Lecture Four

‘A New Pilgrimage Ethic: On the Secular and the Serious’

[Wednesday 22 May, from 5:15 to 6:45 pm, Harris Lecture Theatre, Oriel College]

Victor and Edith Turner consciously adapted Weberian imagery when they argued that a Pilgrimage Ethic, with its emphasis on the benefits of holy travel, helped to create the communications networks that would enable the development of mercantile and industrial capitalism. Themes of both materiality and secularity continue to haunt Euro-American images of religion in general, and pilgrimage in particular, often resulting in a seemingly endless and restless search for authenticity. In this final lecture, I present an alternative view of pilgrimage as moral action and affective stance, which considers its articulations with theories of mobility and political economy alongside the now extensive anthropology of ethics. I ask whether pilgrimage—manifested at contexts like Walsingham and the Camino, but also away from conventional experiences of travel—might be viewed as a refractive, transposable form of ‘seriousness’ as well as political action that goes beyond oppositions between the earnest and the playful, the authentic and the inauthentic, the religious and the secular.

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