Pèlerinages et économie : des marchands du temple aux offrandes pèlerines

Abstract

Because they involve the movement of millions of people over periods of days or weeks, pilgrimages create economic development in the areas in which they take place. In this paper the author proposes to analyze, in a comparative way, some economic dimensions of two contemporary pilgrimages: Lourdes, a French Marian Catholic pilgrimage, and Dajia Mazu, a Taiwanese Taoist pilgrimage. We will demonstrate how the links between the economic and the religious fields are based on differences between the multiple actors of the pilgrimages: religious organizations, secular organizations (elected representatives, administrators, political parties, shopkeepers), the groups of pilgrims and the divine universe. The ‘secular’ effects of the religious field on the economic lead first to the joint mobilization of politicians and local administration staff with more or less direct links with the religious people in charge, in order to perpetuate and regulate the flow of pilgrims (reception policy, accommodation, organization of cultural events, tourism, etc.). But pilgrimages also generate financial donations and offerings, which are in certain cases part of the pilgrim’s interaction with the economy, the vendor in effect acting as the divine dispenser of benefits and ‘favours’. These offerings are collected by religious and/or secular organizations and reinvested, as the case may be, in the religious and/or social or even political domain, as in Taiwan. So the collection of these offerings takes on an important economic dimension, especially as the size of the donations is at least partly connected to the obtaining of the requested favours.