The Seductions of Pilgrimage ─ Sacred Journeys Afar and Astray in the Western Religious Tradition

The Seductions of Pilgrimage explores the simultaneously attractive and repellent, beguiling and alluring forms of seduction in pilgrimage. It focuses on the varied discursive, imaginative, and practical mechanisms of seduction that draw individual pilgrims to a pilgrimage site; the objects, places, and paradigms that pilgrims leave behind as they embark on their hyper-meaningful travel experience; and the often unforeseen elements that lead pilgrims off their desired course. Presenting the first comprehensive study of the role of seduction on individual pilgrims in the study of pilgrimage and tourism, it will appeal to scholars of anthropology, cultural geography, tourism, heritage, and religious studies.

Michael A. Di Giovine is an anthropologist with major research interests in comparative religion, pilgrimage, tourism and heritage policy. He is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at West Chester University, and an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Michael is the author of The Heritage-scape: UNESCO, World Heritage and Tourism, the co-editor of Tourism and the Power of Otherness: Seductions of Difference, also with David Picard, and Edible Identities: Food and Foodways as Cultural Heritage with Ronda Brulotte. He has published extensively on the practices and the ethics behind the heritage and tourism fields. David Picard is an anthropologist working at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, with research interests in tourism, hospitality, sustainable development and winemaking. He has carried out research in the Western Indian Ocean (mainly La RAcunion and Madagascar), Australia, Portugal and Argentina/Antarctica. His main publications include a single-authored book, Tourism, Magic and Modernity and five edited volumes, Festivals, Tourism and Social Change, The Framed World, Emotion in Motion, Couchsurfing Cosmopolitanisms, and Tourism and the Power of Otherness, also with Michael A. Di Giovine.