Rome: Multiversal City: The Material and the Immaterial in Religious Tourism

Abstract

Rome: Multiversal City: The Material and the Immaterial in Religious Tourism Graham Holderness The modern tourist industry in the West is organized conceptually around a secular agenda; and yet much tourism is associated with religion. Donald Horne was one of the first to argue in The Great Museum that the modern tourist is a direct descendant of the medieval pilgrim (Horne 1984). Pilgrims were the first mass tourists, their sightseeing and souvenir collecting focused on the material dimension of their spiritual quest. But the tourist industry and tourism studies assume that there is a huge difference between medieval pilgrimage and modern tourism. Modern tourism parallels medieval pilgrimage as the shadow parallels the substance. In the Middle Ages, travel for purposes of pilgrimage involved genuine religious belief; but the modern (or post‐modern) age is a post‐religious era, so such beliefs are no longer as tenable for the educated. Wherever we see in the contemporary world structures of experience and patterns of behavior that seem to suggest religion, we tend to see them as secularized extrapolations or projections of a vanished medieval belief‐system. The interpretative models used in tourism studies are based on secular, rational, atheistic, materialist categories. It is assumed that people do not believe; or that belief has little to do with material existence. And yet of course people do believe, and what they believe does have profound implications for material culture. The global tourist industry conducts members of all the great world faiths to holy sites across the world: to Mecca, to Kyoto, to Jerusalem, to Santiago de Compostela, to Lourdes, to Rome. Many go for manifestly religious reasons. But this clear evidence simply runs in parallel to the enlightenment paradigms that rule the industry and its academic superstructure. We separate the beliefs of the participants from the materiality of their experience and propose that what they are doing is really no different objectively from what other tourists do. This is just one branch of tourism, religious tourism, which sits alongside adventure tourism, ecotourism, cultural and heritage tourism, etc. Tourist agencies instinctively believe that these travelers are moving through a material environment which remains unaffected by their peculiar idiosyncratic habit of belief. But there’s no need to tell them that. Swatos and Tomasi (2002) have interrogated this dualism, asking if it possible to get beyond these binary oppositions between religious pilgrimage and modern tourism, the sacred and the secular, the material and the immaterial. Are these things really qualitatively different, with the tourist engaged in a quest for pleasure, self‐realization, and authenticity of experience, while the pilgrim is looking for illumination, physical or spiritual healing, or the breath of the divine? Is it possible to reverse the traditional secular analysis and suggest that perhaps the pilgrimage experience can provide a model for tourism, instead of the other way around? To pursue this question involves thinking about place and the sacred, and in this brief paper I propose to consider (from a Christian perspective) the case of Rome. The leading contemporary Christian writers on this topic (e.g., Brown 2004, Inge 2003, Sheldrake 2001) agree that for religion (and for intellectual culture in general) “place” is a highly problematical category. The Western scientific tradition has thoroughly subordinated place to space and time. Science, philosophy, theology (even, according to Inge, geography!) conspire to render place a “contingent category” (Harvey 1991), an accidental factor of human existence. The Christian Middle Ages in the west defined God as unlimited, bound (despite the Incarnation) to no particular place, and humanity as attached to no “abiding city.” In a secular age modern Christian theology has persisted in that long flight from particularity. In the last three centuries the Enlightenment, the ascendancy of the natural and social sciences, and modernity have promoted a universalism that leads not only to the neglect but to the :devaluation” (Foucault 1980: 70) or “suppression” (Casey 1997: ix) of place. “Progress” proceeds through time and into space, leaving place behind. Increasing mobility renders place relative and temporary. The advent of electronic media has in some sense annihilated place, converting (as some thinkers have argued) what was formerly public into something increasingly private. Anthony Giddens argued that...