Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture

by Victor Turner, Edith Turner

First published in 1978, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture is a classic work examining the theological doctrines, popular notions, and corresponding symbols and images promoting and sustaining Christian pilgrimage. The book examines two major aspects of pilgrimage the significance of context, or the theological conditions giving rise to pilgrimage and the folk traditions enabling worshippers to absorb the meaning of the event; and the images and symbols embodying the experience of pilgrimage and transmitting its visions in varying ways.Retelling its own tales of mere mortals confronted by potent visions, such as the man Juan Diego who found redemption with the Lady of Guadalupe and the poor French shepherdess Bernadette whose encounter with the Lady at Lourdes inspired Christians across the globe, this text treats religious visions as both paradox and empowering phenomena, tying them explicitly to the times in which they occurred. Offering vivid vignettes of social history, it extends their importance beyond the realm of the religious to our own conceptions of reality.Extensively revised throughout, this edition includes a new introduction by the theologian Deborah Ross situating the book within the work of Victor and Edith Turner and among the movements of contemporary culture. She addresses the study's legacy within the discipline, especially its hermeneutical framework, which introduced a novel method of describing and interpreting pilgrimage. She also credits the Turners with cementing the link between mysticism, popular devotion, and Christian culture, as well as their recognition of the relationship between pilgrimage and the deep spiritual needs of human beings. She concludes with various critiques of the Turners' work and suggests future directions for research.

Genres: Religion, Nonfiction, Christianity, Anthropology, Spirituality

999 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 1978

About the author

Victor Witter Turner was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals, and rites of passage. His work, along with that of Clifford Geertz and others, is often referred to as symbolic and interpretive anthropology.

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

even though, as a Christian, i’d prefer a world in which the presence of the Turners’ overt Christian (specifically Catholic) normativity in this text didn’t feel weird to me, in which academic anthropologists who are also Christians could mash the “hey what’s good we’re Christians and we’re going to more or less indicate some of the reasons why” button, it still felt weird to me that the authors so closely aligned the Catholic church, the Holy Spirit, the Virgin Mary, and Catholic pilgrimage so closely with their key concept of “communitas.” [communitas is a concept that they had previously become well-known for developing and that basically indicates a very desirable sounding moment of “antistructure” where hierarchies are suspended or utterly flipped upside down, all people are equal, and a radical spirit of connectedness, if not something like brotherhood, prevails among the group, who in turn has a sense that this connectedness actually extends to all human beings… roughly].

point being is that it is a little surprising and sometimes off-putting to encounter the Turners’ bold and indirect approval for much of their subject matter. maybe that’s a problem with the study of religion today and not the Turners! So that in itself isn’t the reason for the 3 stars. Or maybe it is a little bit. It felt jarring for them to remark that women are liberated in devotion to Mary in a kind of typological way. Also possible my Protestant brain just doesn’t compute that one.

With respect to communitas—as in The Ritual Process (1969), I found the concept a smidge too idealistic (even given whatever caveats and limitations and attention to reversions appear around it), or at least I question its utility. It feels more like an inspiring model to think with than a model I’d actually use. I really liked Victor’s 1969 articulation of communitas as a moment in “the subjunctive mood” and would probably have enjoyed a book in which the Turners clearly and explicitly outlined a vision of communitas for modern Christians and then called their readers to live into that vision more than I enjoyed this book. They do have a lot of good things to say in regards to what aspects of Christianity can say to the modern world!

Also, the book was accessible, sure, but it’s argumentative structure was wobbly and winding at best. And since it covers so much ground, there’s more rote detail in this book about the steps one takes during important pilgrimages than actual granular detail about people’s experiences on those pilgrimages—even when discussing modern ones.

Another note I found annoying (condescending) was their imagining that pilgrimage is or should exist in complete contradistinction to “mere tourism.” I don’t think there isn’t a distinction at play here, but Hilary Kaell’s 2014 book on pilgrimage to the Holy Land really eviscerates this point by making it abundantly clear that pilgrimage was and is quite often not a matter of spotless sanctity free from economic exchange, pleasure, or mere trinkets. Hers is a better up-close look at what happens on pilgrimage, and it becomes clear that dismissing some travelers as “mere tourists” is a kind of imposition that carries with it a set of ideas about what pilgrimage should be and in fact often is not. (The problem isn’t having a take on what pilgrimage should be, but that the norms are all over the page without their being acknowledged in some fashion. In general, Edith’s preface from some time in the 1990s does flag the fact that the pair of authors are insiders, at least to a degree, with respect to the material in this book, but I would have wanted them to more consistently mark the various twists and turns in their normative relationship to the material of the book, especially since the reader brushes up against those turns).

My last comment is that I felt a lot of tension in another part of the Turners’ normative framework, which bleeds through into the above. Namely, their desire to dignify and take seriously everyday pilgrims, their experiences, wishes, and their agency over the pilgrimage process felt at odds to me with some of what reads as their alignment with Catholic orthodoxy and/or the approval of the hierarchy. To be sure they don’t seem to love the hierarchy of the Church all the time. (But again, disagreement registers only implicitly). The Turners seemed to signal that they didn’t want to impose absence on the metaphysical claims of everyday visionaries and pilgrims, and I believe them and dig that, especially given their communitas counter culture politics, but then they seemed to share, at least in my reading, the anxieties and embarrassments that figures connected to the Church hierarchy expressed over the supernatural claims of everyday Catholics at various points in the histories of a large number of pilgrimages. This gap between the Turners’ norms and the claims + experiences of everyday pilgrims + devotees is not uniform throughout the text, but it was at times pretty palpable and it dramatically shapes their narration.

Anyway, it’s a good intro to Catholic pilgrimage (even though the title implies it’s about Christian pilgrimage more broadly, it doesn’t much discuss non-Catholic pilgrimages). They also turn a couple dozen very lovely phrases. It’d likely make for great discussion and it did make for a formidable jumping off point for later pilgrimage studies. Mixed bag.

[Deb Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Victor Turner's work on liminality and appreciate how he opens up the liminality of pilgrimage. This book gave me a lot to consider.

[Michelle Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

the classic for thinking about pilgrimage! academic but accessible

[Alison FJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although this book (actually co-written by Victor and Edith Turner) now reads as dated, it's still hard to talk about pilgrimage without reference to the paradigm it established. As a result, it's more or less a must-read for anyone who wants to engage with scholarship on pilgrimage, even if only to realize some of what you can't really accept about the way people thought it was ok to write in the 1970s.