Pilgrimage, Consumption and the Politics of Authenticity: An Abstract

Pilgrimages are a feature of all major world religions as well as spiritual movements and more secular realms (Digance 2003; Margry 2008). The sacred sites of pilgrimages are often important commercial centres featuring vibrant marketplaces, where spiritual goods and services are sold (Scott and Maclaran 2012). As such, pilgrimages and pilgrims’ consumption behaviours can provide rich sites of inquiry into symbolic, spiritual and material consumption. Muslim pilgrimages are notoriously closed to outsiders, and there has traditionally been little opportunity for research studies to gain access and insights. This ethnographic research contributes to further understanding consumption practices at the intersection of the sacred and the secular. A critical dimension of pilgrimage is arguably pilgrims’ experience of authenticity (Belhassen et al. 2008). Drawing on notions of authenticity within tourism literature (Wang 1999), pilgrimage has been approached here as a quest for authenticity. A notoriously problematic concept, authenticity reflects the extreme complexity of interacting phenomena, involving cultural contact, issues of identity, appropriation and commodification (Costa and Bamossi 2001). The purpose of this research is to examine the role of authenticity in the negotiation of identity. Specifically, studying the pilgrimage experience broadens our understanding of the role of religious consumption and perceived authenticity in the negotiation of a Shi’a Muslim identity. The context of this study is a pilgrimage to Syria and Iraq undertaken by a group of Belgian Muslim women in January 2012. This study reveals that secular and sacred consumption are entwined in the context of a religious pilgrimage and contributes to the dialogue on authenticity and in particular recent calls towards contextualising existential authenticity (Shepherd 2015). The pilgrimage proved important in terms of reinforcing pilgrims’ religious identity. The consumption of objects and the visit to various sites of historical and religious importance allowed them to get ‘closer to history’ and to claim an authentic Muslim identity. Ziyara pilgrims demonstrate their ‘authenticity’ as Shi’a Muslims by their participation in the pilgrimage, by projecting their identity via the consumption of particular objects and also through visual markers of their Shi’a identity. In this case, authenticity also assumes a religious and socio-political dimension since it is often at the heart of heated sectarian debates among Muslims (e.g. who is to claim legitimacy in the leadership of the Muslim world).