styles and create unique adaptations combining 'local' traditions with 'external' innovations. Fosterage can thus be established as an important method of peer polity interaction in Iron Age and medieval 'Celtic' societies.     

Archaeology and the Irish rediscovery of the Celtic past

This article examines the place of archaeology in the second wave of Irish cultural nationalism, and how archaeological findings were appropriated by rival ethno‐religious communities in Ireland. In particular, it focuses on George Petrie, who was the founder of ‘scientific’ archaeology and was also one of the leading figures in the nineteenth‐century Celtic revival that sought a moral regeneration of the Irish nation In Ireland, as elsewhere, archaeology was important in reconstructing an early history of the nation where few written records existed and in making this visible through material artefacts. However, archaeology was only significant as part of a wider cultural revival that presented artefacts and sites as national symbols to an island undergoing rapid social change. This article will explore the relationship between archaeology and this national revival, and how the material objects recovered by archaeologists extended and transformed the existing repertoires of how the nation was imagined and felt. It will assess the different reception of these images in the rival Catholic and Protestant communities. Finally, it will comment on the capacity of a medieval ‘Celtic’ repertoire to provide the basis of a dynamic modern Irish national culture.