Tourist Studies

Drawing on existing research in the fields of pilgrimage and tourism studies, the introduction to this special issue reviews the ways in which guiding has been theorized and explored within the two fields, therefore putting them in dialogue with one another. Presenting guiding as a form of mediation, the authors construct a theoretical framework for the analysis of pilgrimage and guiding through adapting Eade and Sallnow’s (2000 [1991]) analytical triad of person, place and text. Arguing that person, place and text may fruitfully be seen as embedded in notions and practices of mediation, they explore (a) how such mediation involves forms of ideologically charged framing, editing, concealment and revelation, through which different and often competing accounts of pilgrimage journeys, destinations, and experiences are produced, and (b) the sources of legitimation of the various forms of guiding present in the fields of pilgrimage and travel, as well as their effects on journeys, participants, and destinations.

This article uses the personalised political tour of the Falls Road as a case study with which to unpack the debate on political tourism in Northern Ireland. It shows how significant the walking mode of tourist transport is to the tourist experience and how integrated and effective it is in the context of explaining the Troubles and extending the Republican ideology. Within this contentious narrative of movement, the tour guide develops an ambivalence that intrigues, repulses and propels the tourist through the tour.

Journeys, labeled pilgrimages, appear to be flourishing in many parts of the world, not least owing to advances in transportation and communication technologies and growing tourism industries. However, surprisingly little research covers the role played by travel agencies and their professional tour leaders in organizing, carrying out, and even transforming the pilgrimage as a religious practice. In this article, I examine the role of travel agencies and tour leaders as mediators between people and priests. In Slovenia, travel agencies are launching pilgrimages led by so-called “spiritual leaders”—priests who have been gaining in popularity as leaders of pilgrim groups seemingly because they are able to joke, sing, and talk to people outside confessional boxes in a “human way.” The Catholic Church and travel agencies are together able to provide pilgrimage with spiritual care in combination with leisure, thus contributing to the revitalization of religious practice in Slovenia.

This article focuses on two Catholic pilgrimages in Bosnia–Herzegovina in order to analyse the similarities and differences between them with regard to forms of religious tourism and variety of interpretations of pilgrimages. Based on ethnographic data gathered in Bosnia–Herzegovina, the discussion focuses on micro-level processes and their structural frames. Regarding the frame analysis, the article provides an analysis of the tourist, transnational and ethno-religious frames that have shaped and still affect these two pilgrimages, including how they are experienced and interpreted by local pilgrims and the local population within a context of a post-conflict society. The main focus is on pilgrims’ responses to various frames, forms of guiding and definitions of situations which they encounter during their journeys. It is maintained that pilgrims’ responses reveal different interpretations of the frames, which are combined with dynamic impression management and identity switching between roles as pilgrims, guides, tourists and (trans)nationals.

More than 20 years after the fall of the Communist regime, we are witnessing the unprecedented development of religious pilgrimage in Romania, a country where, according to the latest census, 84 percent of the population self-identify as Orthodox Christian. Apart from the pilgrimages to well-known destinations (Jerusalem, Rome, etc.) organized by the Romanian Patriarchy’s Pilgrimage Bureau, a separate category is the improvised, hybrid pilgrimages, both religious and touristic, organized by individuals using hired minibuses. This type of pilgrimage has been called “coach pilgrimage” in the touristic jargon and mass media. In Romanian Orthodoxy (and in Orthodoxy Church, at large), the “pilgrimage” is understood today as a long wait in a queue. The aim is to touch the shrine containing the relics of a saint. Pilgrimage, as a ritual, is not centered on walking, as in Compostela, for example—a major difference between Eastern and Western Christianity. This article offers an ethnographic description of such a pilgrimage. The focus is on the methods of recruitment of the pilgrims, the choice of the place to be visited, as well as the role of the memory concerning Communism in shaping the pilgrims’ touristic and religious behavior. The analysis of this type of pilgrimages points to new forms of blending of tourism and religious travel, outside established institutional frameworks, as well as to changing notions of pilgrimage, movement, religious practice, and piety. The emergence of new “guiding” patterns and the rise of a new category, the “pilgrimage organizing guides,” are also investigated here.

This article examines the contribution of guiding to pilgrims’ negotiation of space and experience of place in religious pilgrimage. Written from an anthropological perspective and limited to selected national, regional, and local Christian pilgrimages in Costa Rica, it focuses on the roles, including mediation, of persons, places, and especially texts—oral, written, and environmental—significant in the guiding process. Data are drawn from relevant literature and the author’s ethnographic and ethnohistorical research in the Republic to explore those elements and both the manner and the contexts in which they help to form pilgrims’ expectations and experience of their sacred journey and its destination.