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Although the relationship between religion and football has gained considerable interest during the last twenty years, scant attention has been paid to the relationship between pilgrimage and football. This paper seeks to advance the study of this relationship through an exploration of collective memory about football disasters that throws fresh light on central themes within pilgrimage studies—pilgrimage as both a journey to a sacred place and the performance of diverse rituals at such places. The paper explores, in particular, the ways in which three different tragedies involving English football clubs have been commemorated through journeys to and ritual performance at places seen as sacred to those involved in commemoration—football stadiums and urban spaces, and cathedrals and pilgrimage shrines in England, Germany and Italy. Through this analysis, we seek to show how the commemoration of football disaster is linked to pilgrimage as a process where people seek healing and reconciliation through the public performance of rituals that link the local to the global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses primarily on the role of the camera in representing the famous, much visited Roman Catholic shrine of Lourdes, France, and what this role tells us about the relationship between gazing, knowledge, and the body. After outlining the historical development of the shrine, the discussion proceeds to consider the growth of popular media and the cinematic gaze, the expansion of tourism, debates concerning the morality of gazing at bodies as personal cameras and smartphones becoming increasingly available and used at the shrine, the representation of human and saintly bodies, and the part played by the camera in the attempt to ensure security. Keywords: body, gazing, knowledge, media, Lourdes, The millions visiting pilgrimage sites across the world attest to the continuing social, political, and economic significance of religion. The popularity of pilgrimage is partly driven by the expansion of [...]

This special issue on 'Knowledge, Ignorance, and Pilgrimage'highlights processes of production of knowledge and ignorance that unfold within as well as beyond pilgrimage sites. We illustrate the labor, politics, and power relations involved in the construction of sacred centers, but also the ways in which the field of study must be extended to other places where pilgrims learn to practice their religion, and live their everyday lives. Keywords: ignorance, knowledge production, pilgrimage, The field of pilgrimage studies has greatly expanded in recent years, with scholarship being produced on 'secular' pilgrimages (Margry 2008), the political economy of pilgrimage (Coleman and Eade 2018a), the [...]

The text engages with the ongoing discussion about the role played by religion in social life, with attention paid to transnational dynamics of religiosity in migrants' individual experiences, expectations and modes of involvement. We concentrate on the research problem: how does the Roman Catholic Church, through the networks of the faithful, facilitate, challenge, and intersect with the adaptation or integration of migrants in their new settings? The study draws on a survey conducted with a sample (n = 620) Polish Catholics in Great Britain in 2019. With the cluster analysis, we distinguished five categories of participants in parish life. The results of the study concern the declared expectations of the respondents in the confessional and non-confessional (charity, leisure, tourist, or cultural) activities. It shows two paths of respondents' religious experience: the old parochialism and the new one. The first attitude, represents a general religious-community context, while the second one emphasizes socio-cultural background and cooperative style of work based on associations and goals-achievement. Our findings concern the socio-cultural specificity of migrants resulting from belonging to migrant parishes outside Poland and how this specificity can be juxtaposed with information concerning mainstream Catholic parishes in Great Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the predominantly secular approach towards religion by anthropologists and sociologists, we contend that a discussion of the researcher's positionality with regard to faith and belief, as well as the autoethnographic approach in pilgrimage studies, is methodologically important. Drawing on years of volunteering at two pilgrimage sites, we explore what kind of methodological impact our role as volunteers and our private lives have had on both research at and interpretations of the pilgrimage sites. For one of us working as a volunteer was a personal choice motivated by faith, while for the other it was based on the pragmatics of doing research. In both cases gaining access involved the generation of social capital through the gifting of time and free labor within a hierarchical structure of power exchange. Our role as volunteers gave us an opportunity to explore the faith-based positionality and self-interest which informs pilgrimage volunteering and involves power exchange. Our article seeks to show how we address our own religious beliefs but, at the same time, stay grounded in ethnographic observations and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this collection of three articles that draw on ethnographic research and a more theoretical afterword, we seek to stimulate debate and substantive analysis by looking beyond the dominant approaches towards religion, state, and society through a focus on pilgrimage from a relational perspective. Rather than draw on explanations that concentrate on human actions, meanings, and interpretations, such as those informed by representational, interpretive, and hermeneutic approaches to human thought and practice, we explore the relationship between humans and those who could be defined as 'other-than-humans' or 'non-humans', such as animals, plants, and things, and who are seen as possessing their own being and immanent agency where they affect humans rather than just being the object of our affections or control. We begin by introducing the dominant approaches towards religion and pilgrimage and then outline the ways in which alternative avenues have been explored through a relational approach towards the links between people, places, and materialities. The four contributions are then introduced and the key points drawn out before discussing how this collection can encourage the exploration of avenues beyond the dominant approach, not only in pilgrimage research but also in the study of religion, state, and society more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognising that the beginning of a new millennium can also signal a broadening interest in looking at our world in new ways, the editors of Journeys present this new journal [...]

Walking pilgrimages are experiencing a revival, while at the same time a change of character in light of our changing times. Pilgrimage walking is increasingly taking on non-religious dimensions, related to a person’s self and health as seen on long-distance walking pilgrimages such as the Camino routes to Santiago. Long-range walking pilgrimages seem to offer a promise and space for ‘personal fixing’ / ‘self-healing’, thus attracting people with a variety of motives. This article is based on an empirical study consisting of qualitative open-ended questionnaires with 53 respondents from 13 countries. It aims to shed light on the motives, expectations and hopes that make people walk the less known and studied Norwegian St. Olav Way and what motivational trends prevail there, compared to others pilgrimage routes such as the more popular Camino de Santiago de Compostela and Japanese Shikoku Henro trail. Motivational categories were generated through an inductive thematic analysis of their answers and explanations were sought, drawing on existing literature as well as meaning-making and motivational theories. Results indicate that religious motives were not predominant in people’s quest with the journey. Instead, contemplation, health, social / solitary, pilgrimage walking / repeating, and nature motives stood out as the most significant, followed by less mentioned motives such as historical / cultural / travel interests, spiritual / religious reasons, a more present / simple / slow life, and life celebrations / crossroads / transitions. These findings challenge popular assumptions about why people undertake long-term walking pilgrimages. Further research is needed given the emerging trend to seek long-distance pilgrimage walking for self-discovery / development / therapy. This is largely uncovered ground in health care / science, despite the fact that pilgrimages have, throughout time, been sought for betterment and wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic during 2020 on London's socio-economic structure. After outlining the history of health crises in London during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the city's demographic decline and resurgence, it describes the 2020 pandemic's impact on London's socio-economic inequalities and the role of home working. Context is provided by describing my own locality and experience while the wider context is discussed through comparison with other highly globalised cities such as Singapore. The article concludes by placing London's 2020 pandemic within a historical perspective as infections increase after the summer holidays and the beginning of the teaching term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pilgrimage walking is increasingly sought as self-therapy for different mental, physical and spiritual ailments, sudden life changes, crossroads or challenges. However, pilgrimage walking as therapy is largely an unexplored ground within health science / care / interventions notwithstanding millennia of human experience. To unfold the nature and add to the knowledge about pilgrimage walking as therapy, this article explores the health-related processes (as experienced mentally, physically, spiritually, socially and in nature), the after-effects (on daily life, behaviour and future actions) and the therapeutic mechanisms (that bring forth these processes and effects) involved in walking the St. Olav Way across Norway. Qualitative open-ended questionnaires were made available at all pilgrim accommodations along the St. Olav route in 2017. In total, 53 pilgrims with an average age of 52 years from 13 nationalities holding different belief systems responded. Process, effect and therapeutic categories were generated through an inductive thematic text analysis of their answers. The findings indicate that pilgrims experience mostly mental health-related processes. People report after-effects involving improved mental, physical, spiritual and social health, personal health assets, and a more positive outlook on life. The stated therapeutics categories came down to three key mechanisms: walking, nature and community. Given the relational and dynamic nature of the results, findings are drawn on relational ontology and the mobility turn. The study encourages further debate around pilgrimage walking's health qualities in a health context with the hope of arriving at universal therapeutic mechanisms of pilgrimage walking as to acknowledge pilgrimage walking as therapy in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the authors commentary on the book "Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria" by Kristen Ghodsee. Topics discussed include the similarities created by globalization between East and West Europe, and the history of Bulgaria.

It is a refreshing sign of the times that a book like this should be reviewed in this Journal! The rapid development of 'cultural studies' in the English-speaking world has [...]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic research on the growing links between East and West Europe have largely focussed on secular processes, especially labour migration. Because far less attention has been paid to the role played by religion in forging these links, this article seeks to uncover the historic and contemporary religious networks promoted through pilgrimage. It examines the development of Europe's most popular and highly modern shrine -- Lourdes in the south-west corner of France -- and the ways in which the Assumptionist Order and the Vatican sought to link the shrine to an evangelising mission which extended across a declining Ottoman Empire. This leads on to a discussion of the development of both Lourdes and the Catholic Church in Bulgaria during the 20th century, Vatican policy and relations with other religious traditions and secular politics, as well as the renewed links between the shrine and the Bulgarian Assumptionists since the collapse of the Communist regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last 60 years three forms of mobility have played a crucial role in the process of home-making across London – global migration, suburbanisation and gentrification. While these mobilities have been extensively analysed in terms of secular processes, the role of religion is becoming ever more evident and this paper seeks to contribute to this growing understanding by analysing the involvement by different Christian churches in the making of multiple homes across the metropolis. Various aspects of this home-making process are explored – the ways in which Anglican churches have responded to global migration and gentrification, as well as the challenges of increasing ethnic and ritual diversity for Methodist and Catholic congregations. Religion is intimately involved in diverse crossings of spatial and cultural boundaries and the construction of multiple dwellings (immediate and virtual). While global migration, suburbanisation and gentrification operate here in specific local contexts across a particular city, these modes of mobility operate around the globe and encourage comparison with American and Australian cities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The rapid growth of urban centres around the world is intimately bound up with global migration, which increases the multicultural diversity of these centres. The urban landscape changes to reflect the cultural interests of the minorities created by this migration. This paper analyses this process through an analysis of two types of migrants in London: the well-established Bangladeshi Muslim minority, and those who have recently arrived from Poland. The focus will be on the role played by religious leaders and activists in providing a physical and spiritual home in a Western secular city and their engagement with outsiders, especially local politicians and council officers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Kingdom was one of only three countries to allow migrants from accession countries to enter their labour markets more or less without restriction following European Union enlargement in May 2004. Therefore, it is important to establish the characteristics and labour market performance of migrants from these countries who have subsequently entered the United Kingdom. We principally analyse Labour Force Survey data to compare the labour market outcomes of recent migrants from Poland and other accession countries to those of earlier migrant cohorts from these countries as well as to those of other recent migrants to the United Kingdom. We find that the majority of post-enlargement migrants from the new member states have found employment in low paying jobs, despite some (especially Poles) possessing relatively high levels of education. It follows that recent Polish migrants typically have lower returns to their education than other recent arrivals. Migrants from the new member states who arrived immediately prior to enlargement have similar characteristics and labour market outcomes, apart from displaying a higher propensity to be self-employed. These results are discussed in the context of policy changes, migration strategies, assimilation effects and possible impacts on the sending countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pilgrimage in Britain has been transformed through the process of global migration since the end of the Second World War. In this article we focus on changes taking place within Christian pilgrimage through an analysis of the ways in which the relationship between centre and periphery has been reinterpreted. The first case study involves Polish pilgrims at a Roman Catholic shrine in the Kent countryside while the other focuses on Congolese Kimbanguists. The comparison reveals the ways in which global flows of people and ideas mediated through transnational networks have helped to blur the ideological boundaries between different Christian traditions. Furthermore, local places in the periphery are reinterpreted in conditions of increasing complexity where sacred centres in the countries of origin have to adapt to the emergence of new peripheries, which link up with other peripheries in the Kimbanguist case, and with differences between 'old' and 'new' Poles (settlers and sojourners) in the Polish example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Simon Coleman on the Victorian representations of the Holy Land and another by Erin Kenny on the bifurcation of pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

This article explores the role of politics in public debates about what it means to be a Bangladeshi Muslim in contemporary Britain. It examines the history of Bangladeshi community activism, tensions at work in the political arena, and the part played by Islamist leaders and organisations. It grounds this analysis not only in Tower Hamlets, the ‘heartland’ of the community, but also in Oldham and Birmingham where there are substantial, if scantily researched, concentrations of British Bangladeshis. Through a study of the competing visions of identity and space, this article explores the ways in which secular and religious leaders seek to represent their community in the public sphere. It also discusses the ways in which local political dynamics are shaped by (mainly ideological and social) transnational networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tower Hamlets contains the largest concentration of Bangladeshis in the UK and they have been very successful in campaigning for resources in a borough which has high poverty levels in the north, while to the south it has been radically transformed by global capital and new white middle class "immigrants" employed in the service sector. A debate concerning poverty, social exclusion and the growing incidence of criminality among third generation Bangladeshis was dominated during the 1980s by secularists whose hegemony was challenged during the 1990s by Islamist groups. This struggle between secularist and Islamist leaders is not just a local phenomenon since it is shaped by ideological, political and social ties with Bangladesh and with other Muslim-majority countries. It raises the issue of how leaders seek to represent their "community"—variously defined—in a non-Muslim nation where state institutions (locally and nationally) attempt to co-opt community leaders through multiculturalist strategies. So far, the struggle has not been overshadowed by the kind of urban violence seen in other areas of substantial Bangladeshi population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses aspects of the study of contemporary pilgrimage sites. It states that development of English academic publishing, rise in travel and tourism and interfaith worship have fostered studies of sacred sites. It mentions religious sites research will benefit form more informed global exchange across various religions and linguistic boundaries.

ABSTRACT Out of Giddens' (1990) emphasis on modernity and Robertson's (1992) on globality emerges the need to conceptualize globalization in relation to the social per se. An exemplificatory conceptual case study points to global processes straining older concepts formed for nation state sociologies: deterritorialization of the community concept results in the imagined community," global culture signals the fragmentation of the culture concept," 'milieu' has to be extended and generalized for global relevance. Globalization makes the structuration of new forms and types of groups and social relationships a key conceptual problem for sociology. But its impact also highlights the generative processes for new sociological concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I seek to analyse the diverse understandings among British Bengalis of their social identities as shaped by national and Muslim belongings. The complexity of these understandings is described as the young Bengalis explore the interrelationships between these identities attempt to rank them and in some cases look beyond national boundaries to a worldwide Islamic community. Their constructions of identity are influenced by their social situation within Britain where racism plays a significant role but also by political and religious developments within Bangladesh and other nation-states within the Indian sub continent Like other descendants of migrant workers in Western Europe they are caught up in a public debate about national belonging where their supra-national links provide them with special insights into the construction of hybrid identities and new ethnicities and the maintenance of individual identities in a globalising world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developments within Tower Hamlets during the 1980s have revealed the way in which identities are constructed through political discourses and practices. The emergence of Bangladeshi community organisations in Tower Hamlets during the early 1980s and the political developments within the borough encouraged the articulation of a primordial Bangladeshi identity which linked British Bengalis to political struggles both within their country of origin and in Tower Hamlets. The political discourse was associated with Bangladeshi national rituals and with competition for public resources within the borough. Recent political developments at local and more global levels have encouraged the articulation of another primordial, Islamic solidarity which forged a bond between Bangladeshis and other members of an imagined, universal Islamic community. The prioritisation of a particular identity — Bangladeshi or Islamic and, in other contexts, black, Asian or British — needs to be located, therefore, within political discourses and practices which construct links between people as members of ‘imagined communities’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the last twenty years around the world there has been a rapid increase in the number of people visiting long established religious shrines as well as the creation of new sites by those operating outside the boundaries of institutional religion. This increase is intimately associated with the revival of traditional routes, the creation of new ones and the invention of new rituals (religious, spiritual and secular). To examine this process, I will focus on the European region and two contrasting destinations in particular—the Catholic shrine of Lourdes, France, and the pre-Christian shrine of Avebury, England—drawing on my personal involvement in travelling to both destinations and being involved in ritual activities along the route and at the two destinations. In the discussion section of the paper, I will explore the relevance of these two case studies to the analysis of power, agency and performance and the ways in which they expose (a) the role of institutions and entrepreneurs in creating rituals and sacred places and (b) the relationship between people and the domesticated landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on theoretical issues raised by collection of papers featured within the journal. He notes that the papers featured uses binaries as a useful analytic tool as well as demonstrate its advantages of empirical data. Moreover, he states that the pilgrimage studies indicate an openness and willingness to function across disciplinary boundaries. Also explored is the revision of the structural-functional models of society.

An introduction is presented to a special issue of the journal devoted to the material and spatial understanding of urban religious sites and spaces, with a special focus on East London, England.