Product Description: Twelfth Night, or What You Will is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written around 1601–02 as a Twelfth Night's entertainment for the close of the Christmas season. The play centres on the twins Viola and Sebastian, who are separated in a shipwreck...read more

Product Description: Within the past 10 years, Religious Tourism has seen both economic and education-sector growth on a global scale. This book addresses the central role of religious tourism and interrelationships with other aspects of pilgrimage management...read more

Product Description: Through a discussion of power dynamics with a critical eye towards the political situation of influential Christian leaders including Constantine, Damasus, Ambrose, and Augustine, Death's Dominion demonstrates the ways in which these individuals sought to craft Christian identity and cultural memory around the martyr shrine...read more

Product Description: Most of us set out on the Jeweled Highway, whether we know it or not. We live at a time when the quest for meaning is an enormous force in the inner lives of millions of men and women. It is a key feature of our age, often hidden beneath the distractions of modern civilization...read more

Product Description: This book examines how the growth of tourism in locations that have historically been considered geographically remote plays a major role in the consolidation and transformation of often longstanding and powerful cultural imaginaries about ‘the edges of the world'...read more

An art critic recalls her visits to a number of monuments associated with pilgrimage, traces major historical and scriptural pilgrimage themes, and describes the works of art and rites such pilgrimages inspired

Product Description: Although research on contemporary pilgrimage has expanded considerably since the early 1990s, the conversation has largely been dominated by Anglophone researchers in anthropology, ethnology, sociology, and religious studies from the United Kingdom, the United States, France and Northern Europe...read more

Bikers converge at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Thousands flock to a Nevada desert to burn a towering effigy. And the hopeless but hopeful ill journey to Lourdes as they have for centuries. Although pilgrimage may seem an antiquated religious ritual, it remains a vibrant activity in the modern world as pilgrims combine traditional motives—such as seeking a cure for physical or spiritual problems—with contemporary searches for identity or interpersonal connection. That pilgrimage continues to exercise such a strong attraction is testimony to the power it continues to hold for those who undertake these sacred journeys. This volume brings together anthropological and interdisciplinary perspectives on these persistent forms of popular religion to expand our understanding of the role of the traditional practice of pilgrimage in what many believe to be an increasingly secular world. Focusing on the healing dimensions of pilgrimage, the authors present case studies grounded in specific cultures and pilgrimage traditions to help readers understand the many therapeutic resources pilgrimage provides for people around the world. The chapters examine a variety of pilgrimage forms, both religious and non-religious, from Nepalese and Huichol shamanism pilgrimage to Catholic journeys to shrines and feast days to Nevada’s Burning Man festival. These diverse cases suggest a range of meanings embodied in the concept of healing itself, from curing physical ailments and redefining the self to redressing social suffering and healing the wounds of the past. Collectively and individually, the chapters raise important questions about the nature of ritual in general, and healing through pilgrimage in particular, and seek to illuminate why so many participants find pilgrimage a compelling way to address the problem of suffering. They also illustrate how pilgrimage exerts its social and political influence at the personal, local, and national levels, as well as providing symbols and processes that link people across social and spiritual boundaries. By examining the persistence of pilgrimage as a significant source of personal engagement with spirituality, Pilgrimage and Healing shows that the power of pilgrimage lies in its broad transformative powers. As our world increasingly adopts a secular and atheistic perspective in many domains of experience, it reminds us that, for many, spiritual quest remains a potent force.

Product Description: Exploring what does and what does not constitute pilgrimage, Redefining Pilgrimage draws together a wide variety of disciplines including politics, anthropology, history, religion and sociology. Leading contributors offer a broad range of case studies from a wide geographical area, exploring new ways of approaching pilgrimage beyond the classical religious model...read more

Product Description: For as long as human beings have existed they have been interested in travel. Their homelands and cultural norms have always been constructed with reference to, or contrasted with, the lands and habits of ‘the Other’. Implicit in this statement is the notion that some places are more special (perhaps sacred) than others, and this is the core of the intimate relationship between human beings, place and travel, and religion...read more

       In medieval times, a pilgrimage gave the average Joe his only break from the daily grind. For Gideon Lewis-Kraus, it promises a different kind of escape. Determined to avoid the kind of constraint that kept his father, a gay rabbi, closeted until midlife, he has moved to anything-goes Berlin. But the surfeit of freedom there has begun to paralyze him, and when a friend extends a drunken invitation to join him on an ancient pilgrimage route across Spain, he grabs his sneakers, glad of the chance to be committed to something and someone.        Irreverent, moving, hilarious, and thought-provoking, A Sense of Direction is Lewis-Kraus's dazzling riff on the perpetual war between discipline and desire, and its attendant casualties. Across three pilgrimages and many hundreds of miles - the thousand-year-old Camino de Santiago, a solo circuit of eighty-eight Buddhist temples on the Japanese island of Shikoku, and, together with his father and brother, an annual mass migration to the tomb of a famous Hasidic mystic in the Ukraine - he completes an idiosyncratic odyssey to the heart of a family mystery and a human dilemma: How do we come to terms with what has been and what is - and find a way forward, with purpose?

Product Description: Pilgrimage, Politics, and International Relations addresses issues of global politics, from cooperation to conflict, and shows how a religious metaphor, the pilgrim, can help us to rethink our concepts of self, agency, and community in a time of changing world order...read more

Product Description: Ideas and concepts of liminality have long shaped debates around the uses and practices of space in constructions of identity, particularly in relation to different forms of travel such as tourism, migration and pilgrimage, and the social, cultural and experiential landscapes associated with these and other mobilities...read more

Product Description: The author of Soul and Sensuality guides readers on sacred pilgrimages to eight spiritually significant destinations: the Ganges in India, St. Catherine’s on Mt. Sinai, Big Sur in California, and more.

Product Description: Pilgrimage places anthropological works on a privileged platform for religious studies. The origin of built environment sets apart a platform for worship. It contains the dichotomy of life and death, striving towards the spirit of a dead that may or may not be religious...read more

Product Description: The modern pilgrimage—to sites ranging from Graceland to the veterans’ annual ride to to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to Jim Morrison’s Paris grave—is intertwined with man’s existential uncertainties in the face of a rapidly changing world...read more

Product Description: • 2009 Best Travel Book (Lowell Thomas Gold Award), Society of American Travel Writers • Book of the Year Award Finalist (adventure), ForeWord Reviews It was an idea born while hiking the famed Camino de Santiago across Spain...read more

Product Description: Why do we travel? Ostensibly an act of leisure, travel finds us thrusting ourselves into jets flying miles above the earth, only to endure dislocations of time and space, foods and languages foreign to our body and mind, and encounters with strangers on whom we must suddenly depend...read more

Product Description: Religion and spirituality are common motivations for travel, with many major tourist destinations having developed largely as a result of their connections to sacred people, places and events. Describing practical applications, models and case studies, this book provides an insight into the management of religious tourism, covering both ancient sacred sites and emerging destinations...read more