Materiality has become a compelling register through which to examine religious manifestations and matters of belief. There is a mounting awareness among scholars of both the tangible aspects of religion and the ways in which material objects are never neutral. Following these theoretical developments, I argue that materiality can serve as a form of agency for a particular version of knowledge to become conventional and accepted as true. This emerging materiality codifies a certain version of the truth. However, such validation through matter is often challenged and categorized as fake or a myth. To illustrate my argument, I explore the newly emerging site of Rachel’s Tomb in Tiberias and the competing versions of truth surrounding it. I contend that its new materiality, which has evolved in recent years, serves as a way of validating the site’s new mythology. However, among locals, who are familiar with the site’s previous materiality, this new knowledge is pejoratively labeled as fake or mythical.

“Welcome to Divinity College,” reads a welcome sign to the state-sponsored fieldtrips of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) battlefields in Iran. Rahian-e Noor battlefield tours follow the model of Shia pilgrimage and commemorative rituals, while also tapping into nationalist discourses of the country as an ancient homeland. I ask whether these trips are a means of disseminating knowledge, and what forms of ignorance are assumed to prevail among the visitors that this “Divinity College” seeks to eliminate? Even more importantly, since the tours are state-sponsored, what ignorances are rendered possible, if not encouraged, at the cost of this selective knowledge dissemination? Drawing on fieldwork, I argue that the tours provide a space of encounter with what is presupposed as the visitors’ already acquired knowledge. On RN tours, both knowledge and ignorance are co-constitutive of the transformative power of pilgrimage, where ultimate knowledge is interpreted as putting the already-known-words into deeds.

Abstract Even though pilgrimages may often be directed toward what can conventionally be seen as “religious” sacred sites, religious and ritual forms of knowledge and ignorance may not necessarily be the only, or even the most prominent, forms in their workings. Focusing on Greek Cypriots’ return pilgrimages to the Christian-Orthodox monastery of Apostolos Andreas (Karpasia) under the conditions of Cyprus's ongoing division, in this article I explore the non “religious” forms of knowing and ignoring salient to pilgrimages to sacred religious sites, the conditions under which they become relevant, and the risks associated with them. Showing how pilgrimages to the monastery of Apostolos Andreas are situated within a larger framework of seeing “our places,” I will argue that remembering and knowing these places is the type of knowledge most commonly sought out by pilgrims, while also exploring what the stakes of not knowing/forgetting them may be felt to be. An exclusive focus on “religious” forms of knowledge and ignorance would obscure the ways in which pilgrimage is often embedded in everyday social and political concerns.

Two themes that surface in the articles in this collection are: Visual knowledge and the means of acquiring it—the ability of pilgrims to see and read signs while overlooking or avoiding other sources of knowledge that are visible or readily available; and the issue of authority: who propagates and gains from the teaching, images, and practices of pilgrimage? The articles demonstrate that distance from pilgrimage sites and ignorance of local knowledge is important in intensifying pilgrims’ experience and maintaining the power of traditional authorities. While some shrines readily adopt new technologies to diffuse their messages, activities and images, pilgrimages continue to rely on embodiment and sociality to solidify communities and commitments. The variety of engagements of pilgrimages with changing media and emerging historical realities testifies to the viability of the forms and practices of pilgrimage in transmitting other kinds of knowledge.

This special issue on “Knowledge, Ignorance, and Pilgrimage” highlights processes of production of knowledge and ignorance that unfold within as well as beyond pilgrimage sites. We illustrate the labor, politics, and power relations involved in the construction of sacred centers, but also the ways in which the field of study must be extended to other places where pilgrims learn to practice their religion, and live their everyday lives.

Information phenomena and behaviors underlie every aspect of contemporary life, including spiritual/religious experiences. Pilgrimage as an information context provides insights into the nature of information and knowledge in the lives of individuals undergoing such transformational experiences. Findings based on interviews with twelve Hajj pilgrims suggest that their information practices are varied and transcend both individual (cognitive, affective) and social processes (through shared imaginaries and a wide network of people and resources). As pilgrims prepare for and complete the rituals, then return home, they make use of a range of coping strategies from triangulation and validation to information avoidance. Examining the information strategies of Hajj pilgrims provide us with insights into their processes of negotiating meaning in shifting and unknown contexts.

I first encountered Ai Weiwei’s Law of the Journey as an amalgam of Instagram tiles (see photos on following page). The imposing sixty-meter-long rubber lifeboat—filled with faceless rubber bodies—was reduced to a scrollable algorithm. Posted across multiple time zones and geotagged in places like the Prague National Gallery to the most recent incarnation on Cockatoo Island (a decommissioned shipyard on Sydney harbor), Law of the Journey enjoyed much better travel rights and Visa entitlements than the actual refugees it depicted. While beyond the control of the artist or exhibiting venues, the mobility of images of Law of the Journey nonetheless made me think about the representations of refugees and border violence within the global art circuit.

Richard Lynch Garner’s is a curious case in the history of the fragility of fame. Born in 1848, the explorer, zoologist, specimen hunter, and pioneer in linguistics, animal ethics, and primatology inspired at least one fictional character: the mysterious, offstage Dr. Johausen, the ape fancier who disappears from his jungle hide in Jules Verne’s missing-link fantasy Le Village aérien (Radick 2007: 124). If, as I presume for reasons that will become clear, Garner may also have contributed to the making of Hugh Lofting’s imperishable hero, Dr. Dolittle, it is perhaps surprising that no literary researcher, as far as I know, has ever undertaken to study him. For a brief spell in the early 1890s, around the time of a then-renowned (and soon to be notorious) expedition that he undertook to Fernan Vaz in French Gabon, Garner was one of the most celebrated men in the world—such that satirists had only to allude to him in the certainty that readers would know whom they meant (Radick 2007: 84–85, 123, 136–137). Yet he died in poverty in 1920 (at about the time of the publication of the first Dolittle book).

This article considers the stated motivations for travel in the case of three examples of travel writing about Afghanistan. Jason Elliot’s An Unexpected Light documents his travel in 1984 during the war between the Afghan Mujaheddin and the Soviets; Jonny Bealby’s For a Pagan Song, first published in 1998, takes place during the civil war between Mujaheddin and the Taleban; Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between was written about travel between 2000 and 2002, during which time Operation Enduring Freedom was launched against the Taleban. The article deploys Genette’s concept of paratexts in order to show how the acknowledgments, blurbs, and other paratextual material, when read against the grain, undermine the relationship between the writer and their stated motivations and, thus, destabilize the self-representation of each writer in the course of the narrative. The outcome of these readings is a critique of the three texts, arguing that each one works to justify their travel through a combination of self-narration and paratextual material but that none of them address the implications of their travel for the Afghan people or that the purpose of the travel is to write the text.

Between 1870 and 1915 Peru experienced a rubber-boom, extending into the Putumayo River region in 1893. This huge region of Amazonian forests was controlled by the Peruvian Amazon Company (P. A. Co.). Although Peruvian, they had British company directors and a British-Barbadian workforce. Their methods of extraction generated unimaginable degrees of human and ecological violence. Roger Casement, a British diplomat, was sent on a harrowing mission to investigate these allegations made by travelers. His Amazon Journal takes precedence; however, Peruvians also responded to the situation, reporting to the Geographical Society of Lima. Included are two forgotten yet influential Peruvian explorers: the geographer Manuel Antonio Mesones Muro and the engineer Cárlos Oyague y Calderón. By highlighting some of the early debates that circulated between Europe and Latin America on the natural resources and people of the Amazon forests, the focus is to draw out textual examples of perceptions on race, environment, and early consumer responsibility. Supported by coloniality/modernity theories, it also asks whether this form of travel writing was functioning as a resistance literature to imperialism for the time. Thus, this study investigates alternative readings that might also inform twenty-first-century scholars and activists as they articulate environmentalist and even social and ecological positions.