Case Study 6: Visiting Sacred Sites in India: Religious Tourism or Pilgrimage?

Travel provides an opportunity to fulfil one's desire to move away from the routines of life in order to seek changes, such as spiritual, religious or recreational. Such travel, depending on the motivation, the destination and the journey, generally finds expression within the spectrum of two polar types of movements, pilgrimage and tourism. While the focus in pilgrimage is on the association with some sacred and numinous supernatural power and the ability to go closer to it by means of religious practices, tourism is mainly about 'getting away' to experience a change, and is replete with hedonistic pursuits. There has been a substantial body of literature dominated by discussions on the similarities and differences between the two (MacCannell, 1973; Graburn, 1978; Turner and Turner, 1978; Cohen, 1992; Smith, 1992).