Antropología, peregrinación y turismo: Consideraciones teóricas y metodológicas sobre un encuentro tardío

GUSTAVO ANDRÉS LUDUEÑA

Buenos Aires

Workshop; Ciclo de seminarios abiertos ?Mitologías, Símbolos y Rituales?; 2003

This article will discuss the process through which religious traditions are promoted as cultural commodity for consumption in mass tourism. A lot of my paper will focus on pilgrimage, understood as a travel to a sacred place. Spain represents an interesting example in this regard. It is a country with a long history of popular devotions to the Virgin Mary and Catholic saints ?as well as numerous shrines where devotees converge as pilgrims. Therefore, in this paper it will be stated that a shrine-based pilgrimage becomes an object of mass consumption for tourism mainly through a process of ?orientalization.? I take orientalism to mean a process of construction of exoticness, strangeness, and distinctness. In relation to the commoditization of culture it operates on, at least, two different levels: 1) the dissolution of the regional and, as a consequence, its appropriation and displacement to the national-based level (whether by its identification with people cultural identity, heritage, history, or popular country-wide devotion); and, 2) its commoditization in the promise of joining the tourist to such an otherness as a whole perceptive experience. The first, related to space, establishes the making of distance and separation of the cult from its origin (geographic, cultural, historic); the second, related to the body, constructs the strangeness as commodity to be consumed for the mass audience through the action of the senses and perception. In dealing with this argument, I shall first present a discussion of the conceptualization of pilgrimage particularly stressing its relationships with space and sacred sites, change through ritual passage, and the concept of ?competing discourses?. Secondly, I shall deal with these components in the particular case of the Virgin of the Dew in Andalusia. Thirdly, I shall demonstrate how pilgrimages and other Catholic-associated rituals are commoditisized through the new official publicity campaign, ?Spain Marks,? for touristic consumption. This campaign encourages the exploitation of a large process of ?revitalization? of ?old? traditions in Spain.