Ritual Doing, Religious Doing

Abstract

Ritual is a complex concept that spans the supposed borders between religious activities and non-religious ones. It also spans responses to deeply held beliefs, real events, and fictional worlds. This chapter examines fan pilgrimages based on Harry Potter as a window into ritual practices in the borderlands of religiosity. Fan pilgrimage provides an opportunity to understand performances of ritual acts in a media-rich, secularizing world. Indeed, fan pilgrims’ ritual performances are a marker of “doing religiously” outside the boundaries of traditional religions. The chapter analyzes the interview accounts of fan pilgrims who visited King’s Cross Station and the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in light of theorizations of ritualization, sacralization of space, and contemporary pilgrimage. It argues that the ritual activities of fan pilgrims and how they talk about them are a kind of religious doing, unrelated to any established institution or creed. Moreover, the emergence of fan pilgrimage from fictional materials and material fakery (like theme parks) is not a hindrance to these ritualizations, but rather gives them power. This forces us to ask ourselves important questions about where we imagine the limits of religiosity to be.