Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World

New Itineraries into the Sacred

Distributed for Amsterdam University Press

352 pages | 6-3/10 x 9-1/2

Paper $49.50 ISBN: 9789089640116 Published December 2008 For sale only in the United States, its dependencies, the Philippines, and Canada

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. In a climate that reproduces the religious quest in seemingly secular places, it’s no longer clear exactly what the term pilgrimage infers—and Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World critiques our notions of the secular and the sacred, while commenting on the modern media’s multiplication of images that renders the modern pilgrimage a quest without an object. Using new ethnographical and theoretical approaches, this volume offers a surprising new vision on the non-secularity of the “secular” pilgrimage.

"This book will be sure to stoke our intellectual fire and heat up the discussion over the highly charged topic of secular pilgrimage.”—Simon Bronner, Penn State University