Introduction
This paper wishes to analyse pilgrimage in the non-religious context of alternative touristic trends, especially film location tourism. On the basis of motivations and values added to the “toured place” (Belhassen), the semantics of film tourism seems to be comparable to that of pilgrimages. The essential feature of all pilgrimages is the fictitious nature of the place visited, as it is saturated by and gains value from religious contents instead of physical/historical/architectural/etc. essences.
Tourism studies often regards authenticity as the very product marketed by tourism. There are industries to sustain and develop the feeling of authenticity and to serve the growing (and artificially generated) demand. The assumption to test in this paper is that the concept tourism literature labels authenticity (which is claimed to be self-evident and given as something concrete and possible to sell) is exactly the same phenomenon as fictitiousness in terms of cultural memory studies (Halbwachs 1941;
Assmann) and can be best examined with methods of social psychology. Authenticity in terms of fictitiousness may in turn be investigated in the framework of Moscovici’s social representation theory, which studies the processes and contents of representations in relation to social dynamics: things that are represented become part of common social knowledge consistent with the reality of the group (Wagner).
Moscovici’s approach has much in common with the theory of cultural memory, above all in its approach to culture by relating social sign systems to cognition in terms of psychology (László, “Narrative organizations”).
On the basis of this hypothesis my paper aims to investigate whether cultic attitudes performed in verbal and visual representations can be detected in the behaviour of the so-called film-tourists. The basis of this assumption is that the attitude we call cultic is related to religious behaviour. Religious behaviour in this study will be reduced to forms of pilgrimage, the object and goal of which is imaginary and fictitious, existing only in the pilgrim’s perception and in his experienced reality, constructed upon his preconception. The background of this study is provided by an on-going research project in social psychology among film tourists, based on interviews and questionnaires.
As I will argue, these places do not exist beyond the pilgrim’s—and the tourist’s—perception of reality, at least not in the way that they could be called
“anthropological spaces”, with a history and a tradition in the general sense. Augé claims that “non-places” are not “anthropological spaces” because they do not have a history by which they are determined (78). I wish to develop Augé’s concept arguing
that places filled with imaginary contents and essences may be considered fictitious and even non-existent even in the extreme case of a built, hence tangible, object or a building. The aim of this paper is to prove that non-places are created by a special religious perception and cultic mode of behaviour which recreates existing spaces by physical movements: the “toured place” may be conceived as a re-created topography, a re-mapped location. Since fictitiousness may be equated with the concept Halbwachs called “legendary” (La topographie legendaire), it seems reasonable to investigate pilgrim behaviour in terms of the theory of collective and cultural memory.
Technically speaking, tourism literature will be confronted with the literature of cultural studies and social psychology to touch upon the motives of the tourist-pilgrim. Tourism industry and marketing strategies usually take motivations for granted: the tourists are handled as target groups only from marketing points of view, with regard to business communication, slightly touching upon (sometimes vulgar) psychology. The trend lately called experience economy (Gilmore) is specifically concerned with selling the experience, rather than something material and tangible.
This seems to grasp the outlines of the phenomenon without explaining tourists’
behaviour, manifestations of attitude, motivations, manipulation, or channels of interest.
Who is the pilgrim and who is the tourist? When does the tourist turn into a pilgrim, and when does the pilgrim turn into a tourist? Are the two concepts permeable? What is the relic, and what is the souvenir? When does one turn into the other? In order to reveal motivations, interviews were taken with (mostly young) film tourists, focusing on questions of film watching habits, evaluation mechanisms, taste, motivations for visiting film locations, emotions, reactions, and elaboration of the experience. In order to see how they communicate their travel, verbal and visual manifestations on the social media were also closely examined.
Mitchell’s “pictorial turn” vs Stafford’s “ocular-centricism”
Visual representation on the internet is an important contemporary mode of how travels are communicated. In the interviews I made, young people repeatedly claim that pictures on the social media are more important to them than texts. The pictures often bear witness to a grandiose and unreal impression, showing a wished status and position in an imagined landscape Stafford calls “dreamscape”. It is a widespread phenomenon to post imaginary filmic places on the internet with the tourist being the protagonist of the scene, as if he stepped into the reality of the movie by simply physically being on the spot where the films were shot (Roesch). This is to be examined firstly from the point of view of art history, then, secondly, from the point of view of culture and social psychology, as visual modes of social representation and, thirdly, in the scope of the tourism-industry, in order to investigate how the sold object is visualized and in what ways marketing strategies and advertisements operate, and how all these manipulate people via artificially-created and self-generated mechanisms.
Art historian W. J. T. Mitchell has written about the “pictorial turn” in contemporary culture as “the widely shared notion that visual images have replaced words as dominant mode of expression in our time” (5). Barbara Stafford’s concept of
“ocular-centricism” seems to overlap with Mitchell’s term: tourists approach the landscape as a wished spectacle they dream of, a “dreamscape” framed as a photo theme to be posted on the internet. According to Schoefield, the postmodern touristic space is a “media-imagined experience of space”.
Mitchell assumes that the media is a kind of “middle ground” between material and social practice, and this paradox is immanent in the concept itself: “The medium is just in the middle, an in-between or go-between, a space pathway or messenger that connects two things—a sender to a receiver, a writer to a reader, an artist to a beholder.” (204–205) However, the medium is really not between the sender and the receiver, but it includes and is a part of both.
Moscovici’s social representation vs Halbwachs’s collective memory
I think that any kind of pilgrimage or tourism may be fruitfully investigated in the framework of Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory, especially because his influential case study focused on the legendary topography of the Biblical Holy Land, as realized in pilgrimages and the crusades. Assmann claims that Halbwachs’s original thinking can be seen especially in the fact that he, as a sociologist and a philosopher, dared to demonstrate his theory on such a marginal theme as the crusades (41). Assmann’s gesture of calling the crusades marginal is astonishing: the movement actually determined more than two hundred years in European history, with long-lasting effects not only in history, but also in religion and thinking: culture as such.
Georges Duby the prominent French medievalist claimed in his Le temps des cathedrals that it was the crusades that strengthened the impression that the Holy Land was reality, and that the Biblical places did in fact exist, thus underlining Jesus’s earthly life and human essence, i.e. the dual nature of Jesus. Duby maintained that all the important elements that characterize the High Middle Ages, from the cult of the Virgin Mary to scholastic thinking, come from the Jesus-centred new religion, to produce in the end what we call gothic art and architecture. Duby interpreted all these elements in a framework he labelled as “medieval humanism”. In Duby’s revolutionary concept, “medieval humanism” is related to the witness experience of pilgrims and crusaders. The theory claims that the mass experience (by troops of crusaders) of a “real” Holy Land changed the religious perspective of European Christianity, shifting its focus more to the human Jesus rather than the judging Christ of the Dies Irae. The Maiestas Domini image turned more and more into the concept of Imitatio Christi.
As Duby argues, crusaders and pilgrims experienced the reality of the Biblical places. They could see, touch and witness locations like Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, the Mount of Olives, the River Jordan and the place of Ascension. These experiences could prove that the Bible was not a fiction (an idea directly to be
confronted with Halbwachs), because the places mentioned in the scriptures were all real geographical locations, which seemed to prove the reality of the Biblical events associated with them. As a result, Duby claims, even the images of Christian iconography underwent a significant transformation, with the appearance of iconographic scenes such as the life scenes of Jesus, or the tree of Jesse, which emphasised the human origin of Jesus. This new humanistic perspective also brought together with it the increased importance of Jesus’s human mother, resulting in the cult of the Virgin Mary, and, according to Duby, even troubadour love literature is a result of the appearance of the image of the woman first through the image of the Madonna in the Middle Ages.
Georges Duby’s argumentation seems to be the direct opposite of that of Halbwachs (at least with regard to fictitiousness). However, I think the two theories operate on different levels and with careful handling it may be possible to construct a complex theory of the two. What is important for us now is to prove, with the help of another influential interpretative system, that Halbwachs’s theme was not only not marginal (Assmann 41), but truly ingenious. In other words, I think that Halbwachs did not only create an original new framing system for cultural interpretation, but also touched upon a theme that is specifically European and excitingly multi-layered. His findings in terms of the “legendary”—in our interpretation, the fictitious—are at least as important and exciting as his concept of collective memory. Moreover, Halbwachs’s structure is to be especially appreciated because of the combination of these two. Assmann underlined the collective memory element, thus making the original idea triumphant, and developed a special structure to explain the interrelations of collective and cultural memory (54). However, the notion of cultural memory had been used and taken for granted even before Assmann, for example in art history: Hans Belting in his book Bild und Kult (edited in 1990, that is, two years prior to Assmann) uses “cultural memory” as a term parallel to Aby Warburg’s mnemosyne concept and Jung’s archetypes.
Contemporary postcolonial theory views the crusades to the Holy Land as crucial to European culture and the development of Euro-centric attitudes, arguing that the movement could be conceived as the first manifestation of European expansiveness, possibly to be understood as colonization (Feldbauer, Liedl, Morissey). The Euro-centric narratives created by the crusades speak in terms of binary oppositions, the dichotomy of “us” and “them”. The originality of Halbwachs was not only to link social, cultural and psychological semantic layers of interpretation (László, “A szociális reprezentáció” 9–41), but also to touch upon the special discourse and curious narrative of the Holy Land for the first time.
Moscovici’s social representation theory is closely linked to Halbwach’s collective memory not only in the idea that both constructions are created in social communication, but also in both being sensitive to psychological processes. Halbwach emphasises the concrete nature of memory: “Any truth should take the form of a particular, concrete event, person, or space, concept and image should merge, so as to be preserved in collective memory” (Collective Memory 151). Similarly, Moscovici underlines that “concept and image are inseparable”: two sides of the same coin in
social representation (33). “Visual images . . . are parts of the socialization and enculturation processes” and as such are integrative and central components of social representations (Mamali 3.2).
As mentioned above, film tourists claim that the pictures they take on the spot and then post on the social media pages are much more important than the text (comment) they add to it. The representation of film-tourism on the internet is mainly through the visual mode: a re-interpretation not only of movies, but also of famous traditional sites appearing in fiction (like, for example, Rome in Angels and Demons) or of places of no particular character or history (like the rock Bella jumps from in Twilight). As we have seen, the visual nature of film-tourism representations may be approached from various angles: from Mitchell’s art historical concept of the
“pictorial turn” overlapping with Stafford’s “ocular centricism”, to Moscovici’s theory of social representation that has, in turn, several interrelations with Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory.
The tourist and the pilgrim
Elements of pilgrimage appearing outside the terrain of religion are well-known to all of us from school excursions, when birthplaces, death masks, pens and slippers of famous literary figures had to be visited and observed on an obligatory basis.
Conferences and publications prove the intensive study of literary cults from the 1980’s onwards, both in Hungary and abroad. To visit Shakespeare’s tomb or his birthplace are cultic forms of behaviour: Péter Dávdiházi in his major work quotes Hungarian writer Magda Szabó who swore to herself as a little girl to kneel down at Shakespeare’s tomb if she could ever get to the church („Isten másodszülöttje” 269).
The cultic approach to outstanding literary, cultural, or historical figures has a long tradition. Visiting “sacred places” is a typical phenomenon of cultic behaviour:
birth and burial sites of famous personalities have attracted visitors and induced tourism for a long time. Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-on-Avon, Freud’s house in Vienna, or Rembrandt’s house in Amsterdam are important touristic spectacles. All these objects are available in the museum shop in reduced size, in puzzle or pop-up form, and can be taken home. Mechanisms of consumption strengthen the need for spectacles (Best) and institutionalise how the tourist attractions should be gazed upon, photographed and framed (Urry, Consuming Places). The “toured objects” (i.e. the places) are then captured and reproduced as previously imaged in representative examples. This phenomenon is again in connection with Mitchell’s “pictorial turn”, a shift that has been denoted as a transition into a society of spectacle. The real has become hyper-real or a simulacrum, the world has been replaced by a copy of the world. Eco has labelled this notion as the “authentic fake” (Travels in Hyperreality), a concept also to be paralleled with Strafford’s theories.
However, what is the fictitious element in these buildings that exist in evident reality and in a tangible form? The possible answer is that it is not the architectural or historical value we look for in these buildings—after all, old houses like Shakespeare’s house can be seen all over England. The touristic value is the personal
aspect that may make the figure of the famous author more human and personal, and possibly more consumable by a process of domestication. The motivation is not to know or to understand better the oeuvre of the author, and the phenomenon has got nothing to do with the interpretation of works of art. A huge number of visitors and potential visitors most probably have never read and will never read anything by the given author. These houses, then, are not what they are: they are permeated by a content that makes them special. Shakespeare’s house is not one of the old English cottages, but the birthplace of the person considered the greatest genius of literature.
In this sense, real objects can be called fictitious as well. They do not exist in the manner they are conceived and consumed, which means they do not exist in their original sense: they are not there as they are (for example as an architectural object) in the cognition of the tourist-pilgrim.
In Dublin there are touristic agencies operating to show scenes of Ulysses and in Moscow a significant number of guided tours are built around Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita: symbolic literary spaces are being concretized in forms of guided city tours. Ferenc Takács writes: “Dublin is now properly infused with the spiritual power emanating from the person, the life and work of James Joyce as memorial plaques, statues, commemorative ceremonies abound”, and, as the curator of the James Joyce Museum in Sandycove claimed, the Bloomsday ritual is “an act, not merely of study, but of homage. It is, in fact, a sort of pilgrimage.” (Takács 249) Real buildings filtered through a literary work of art gain new meaning by being released and by becoming independent of the work of art. In other words, it is not the original building that is looked for, but the one that had gained a special meaning through and by the work of art. The buildings and objects are present in their reality, and still, the building in front of the tourist as the object of what Urry calls the
“tourist’s gaze” is a fictitious entity (The Tourist Gaze).
The behaviour operating when we approach the birthplace or the tomb of the author is governed by a religious and cultic mechanism, with its special rites and language (Dávidházi, “Cult and Criticism”). The experience is not void of spiritual content, i.e., of the religious mode in the psychological sense. We may become emotional, we may cry, so a definitely elevated, sometimes even cathartic experience may take place. This is how the tourist can turn into a pilgrim and in the same way the souvenir bought at the “shrine” may become a “relic”. The analysis of the extent to which every souvenir has got the potential to become a relic or whether souvenirs are produced with an innate relic-making intention exceeds the scope of this study.
However, we may assert that the tourist may transform into a pilgrim and the pilgrim
“dormant in many tourists” (Dávidházi, “Cult and Criticism” 39) may be resuscitated, even if only for a few seconds. The feeling of recognition or the experience of witnessing and testimony may take place several times during travel, bringing together with it an elevated and emotional state of mind. Equally, the pilgrim is often functionally a tourist. Besides his elevated state he needs accommodation, he has to eat, he spends money. This evident point has been fully exploited by pilgrim tourism, and as a result, pilgrimage is and has been not only a religious activity but an important trigger of economy from the earliest times.
Religious pilgrimage
However, the goal of pilgrimage is in itself problematic. The most traditional destinations of pilgrim routes are the tombs of saints. But the decaying body as a cultic object is difficult to interpret in terms of the spirituality of Christianity. The cult
However, the goal of pilgrimage is in itself problematic. The most traditional destinations of pilgrim routes are the tombs of saints. But the decaying body as a cultic object is difficult to interpret in terms of the spirituality of Christianity. The cult