Introducing Tourists

For thousands of years the combination of shrines, relics and pilgrimage have created a symbiotic relationship between religion and what could, in modern terminology, be termed tourism. People have travelled to partake in the supposed efficacy of sacred sites (places) and sacred sights (relics) as both a substitution and augmentation for what was available at home. The history of the world's religions is often presented as a history of travel to “the sacred,” “the transcendent,” “the holy” and such catchphrases of “the numinous” – itself another catchphrase. In a similar fashion, travel has often been justified as undertaken in the pursuit of such intangibles as wisdom or enlightenment.

Over the past two hundred years, following the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, these experiences have been coalesced by the Western seeker. Following the turn against religion in the West, a new form of religious travel has occurred. The experiences dismissed and marginalized in the modern West are viewed as still located and experienced in other religious traditions. The aim of the Western seeker is to relocate and participate in what has been lost. This relocation takes two forms. She can experience by her participation in a religious tradition that has relocated to the West. Alternatively, rather than participating in ‘the exotic’ in her home location her relocation is often a physical one from the West to what is viewed as the host culture. Both relocations occur as part of what could be termed the traditional reading of religion and tourism.