Pilgrimages and Shared Experience
Pilgrimages and Shared Experience
Pilgrimage is one of humanity's oldest forms of shared journey. Across religious traditions, cultures, and historical periods, people have traveled together toward places invested with spiritual, cultural, historical, or personal meaning. Although the destinations and beliefs differ enormously, pilgrimage repeatedly brings people into sustained contact through walking, worship, meals, accommodation, hardship, ritual, storytelling, hospitality, and common purpose.
Research on pilgrimage therefore provides an important window into the relationship between shared experience and human connection. Pilgrims may begin their journeys as strangers but often develop temporary communities based on common identity and experience. The concept of communitas has frequently been used to describe the unusually direct bonds that can emerge when people temporarily leave ordinary routines and social structures behind.
Pilgrimage should not, however, be romanticized as automatically producing equality or harmony. Research also documents disagreement, hierarchy, cultural differences, gender inequalities, political tensions, commercialization, and conflict. The importance of pilgrimage lies partly in this complexity: it creates unusual social environments in which solidarity and difference can coexist.
Pilgrimage, Communitas, and Human Connection
The anthropological concept of communitas, associated particularly with Victor Turner, has become one of the major frameworks for understanding the social experience of pilgrimage. Pilgrims temporarily separate themselves from everyday routines and enter a journey organized around a common destination, practice, or purpose.
Ordinary distinctions of occupation, wealth, status, and social position can become less prominent during such journeys. Walking the same roads, sleeping in similar accommodations, experiencing fatigue, waiting together, eating together, and participating in common rituals can produce unusually immediate relationships among participants.
Pilgrimage can consequently create temporary communities among people who otherwise might never have met. Conversations develop along routes, assistance is offered to strangers, stories are exchanged, and repeated encounters transform unfamiliar travelers into recognizable companions.
Yet communitas is neither universal nor complete. Social distinctions do not simply disappear when a pilgrimage begins. Differences involving nationality, class, gender, theology, politics, religious authority, and expectations may remain important. Pilgrimage can therefore simultaneously create unity and reveal difference.
Walking Together and the Camino de Santiago
The Camino de Santiago provides one of the clearest contemporary examples of pilgrimage as a shared social experience. People from many countries walk toward Santiago de Compostela for religious, spiritual, cultural, recreational, psychological, and personal reasons.
The Camino's social environment is partly created through repeated encounters. Individuals who begin alone may repeatedly meet the same walkers in villages, hostels, restaurants, churches, and along the trail. These encounters can gradually create informal communities.
Shared physical difficulty is also important. Long-distance walking exposes participants to fatigue, weather, injury, uncertainty, and simplicity. Helping another pilgrim, sharing food, discussing difficulties, or simply walking beside someone can create relationships with unusual speed.
Research represented in the collected material associates Camino pilgrimage with community, interpersonal relationships, reflection, well-being, personal transformation, trust, communication, and valued living. Studies of couples and families suggest that walking together can also affect existing relationships by creating sustained opportunities for conversation and mutual understanding.
The Camino also demonstrates the changing boundary between tourism and pilgrimage. Modern participants frequently combine religious, cultural, recreational, social, and personal motivations. Rather than representing completely separate categories, pilgrim and tourist identities may overlap.
Hajj, Shared Identity, and Cooperation
The Hajj provides an extraordinary example of collective religious identity operating on a massive scale. Millions of Muslims from different countries, languages, ethnic backgrounds, occupations, and social circumstances participate in common rituals centered on Mecca.
Research on the social psychology of Hajj emphasizes the importance of shared identity. Dense crowds are not necessarily experienced simply as collections of strangers. When participants recognize those around them as fellow members of a meaningful group, crowd density can be interpreted differently.
Shared identity can encourage cooperation, assistance, trust, and supportive behavior. Pilgrims may provide practical help, information, emotional reassurance, or physical assistance to people they have never previously met.
Hajj also brings extraordinary human diversity into direct contact. Participants encounter Muslims from societies they may previously have known only indirectly. Research in the collected sources examines whether this experience can affect social attitudes, tolerance, perceptions of other groups, and understanding of the global Muslim community.
At the same time, the enormous scale of the gathering creates significant logistical and safety challenges. Crowd management, transportation, infrastructure, health services, communication, and risk management are essential to making collective participation possible.
Kumbh Mela, Magh Mela, and Collective Identity
India's Kumbh Mela and Magh Mela offer another major setting for studying shared identity within enormous gatherings. Millions of people temporarily occupy pilgrimage landscapes where bathing, worship, movement, accommodation, religious teaching, and everyday life occur collectively.
Research on these gatherings challenges the assumption that extremely dense crowds must necessarily be psychologically unpleasant. Participants who identify strongly with fellow pilgrims may experience crowding as part of a meaningful collective event.
Shared identity can influence perceptions of intimacy, support, noise, physical proximity, and well-being. A crowd composed of people understood as fellow participants in a sacred undertaking may be experienced differently from an anonymous crowd.
The Kumbh Mela also illustrates the extraordinary temporary social systems that pilgrimage can generate. Transportation networks, camps, religious institutions, markets, sanitation systems, communication networks, and vast temporary populations appear around the gathering.
Modern research using interviews, psychological measures, and even mobile-phone data has examined how social relationships, regional identities, movement, and spatial clustering operate within these immense gatherings.
Arbaeen, Walking, Service, and Hospitality
The Arbaeen pilgrimage to Karbala demonstrates how shared journey can become intertwined with an extensive culture of service and hospitality.
Large numbers of pilgrims walk toward Karbala while families, volunteers, religious organizations, and local communities establish mawkibs and other facilities providing food, drinks, accommodation, medical assistance, and practical support.
Hospitality is therefore not merely an auxiliary service surrounding the pilgrimage. It becomes part of the pilgrimage's social meaning. People serve strangers because they understand both themselves and the travelers as participants in a common religious undertaking.
The journey combines walking, mourning, prayer, conversation, physical hardship, collective memory, and service. Research represented in the source material examines its spiritual, psychological, physical, and social dimensions.
Arbaeen demonstrates how pilgrimage communities can include both travelers and hosts. Human connection is created not only among those walking together but between pilgrims and the communities through which they pass.
Lourdes, Fátima, and Christian Pilgrimage
Christian pilgrimage traditions represented by Lourdes and Fátima demonstrate the continuing importance of shared sacred journeys in modern societies.
At Lourdes, pilgrimage frequently includes people experiencing illness or disability, together with relatives, volunteers, medical personnel, clergy, and other pilgrims. Service and caregiving consequently become important components of the collective experience.
Research included in the material examines pilgrimage in relation to quality of life, transcendent experiences, spiritual renewal, companionship, common purpose, and social support.
Fátima similarly brings pilgrims together through walking routes, religious devotion, sacred-place experiences, prayer, cultural traditions, and interpersonal encounters. The surrounding routes connect the sanctuary with communities through which pilgrims travel.
These traditions show that pilgrimage is not simply movement toward a destination. The relationships created while traveling, assisting others, worshipping together, and sharing emotional experiences can be as important as arrival itself.
Buddhist and Japanese Pilgrimage Traditions
Buddhist and Japanese pilgrimage routes demonstrate another form of connection among sacred landscape, walking, ritual, hospitality, and community.
Japan's Shikoku pilgrimage connects 88 temples through a long-established route associated with Buddhist practice. Pilgrims encounter temples, residents, other walkers, local traditions, and the custom of osettai, through which local people provide assistance or gifts to pilgrims.
The Kumano Kodo similarly combines sacred sites, historic pathways, forests, settlements, religious traditions, hospitality, and contemporary walking.
These routes illustrate the importance of host communities in sustaining pilgrimage traditions across generations. Pilgrimage is therefore not only a relationship between an individual and a sacred destination. It forms a network connecting travelers, religious institutions, landscapes, local residents, and inherited cultural practices.
Interreligious journeys represented in the collected sources also demonstrate how pilgrimage can expose travelers to traditions other than their own and create opportunities for cultural and spiritual exchange.
Indigenous Pilgrimage and Community Identity
Pilgrimage has also played important roles in Indigenous societies and historical communities.
Research represented in the collected material examines Maya ritual landscapes, migration, sacred sites, community connectivity, political memory, trade, and cross-cultural interaction. Sacred journeys could connect settlements and reinforce relationships among communities dispersed across wider landscapes.
Repeated visits to shrines and ceremonial places allowed communities to engage with collective histories and shared identities. Ritual landscapes consequently became repositories of memory as well as destinations for religious activity.
Research on Andean pilgrimage similarly demonstrates how sacred images, shrines, festivals, landscapes, Indigenous traditions, and Catholic practices can become intertwined.
Such cases show that pilgrimage routes can function as social infrastructure. By repeatedly bringing people together at significant places, pilgrimage helps maintain relationships among communities across both space and generations.
Pilgrimage, Healing, Well-Being, and Transformation
Many modern pilgrims describe their journeys in terms of healing, reflection, renewal, or personal transformation.
Walking itself combines sustained physical activity with distance from ordinary routines. Pilgrims may spend long periods thinking, talking, observing landscapes, confronting physical difficulty, and reconsidering personal priorities.
The social dimension can be equally important. Companionship, conversations with strangers, shared meals, mutual assistance, and temporary communities can provide forms of support that are difficult to reproduce in everyday environments.
Research in the collected material examines pilgrimage in relation to psychological distress, subjective well-being, resilience, restoration, spirituality, relationships, and personal values.
Transformation does not necessarily result from solitude alone. Pilgrims frequently interpret their experiences through conversations and relationships with others. The journey can therefore become both an individual and collective process of meaning-making.
Hospitality and Mutual Aid
Hospitality appears repeatedly across very different pilgrimage traditions.
Pilgrims depend upon networks of hostels, religious institutions, households, volunteers, communities, temples, charitable organizations, and other travelers. These networks transform routes into social environments capable of sustaining large numbers of people.
Hospitality also changes relationships between strangers. Offering food, accommodation, directions, medical assistance, conversation, or encouragement creates brief but meaningful forms of reciprocity.
Examples range from osettai along the Shikoku pilgrimage to the enormous volunteer networks surrounding Arbaeen and the hostels and communal accommodations found along the Camino de Santiago.
Such practices demonstrate that community does not always require long-term membership. Temporary acts of care between strangers can create a powerful sense of belonging and shared humanity.
Heritage, Secular Pilgrimage, and Collective Memory
Pilgrimage-like journeys increasingly occur outside conventional religious frameworks.
People travel to battlefields, graves, memorials, ancestral homelands, historical sites, wilderness areas, and locations associated with admired cultural figures. Although participants may not describe these journeys as religious, they can display characteristics traditionally associated with pilgrimage.
Secular pilgrims may undertake difficult journeys, visit symbolically important places, perform rituals, leave objects, remember the dead, search for identity, or share experiences with others who attach similar meaning to the destination.
Heritage and diaspora travel are especially important examples. Returning to ancestral landscapes can connect individuals with family histories and larger collective narratives.
Battlefield pilgrimage can similarly connect participants with national memory, family history, sacrifice, grief, and shared identity. Visits to graves or cultural landmarks can create communities organized around memory rather than formal religious belief.
These examples suggest that pilgrimage is better understood as a broad human practice of meaningful journey rather than exclusively as religious tourism.
Pilgrimage Routes and Cultural Exchange
Pilgrimage routes historically moved more than pilgrims. They also moved stories, information, customs, religious ideas, goods, languages, artistic traditions, and social relationships.
Travelers encountered communities along the way, while local populations encountered people arriving from distant regions. Sacred routes therefore became corridors of cultural exchange.
Repeated movement could connect otherwise separated communities and create recognizable networks of accommodation, commerce, ritual, and hospitality.
Modern pilgrimage continues this function. International routes such as the Camino bring people from many societies into sustained face-to-face contact. Hajj connects Muslims from across the world, while Buddhist and Christian pilgrimage routes similarly attract international participants.
Pilgrimage therefore demonstrates how movement through physical space can expand social networks and expose individuals to people outside their ordinary communities.
Pilgrimage in a Digital Age
Contemporary pilgrimage increasingly exists alongside smartphones, social media, digital navigation, online communities, and virtual forms of religious participation.
Digital technology can make routes safer and easier to navigate, maintain relationships with family, provide information, and connect pilgrims before and after their journeys.
At the same time, pilgrimage often appeals precisely because it provides distance from digitally saturated everyday life. Some pilgrims deliberately limit phone use in order to concentrate on walking, landscape, reflection, ritual, and face-to-face relationships.
This creates an important tension between connection through technology and connection through physical presence.
Research on virtual pilgrimage raises a related question: whether digitally mediated journeys can reproduce the embodied, social, spatial, and emotional qualities of traveling physically with other people.
The continuing popularity of walking pilgrimage suggests that physical presence remains significant. Fatigue, weather, landscape, meals, silence, spontaneous conversation, hospitality, and chance encounters are difficult to reproduce completely through digital media.
Pilgrimage, Tourism, and Changing Identities
Modern pilgrimage increasingly blurs traditional distinctions between sacred travel and tourism.
A single traveler may simultaneously be motivated by religion, spirituality, history, exercise, landscape, cultural curiosity, personal difficulty, wellness, social interaction, or the desire for adventure.
The pilgrim-tourist distinction therefore does not always describe contemporary travelers accurately. People may begin a route primarily as tourists and gradually interpret their experience in more personal or spiritual terms. Religious pilgrims may simultaneously appreciate scenery, heritage, food, recreation, and cultural experiences.
Commercialization creates additional tensions. The popularity of historic routes can generate tourism industries, accommodation businesses, transportation services, souvenirs, organized tours, and destination marketing.
Yet commercialization does not necessarily eliminate meaningful experience. Pilgrimage has historically involved economic exchange as well as religious practice.
The more important question is how changing tourism systems influence the relationships among pilgrims, local residents, sacred traditions, landscapes, and the communities that maintain pilgrimage routes.
Why Shared Pilgrimage Matters
Across the traditions represented in the collected material, several recurring social mechanisms help explain why pilgrimage can create powerful shared experiences.
First, pilgrims possess a common destination or purpose. Even when their individual motivations differ, participants recognize that they are undertaking something together.
Second, pilgrimage creates sustained proximity. People repeatedly encounter one another over hours, days, or weeks rather than during brief social interactions.
Third, shared difficulty can encourage cooperation. Walking, weather, crowds, fatigue, uncertainty, illness, and unfamiliar environments create situations in which people both need and provide assistance.
Fourth, ritual gives collective experience structure. Walking routes, prayers, sacred bathing, mourning, chanting, visiting shrines, communal meals, and other practices allow large numbers of people to participate in coordinated activity.
Fifth, pilgrimage creates opportunities for storytelling. Travelers explain why they came, describe their lives, exchange memories, and interpret their experiences together.
Finally, pilgrimage temporarily removes people from ordinary routines. This separation can make interactions with strangers easier and provide space for reconsidering identities, relationships, priorities, and beliefs.
Conclusion
Pilgrimage demonstrates the extraordinary human capacity to create community through shared movement, purpose, ritual, difficulty, hospitality, and experience.
From the Camino de Santiago and Hajj to the Kumbh Mela, Arbaeen, Lourdes, Fátima, Japanese pilgrimage routes, Indigenous sacred landscapes, heritage journeys, and secular walking traditions, people repeatedly transform travel into a social experience.
The communities created by pilgrimage are often temporary. Travelers eventually return home, crowds disperse, hostels empty, temporary settlements disappear, and routes become quiet again. Yet temporary does not mean insignificant. Relationships formed over a few days can influence memories, values, attitudes, and understandings of other people long after a journey ends.
Pilgrimage also reminds us that human connection is often created through doing something together rather than merely being physically near one another. Walking toward a common destination, enduring difficulty, sharing food, participating in ritual, helping strangers, telling stories, and experiencing meaningful places together can transform anonymous individuals into companions.
In an increasingly digital and socially fragmented world, the continuing appeal of pilgrimage is particularly revealing. Ancient pilgrimage traditions and their modern secular counterparts suggest that people continue to seek embodied experiences in which place, purpose, physical presence, and other human beings come together.
Pilgrimage therefore offers more than a history of religious travel. It provides a powerful example of how shared experiences create belonging—and how communities can emerge whenever people undertake meaningful journeys together.
Pilgrimage, Communitas, and Human Connection
| D. Rojíková et al. | Journal of Heritage Tourism | 2026
Mapping the Cultural Pilgrim identifies a socially curious type of pilgrim for whom interpersonal encounters, communal meals, shared accommodation, social learning, and collective experiences are central to the journey.
| P. Zhou et al. | Annals of Tourism Research | 2026
Communitas, Fluidunitas and Healing at a Post-Secular Pilgrimage examines how contemporary pilgrims form shifting communities across religious and secular boundaries, showing that companionship and collective participation can become part of the healing experience.
| Regent College | Regent College | 2026
Narrative and Pilgrimage: Forming Our Stories in the Company of Others considers pilgrimage a practice through which people reinterpret their lives while walking, talking, worshipping, and sharing stories with companions.
| G.S. Ekin et al. | Tourism and Hospitality | 2026
Review of the Intersections Within Faith Tourism, Social Memory and Cultural Heritage explores religious travel as a mechanism through which communities repeatedly encounter and transmit collective memories.
| Sophie Haggar | Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale | 2025
Communitas revisited examines Victor Turner's influential concept of communitas and its usefulness for understanding intense collective experiences in which ordinary social distinctions temporarily recede and participants experience connection and common humanity.
| M. Bellefeuille-Frost | St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology | 2025
Pilgrimage examines the Christian tradition of sacred travel and explains how the metaphor of Christians as fellow pilgrims has historically supplied a common identity across communities and denominations.
| Enes Yalcin and Nick Hopkins | British Journal of Social Psychology | 2025
Identity Enactment as a Social Accomplishment examines Hajj pilgrims and shows how shared identity produces psychological, material, informational, and behavioral support among people undertaking demanding rituals together.
| Nelson Graburn | Annals of Tourism Research | 2024
Tourism, Pilgrimage and the Sacred: At Home or Away revisits the similarities between tourism and pilgrimage as periods of separation from ordinary life in which participants encounter different people, places, rituals, and identities.
| Sacred Journeys Researchers | Qualitative Market Research | 2023
Sacred Journeys: Moving In, Out and Around Sacred Sites considers pilgrimage as movement through social as well as geographical space, including encounters among pilgrims, hosts, sacred objects, and local communities.
| Rosilawati Polus et al. | Tourism Review International / Springer | 2022
Conceptualizing the Changing Faces of Pilgrimage examines how meaning, ritual, and transformation connect traditional pilgrimage with contemporary forms of meaningful travel.
| Noga Collins-Kreiner | Tourism Review | 2020
Pilgrimage Tourism: Past, Present and Future Rejuvenation traces pilgrimage from one of humanity's oldest forms of mobility to its renewed importance in contemporary tourism and spiritual travel.
| Tourism Researchers | Tourism Studies | 2020
Pilgrimage, Material Objects and Spontaneous Communitas examines Lourdes and shows how objects exchanged, carried, blessed, or brought home can preserve feelings of connection generated between pilgrims.
| Michael A. Di Giovine | Tourism Geographies | 2019
Geographies of Religion and Spirituality considers pilgrimage beyond simple sacred-versus-secular distinctions and shows how movement, landscape, identity, spirituality, and social encounters combine in contemporary journeys.
| Nadia Caidi and Perla Innocenti | Information Research / ISIC | 2018
On Being Spiritual: Pilgrimage as an Information Context considers religious and secular pilgrimages as environments where travelers exchange knowledge, stories, meaning, and experience.
| Darius Liutikas | Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism | 2017
The Manifestation of Values and Identity in Travelling considers pilgrimage and other meaningful journeys as ways people express personal values, identity, belonging, and relationships to significant places.
| Folklore Researchers | Western Folklore | 2017
Tangible Communitas: The Los Angeles Wisdom Tree examines a contemporary informal pilgrimage site where repeated walking, offerings, storytelling, and shared practices contribute to an inclusive community.
| Jackie Feldman | Social Anthropology | 2017
Key Figure of Mobility: The Pilgrim argues that modern pilgrimage remains capable of creating alternative social bonds, intimacy, embodied experience, and new ways of imagining collective futures.
| Jens Kreinath | Interreligious Studies and Intercultural Theology | 2017
Interrituality as a New Approach for Studying Interreligious Encounters explains how participation in ritual can create, modify, and negotiate social relationships across religious boundaries.
| Religious Tourism Researchers | International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage | 2014
Reflections on Pilgrims' Identity, Role and Interplay with the Pilgrimage Environment examines how pilgrims continually negotiate identity through relationships with sacred environments and other travelers.
| N. Farra-Haddad | Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religions | 2013
Dismantling Religious Boundaries by Sharing the Baraka examines votive pilgrimage traditions in which participation at sacred places can make boundaries between religious communities more permeable.
| Michael A. Di Giovine | Tourism / Anthropology Research | 2011
Communitas and Contestation, Unity and Difference explores how pilgrimage can create powerful feelings of solidarity while also revealing disagreements, social boundaries, and differences among participants.
| Michael A. Di Giovine | Tourism Review | 2011
Pilgrimage: Communitas and Contestation, Unity and Difference explains why pilgrimage can simultaneously create intense fellowship and expose divisions of class, nationality, politics, religious authority, and personal interpretation.
| Ellen Badone and Sharon R. Roseman, eds. | University of Illinois Press / JSTOR | 2004
Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism brings together ethnographic studies showing that sacred destinations can simultaneously generate community, conflict, identity, commerce, ritual, and social exchange.
| Darlene M. Juschka | Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion | 2003
Whose Turn Is It to Cook? questions idealized theories of pilgrimage communitas by examining the practical relationships, inequalities, responsibilities, and negotiations that continue within pilgrim groups.
| Brannon Wheeler | Method & Theory in the Study of Religion | 1999
Models of Pilgrimage considers communitas as one model for understanding how people united by a special common purpose can temporarily form relationships outside ordinary social structures.
| Jill Dubisch | Anthropological Quarterly | 1996
Anthropology as Pilgrimage compares anthropological fieldwork with pilgrimage and reflects on liminality, communitas, transformation, travel, and encounters outside ordinary social life.
| Glenn Bowman | Current Anthropology | 1988
Pilgrimage Conference reviews anthropological debates about pilgrimage, sacred places, aggregation, communitas, identity, and the limitations of treating every pilgrimage as socially egalitarian.
| John M. Theilmann | Journal of Popular Culture | 1984
Communitas Among Fifteenth-Century Pilgrims explores historical evidence for bonds among medieval travelers and considers how awareness of other pilgrims created a larger imagined community.
| John Eade | British Pilgrimage Trust | n.d.
Pilgrimage as Communitas explains Victor and Edith Turner's argument that pilgrimage can temporarily loosen conventional social hierarchies and create unusually direct relationships among fellow travelers.
Camino de Santiago and Shared Pilgrim Community
| Snežana Brumec | Religions | 2025
Pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago as a Path to Repair examines the Camino as an environment where reflection and social interaction can support personal growth and greater concern for other people.
| C. Johnmeyer et al. | Tourism and Hospitality Research | 2025
The Meaningful Elements of the Camino investigates the particular places, practices, encounters, challenges, and experiences that give Camino pilgrimage its significance.
| D. Allen-Perkins et al. | Social Sciences | 2025
Sacred Yet Connected? investigates how Camino pilgrims negotiate smartphones and digital communication while seeking presence, solitude, connection with others, and immersion in the journey.
| H. Silva Lopes et al. | Pastoral Psychology | 2025
Profile and Motivations of Pilgrims on the Portuguese St. James Way examines spirituality, landscape, wellness, life challenges, reflection, and the motives that bring diverse walkers onto a common trail.
| Piotr Roszak et al. | Journal of Religion and Health | 2024
The Camino de Santiago as a Spiritual Journey explores how landscape, walking, encounters, physical challenge, contemplation, and social relationships contribute to pilgrims' physical, emotional, spiritual, and social well-being.
| Snežana Brumec and Piotr Roszak | Journal of Religion and Health | 2024
Exploring the Transformative Aftereffects of Religious Experiences studies how exceptional experiences on the Camino can produce lasting changes involving love, unity, spirituality, wisdom, and relationships.
| M. Andrade Suárez et al. | Current Issues in Tourism | 2024
A Pilgrim but a Tourist Too examines how contemporary Camino travelers combine religious, spiritual, cultural, social, recreational, and personal motives rather than fitting neatly into a pilgrim-or-tourist category.
| Albert Feliu-Soler et al. | Journal of Happiness Studies | 2024
Assessing the Impact of the Way of Saint James on Psychological Distress and Subjective Well-Being compares pilgrims with ordinary vacationers and finds distinctive improvements in several measures of well-being and valued living.
| Sławomir Tykarski et al. | Journal of Religion and Health | 2024
The Pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago and Its Impacts on Marital and Familial Relationships reports that traveling together can strengthen trust, communication, affection, mutual understanding, and parent-child relationships.
| Maximilian Schmeiser | University of Humanistic Studies | 2024
Transformative Experiences on the Camino de Santiago finds that community was among the most consequential aspects of the Camino experience and played an important role in pilgrims' reported transformation.
Becoming More Grounded examines people who walked the Camino de Santiago or undertook pilgrimage to Lough Derg and considers why embodied pilgrimage retains appeal in highly technological societies.
The Pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago and Its Impacts on Marital Relationships reports that walking together can strengthen trust, communication, mutual understanding, and bonds between partners.
| Snežana Brumec | International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage | 2023
Communitas Along the Camino de Santiago examines whether the temporary community that develops among Camino walkers resembles Turner's theory of communitas and how companions affect that experience.
| J. Malis et al. | Journal of Heritage Tourism | 2023
The Solo Pilgrim Phenomenon on the Journey to Santiago examines how people traveling alone nevertheless form temporary communities through repeated encounters and shared experiences on the route.
| Piotr Roszak | Pastoral Psychology | 2023
From Tourist to Pilgrim argues that pilgrimage is fundamentally relational, with the journey creating encounters with sacred places, fellow travelers, communities, and religious meaning.
| F.M. Silva et al. | Religions | 2023
Pilgrimages on the Portuguese Way to Santiago de Compostela studies contemporary pilgrimage along an increasingly popular network of routes where religious, cultural, recreational, and social motivations coexist.
| Piotr Roszak et al. | Religions | 2022
The Challenging Future of Pilgrimage After the Pandemic discusses how COVID-era distancing changed Camino life by reducing spontaneous relationships and many of the social practices normally associated with the route.
| K. Zhang et al. | Sustainability | 2021
A Guest at Home examines Chinese pilgrims on the Camino and finds that the route provides opportunities for personal growth as well as extensive cross-cultural encounters with other pilgrims and host communities.
| Morgan Elizabeth Havard | International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage | 2018
Communitas and Conflict Along the Camino de Santiago explores both the remarkable solidarity pilgrims describe and the tensions that arise when social and personal differences accompany people onto the trail.
Hajj, Shared Identity, and Cooperation
| Mass-Gathering Researchers | F1000Research | 2026
Psychological, Social, and Risk Perception Factors Among Hajj Pilgrims examines how shared beliefs, collective behavior, risk perceptions, and social processes influence people's experiences in massive religious gatherings.
| Hajj Social Psychology Researchers | Social Psychology Research | 2026
Perceiving People as a Group investigates how pilgrims interpret the extraordinary human diversity at Hajj and how common identity can encourage mutual assistance among strangers.
| M. Muzammil | Preprints | 2026
Pilgrimage Tourism and Hospitality in Makkah and Madinah considers how hospitality systems interact with Islamic values and the enormous flows of visitors to Islam's principal pilgrimage centers.
| Mostafa Omran | International Journal of Social Research, Humanities and Social Sciences | 2025
Faith, Culture and Hospitality examines Hajj as a combination of sacred ritual, cultural encounter, hospitality, technological organization, and interaction among pilgrims from around the world.
| Social Identity Researchers | British Journal of Social Psychology | 2024
Identity Enactment as a Social Accomplishment investigates how Hajj pilgrims actively express and reinforce a common identity through mutual support and shared behavior.
| A.H. Alzeer et al. | Healthcare / PMC | 2024
Beyond Borders examines the mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of Hajj, including experiences of unity, humility, gratitude, reflection, and connection with Muslims from around the world.
| Robert W. Schaefer | Cambridge University Press | 2024
The Hajj as Social Identity and Social Capital considers how participation in an immense common ritual can reinforce a shared religious identity and create social connections that extend beyond the pilgrimage itself.
| Robert W. Schaefer | Cambridge University Press | 2024
Mass Religious Ritual and Intergroup Tolerance examines pilgrimage as a setting in which intense in-group religious identification can coexist with expanded contact, social capital, and changed attitudes toward outsiders.
| Researchers in Social Identity and Crowd Psychology | British Journal of Social Psychology | 2023
The Role of Identity-Related Beliefs examines how a shared identity among Hajj pilgrims influences their interpretation of crowd conditions and their relationships with fellow participants.
| Y.J. Ahn et al. | ESS Open Archive | 2023
Unveiling the Behavioral Dynamics of the Hajj Pilgrimage discusses cooperation, social cohesion, collective ritual, and the behavioral dynamics created when millions undertake the same religious journey.
| Hani Alnabulsi et al. | European Journal of Social Psychology | 2020
Understanding the Impact of the Hajj investigates why participation can strengthen Muslim identity while also contributing to more positive attitudes toward members of other groups.
| Hani Alnabulsi et al. | European Journal of Social Psychology | 2018
Predicting Collective Behaviour at the Hajj examines how shared social identity can encourage pilgrims to support one another and how the physical environment affects cooperation within enormous crowds.
| John Drury and colleagues | University of Sussex | 2017
The Social Psychology of the Hajj summarizes research suggesting that identification with the enormous pilgrim crowd can encourage cooperation and more positive attitudes toward people beyond one's immediate group.
| Hani Alnabulsi | University of Dundee | 2015
Shared Identity at the Muslim Pilgrimage of the Hajj investigates how pilgrims anticipate and experience a common Muslim identity while participating in the enormous multinational gathering at Mecca.
| Hani Alnabulsi | University of Sussex / Semantic Scholar | 2015
The Crowd Psychology of the Hajj examines shared social identity, crowd experience, cooperation, and interpersonal support during one of the world's largest annual pilgrimages.
| Hani Alnabulsi and John Drury | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | 2014
Social Identification Moderates the Effect of Crowd Density shows that identifying with fellow Hajj pilgrims can change how people experience dense crowds and contribute to feelings of safety and mutual support.
| Wired Staff / Crowd Science Researchers | Wired | 2010
Faith in Numbers describes how mathematics and crowd modeling have been applied to Hajj so millions of people can participate in shared rituals more safely.
| David Clingingsmith, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Michael Kremer | Quarterly Journal of Economics | 2009
Estimating the Impact of the Hajj uses a large natural experiment to explore how pilgrimage affects religious practice, social attitudes, tolerance, gender attitudes, and perceptions of Muslims from other nations.
The Dynamics of Crowd Disasters uses Hajj crowd movement to show how extremely dense collective gatherings behave and why infrastructure and crowd management are crucial to protecting pilgrims.
Kumbh Mela, Magh Mela, and Collective Identity
| Festival and Tourism Researchers | International Journal of Event and Festival Management | 2026
From Chaos to Clarity investigates how participation in Kumbh Mela may affect thought transformation, mindfulness, mental well-being, and pilgrims' desire to return.
| Associated Press | AP | 2025
The Maha Kumbh Festival in Northern India Is the World's Largest Religious Gathering documents the communal rituals, temporary city, sacred bathing, religious devotion, and enormous human movement surrounding the pilgrimage.
| G. Tiwari | PhilArchive | 2025
The Ecodharmic Significance and Liminal Experience of Kumbh Mela examines the pilgrimage as a liminal environment in which participants can temporarily move beyond everyday social identities through shared sacred practice.
| Religions Editorial Team | Religions | 2024
Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage collects international scholarship emphasizing sacred journeys as settings where people from diverse cultural backgrounds meet, interact, worship, travel, and exchange experiences.
| Arthur Lazarus | KevinMD | 2023
The Kumbh Mela Festival and the Social Psychological Implications of Crowds discusses research suggesting that pilgrims can experience vast gatherings positively when they perceive those around them as fellow members of a meaningful group.
Social Relations in a Pilgrimage Gathering uses interviews with Magh Mela participants to show how recognition, validation, and solidarity arise from a shared religious identity.
The World's Largest Peaceful Gathering Starts Today in India describes the immense scale of the Kumbh Mela and the infrastructure required for tens of millions of pilgrims to perform rituals together.
| Nick Hopkins et al. | European Journal of Social Psychology | 2017
Social Identity and Health at Mass Gatherings considers how participating in meaningful crowds such as the Magh Mela may produce psychological benefits through shared identity and social support.
| Nick Hopkins et al. | British Journal of Social Psychology | 2016
A Calming Cacophony investigates how shared identity can even influence people's experience of sound and noise within the crowded environment of an Indian pilgrimage gathering.
| Ian Barnett, Tarun Khanna and Jukka-Pekka Onnela | arXiv / scientific research | 2016
Social and Spatial Clustering of People at Humanity's Largest Gathering uses mobile-phone data to investigate how millions of Kumbh Mela participants form social and geographical patterns.
| Nick Hopkins et al. | PLOS ONE | 2015
Investigating the Relationship Between Shared Social Identity examines how identification with fellow pilgrims at India's Magh Mela is associated with intimacy, support, positive experience, and well-being.
| Jukka-Pekka Onnela and Tarun Khanna | arXiv / Harvard research | 2015
Investigating Population Dynamics of the Kumbh Mela uses hundreds of millions of mobile-phone records to study patterns created when enormous populations temporarily gather for pilgrimage.
| Nick Hopkins et al. | University of Dundee | 2015
Being Together at the Magh Mela examines why people voluntarily enter enormous crowds and how shared identity can transform density from an unpleasant condition into a valued collective experience.
| Christine N. Buzinde et al. | Annals of Tourism Research | 2014
Emic Understandings of Kumbh Mela Pilgrimage Experiences investigates pilgrims' own interpretations of one of humanity's largest gatherings, emphasizing religious meaning, participation, relationships, and collective experience.
| Laura Spinney | National Geographic | 2014
Karma of the Crowd explores the social psychology of the Kumbh Mela and the surprising order, cooperation, spirituality, and shared identity found inside a gathering of tens of millions of people.
| Shailendra Tewari et al. | PLOS ONE | 2012
Participation in Mass Gatherings Can Benefit Well-Being demonstrates that prolonged participation in the Magh Mela can improve reported well-being despite the crowding and physical hardship associated with the event.
| Psychological Researchers | Psychological Studies | 2010
Psychological Well-Being and Pilgrimage investigates religiosity, happiness, and life satisfaction among Ardh-Kumbh Mela pilgrims and considers how collective religious participation relates to well-being.
Arbaeen, Walking, Service, and Hospitality
| K. Moulaei et al. | Health Science / PMC | 2026
The Impact of Arbaeen Long-Walk on the Health of Pilgrims examines how the extended collective walk is perceived to influence physical, psychological, social, and spiritual health.
| The Times Correspondents | The Times | 2026
Iran War Follows the Faithful on the World's Biggest Pilgrimage describes Arbaeen's huge volunteer network of mawkibs providing pilgrims with free food, shelter, medical assistance, and hospitality.
| Islamic Centre of England | Islamic Centre of England | 2025
Arbaeen: A Monumental Step Toward Building a Global Community presents the pilgrimage as a mechanism through which shared values, service, identity, and intergenerational religious belonging are reinforced.
| Arbaeen Studies Researchers | Arbaeen Journal | 2025
Faith Beyond Limits examines elderly Arbaeen pilgrims and the role of faith, resilience, companionship, service, and determination in enabling older participants to complete the demanding journey.
| Researchers on Arbaeen | global-e | 2024
Arbaeen Walk: From Sectarian Ritual to Global Pilgrimage examines how a shared Shia identity encourages cooperation, trust, mutual respect, and relationships that can endure beyond the pilgrimage itself.
| Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies | CMCS Oxford | 2024
Observing the Arbaeen describes a powerful atmosphere of common identity as pilgrims from many places walk, worship, mourn, converse, and gather around the memory of Hussein.
| A. Movahed et al. | International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage | 2024
Spiritual Experience at the Arbaeen Pilgrimage analyzes Iranian participants' accounts of walking to Karbala and the spiritual, emotional, social, and interpersonal dimensions of their experience.
| Pilgrimage Researchers | MOS Journal | 2024
Arbaeen Pilgrimage examines the long historical tradition of gathering and walking toward Karbala and considers pilgrimage a social as well as religious expression of collective faith.
| S. Mraiji | Journal of Islamic Social Sciences | 2022
A Sociological Explanation of Arbaeen Pilgrimage examines the enormous walking pilgrimage as a social phenomenon and identifies religious solidarity, service, relationships, and common identity among its social functions.
| Researchers on Arbaeen Pilgrimage | Tourism Management Perspectives | 2020
From Attachment to a Sacred Figure to Loyalty to a Sacred Route examines the social and psychological processes that connect devotion to Imam Hussein with attachment to the pilgrimage route and its community.
| A. Nikjoo et al. | Religions | 2020
From Attachment to a Sacred Figure to Loyalty to a Sacred Route examines how devotion to Imam Hussein develops into emotional attachment to the Arbaeen walk itself and the social world surrounding the pilgrimage.
A Phenomenological Study of Arbaeen Foot Pilgrimage in Iraq investigates pilgrims' motivations and lived experiences while walking together toward Karbala.
| Tourism Researchers | Tourist Studies | 2017
The Post-Secular Tourist: Re-Thinking Pilgrimage Tourism examines journeys in which religious devotion, leisure, personal transformation, and encounters with other travelers overlap.
| David Clingingsmith, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Michael Kremer | Quarterly Journal of Economics | 2009
Estimating the Impact of the Hajj investigates how participation in Islam's global pilgrimage affects religious practice, social attitudes, tolerance, and perceptions of Muslims from different backgrounds.
| Various Authors | International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society | n.d.
Between Hajj and the Christian Pilgrimage compares major pilgrimage traditions and the shared ideas of purposeful journey, purification, sacred destination, and religious commitment.
| Pilgrimage Route Researchers | International Social Science Research | n.d.
Evaluation of Capabilities and Facilities of the Najaf-to-Karbala Route examines the infrastructure and social services that support the enormous flow of Arbaeen walkers between the two Iraqi cities.
Lourdes, Fátima, and Christian Pilgrimage
| Caminhos de Fátima | Fátima Walking Routes | 2026
Share Your Experience on the Fátima Walking Routes describes current research investigating pilgrim motivations, route organization, experiences, and the effects of pilgrimage networks on surrounding communities.
| Associated Press | AP | 2025
Thousands of Motorcyclists Converge on Portuguese Shrine describes the Blessing of the Helmets pilgrimage, where a shared motorcycling identity combines with prayer, remembrance, grief, solidarity, and religious ritual.
| Ana Jorge et al. | Mobile Media & Communication | 2023
Pilgrimage to Fátima and Santiago After COVID examines how pilgrims use and deliberately disconnect from digital media, revealing the importance of presence, walking, reflection, and interpersonal encounters.
| University of Coimbra | University of Coimbra | 2023
Study Conducted at the Shrine of Fátima Assesses Tourist Experiences examines emotional attachment, sacred-place experiences, religious meaning, and visitors' relationships with the sanctuary.
| E.A. Duarte et al. | International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage | 2023
The Marian Paths of Portugal and Local Development examines walking routes connected with Marian shrines and the ways pilgrimage creates spiritual, cultural, economic, and community interactions.
| J. Klimiuk et al. | Journal of Religion and Health | 2021
The Lourdes Pilgrimage and the Impact on Pilgrim Quality of Life finds measurable short-term improvements in reported quality of life among sick pilgrims and considers community and common purpose among the possible mechanisms.
| E. Rahtz et al. | Journal of Religion and Health | 2021
Transcendent Experiences Among Pilgrims to Lourdes investigates extraordinary spiritual and emotional experiences occurring within the social and religious environment of the Lourdes pilgrimage.
| Diocese of Salford | Diocese of Salford | 2021
The Power of Pilgrimage discusses medical research into Lourdes and the possible significance of faith, companionship, service, social support, and the collective pilgrimage environment.
| UK Health Research Authority | HRA | n.d.
Quality of Life and Pilgrimage to Lourdes describes research into how spiritual renewal, community, common purpose, travel, caregiving, and participation may influence pilgrims' well-being.
| D. Fino et al. | Journal of Tourism Research | n.d.
Routes to Fátima investigates pedestrian pilgrimage routes and the practical conditions that shape the shared walking experience.
Buddhist and Japanese Pilgrimage Traditions
| A. Marchenko | Contemporary Jewry | 2026
Perceptions of Danger Around Jewish Pilgrimages to Uman examines relations between Hasidic pilgrims and local communities in Ukraine and how shared identity interacts with conflict, risk, gender, and place.
| Japan National Tourism Organization | Japan Travel | 2024
Experience an Authentic Pilgrimage in Shikoku introduces the 88-temple route and the tradition of osettai, through which local residents offer hospitality and assistance to pilgrims.
| National Geographic Travel | National Geographic | 2024
Why You Should Walk Japan's Most Sacred Pilgrimage Trail describes the Kumano Kodo as a living network of shrines, traditional settlements, forests, rituals, hospitality, and shared walking extending back more than a millennium.
| El País Viajes | El País | 2024
Kumano Kodo, the Japanese Camino de Santiago describes the ancient paths connecting the Kumano shrines and the continuing appeal of walking through a landscape shaped by both Shinto and Buddhist traditions.
| Gereon Kopf | Buddhistdoor Global | 2023
Religion as Practice: The Shikoku Pilgrimage in Japan reflects on pilgrimage as embodied Buddhist practice in which walking, temples, hospitality, ritual, hardship, and encounters become inseparable.
| M.E. Çelebi Karakök et al. | Religions | 2023
Determining the Characteristics of Faith-Themed Routes compares pilgrimage routes and considers the combination of sacred landscapes, cultural heritage, walking, visitors, and host communities.
| K.A. Shinde | Heritage | 2022
How Effective Is a Buddhist Pilgrimage Circuit as a Tourism Product? examines travel through Buddhist sacred sites and the search for meditation, spiritual development, cultural understanding, and meaningful encounters.
| Religious Studies Scholars | Cambridge University Press | 2022
Thomas Merton and Christian and Jewish Pilgrims in Buddhist Asia examines interreligious journeys in which encounters with Asian religious traditions changed participants' ideas about spirituality, selfhood, and human connectedness.
| P. Moira et al. | International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage | 2021
The Case of the Kumano Kodo Route in Japan examines one of the world's best-known historic pilgrimage landscapes and the relationship between heritage preservation, sacred travel, tourism, and local communities.
| Sonia Ryang/Kang | Asia-Pacific Journal | 2019
Contested Pilgrimage: Shikoku Henro and Dark Tourism explores the less idealized histories and contested meanings surrounding one of Japan's most famous pilgrimage landscapes.
| Paul Salopek | The New Yorker | 2019
Walking the Path of the Buddha in a Neglected Corner of India follows efforts to rediscover ancient Buddhist walking routes and reconnect modern travelers with the landscapes and communities associated with the Buddha.
| Tahir Albayrak et al. | Tourism Management | 2018
Exploring Religious Tourist Experiences in Jerusalem studies Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other visitors and shows how engagement, learning, sacred meaning, interaction, and emotion combine in religious travel.
| Condé Nast Traveler | Condé Nast Traveler | 2018
Hiking With a Priestess on Japan's Kumano Kodo follows a group pilgrimage led by a mountain priestess and illustrates how spiritual instruction, physical challenge, companionship, nature, and shared ritual intertwine.
| Barre Center for Buddhist Studies | Barre Center for Buddhist Studies | n.d.
The Pilgrims' Experience describes Buddhist sacred sites where monks and pilgrims from many countries chant, meditate, explore, learn, and participate in overlapping traditions together.
The Shikoku Pilgrimage explains the history and culture of the 88-temple route and the unusually close relationship that has developed over centuries between pilgrims and communities along the trail.
| Association for Jewish Studies | Association for Jewish Studies | n.d.
Jewish Pilgrimages explores how Jewish pilgrims create religious meaning and social connection through traveling, praying, eating, singing, storytelling, and gathering at sacred places.
| Scholars of Jewish Diaspora | Diaspora | n.d.
Migration, Diaspora, and Religious Pilgrimage examines Jewish pilgrimage within migration and diaspora networks, including journeys associated with Lag Ba'Omer and revered rabbinic tombs.
| UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.
Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range describes the centuries-old network of forest paths linking sacred sites where Shinto and Buddhist traditions have interacted for generations.
| World Expeditions | World Expeditions | n.d.
How to Become a Dual Pilgrim describes the partnership connecting Japan's Kumano Kodo and Spain's Camino de Santiago and the symbolic identity granted to travelers who complete significant portions of both routes.
Indigenous Pilgrimage and Community Identity
| Joel W. Palka and Santiago Juarez | Latin American Antiquity | 2026
Maya Collectives, Ritual Landscapes, and Community Dynamics examines how ceremonies at sacred places expressed collective identity and helped organize Maya communities.
| Olivia C. Navarro-Farr et al. | Latin American Antiquity | 2026
Memory, Pilgrimage, and Social Life in an Ancient Maya City examines a shrine whose repeated ritual deposits helped communities engage with political history and collective memory.
| UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | 2025
Wixárika Route Through Sacred Sites to Wirikuta documents a pilgrimage landscape extending more than 500 kilometers and connecting ritual practices with ancestors, agriculture, ecology, and community well-being.
The Wixárika Route in Mexico Joins the UNESCO World Heritage List describes recognition of an Indigenous pilgrimage tradition that has connected communities and sacred landscapes for generations.
| ICOMOS | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | 2025
Huichol Route Through Sacred Sites to Huiricuta evaluates the sacred landscapes and pilgrimage practices through which Wixárika communities maintain relationships with ancestral deities and one another.
| Joel W. Palka | Cambridge Archaeological Journal | 2024
A Small Rural Travel Stopover at the Late Postclassic Maya Site of Mensabak shows how shrines, trade, information exchange, and collective rituals brought foreign travelers and local populations into sustained contact.
| Joel W. Palka | Latin American Antiquity | 2023
Maya Pilgrimage, Migration, and Community Connectivity argues that sacred journeys helped migrants explore new settlements and subsequently reinforced solidarity and community identity around sacred landscapes.
| Peter Sutherland | African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage Research | 2007
Walking Middle Passage History in Reverse examines the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage, a year-long journey connecting historical memory, African diasporic identity, Buddhism, reconciliation, and collective remembrance.
| Michael J. Sallnow | Man | 1981
The Sociology of Andean Pilgrimage examines how sacred images, shrines, ritual journeys, and festival participation symbolize and reproduce local community identities in the Andes.
Pilgrimage, Healing, Well-Being, and Transformation
| Semmelweis University | Semmelweis University | 2026
Pilgrimage as Well-Being Therapy describes research into walking pilgrimages as experiences that combine physical exercise, psychological reflection, spirituality, companionship, and social well-being.
| A. Marasco et al. | Sustainability | 2026
Emotional Well-Being in Tourism Experiences on Pathways reviews how walking routes and meaningful journeys contribute to psychological well-being through movement, landscape, reflection, social contact, and purposeful travel.
| Franciszek Mróz et al. | Journal of Religion and Health | 2025
Eco-Pilgrimage examines ecological, religious, and health dimensions of the Camino and notes that walking with companions can provide social support, strengthen interpersonal bonds, and foster community.
| S. Grocutt et al. | Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism | 2025
Walking With Purpose studies solo women's pilgrimage experiences and explores how walking can build resilience, identity, well-being, and connections with the people encountered along the route.
| S. Sinha et al. | Medical and Social Science Research | 2025
Interplay of Pilgrimage, Cultural Tourism and Well-Being examines participants at the Mahakumbh and considers relationships among spiritual engagement, collective participation, mental health, and physical well-being.
| E. Reid Boyd | Studies in Travel Writing | 2025
A Moving Cause: Travel Notes Towards Pilgrimage as Method uses pilgrimage writing and walking to consider how travel produces knowledge through embodied encounters with landscapes, histories, and other people.
| T. Weiler et al. | Journal of Heritage Tourism | 2025
Israeli Women's Journeys to Uman examines women's spiritual travel to the Jewish pilgrimage center in Ukraine and explores devotion, identity, transformation, friendship, and gendered religious experience.
| T. Thelen et al. | Tourism Geographies | 2025
A Contested Fan Pilgrimage Site for Rural Tourism Development examines the emergence of a popular-culture pilgrimage destination in rural Japan and the negotiations between fans and local residents over the meaning of place.
| J. Grosnick | Religion of South Asia | 2025
The Holy Sojourns of Jagannath reverses the conventional perspective on pilgrimage by examining occasions when the sacred deity journeys outward toward worshipping communities.
| M. Mammarella | Fieldwork in Religion | 2024
Carrying the Cross of Discord examines a traditional Balkan procession and shows how pilgrimage practices may unite communities while also exposing political, ethnic, and religious disagreement.
| Carole M. Cusack | International Journal for the Study of New Religions | 2024
The Appeal of Stones Standing in the Landscape examines contemporary sacred landscapes and the ways communities create ritual places that encourage gathering, pilgrimage, remembrance, and spiritual experience.
| British Holistic Medical Association | BHMA | 2023
Pilgrimage as a Pathway to Healing considers intentional journeys as opportunities to process difficulty through movement, purpose, reflection, encounter, and connection with landscapes and other people.
| Holly Nelson-Becker | Journal of Religion, Spirituality & Aging | 2023
Adventure and Spiritual Restoration examines pilgrimage as intentional travel capable of promoting well-being through challenge, spirituality, natural environments, reflection, and shared journeying.
| Religious Landscape Researchers | Equinox Publishing | 2023
Clouds Drifting Through a Landscape: Glimpses of Rishikesh examines India's sacred city as a landscape of shrines, yoga, meditation, religious travel, spiritual practice, and encounters among diverse seekers.
| Mario Katić and John Eade | Routledge | 2023
Approaching Pilgrimage introduces contemporary pilgrimage studies through questions of mobility, sacred space, agency, hospitality, religious authority, conflict, and relationships between pilgrims and local communities.
| L.P.L. Lin et al. | Tourism Management | 2022
Exploring How Perceived Resilience and Restoration Influence Pilgrimage Well-Being finds that experiences of restoration and resilience associated with pilgrimage can significantly affect participants' well-being.
| Pilgrimage Researchers | Applied Psychology / Tourism Research | 2022
Walking for Well-Being examines modern pilgrimage phenomenologically and finds that many contemporary pilgrims walk in search of reflection, life clarification, healing, transformation, and renewed relationships.
| M. Lavrič et al. | Advance Research | 2022
A Study of Self-Reported Experiences and Transformative Effects on Camino Pilgrims analyzes accounts of significant experiences and how pilgrims interpret lasting changes in values, spirituality, relationships, and their understanding of life.
| E. Aleknaitė | Pomegranate | 2021
Who Owns the Heart of Vilnius? examines competing Catholic and contemporary Pagan relationships with sacred urban space and demonstrates how pilgrimage can become part of negotiations over collective religious identity.
Pilgrimage, Hospitality, and Service
| Amelda Pramezwary et al. | Societies | 2026
Sacred Service, Cultural Transformation, and Sustainable Religious Tourism examines Catholic pilgrimage sites in Indonesia where community volunteers and church institutions provide hospitality while maintaining local religious traditions.
Religious Sensitivity and Regenerative Tourism considers how growing visitor numbers affect sacred spaces and argues for pilgrimage management that respects worshippers and the communities responsible for religious heritage.
| D. Nega et al. | Heritage | 2026
Religious Festivals in Tourism Research reviews scholarship on pilgrimages and sacred festivals as events in which worship, cultural identity, visitors, local residents, heritage, and tourism intersect.
| Rosilawati Polus et al. | Anatolia | 2024
From Pilgrimage to Volunteer Tourism examines volunteer travel as a spiritual journey and considers how service to other people can reproduce some of pilgrimage's traditional qualities of sacrifice, purpose, transformation, and community.
| Community Development Researchers | Religious Tourism Research | 2024
Optimizing Pilgrimage Traditions and Community Empowerment examines ways pilgrimage practices can support spiritual life while also strengthening local social and economic networks.
Heritage, Secular Pilgrimage, Identity, and Collective Memory
| Financial Times | Financial Times | 2026
Sacred Pilgrimage Has Journeyed to Commercial Boom examines the contemporary revival of pilgrimage and the way ancient routes now attract both religious travelers and secular seekers looking for meaning, heritage, wellness, and connection.
| R. Aryee et al. | Journal of Heritage Tourism | 2025
Roots Tourism Experiences, Identity Construction, Social Justice and Well-Being examines ancestral travel as a process through which diaspora travelers construct identity and reconnect with collective histories.
| Tourism Researchers | Journal of Vacation Marketing | 2025
Achieving Self-Concept Clarity Through Diaspora Tourism examines how ancestral journeys strengthen place identity, psychological ownership, self-understanding, and connections with heritage.
| The Australian | The Australian | 2025
Why More People Are Walking Ancient Pilgrim Paths for Midlife Clarity describes the revival of traditional routes among secular seekers who use walking, solitude, chance encounters, shared hardship, and temporary pilgrim communities as opportunities for reflection and renewal.
| K.C. Fromkin | Harvard University | 2025
Wild Pilgrimage: Reimagining the Sacred in a Secularizing World explores emerging forms of pilgrimage involving wilderness, hiking groups, shared rituals, nature, and communal spiritual experiences outside conventional religious institutions.
| S. Rautela et al. | Cogent Social Sciences | 2025
Exploring the Sacred examines the growth of spiritual tourism and emphasizes cultural identity, sacred experience, spirituality, and relationships with religious places.
| Y. Zhu et al. | Tourism Geographies | 2025
Contested Sacred Space investigates struggles over ownership, interpretation, heritage, religious authority, and tourism at sacred places shared by different groups.
| Evgenia Mesaritou | Politics and Religion | 2024
Of Pilgrimages and Restorations examines reciprocal Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot visits to sacred sites and shows how pilgrimage can intersect with heritage, memory, political division, and cross-community contact.
| Kevin Rushby | The Guardian | 2024
A Modern Pilgrimage Through Herefordshire's Golden Valley describes strangers walking and sleeping in churches together, gradually sharing personal stories and forming a temporary community through common effort and conversation.
| Editorial | The Guardian | 2024
The Guardian View on Pilgrimage considers the renewed appeal of walking pilgrimage among religious believers, secular seekers, people experiencing grief, and others looking for reflection and companionship.
| Vogue Contributor | Vogue | 2024
A Journey Along the Camino de Santiago describes how travelers with varied personal motives develop collective momentum through the shared objective of moving toward Santiago.
| Tourism and Media Researchers | Tourism and Digital Media Research | 2024
The Hybrid Authenticity of Virtual Pilgrimage examines whether digitally mediated sacred journeys can reproduce some elements of physical pilgrimage and raises questions about presence, participation, community, and authenticity.
| V. Singh et al. | African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure | 2024
Four Decades of Research on Religious Tourism reviews scholarship showing the diversity of motivations, identities, experiences, and community relationships associated with pilgrimage destinations.
In Search of New Dimensions for Religious Tourism examines newly developed pilgrimage routes in Bulgaria and the relationship between sacred heritage, tourism, local communities, and regional development.
| I.A. Drăguleasa et al. | Religions | 2024
Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage in Vâlcea County examines monasteries, sacred landscapes, visitor motivations, and the role pilgrimage can play in maintaining local cultural heritage.
| K.A. Shinde | Sustainability | 2023
Reframing the Intersections of Pilgrimage, Religious Tourism, and Sustainability explains how pilgrimage can revitalize local religious customs, cultural practices, sacred places, and community institutions.
| Kathryn Hurlock | War & Society | 2022
Peace, Politics and Piety: Catholic Pilgrimage in Wartime Europe shows that pilgrimage remained important during the Second World War partly because displaced communities needed opportunities for collective identity, prayer, and solidarity.
| Peter Polak-Springer | Nationalities Papers | 2020
Religiosity, Nationalism, and Politics in Palestine and Poland compares mass pilgrimages at Nabi Musa and Jasna Góra and demonstrates how sacred gatherings can simultaneously reinforce religion, nationalism, community identity, and political conflict.
| A. Mehtiyeva | Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism | 2020
Journeys of Research, Emotions and Belonging explores ancestral tourism and genealogy travel as journeys through which diaspora members seek emotional connection with family histories, communities, and places of origin.
| C. Michael Hall et al. | International Journal of Consumer Studies | 2018
Spiritual Values and Motives of Secular Pilgrims examines journeys that function like pilgrimage even without conventional religious belief, highlighting meaning, values, identity, transformation, and attachment to significant places.
| D. Bryce et al. | Annals of Tourism Research | 2017
Diaspora, Authenticity and the Imagined Past explores how descendants returning to ancestral landscapes seek authentic contact with heritage and use travel to strengthen personal and collective identity.
| Derek Bryce, Alexander and Murdy | Annals of Tourism Research | 2017
Diaspora, Authenticity and the Imagined Past studies encounters between diaspora visitors and ancestral heritage sites and the search for authentic connections with a shared past.
| Condé Nast Traveler Staff | Condé Nast Traveler | 2017
Why Heritage Tourism Is More Popular Than Ever examines the growing desire to travel to ancestral homelands and understand family history, cultural identity, and belonging through direct experience of place.
| H. Yueh-po | Asian Ethnology | 2017
Pilgrimage, Modernity, Tourism, and Nostalgia examines Taiwanese Tenrikyō followers traveling to Tenri, Japan, and considers how pilgrimage connects spiritual development with transnational identity and memory.
| Avril Maddrell | Social & Cultural Geography | 2016
Celtic Pilgrimage, Past and Present examines revived pilgrimage routes and how walking through culturally meaningful landscapes connects contemporary travelers with spiritual traditions, historical communities, and place.
| Ismail Fajrie Alatas | Comparative Studies in Society and History | 2016
The Poetics of Pilgrimage investigates Indonesian pilgrimage to Hadramawt and explains how narratives, religious authorities, genealogies, and travel networks collectively sustain pilgrimage traditions across international borders.
| Carole M. Cusack | Fieldwork in Religion | 2016
Medieval Pilgrims and Modern Tourists examines the revival of pilgrimage to Walsingham and the ways historical devotion, contemporary spirituality, heritage, and tourism coexist.
| Guillermo Salas Carreño | Signs and Society | 2014
The Glacier, the Rock, the Image examines emotional and symbolic practices at Peru's Quyllurit'i pilgrimage, where enormous crowds combine Catholic worship with Indigenous Andean traditions.
| David J. Corpis | Central European History | 2012
Marian Pilgrimage and the Performance of Male Privilege examines pilgrimage in eighteenth-century Augsburg and shows how ritual fellowship interacted with existing gender and social hierarchies.
| Kenneth Hyde and Shane Harman | Tourism Management | 2011
Motives for a Secular Pilgrimage to the Gallipoli Battlefields identifies spiritual, national, family, friendship, and travel motives that bring Australians and New Zealanders together at a site of collective memory.
| Noga Collins-Kreiner | Annals of Tourism Research | 2010
Researching Pilgrimage: Continuity and Transformations reviews changes in pilgrimage scholarship and demonstrates how sacred journeys increasingly overlap with tourism, personal transformation, heritage, and modern identity.
| Alison Frank | Austrian History Yearbook | 2009
The Pleasant and the Useful explores nineteenth-century Mariazell, showing how devotion, leisure, landscape appreciation, social gathering, and early tourism increasingly occupied the same pilgrimage space.
| Peter Jan Margry | Shrine and Pilgrimage Studies | 2008
Secular Pilgrimage: A Contradiction in Terms? examines journeys to graves, memorials, celebrity sites, and other meaningful destinations where participants seek connection with people, memories, ideals, and collective narratives.
| Matthew T. Loveland | Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion | 2008
Pilgrimage, Religious Institutions, and the Construction of Communal Identity considers the continuing role of pilgrimage in creating community despite modernization, tourism, and commercialization.
| James W. Davidson | Wilfrid Laurier University | 1985
The Pilgrimage to Elvis Presley's Graceland investigates why admirers travel to the singer's home and grave and how a meaningful place can become a focus of ritual, memory, identity, and community.
| Diaspora Studies Researcher | SOAS University of London | n.d.
Travels to an Ancestral Past examines roots travel as an embodied identity practice in which returning to ancestral landscapes helps diaspora travelers construct personal and collective relationships with history.
Pilgrimage Routes and Cultural Exchange
| Mario Katić | Religions | 2024
The Case of Adriatic Maritime Pilgrimages in Nin and Perast examines boat pilgrimages in which sacred images, seascapes, local identity, procession, and collective participation bind coastal communities together.
| Saudi Arabia / UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | 2022
The Hajj Pilgrimage Routes: Darb Zubaydah describes an historic road through which religious travelers also enabled long-term cultural, commercial, and intellectual exchange across regions.
| Nabanita Nath | Studies in Religion / Equinox | 2022
From Pilgrim Landscape to Pilgrim Road explores India's Char Dham journeys and the transformation of deeply ecological and sensory Himalayan pilgrimages into modern road-based travel.
| Marion Bowman | Numen / Pilgrimage Studies | 2020
Rehabilitating Pilgrimage in Scotland examines revived Scottish pilgrimage routes and the ways history, Protestant culture, heritage, and Camino-inspired practices create new forms of shared walking.
| Hogne Øian | Tourism Geographies | 2019
Pilgrim Routes as Contested Spaces in Norway examines St. Olav's Way and shows how religious communities, heritage organizations, outdoor enthusiasts, tourism interests, and pilgrims negotiate the meaning of a shared route.
| ICOMOS | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | 2015
Routes of Santiago in Northern Spain documents nearly 1,500 kilometers of interconnected pilgrimage routes that have functioned for centuries as places of cultural dialogue between pilgrims and host communities.
Pilgrimage: Shedding New Light on a Forgotten Element of World Heritage considers pilgrimage an important dimension of living heritage linking sacred sites with communities, routes, traditions, and continuing religious practices.
| UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.
Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France describes a network whose churches, bridges, hospitals, and roads supported centuries of encounters among pilgrims and helped circulate religious ideas, art, and culture across Europe.
| Egypt / UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.
The An-Nakhl Fortress, a Stage on the Pilgrimage Route to Mecca examines infrastructure serving generations of pilgrims traveling from Africa and other regions toward Islam's holy cities.
Digital and Networked Pilgrimage
| Digital Religion Researchers | Pilgrimage and Media Studies | 2026
Digital Communitas proposes that contemporary pilgrims can create and maintain communal relationships through route applications, pilgrim credentials, social networks, photographs, and online storytelling.
| N. Maheshwari et al. | Cogent Social Sciences | 2026
Post-Pandemic Religious Tourism Research reviews recent scholarship on religious tourism, including digital technologies, changing pilgrimage behavior, sustainability, and post-pandemic transformations in sacred travel.
| Edward Wright-Ríos and Carlota Guadalupe Martínez-Don | Latin American Research Review | 2024
Posting the Journey to Juquila investigates Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram use among Mexican pilgrims and shows how social media supports pilgrimage-group communication, devotional expression, storytelling, and virtual community formation.
| Rongxuan Mu et al. | arXiv | 2023
Pilgrimage to Pureland reconstructs the Mount Wutai pilgrimage imagery of Dunhuang in virtual reality and examines how digital environments can make complex pilgrimage heritage accessible to new audiences.
Pilgrimage, Tourism, and Changing Identities
| D. Wang et al. | Sustainability | 2024
What Is the Most Influential Authenticity of Beliefs, Places, and Activities? investigates how religious travelers perceive authenticity and why sacred beliefs, rituals, and environments influence the quality of pilgrimage experiences.
| Hany Kim, Semih Yilmaz and Soyoun Ahn | Sustainability | 2019
Motivational Landscape and Evolving Identity of a Route-Based Religious Tourism Space examines Camino travelers and finds that religious and secular motivations increasingly overlap while spiritual meaning remains important.
