Pilgrimage studies is a genre of scholarship fraught with conflicts over theoretical models. On the one hand, you have those who would have every instance of pilgrimage conform to a single, universal model. This view can be found in Edith Turner's entry “Pilgrimage: An Overview” in the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 2004). Drawing on Victor Turner's model of pilgrimages, consisting of separation, liminality, and reaggregation generating a sense of communitas, Edith Turner's contention is that “whatever the site, whatever the culture, the general features of a pilgrim's journey are remarkably similar.” This transhistorical, transcultural view in effect imposes a model of Western Christian notions of pilgrimage onto all religions, which assimilate diverse phenomena into a theoretical discourse that does not understand specific pilgrimages on their own terms.
In contrast, in their introduction to Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage (London; New...
