Academic literature on the topic 'Symbolic aspects of Pilgrims and pilgrimages'

The article „Pilgrimage to Aglona: Audio-Visual Codes” is dedicated to Aglona pilgrimage, which is considered a significant element of intangible cultural heritage of Latvia. The importance of this tradition has been acknowledged by its vitality: in spite of the historical complexities, the tradition of Aglona ritual pilgrimage has survived for more than a century and in due course has strengthened its value in practice and social memory of the community. At the same time it is not a rigid value based in the past; instead it exists on its own and develops according to the dialectical patterns of ritual.The aim of the article is to investigate the most significant audio-visual codes featured in Aglona pilgrimage, by revealing the most distinctive expressions of identity among pilgrims and by highlighting the diachronic development of audio-visually perceptible attributes relevant to the pilgrimage. The subject of the research is a specific part of the pilgrimage ritual – presentations of pilgrim groups on Assumption Day of the Virgin Mary into Heaven on August 14, which are staged during the holy mass dedicated to pilgrims and youth. Typologically presentations staged by pilgrim groups are being viewed as a closure phase (postliminal rite) of a transition ritual (liminal rite).The article examines 93 presentations prepared by pilgrim groups in 2014, 2015 and 2016. For data acquisition an on-site observation was applied, which falls under the definition of the sensory anthropological meaning (Howes 2003:54). Analysis of presentations staged by pilgrims was conducted by means of structurally semiotic approach that allows defining the specific symbolic language of the pilgrimage while displaying sensory perceptible ritual codes of the pilgrimage – visual and audial codes, i.e. the visual attributes of pilgrim groups and verbally musical representations with their characteristic performative and reproduction elements.The visual code of pilgrimage refers to various aspects of social identity. The affiliation to religious identity has been presented by such religious symbols as cross, flags belonging to various congregations, religious movements or separate Christian communities, tablets with images of pilgrimage patrons and visualisations of the intent of participation in pilgrimage; locally patriotic identity has been attested by the flag of the country, region, municipality or city. The research confirms that religious symbols (especially cross) and the related ceremonies are becoming more modest, whereas locally patriotic representations are expanding, thus marking the geographical circumference of the pilgrimage and confirming Aglona as a sanctuary of international significance. The clothing of participants reflects either their professional identity (National Armed Forces, clergymen, nuns) or affiliation to a specific interest group (European Guides).The audial codes are explored within the repertoires of pilgrim presentations, appearing in the form of performance and reproduction. Metonymically, the audial codes in pilgrim presentations contain the most essential functions related to the ritual in general and demonstrate such inherent features of the postmodern culture as interplay of the traditional and the innovative. The traditional values have been represented by sacred symbols and topics, but the innovative by artistic performance techniques: method of exact dating, typological generalizations directed towards community identity generation, stylization of texts drawn from other cultural areas (folklore, pop culture). The verbal codes of pilgrim groups in turn manifest ambivalence that is inherent to the pilgrimage ritual in general and marks not only the text, but also a the dialogue among generations and values. The audio-visual codes being organically embedded in the symbolic system of pilgrimage ritual language reveal multi-layered dialogue on cultural values, which is present within the ritual at subject, text and action level.

Pilgrimage in Islam is a religious act wherein Muslims leave their homes and spaces and travel to another place, the nature, geography, and dispositions of which they are unfamiliar. They carry their luggage and belongings and leave their own spaces to receive the blessings of the dead, commemorate past events and places, and venerate the elect. In Pilgrimage in Islam, Sophia Rose Arjana writes that “intimacy with Allah is achievable in certain spaces, which is an important story of Islamic pilgrimage”. The devotional life unfolds in a spatial idiom. The introductory part of the book reflects on how pilgrimage in Islam is far more complex than the annual pilgrimage (ḥajj), which is one of the basic rites and obligations of Islam beside the formal profession of faith (kalima); prayers (ṣalāt); fasting (ṣawm); and almsgiving (zakāt). More pilgrims throng to Karbala, Iraq, on the Arbaeen pilgrimage than to Mecca on the Hajj, for example, but the former has received far less academic attention. The author expands her analytic scope to consider sites like Konya, Samarkand, Fez, and Bosnia, where Muslims travel to visit countless holy sites (mazarāt), graves, tombs, complexes, mosques, shrines, mountaintops, springs, and gardens to receive the blessings (baraka) of saints buried there. She reflects on broader methodological and theoretical questions—how do we define religion?—through the diversity of Islamic traditions about pilgrimage. Arjana writes that in pilgrimage—something which creates spaces and dispositions—Muslim journeys cross sectarian boundaries, incorporate non-Muslim rituals, and involve numerous communities, languages, and traditions (the merging of Shia, Sunni, and Sufi categories) even to “engende[r] a syncretic tradition”. This approach stands against the simplistic scholarship on “pilgrimage in Islam”, which recourses back to the story of the Hajj. Instead, Arjana borrows a notion of ‘replacement hajjs’ from the German orientalist Annemarie Schimmel, to argue that ziyārat is neither a sectarian practice nor antithetical to Hajj. In the first chapter, Arjana presents “pilgrimage in Islam” as an open, demonstrative and communicative category. The extensive nature of the ‘pilgrimage’ genre is presented through documenting spaces and sites, geographies, and imaginations, and is visualized through architectural designs and structures related to ziyārat, like those named qubba, mazār (shrine), qabr (tomb), darih (cenotaph), mashhad (site of martyrdom), and maqām (place of a holy person). In the second chapter, the author continues the theme of visiting sacred pilgrimage sites like “nascent Jerusalem”, Mecca, and Medina. Jerusalem offers dozens of cases of the ‘veneration of the dead’ (historically and archaeologically) which, according to Arjana, characterizes much of Islamic pilgrimage. The third chapter explains rituals, beliefs, and miracles associated with the venerated bodies of the dead, including Karbala (commemorating the death of Hussein in 680 CE), ‘Alawi pilgrimage, and pilgrimage to Hadrat Khidr, which blur sectarian lines of affiliation. Such Islamic pilgrimage is marked by inclusiveness and cohabitation. The fourth chapter engages dreams, miracles, magical occurrences, folk stories, and experiences of clairvoyance (firāsat) and the blessings attached to a particular saint or walī (“friend of God”). This makes the theme of pilgrimage “fluid, dynamic and multi-dimensional,” as shown in Javanese (Indonesian) pilgrimage where tradition is associated with Islam but involves Hindu, Buddhist and animistic elements. This chapter cites numerous sites that offer fluid spaces for the expression of different identities, the practice of distinct rituals, and cohabitation of different religious communities through the idea of “shared pilgrimage”. The fifth and final chapter shows how technologies and economies inflect pilgrimage. Arjana discusses the commodification of “religious personalities, traditions and places” and the mass production of transnational pilgrimage souvenirs, in order to focus on the changing nature of Islamic pilgrimage in the modern world through “capitalism, mobility and tech nology”. The massive changes wrought by technological developments are evident even from the profusion of representations of Hajj, as through pilgrims’ photos, blogs, and other efforts at self documentation. The symbolic representation of the dead through souvenirs makes the theme of pilgrimage more complex. Interestingly, she then notes how “virtual pilgrimage” or “cyber-pilgrimage” forms a part of Islamic pilgrimage in our times, amplifying how pilgrimage itself is a wide range of “active, ongoing, dynamic rituals, traditions and performances that involve material religions and imaginative formations and spaces.” Analyzing religious texts alone will not yield an adequate picture of pilgrimage in Islam, Arjana concludes. Rather one must consider texts alongside beliefs, rituals, bodies, objects, relationships, maps, personalities, and emotions. The book takes no normative position on whether the ziyāratvisitation is in fact a bid‘ah (heretical innovation), as certain Muslim orthodoxies have argued. The author invokes Shahab Ahmad’s account of how aspects of Muslim culture and history are seen as lying outside Islam, even though “not everything Muslims do is Islam, but every Muslim expression of meaning must be constituting in Islam in some way”. The book is a solid contribution to the field of pilgrimage and Islamic studies, and the author’s own travels and visits to the pilgrimage sites make it a practicalcontribution to religious studies. Nazar Ul Islam Wani, PhDAssistant Professor, Department of Higher EducationJammu and Kashmir, India

Pilgrimage in Islam is a religious act wherein Muslims leave their homes and spaces and travel to another place, the nature, geography, and dispositions of which they are unfamiliar. They carry their luggage and belongings and leave their own spaces to receive the blessings of the dead, commemorate past events and places, and venerate the elect. In Pilgrimage in Islam, Sophia Rose Arjana writes that “intimacy with Allah is achievable in certain spaces, which is an important story of Islamic pilgrimage”. The devotional life unfolds in a spatial idiom. The introductory part of the book reflects on how pilgrimage in Islam is far more complex than the annual pilgrimage (ḥajj), which is one of the basic rites and obligations of Islam beside the formal profession of faith (kalima); prayers (ṣalāt); fasting (ṣawm); and almsgiving (zakāt). More pilgrims throng to Karbala, Iraq, on the Arbaeen pilgrimage than to Mecca on the Hajj, for example, but the former has received far less academic attention. The author expands her analytic scope to consider sites like Konya, Samarkand, Fez, and Bosnia, where Muslims travel to visit countless holy sites (mazarāt), graves, tombs, complexes, mosques, shrines, mountaintops, springs, and gardens to receive the blessings (baraka) of saints buried there. She reflects on broader methodological and theoretical questions—how do we define religion?—through the diversity of Islamic traditions about pilgrimage. Arjana writes that in pilgrimage—something which creates spaces and dispositions—Muslim journeys cross sectarian boundaries, incorporate non-Muslim rituals, and involve numerous communities, languages, and traditions (the merging of Shia, Sunni, and Sufi categories) even to “engende[r] a syncretic tradition”. This approach stands against the simplistic scholarship on “pilgrimage in Islam”, which recourses back to the story of the Hajj. Instead, Arjana borrows a notion of ‘replacement hajjs’ from the German orientalist Annemarie Schimmel, to argue that ziyārat is neither a sectarian practice nor antithetical to Hajj. In the first chapter, Arjana presents “pilgrimage in Islam” as an open, demonstrative and communicative category. The extensive nature of the ‘pilgrimage’ genre is presented through documenting spaces and sites, geographies, and imaginations, and is visualized through architectural designs and structures related to ziyārat, like those named qubba, mazār (shrine), qabr (tomb), darih (cenotaph), mashhad (site of martyrdom), and maqām (place of a holy person). In the second chapter, the author continues the theme of visiting sacred pilgrimage sites like “nascent Jerusalem”, Mecca, and Medina. Jerusalem offers dozens of cases of the ‘veneration of the dead’ (historically and archaeologically) which, according to Arjana, characterizes much of Islamic pilgrimage. The third chapter explains rituals, beliefs, and miracles associated with the venerated bodies of the dead, including Karbala (commemorating the death of Hussein in 680 CE), ‘Alawi pilgrimage, and pilgrimage to Hadrat Khidr, which blur sectarian lines of affiliation. Such Islamic pilgrimage is marked by inclusiveness and cohabitation. The fourth chapter engages dreams, miracles, magical occurrences, folk stories, and experiences of clairvoyance (firāsat) and the blessings attached to a particular saint or walī (“friend of God”). This makes the theme of pilgrimage “fluid, dynamic and multi-dimensional,” as shown in Javanese (Indonesian) pilgrimage where tradition is associated with Islam but involves Hindu, Buddhist and animistic elements. This chapter cites numerous sites that offer fluid spaces for the expression of different identities, the practice of distinct rituals, and cohabitation of different religious communities through the idea of “shared pilgrimage”. The fifth and final chapter shows how technologies and economies inflect pilgrimage. Arjana discusses the commodification of “religious personalities, traditions and places” and the mass production of transnational pilgrimage souvenirs, in order to focus on the changing nature of Islamic pilgrimage in the modern world through “capitalism, mobility and tech nology”. The massive changes wrought by technological developments are evident even from the profusion of representations of Hajj, as through pilgrims’ photos, blogs, and other efforts at self documentation. The symbolic representation of the dead through souvenirs makes the theme of pilgrimage more complex. Interestingly, she then notes how “virtual pilgrimage” or “cyber-pilgrimage” forms a part of Islamic pilgrimage in our times, amplifying how pilgrimage itself is a wide range of “active, ongoing, dynamic rituals, traditions and performances that involve material religions and imaginative formations and spaces.” Analyzing religious texts alone will not yield an adequate picture of pilgrimage in Islam, Arjana concludes. Rather one must consider texts alongside beliefs, rituals, bodies, objects, relationships, maps, personalities, and emotions. The book takes no normative position on whether the ziyāratvisitation is in fact a bid‘ah (heretical innovation), as certain Muslim orthodoxies have argued. The author invokes Shahab Ahmad’s account of how aspects of Muslim culture and history are seen as lying outside Islam, even though “not everything Muslims do is Islam, but every Muslim expression of meaning must be constituting in Islam in some way”. The book is a solid contribution to the field of pilgrimage and Islamic studies, and the author’s own travels and visits to the pilgrimage sites make it a practicalcontribution to religious studies. Nazar Ul Islam Wani, PhDAssistant Professor, Department of Higher EducationJammu and Kashmir, India

Sites of pilgrimage and heritage tourism are often sites of social inequality and volatility that are impaired by hostilities between historical, ethnic, and competing religious discourses of morality, personhood, and culture, as well as between imaginaries of nationalism and citizenship. Often these pilgrim sites are much older in national and global history than the actual sovereign nation-state in which they are located. Pertinent issues to do with finance—such as regimes of taxation, livelihoods, and the wealth of regional and national economies—underscore these sites of worship. The articles in this special issue engage with prolix travel arrangement, accommodation, and other aspects of heritage tourism in order to understand how intangible aspects of such tourism proceed. But they also relate back to when and how these modern infrastructures transformed the pilgrimage and explore what the emerging discourses and practices were that gave newer meanings to neoliberal pilgrimages. The different case studies presented in this issue analyze the impact of these journeys on the pilgrims’ own subjectivities—especially with regard to the holy sites being situated in their imaginations of historical continuity and discontinuity and with regard to their transformative experiences of worship—using both modern and traditional infrastructures.

This essay focuses on the genre of pilgrimage photography as it developed over the course of the twentieth century in the holy city of Mashhad, Iran. Photographs made during pilgrimages to the shrine of Imam Riza count among the most popular vernacular genres of Iranian photography. Pilgrimage photographs should be understood as sacred photo-objects, at once signifiers and carriers of piety. Once framed and taken home by pilgrims, they not only capture and memorialize the sacred encounter, but also carry the aura of the divine into the mundane space and time of the everyday. I focus on the particular visual language of these sacred photographic objects; a visual language achieved through costumes, gestures and body language, through painted backgrounds with symbolic themes. Second, I consider the kind of cultural work and pious affect they elicit as image-objects when placed in pilgrim’s homes. I end by briefly considering the recent changes and continuities brought about by digital imaging technologies.

Background: Annually, approximately 10 million pilgrims travel to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) for Umrah from more than 180 countries. This event presents major challenges for the Kingdom’s public health sector, which strives to decrease the burden of infectious diseases and to adequately control their spread both in KSA and pilgrims home nations. The aims of the study were to assess preventative measures practice, including vaccination history and health education, among Umrah pilgrims in Saudi Arabia. Methods: A cross sectional survey was administered to pilgrims from February to April 2019 at the departure lounge at King Abdul Aziz International airport, Jeddah city. The questionnaire comprised questions on sociodemographic information (age, gender, marital status, level of education, history of vaccinations and chronic illnesses), whether the pilgrim had received any health education and orientation prior to coming to Saudi Arabia or on their arrival, and their experiences with preventative practices. Results: Pilgrims (n = 1012) of 41 nationalities completed the survey. Chronic diseases were reported among pilgrims (n = 387, 38.2%) with cardiovascular diseases being the most reported morbidity (n = 164, 42.3%). The majority of pilgrims had been immunized prior to travel to Saudi Arabia (n = 770, 76%). The most commonly reported immunizations were influenza (n = 514, 51%), meningitis (n = 418, 41%), and Hepatitis B virus vaccinations (n = 310, 31%). However, 242 (24%) had not received any vaccinations prior to travel, including meningitis vaccine and poliomyelitis vaccine, which are mandatory by Saudi Arabian health authorities for pilgrims coming from polio active countries. Nearly a third of pilgrims (n = 305; 30.1%) never wore a face mask in crowded areas during Umrah in 2019. In contrast, similar numbers said they always wore a face mask (n = 351, 34.6%) in crowded areas, while 63.2% reported lack of availability of face masks during Umrah. The majority of participants had received some form of health education on preventative measures, including hygiene aspects (n = 799, 78.9%), mostly in their home countries (n = 450, 44.4%). A positive association was found between receiving health education and practicing of preventative measures, such as wearing face masks in crowded areas (p = 0.04), and other health practice scores (p = 0.02). Conclusion: Although the experiences of the preventative measures among pilgrims in terms of health education, vaccinations, and hygienic practices were at times positive, this study identified several issues. These included the following preventative measures: immunizations, particularly meningitis and poliomyelitis vaccine, and using face masks in crowded areas. The recent COVID-19 pandemic highlights the need for further studies that focus on development of accessible health education in a form that engages pilgrims to promote comprehensive preventative measures during Umrah and Hajj and other religious pilgrimages.

This article considers the architecture of English medieval churches and how it was affected by its function as a setting for the cult of saints. It looks at the impression which the patrons of medieval buildings were hoping to make on the minds and spirits of those who visited them. It is not concerned so much with the functional planning issues surrounding access, security, and the management of pilgrims as it is with the symbolic content of those larger spaces within which the shrine and its immediate surroundings are contained and visually celebrated. Plans, forms, and decoration carrying specific associations with prestigious buildings in Rome are considered in relation to some early medieval buildings. The new work at Canterbury, following the fire of 1174, created a new and influential architectural language adopted by other cathedrals in which aspects of the saint could be signaled by architectural detail and decoration. The article ends with the thirteenth-century Chapel of the Nine Altars at Durham as a setting for the shrine of Cuthbert.

This essay combines life writing with meditations on the significance of walking as integral to the ritual practice of pilgrimage, where the individual improves her soul or health through the act of walking to a shrine containing healing relics of a saint. Braiding together insights from medieval literature, contemporary ecocriticism, and memory studies, I reflect on my own pilgrimage practice as it impacts the land itself. Canterbury, England serves as the central shrine for four pilgrimages over decades: 1966, 1994, 1997, and 2003.The act of memory was not invented in the Anthropocene. Rather, the nonhuman world has taught humans how to remember. From ice-core samples retaining the history of Europe’s weather to rocks embedded with fossilized extinct species, nonhuman actors literally petrifying or freezing the past—from geologic sites to frozen water—become exposed through the process of anthropocentric discovery and human interference. The very act of human uncovery and analysis threatens to eliminate the nonhuman actor which has hospitably shared its own experience. How can humans script nonhuman memory?As for the history of memory studies itself, a new phase is arguably beginning, shifting from “the transnational, transcultural, or global to the planetary; from recorded to deep history; from the human to the nonhuman” (Craps et al. 3). Memory studies for the Anthropocene can “focus on the terrestrialized significance of (the historicized) forms of remembrance but also on the positioning of who is remembering and, ultimately, which ‘Anthropocene’ is remembered” (Craps et al. 5). In this era of the “self-conscious Anthropocene” (Craps et al. 6), narrative itself can focus on “the place of nonhuman beings in human stories of origins, identity, and futures point to a possible opening for the methods of memory studies” (Craps et al. 8). The nonhuman on the paths of this essay range from the dirt on the path to the rock used to build the sacred shrine, the ultimate goal. How they intersect with human actors reveals how the “human subject is no longer the one forming the world, but does indeed constitute itself through its relation to and dependence on the object world” (Marcussen 14, qtd. in Rodriguez 378). Incorporating “nonhuman species as objects, if not subjects, of memory [...] memory critics could begin by extending their objects to include the memory of nonhuman species,” linking both humans and nonhumans in “an expanded multispecies frame of remembrance” (Craps et al. 9). My narrative—from diaries recording sacred journey to a novel structured by pilgrimage—propels motion, but also secures in memory events from the past, including memories of those nonhuman beings I interact with.Childhood PilgrimageThe little girl with brown curls sat crying softly, whimpering, by the side of the road in lush grass. The mother with her soft brown bangs and an underflip to her hair told the story of a little girl, sitting by the side of the road in lush grass.The story book girl had forgotten her Black Watch plaid raincoat at the picnic spot where she had lunched with her parents and two older brothers. Ponchos spread out, the family had eaten their fresh yeasty rolls, hard cheese, apples, and macaroons. The tin clink of the canteen hit their teeth as they gulped metallic water, still icy cold from the taps of the ancient inn that morning. The father cut slices of Edam with his Swiss army knife, parsing them out to each child to make his or her own little sandwich. The father then lay back for his daily nap, while the boys played chess. The portable wooden chess set had inlaid squares, each piece no taller than a fingernail paring. The girl read a Junior Puffin book, while the mother silently perused Agatha Christie. The boy who lost at chess had to play his younger sister, a fitting punishment for the less able player. She cheerfully played with either brother. Once the father awakened, they packed up their gear into their rucksacks, and continued the pilgrimage to Canterbury.Only the little Black Watch plaid raincoat was left behind.The real mother told the real girl that the story book family continued to walk, forgetting the raincoat until it began to rain. The men pulled on their ponchos and the mother her raincoat, when the little girl discovered her raincoat missing. The story book men walked two miles back while the story book mother and girl sat under the dripping canopy of leaves provided by a welcoming tree.And there, the real mother continued, the storybook girl cried and whimpered, until a magic taxi cab in which the father and boys sat suddenly appeared out of the mist to drive the little girl and her mother to their hotel.The real girl’s eyes shone. “Did that actually happen?” she asked, perking up in expectation.“Oh, yes,” said the real mother, kissing her on the brow. The girl’s tears dried. Only the plops of rain made her face moist. The little girl, now filled with hope, cuddled with her mother as they huddled together.Without warning, out of the mist, drove up a real magic taxi cab in which the real men sat. For magic taxi cabs really exist, even in the tangible world—especially in England. At the very least, in the England of little Susie’s imagination.Narrative and PilgrimageMy mother’s tale suggests how this story echoes in yet another pilgrimage story, maintaining a long tradition of pilgrimage stories embedded within frame tales as far back as the Middle Ages.The Christian pilgrim’s walk parallels Christ’s own pilgrimage to Emmaus. The blisters we suffer echo faintly the lash Christ endured. The social relations of the pilgrim are “diachronic” (Alworth 98), linking figures (Christ) from the past to the now (us, or, during the Middle Ages, William Langland’s Piers Plowman or Chaucer’s band who set out from Southwark). We embody the frame of the vera icon, the true image, thus “conjur[ing] a site of simultaneity or a plane of immanence where the actors of the past [...] meet those of the future” (Alworth 99). Our quotidian walk frames the true essence or meaning of our ambulatory travail.In 1966, my parents took my two older brothers and me on the Pilgrims’ Way—not the route from London to Canterbury that Chaucer’s pilgrims would have taken starting south of London in Southwark, rather the ancient trek from Winchester to Canterbury, famously chronicled in The Old Road by Hilaire Belloc. The route follows along the south side of the Downs, where the muddy path was dried by what sun there was. My parents first undertook the walk in the early 1950s. Slides from that pilgrimage depict my mother, voluptuous in her cashmere twinset and tweed skirt, as my father crosses a stile. My parents, inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, decided to walk along the traditional Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury. Story intersects with material traversal over earth on dirt-laden paths.By the time we children came along, the memories of that earlier pilgrimage resonated with my parents, inspiring them to take us on the same journey. We all carried our own rucksacks and walked five or six miles a day. Concerning our pilgrimage when I was seven, my mother wrote in her diary:As good pilgrims should, we’ve been telling tales along the way. Yesterday Jimmy told the whole (detailed) story of That Darn Cat, a Disney movie. Today I told about Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, which first inspired me to think of walking trips and everyone noted the resemblance between Stevenson’s lovable, but balky, donkey and our sweet Sue. (We hadn’t planned to tell tales, but they just happened along the way.)I don’t know how sweet I was; perhaps I was “balky” because the road was so hard. Landscape certainly shaped my experience.As I wrote about the pilgrimage in my diary then, “We went to another Hotel and walked. We went and had lunch at the Boggly [booglie] place. We went to a nother hotel called The Swan with fether Quits [quilts]. We went to the Queens head. We went to the Gest house. We went to aother Hotle called Srping wells and my tooth came out. We saw some taekeys [turkeys].” The repetition suggests how pilgrimage combines various aspects of life, from the emotional to the physical, the quotidian (walking and especially resting—in hotels with quilts) with the extraordinary (newly sprung tooth or the appearance of turkeys). “[W]ayfaring abilities depend on an emotional connection to the environment” (Easterlin 261), whether that environment is modified by humans or even manmade, inhabited by human or nonhuman actors. How can one model an “ecological relationship between humans and nonhumans” in narrative (Rodriguez 368)? Rodriguez proposes a “model of reading as encounter [...] encountering fictional story worlds as potential models” (Rodriguez 368), just as my mother did with the Magic Taxi Cab story.Taxis proliferate in my childhood pilgrimage. My mother writes in 1966 in her diary of journeying along the Pilgrims’ Way to St. Martha’s on the Hill. “Susie was moaning and groaning under her pack and at one desperate uphill moment gasped out, ‘Let’s take a taxi!’ – our highborn lady as we call her. But we finally made it.” “Martha’s”, as I later learned, is a corruption of “Martyrs”, a natural linguistic decay that developed over the medieval period. Just as the vernacular textures pilgrimage poems in the fourteeth century, the common tongue in all its glorious variety seeps into even the quotidian modern pilgrim’s journey.Part of the delight of pilgrimage lies in the characters one meets and the languages they speak. In 1994, the only time my husband and I cheated on a strictly ambulatory sacred journey occurred when we opted to ride a bus for ten miles where walking would have been dangerous. When I ask the bus driver if a stop were ours, he replied, “I'll give you a shout, love.” As though in a P. G. Wodehouse novel, when our stop finally came, he cried out, “Cheerio, love” to me and “Cheerio, mate” to Jim.Language changes. Which is a good thing. If it didn’t, it would be dead, like those martyrs of old. Like Latin itself. Disentangling pilgrimage from language proves impossible. The healthy ecopoetics of languages meshes with the sustainable vibrancy of the land we traverse.“Nettles of remorse…”: Derek Walcott, The Bounty Once my father had to carry me past a particularly tough patch of nettles. As my mother tells it, we “went through orchards and along narrow woodland path with face-high nettles. Susie put a scarf over her face and I wore a poncho though it was sunny and we survived almost unscathed.” Certain moments get preserved by the camera. At age seven in a field outside of Wye, I am captured in my father’s slides surrounded by grain. At age thirty-five, I am captured in film by my husband in the same spot, in the identical pose, though now quite a bit taller than the grain. Three years later, as a mother, I in turn snap him with a backpack containing baby Sarah, grumpily gazing off over the fields.When I was seven, we took off from Detling. My mother writes, “set off along old Pilgrims’ Way. Road is paved now, but much the same as fifteen years ago. Saw sheep, lambs, and enjoyed lovely scenery. Sudden shower sent us all to a lunch spot under trees near Thurnham Court, where we huddled under ponchos and ate happily, watching the weather move across the valley. When the sun came to us, we continued on our way which was lovely, past sheep, etc., but all on hard paved road, alas. Susie was a good little walker, but moaned from time to time.”I seem to whimper and groan a lot on pilgrimage. One thing is clear: the physical aspects of walking for days affected my phenomenological response to our pilgrimage which we’d undertaken both as historical ritual, touristic nature hike, and what Wendell Berry calls a “secular pilgrimage” (402), where the walker seeks “the world of the Creation” (403) in a “return to the wilderness in order to be restored” (416). The materiality of my experience was key to how I perceived this journey as a spiritual, somatic, and emotional event. The link between pilgrimage and memory, between pilgrimage poetics and memorial methods, occupies my thoughts on pilgrimage. As Nancy Easterlin’s work on “cognitive ecocriticism” (“Cognitive” 257) contends, environmental knowledge is intimately tied in with memory (“Cognitive” 260). She writes: “The advantage of extensive environmental knowledge most surely precipitates the evolution of memory, necessary to sustain vast knowledge” (“Cognitive” 260). Even today I can recall snatches of moments from that trip when I was a child, including the telling of tales.Landscape not only changes the writer, but writing transforms the landscape and our interaction with it. As Valerie Allen suggests, “If the subject acts upon the environment, so does the environment upon the subject” (“When Things Break” 82). Indeed, we can understand the “road as a strategic point of interaction between human and environment” (Allen and Evans 26; see also Oram)—even, or especially, when that interaction causes pain and inflames blisters. My relationship with moleskin on my blasted and blistered toes made me intimately conscious of my body with every step taken on the pilgrimage route.As an adult, my boots on the way from Winchester to Canterbury pinched and squeezed, packed dirt acting upon them and, in turn, my feet. After taking the train home and upon arrival in London, we walked through Bloomsbury to our flat on Russell Square, passing by what I saw as a new, less religious, but no less beckoning shrine: The London Foot Hospital at Fitzroy Square.Now, sadly, it is closed. Where do pilgrims go for sole—and soul—care?Slow Walking as WayfindingAll pilgrimages come to an end, just as, in 1966, my mother writes of our our arrival at last in Canterbury:On into Canterbury past nice grassy cricket field, where we sat and ate chocolate bars while we watched white-flannelled cricketers at play. Past town gates to our Queen’s Head Inn, where we have the smallest, slantingest room in the world. Everything is askew and we’re planning to use our extra pillows to brace our feet so we won’t slide out of bed. Children have nice big room with 3 beds and are busy playing store with pounds and shillings [that’s very hard mathematics!]. After dinner, walked over to cathedral, where evensong was just ending. Walked back to hotel and into bed where we are now.Up to early breakfast, dashed to cathedral and looked up, up, up. After our sins were forgiven, we picked up our rucksacks and headed into London by train.This experience in 1966 varies slightly from the one in 1994. Jim and I walk through a long walkway of tall, slim trees arching over us, a green, lush and silent cloister, finally gaining our first view of Canterbury with me in a similar photo to one taken almost thirty years before. We make our way into the city through the West Gate, first passing by St. Dunstan’s Church where Henry II had put on penitential garb and later Sir Thomas More’s head was buried. Canterbury is like Coney Island in the Middle Ages and still is: men with dreadlocks and slinky didjeridoos, fire tossers, mobs of people, tourists. We go to Mercery Lane as all good pilgrims should and under the gate festooned with the green statue of Christ, arriving just in time for evensong.Imagining a medieval woman arriving here and listening to the service, I pray to God my gratefulness for us having arrived safely. I can understand the fifteenth-century pilgrim, Margery Kempe, screaming emotionally—maybe her feet hurt like mine. I’m on the verge of tears during the ceremony: so glad to be here safe, finally got here, my favorite service, my beloved husband. After the service, we pass on through the Quire to the spot where St. Thomas’s relic sanctuary was. People stare at a lit candle commemorating it. Tears well up in my eyes.I suppose some things have changed since the Middle Ages. One Friday in Canterbury with my children in 2003 has some parallels with earlier iterations. Seven-year-old Sarah and I go to evensong at the Cathedral. I tell her she has to be absolutely quiet or the Archbishop will chop off her head.She still has her head.Though the road has been paved, the view has remained virtually unaltered. Some aspects seem eternal—sheep, lambs, and stiles dotting the landscape. The grinding down of the pilgrimage path, reflecting the “slowness of flat ontology” (Yates 207), occurs over vast expanses of time. Similarly, Easterlin reflects on human and more than human vitalism: “Although an understanding of humans as wayfinders suggests a complex and dynamic interest on the part of humans in the environment, the surround itself is complex and dynamic and is frequently in a state of change as the individual or group moves through it” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 261). An image of my mother in the 1970s by a shady tree along the Pilgrims’ Way in England shows that the path is lower by 6 inches than the neighboring verge (Bright 4). We don’t see dirt evolving, because its changes occur so slowly. Only big time allows us to see transformative change.Memorial PilgrimageOddly, the erasure of self through duplication with a precursor occurred for me while reading W.G. Sebald’s pilgrimage novel, The Rings of Saturn. I had experienced my own pilgrimage to many of these same locations he immortalizes. I, too, had gone to Somerleyton Hall with my elderly mother, husband, and two children. My memories, sacred shrines pooling in familial history, are infused with synchronic reflection, medieval to contemporary—my parents’ periodic sojourns in Suffolk for years, leading me to love the very landscape Sebald treks across; sadness at my parents’ decline; hope in my children’s coming to add on to their memory palimpsest a layer devoted to this land, to this history, to this family.Then, the oddest coincidence from my reading pilgrimage. After visiting Dunwich Heath, Sebald comes to his friend, Michael, whose wife Anne relays a story about a local man hired as a pallbearer by the local undertaker in Westleton. This man, whose memory was famously bad, nevertheless reveled in the few lines allotted him in an outdoor performance of King Lear. After her relating this story, Sebald asks for a taxi (Sebald 188-9).This might all seem unremarkable to the average reader. Yet, “human wayfinders are richly aware of and responsive to environment, meaning both physical places and living beings, often at a level below consciousness” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 265). For me, with a connection to this area, I startled with recollection emerging from my subconscience. The pallbearer’s name in Sebald’s story was Mr Squirrel, the very same name of the taxi driver my parents—and we—had driven with many times. The same Mr Squirrel? How many Mr Squirrels can there be in this small part of Suffolk? Surely it must be the same family, related in a genetic encoding of memory. I run to my archives. And there, in my mother’s address book—itself a palimpsest of time with names and addressed scored through; pasted-in cards, names, and numbers; and looseleaf memoranda—there, on the first page under “S”, “Mr. Squirrel” in my mother’s unmistakable scribble. She also had inscribed his phone number and the village Saxmundum, seven miles from Westleton. His name had been crossed out. Had he died? Retired? I don’t know. Yet quick look online tells me Squirrell’s Taxis still exists, as it does in my memory.Making KinAfter accompanying a class on a bucolic section of England’s Pilgrims’ Way, seven miles from Wye to Charing, we ended up at a pub drinking a pint, with which all good pilgrimages should conclude. There, students asked me why I became a medievalist who studies pilgrimage. Only after the publication of my first book on women pilgrims did I realize that the origin of my scholarly, long fascination with pilgrimage, blossoming into my professional career, began when I was seven years old along the way to Canterbury. The seeds of that pilgrimage when I was so young bore fruit and flowers decades later.One story illustrates Michel Serres’s point that we should not aim to appropriate the world, but merely act as temporary tenants (Serres 72-3). On pilgrimage in 1966 as a child, I had a penchant for ant spiders. That was not the only insect who took my heart. My mother shares how “Susie found a beetle up on the hill today and put him in the cheese box. Jimmy put holes in the top for him. She named him Alexander Beetle and really became very fond of him. After supper, we set him free in the garden here, with appropriate ceremony and a few over-dramatic tears of farewell.” He clearly made a great impression on me. I yearn for him today, that beetle in the cheese box. Though I tried to smuggle nature as contraband, I ultimately had to set him free.Passing through cities, landscape, forests, over seas and on roads, wandering by fields and vegetable patches, under a sky lit both by sun and moon, the pilgrim—even when in a group of fellow pilgrims—in her lonesome exercise endeavors to realize Serres’ ideal of the tenant inhabitant of earth. Nevertheless, we, as physical pilgrims, inevitably leave our traces through photos immortalizing the journey, trash left by the wayside, even excretions discretely deposited behind a convenient bush. Or a beetle who can tell the story of his adventure—or terror—at being ensconced for a time in a cheese box.On one notorious day of painful feet, my husband and I arrived in Otford, only to find the pub was still closed. Finally, it became time for dinner. We sat outside, me with feet ensconced in shoes blessedly inert and unmoving, as the server brought out our salads. The salad cream, white and viscous, was presented in an elegantly curved silver dish. Then Jim began to pick at the salad cream with his fork. Patiently, tenderly, he endeavored to assist a little bug who had gotten trapped in the gooey sauce. Every attempt seemed doomed to failure. The tiny creature kept falling back into the gloppy substance. Undaunted, Jim compassionately ministered to our companion. Finally, the little insect flew off, free to continue its own pilgrimage, which had intersected with ours in a tiny moment of affinity. Such moments of “making kin” work, according to Donna Haraway, as “life-saving strateg[ies] for the Anthropocene” (Oppermann 3, qtd. in Haraway 160).How can narrative avoid the anthropocentric centre of writing, which is inevitable given the human generator of such a piece? While words are a human invention, nonhuman entities vitally enact memory. The very Downs we walked along were created in the Cretaceous period at least seventy million years ago. The petrol propelling the magic taxi cab was distilled from organic bodies dating back millions of years. Jurassic limestone from the Bathonian Age almost two hundred million years ago constitutes the Caen stone quarried for building Canterbury Cathedral, while its Purbeck marble from Dorset dates from the Cretaceous period. Walking on pilgrimage propels me through a past millions—billions—of eons into the past, dwarfing my speck of existence. Yet, “if we wish to cross the darkness which separates us from [the past] we must lay down a little plank of words and step delicately over it” (Barfield 23). Elias Amidon asks us to consider how “the ground we dig into and walk upon is sacred. It is sacred because it makes us neighbors to each other, whether we like it or not. Tell this story” (Amidon 42). And, so, I have.We are winding down. Time has passed since that first pilgrimage of mine at seven years old. Yet now, here, I still put on my red plaid wollen jumper and jacket, crisp white button-up shirt, grey knee socks, and stout red walking shoes. Slinging on my rucksack, I take my mother’s hand.I’m ready to take my first step.We continue our pilgrimage, together.ReferencesAllen, Valerie. “When Things Break: Mending Rroads, Being Social.” Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.———, and Ruth Evans. Introduction. Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.Alworth, David J. Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016.Amidon, Elias. “Digging In.” Dirt: A Love Story. Ed. Barbara Richardson. Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2015.Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1967.Berry, Wendell. “A Secular Pilgrimage.” The Hudson Review 23.3 (1970): 401-424.Bright, Derek. “The Pilgrims’ Way Revisited: The Use of the North Downs Main Trackway and the Medway Crossings by Medieval Travelers.” Kent Archaeological Society eArticle (2010): 4-32.Craps, Stef, Rick Crownshaw, Jennifer Wenzel, Rosanne Kennedy, Claire Colebrook, and Vin Nardizzi. “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene: A Roundtable.” Memory Studies 11.4 (2017) 1-18.Easterlin, Nancy. A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012.———. “Cognitive Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinding, Sociality, and Literary Interpretation.” Introduction to Cognitive Studies. Ed. Lisa Zunshine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. 257-274.Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159-65.James, Erin, and Eric Morel. “Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory: An Introduction.” English Studies 99.4 (2018): 355-365.Marcussen, Marlene. Reading for Space: An Encounter between Narratology and New Materialism in the Works of Virgina Woolf and Georges Perec. PhD diss. University of Southern Denmark, 2016.Oppermann, Serpil. “Introducing Migrant Ecologies in an (Un)Bordered World.” ISLE 24.2 (2017): 243–256.Oram, Richard. “Trackless, Impenetrable, and Underdeveloped? Roads, Colonization and Environmental Transformation in the Anglo-Scottish Border Zone, c. 1100 to c. 1300.” Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.Rodriquez, David. “Narratorhood in the Anthropocene: Strange Stranger as Narrator-Figure in The Road and Here.” English Studies 99.4 (2018): 366-382.Savory, Elaine. “Toward a Caribbean Ecopoetics: Derek Walcott’s Language of Plants.” Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Eds. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 80-96.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1998.Serres, Michel. Malfeasance: Appropriating through Pollution? Trans. Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2011.Walcott, Derek. Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Baugh. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. 3-16.Yates, Julian. “Sheep Tracks—A Multi-Species Impression.” Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Washington, D.C.: Oliphaunt Books, 2012.

The Australian Government has been actively evaluating how best to merge the functions of the Australian Communications Authority (ACA) and the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA) for around two years now. Broadly, the reason for this is an attempt to keep pace with the communications media transformations we reduce to the term “convergence.” Mounting pressure for restructuring is emerging as a site of turf contestation: the possibility of a regulatory “one-stop shop” for governments (and some industry players) is an end game of considerable force. But, from a public interest perspective, the case for a converged regulator needs to make sense to audiences using various media, as well as in terms of arguments about global, industrial, and technological change. This national debate about the institutional reshaping of media regulation is occurring within a wider global context of transformations in social, technological, and politico-economic frameworks of open capital and cultural markets, including the increasing prominence of international economic organisations, corporations, and Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Although the recently concluded FTA with the US explicitly carves out a right for Australian Governments to make regulatory policy in relation to existing and new media, considerable uncertainty remains as to future regulatory arrangements. A key concern is how a right to intervene in cultural markets will be sustained in the face of cultural, politico-economic, and technological pressures that are reconfiguring creative industries on an international scale. While the right to intervene was retained for the audiovisual sector in the FTA, by contrast, it appears that comparable unilateral rights to intervene will not operate for telecommunications, e-commerce or intellectual property (DFAT). Blurring Boundaries A lack of certainty for audiences is a by-product of industry change, and further blurs regulatory boundaries: new digital media content and overlapping delivering technologies are already a reality for Australia’s media regulators. These hypothetical media usage scenarios indicate how confusion over the appropriate regulatory agency may arise: 1. playing electronic games that use racist language; 2. being subjected to deceptive or misleading pop-up advertising online 3. receiving messaged imagery on your mobile phone that offends, disturbs, or annoys; 4. watching a program like World Idol with SMS voting that subsequently raises charging or billing issues; or 5. watching a new “reality” TV program where products are being promoted with no explicit acknowledgement of the underlying commercial arrangements either during or at the end of the program. These are all instances where, theoretically, regulatory mechanisms are in place that allow individuals to complain and to seek some kind of redress as consumers and citizens. In the last scenario, in commercial television under the sector code, no clear-cut rules exist as to the precise form of the disclosure—as there is (from 2000) in commercial radio. It’s one of a number of issues the peak TV industry lobby Commercial TV Australia (CTVA) is considering in their review of the industry’s code of practice. CTVA have proposed an amendment to the code that will simply formalise the already existing practice . That is, commercial arrangements that assist in the making of a program should be acknowledged either during programs, or in their credits. In my view, this amendment doesn’t go far enough in post “cash for comment” mediascapes (Dwyer). Audiences have a right to expect that broadcasters, production companies and program celebrities are open and transparent with the Australian community about these kinds of arrangements. They need to be far more clearly signposted, and people better informed about their role. In the US, the “Commercial Alert” <http://www.commercialalert.org/> organisation has been lobbying the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission to achieve similar in-program “visual acknowledgements.” The ABA’s Commercial Radio Inquiry (“Cash-for-Comment”) found widespread systemic regulatory failure and introduced three new standards. On that basis, how could a “standstill” response by CTVA, constitute best practice for such a pervasive and influential medium as contemporary commercial television? The World Idol example may lead to confusion for some audiences, who are unsure whether the issues involved relate to broadcasting or telecommunications. In fact, it could be dealt with as a complaint to the Telecommunication Industry Ombudsman (TIO) under an ACA registered, but Australian Communications Industry Forum (ACIF) developed, code of practice. These kind of cross-platform issues may become more vexed in future years from an audience’s perspective, especially if reality formats using on-screen premium rate service numbers invite audiences to participate, by sending MMS (multimedia messaging services) images or short video grabs over wireless networks. The political and cultural implications of this kind of audience interaction, in terms of access, participation, and more generally the symbolic power of media, may perhaps even indicate a longer-term shift in relations with consumers and citizens. In the Internet example, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) Internet advertising jurisdiction would apply—not the ABA’s “co-regulatory” Internet content regime as some may have thought. Although the ACCC deals with complaints relating to Internet advertising, there won’t be much traction for them in a more complex issue that also includes, say, racist or religious bigotry. The DVD example would probably fall between the remits of the Office of Film and Literature Classification’s (OFLC) new “convergent” Guidelines for the Classification of Film and Computer Games and race discrimination legislation administered by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC). The OFLC’s National Classification Scheme is really geared to provide consumer advice on media products that contain sexual and violent imagery or coarse language, rather than issues of racist language. And it’s unlikely that a single person would have the locus standito even apply for a reclassification. It may fall within the jurisdiction of the HREOC depending on whether it was played in public or not. Even then it would probably be considered exempt on free speech grounds as an “artistic work.” Unsolicited, potentially illegal, content transmitted via mobile wireless devices, in particular 3G phones, provide another example of content that falls between the media regulation cracks. It illustrates a potential content policy “turf grab” too. Image-enabled mobile phones create a variety of novel issues for content producers, network operators, regulators, parents and viewers. There is no one government media authority or agency with a remit to deal with this issue. Although it has elements relating to the regulatory activities of the ACA, the ABA, the OFLC, the TIO, and TISSC, the combination of illegal or potentially prohibited content and its carriage over wireless networks positions it outside their current frameworks. The ACA may argue it should have responsibility for this kind of content since: it now enforces the recently enacted Commonwealth anti-Spam laws; has registered an industry code of practice for unsolicited content delivered over wireless networks; is seeking to include ‘adult’ content within premium rate service numbers, and, has been actively involved in consumer education for mobile telephony. It has also worked with TISSC and the ABA in relation to telephone sex information services over voice networks. On the other hand, the ABA would probably argue that it has the relevant expertise for regulating wirelessly transmitted image-content, arising from its experience of Internet and free and subscription TV industries, under co-regulatory codes of practice. The OFLC can also stake its claim for policy and compliance expertise, since the recently implemented Guidelines for Classification of Film and Computer Games were specifically developed to address issues of industry convergence. These Guidelines now underpin the regulation of content across the film, TV, video, subscription TV, computer games and Internet sectors. Reshaping Institutions Debates around the “merged regulator” concept have occurred on and off for at least a decade, with vested interests in agencies and the executive jockeying to stake claims over new turf. On several occasions the debate has been given renewed impetus in the context of ruling conservative parties’ mooted changes to the ownership and control regime. It’s tended to highlight demarcations of remit, informed as they are by historical and legal developments, and the gradual accretion of regulatory cultures. Now the key pressure points for regulatory change include the mere existence of already converged single regulatory structures in those countries with whom we tend to triangulate our policy comparisons—the US, the UK and Canada—increasingly in a context of debates concerning international trade agreements; and, overlaying this, new media formats and devices are complicating existing institutional arrangements and legal frameworks. The Department of Communications, Information Technology & the Arts’s (DCITA) review brief was initially framed as “options for reform in spectrum management,” but was then widened to include “new institutional arrangements” for a converged regulator, to deal with visual content in the latest generation of mobile telephony, and other image-enabled wireless devices (DCITA). No other regulatory agencies appear, at this point, to be actively on the Government’s radar screen (although they previously have been). Were the review to look more inclusively, the ACCC, the OFLC and the specialist telecommunications bodies, the TIO and the TISSC may also be drawn in. Current regulatory arrangements see the ACA delegate responsibility for broadcasting services bands of the radio frequency spectrum to the ABA. In fact, spectrum management is the turf least contested by the regulatory players themselves, although the “convergent regulator” issue provokes considerable angst among powerful incumbent media players. The consensus that exists at a regulatory level can be linked to the scientific convention that holds the radio frequency spectrum is a continuum of electromagnetic bands. In this view, it becomes artificial to sever broadcasting, as “broadcasting services bands” from the other remaining highly diverse communications uses, as occurred from 1992 when the Broadcasting Services Act was introduced. The prospect of new forms of spectrum charging is highly alarming for commercial broadcasters. In a joint submission to the DCITA review, the peak TV and radio industry lobby groups have indicated they will fight tooth and nail to resist new regulatory arrangements that would see a move away from the existing licence fee arrangements. These are paid as a sliding scale percentage of gross earnings that, it has been argued by Julian Thomas and Marion McCutcheon, “do not reflect the amount of spectrum used by a broadcaster, do not reflect the opportunity cost of using the spectrum, and do not provide an incentive for broadcasters to pursue more efficient ways of delivering their services” (6). An economic rationalist logic underpins pressure to modify the spectrum management (and charging) regime, and undoubtedly contributes to the commercial broadcasting industry’s general paranoia about reform. Total revenues collected by the ABA and the ACA between 1997 and 2002 were, respectively, $1423 million and $3644.7 million. Of these sums, using auction mechanisms, the ABA collected $391 million, while the ACA collected some $3 billion. The sale of spectrum that will be returned to the Commonwealth by television broadcasters when analog spectrum is eventually switched off, around the end of the decade, is a salivating prospect for Treasury officials. The large sums that have been successfully raised by the ACA boosts their position in planning discussions for the convergent media regulatory agency. The way in which media outlets and regulators respond to publics is an enduring question for a democratic polity, irrespective of how the product itself has been mediated and accessed. Media regulation and civic responsibility, including frameworks for negotiating consumer and citizen rights, are fundamental democratic rights (Keane; Tambini). The ABA’s Commercial Radio Inquiry (‘cash for comment’) has also reminded us that regulatory frameworks are important at the level of corporate conduct, as well as how they negotiate relations with specific media audiences (Johnson; Turner; Gordon-Smith). Building publicly meaningful regulatory frameworks will be demanding: relationships with audiences are often complex as people are constructed as both consumers and citizens, through marketised media regulation, institutions and more recently, through hybridising program formats (Murdock and Golding; Lumby and Probyn). In TV, we’ve seen the growth of infotainment formats blending entertainment and informational aspects of media consumption. At a deeper level, changes in the regulatory landscape are symptomatic of broader tectonic shifts in the discourses of governance in advanced information economies from the late 1980s onwards, where deregulatory agendas created an increasing reliance on free market, business-oriented solutions to regulation. “Co-regulation” and “self-regulation’ became the preferred mechanisms to more direct state control. Yet, curiously contradicting these market transformations, we continue to witness recurring instances of direct intervention on the basis of censorship rationales (Dwyer and Stockbridge). That digital media content is “converging” between different technologies and modes of delivery is the norm in “new media” regulatory rhetoric. Others critique “visions of techno-glory,” arguing instead for a view that sees fundamental continuities in media technologies (Winston). But the socio-cultural impacts of new media developments surround us: the introduction of multichannel digital and interactive TV (in free-to-air and subscription variants); broadband access in the office and home; wirelessly delivered content and mobility, and, as Jock Given notes, around the corner, there’s the possibility of “an Amazon.Com of movies-on-demand, with the local video and DVD store replaced by online access to a distant server” (90). Taking a longer view of media history, these changes can be seen to be embedded in the global (and local) “innovation frontier” of converging digital media content industries and its transforming modes of delivery and access technologies (QUT/CIRAC/Cutler & Co). The activities of regulatory agencies will continue to be a source of policy rivalry and turf contestation until such time as a convergent regulator is established to the satisfaction of key players. However, there are risks that the benefits of institutional reshaping will not be readily available for either audiences or industry. In the past, the idea that media power and responsibility ought to coexist has been recognised in both the regulation of the media by the state, and the field of communications media analysis (Curran and Seaton; Couldry). But for now, as media industries transform, whatever the eventual institutional configuration, the evolution of media power in neo-liberal market mediascapes will challenge the ongoing capacity for interventions by national governments and their agencies. Works Cited Australian Broadcasting Authority. Commercial Radio Inquiry: Final Report of the Australian Broadcasting Authority. Sydney: ABA, 2000. Australian Communications Information Forum. Industry Code: Short Message Service (SMS) Issues. Dec. 2002. 8 Mar. 2004 <http://www.acif.org.au/__data/page/3235/C580_Dec_2002_ACA.pdf >. Commercial Television Australia. Draft Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice. Aug. 2003. 8 Mar. 2004 <http://www.ctva.com.au/control.cfm?page=codereview&pageID=171&menucat=1.2.110.171&Level=3>. Couldry, Nick. The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age. London: Routledge, 2000. Curran, James, and Jean Seaton. Power without Responsibility: The Press, Broadcasting and New Media in Britain. 6th ed. London: Routledge, 2003. Dept. of Communication, Information Technology and the Arts. Options for Structural Reform in Spectrum Management. Canberra: DCITA, Aug. 2002. ---. Proposal for New Institutional Arrangements for the ACA and the ABA. Aug. 2003. 8 Mar. 2004 <http://www.dcita.gov.au/Article/0,,0_1-2_1-4_116552,00.php>. Dept. of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement. Feb. 2004. 8 Mar. 2004 <http://www.dfat.gov.au/trade/negotiations/us_fta/outcomes/11_audio_visual.php>. Dwyer, Tim. Submission to Commercial Television Australia’s Review of the Commercial Television Industry’s Code of Practice. Sept. 2003. Dwyer, Tim, and Sally Stockbridge. “Putting Violence to Work in New Media Policies: Trends in Australian Internet, Computer Game and Video Regulation.” New Media and Society 1.2 (1999): 227-49. Given, Jock. America’s Pie: Trade and Culture After 9/11. Sydney: U of NSW P, 2003. Gordon-Smith, Michael. “Media Ethics After Cash-for-Comment.” The Media and Communications in Australia. Ed. Stuart Cunningham and Graeme Turner. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2002. Johnson, Rob. Cash-for-Comment: The Seduction of Journo Culture. Sydney: Pluto, 2000. Keane, John. The Media and Democracy. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Lumby, Cathy, and Elspeth Probyn, eds. Remote Control: New Media, New Ethics. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2003. Murdock, Graham, and Peter Golding. “Information Poverty and Political Inequality: Citizenship in the Age of Privatized Communications.” Journal of Communication 39.3 (1991): 180-95. QUT, CIRAC, and Cutler & Co. Research and Innovation Systems in the Production of Digital Content and Applications: Report for the National Office for the Information Economy. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, Sept. 2003. Tambini, Damian. Universal Access: A Realistic View. IPPR/Citizens Online Research Publication 1. London: IPPR, 2000. Thomas, Julian and Marion McCutcheon. “Is Broadcasting Special? Charging for Spectrum.” Conference paper. ABA conference, Canberra. May 2003. Turner, Graeme. “Talkback, Advertising and Journalism: A cautionary tale of self-regulated radio”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 3.2 (2000): 247-255. ---. “Reshaping Australian Institutions: Popular Culture, the Market and the Public Sphere.” Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs. Ed. Tony Bennett and David Carter. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2001. Winston, Brian. Media, Technology and Society: A History from the Telegraph to the Internet. London: Routledge, 1998. Web Links http://www.aba.gov.au http://www.aca.gov.au http://www.accc.gov.au http://www.acif.org.au http://www.adma.com.au http://www.ctva.com.au http://www.crtc.gc.ca http://www.dcita.com.au http://www.dfat.gov.au http://www.fcc.gov http://www.ippr.org.uk http://www.ofcom.org.uk http://www.oflc.gov.au Links http://www.commercialalert.org/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Dwyer, Tim. "Transformations" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/06-transformations.php>. APA Style Dwyer, T. (2004, Mar17). Transformations. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/06-transformations.php>

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Technology: Tourism and Hospitality Management in the Faculty of Business at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology 2013
This thesis is concerned with the service delivery received by pilgrims based in South Africa, especially with regards to services and amenities that were paid for and promised in the contract, but which may not have materialized. The focus on Hajj travelling can be viewed as an aspect of religious tourism (so to speak). Currently there is a dearth of research on this particular spiritual journey in South Africa. For this reason, this research aims to elucidate the service delivery components, processes and challenges. The researcher finds it necessary to research this topic because pilgrimage constitutes part of religious tourism and the policies governing the Hajj industry, as well as the operational aspects of the Hajj industry are unclear. Problems such as poor service standards, lack of business ethics and malpractice exist in the Hajj industry. The main challenges in the South African Hajj industry are: a) Lack of mainstream travel and tourism practices in the South African Hajj industry. b) Absence of a service and quality driven industry. c) Difficulty in acquisition of travel documentation for pilgrims. d) Lack of business ethics and malpractice by service providers. e) Limitations on travel through the newly introduced quota system by the Hajj Ministry of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). In 1994 the South African Government formed the South African Hajj and Umrah Council, (SAHUC) and is a nationally based constituted organisation. This organisation is officially recognised by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as the official structure responsible and accountable for facilitating the affairs of the South African pilgrims within South Africa and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (SAHUC, 2005). The researcher intends on addressing the above-mentioned challenges through developing a service delivery framework that will help alleviate the problems in the industry between South African Hajj role players. The framework is aimed at identifying current gaps between supply and demand in the Hajj industry as well as providing recommendations for the future.

Orientador: Jeanne Marie Gagnebin de Bons
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
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Resumo: O objetivo dessa dissertação de mestrado foi analisar a metáfora da caminhada, a partir da leitura comparativa entre duas obras: Auto da Alma, de Gil Vicente, e Morte e Vida Severina - Auto de Natal Pernambucano, de João Cabral de Melo Neto. Procurei investigar como essas produções desenvolvem, a partir do trabalho com poesia e com o auto, a caminhada como imagem central de construção do texto: em ambos, são personagens em deslocamento espacial e temporal que protagonizam os poemas. Partindo da revisitação a textos da tradição cristã e a textos literários que trabalham com a tópica da peregrinatio, levantei alguns temas e imagens comuns relativos à peregrinação, que guiaram minha leitura comparativa. Além da própria metáfora de vida como caminho e/ou peregrinação, há a questão da ajuda divina para essa realização, bem como os perigos de desvio e do cansaço; as paradas para descanso (e os diferentes valores atribuídos ao parar); a questão do nome/singularidade (ou possibilidade de representação de outros personagens) do peregrino central; as vestimentas que o viajante porta, ou das quais se desfaz ao longo da caminhada; a questão do alimento recebido (ou da falta dele) ao caminhar; assim como o que, intrinsecamente, constitui esse tipo de viagem: a partida e a chegada, e as dificuldades ao longo do caminho. As diferenças de contexto da produção de cada auto foram retomadas e discutidas, a fim de entender as diferenças de significação no aproveitamento que João Cabral faz do gênero através do qual Gil Vicente tanto escreveu. Um dos objetivos finais da pesquisa foi procurar entender por que o poeta brasileiro usa uma matéria cristã-católica em um texto de explícita crítica social. Encerrei, então, discutindo as implicações da construção de um auto natalino dentro do auto: como a afirmação de outra vida severina vem ao final do poema para mostrar o comprometimento coletivo com a caminhada
Abstract: The purpose of this reserach was to analyze the metaphor of the walk, by a comparative reading of two works: ?Auto da Alma?, by Gil Vicente, and ?Morte e Vida Severina - Auto de Natal Pernambucano?, by João Cabral de Melo Neto. It sought to investigate how these productions developed the walk as the central image of the text construction, by working with poetry and auto: both texts have characters in spatial and temporal displacement which star in the poems. Starting from revisiting the texts of the Christian tradition and literary texts that work with peregrinatio, it was raised some common themes and images on the pilgrimage, which guided my comparative reading. Beyond the metaphor of life as way, as pilgrimage, there is the matter of divine aid to fulfillment as well as the dangers of diversion and fatigue; the rest stops (and the different values assigned to the stop); the question of the pilgrim's name/singularity (or the possibility to represent others; the traveler's dressing (or disposes of them along the way); the question of food received (or lack of it) when walking; as well as what is inherently in a journey: departure and arrival, and difficulties along the way. The differences in the context of production of each auto were discussed in order to understand the significance of the use of this genre in João Cabral's poem - in which Gil Vicente wrote so much. One of the ultimate goals of the research was to try to understand why the Brazilian poet uses a Catholic-Christian's subject in a text with explicit social criticism. Then, we discuss the implications of building a Christmas auto within the auto: the affirmation of another severina's life comes at the end of the poem to show the collective commitment to walk
Mestrado
Teoria e Critica Literaria
Mestre em Teoria e História Literária

Depuis le début des années quatre-vingt, la petite localité de Kibeho - un hameau particulièrement difficile d’accès situé aux confins d’une région rurale du sud-ouest du Rwanda, à environ deux cents kilomètres de Kigali - s’est muée en une destination de pèlerinage prisée par de nombreux Catholiques rwandais et, désormais, étrangers. L’origine de ce changement de nature du lieu se confond avec les apparitions de la Vierge (mais aussi du Christ et d’autres personnages du « panthéon » catholique) dont ont été favorisées plusieurs jeunes filles scolarisées au collège catholique local au début des années quatre-vingt, puis un certain nombre d’adolescents des environs. De spontanés et irréguliers qu’ils étaient dans les premières années du phénomène, encore liés aux performances publiques des voyants qui bénéficiaient des apparitions à heures fixes sur un podium surélevé, les déplacements d’individus se sont graduellement organisés. Aujourd’hui, à Kibeho, les apparitions publiques ont pris fin. Les pèlerins, qu’ils appartiennent à l’un ou l’autre mouvement d’Action catholique ou à un groupe de prière et de pèlerinage né des apparitions, se regroupent dans différents centres urbains du pays pour rejoindre le sanctuaire de Notre-Dame des Douleurs, érigé suite à la reconnaissance des apparitions par l’Eglise catholique en 2001 et en perpétuelle expansion depuis lors.

En 2001, la déclaration de reconnaissance mentionne, parmi les signes de crédibilité des apparitions, « la journée du 15 août 1982 qui fut marquée notamment, contre toute attente, par des visions effroyables, qui dans la suite se sont avérées prophétiques au vu des drames humains vécus au Rwanda et dans l’ensemble des pays de notre région des Grands Lacs ». Cette lecture officielle qui confère un horizon de sens aux événements, instituant la prophétie en des termes choisis permettant d’y entrevoir le génocide comme l’hécatombe du choléra dans les camps de réfugiés du Congo, est diversement négociée par les acteurs locaux, même si la conviction de la réalisation d’une prophétie est quasi-unanime. Du point de vue des pèlerins, les apparitions demeurent relativement problématiques. Elles exigent de chacun qu’il négocie sa position en fonction d’une représentation de l’orthodoxie constamment réévaluée dans les limites de ce qui est expérimenté et affirmé comme une identité catholique. Cette difficulté est notamment due à la multiplicité des individus qui ont revendiqué ou revendiquent encore des visions ou apparitions, alors que seules trois jeunes filles ont été reconnues par l’Eglise catholique en 2001.

Après avoir soigneusement défini le cadre socio-historique des apparitions rwandaises, en abordant la question depuis le point de vue de voyants non reconnus - dont l’une expatriée en Belgique - et de ceux qui leur sont proches, la thèse propose une analyse des discours par lesquels ceux-ci se définissent et négocient la légitimité de leur pratique religieuse. Une attention particulière a été portée aux outils stéréotypés de la critique (sexualité, politique, vénalité…), mobilisés dans le cadre des tensions et conflits qui opposent différents acteurs individuels et collectifs. Par ailleurs, les mécanismes qui président aux rhétoriques de la construction de soi ont été mis en lumière, notamment par le biais des récits de guerre qui fondent une identité de survivant liée à la conviction d’une intervention mariale. Ce processus se confond souvent avec ceux qui président à la construction du pouvoir de la Vierge, et donc des voyants. Finalement, au travers de l’analyse des représentations touchant notamment à la prophétie du génocide et de la guerre civile, les nouveaux rapports au national se font jour, les violences des années nonante étant intégrées dans un schéma biblique qui opère un basculement significatif :parce que le Rwanda serait touché de plein fouet par la Mal, il a été choisi par Dieu et par la Vierge comme noyau de la Nouvelle Evangélisation. À travers l’analyse du rapport au divin, à l’autorité, aux représentations de la modernité que les mots des acteurs reflètent, c’est le catholicisme vécu qui s’éclaire à l’ombre du sanctuaire et de son appareil médiatique foisonnant, ce catholicisme empirique dont la richesse se renouvelle à chaque « enculturation » comme au passage des générations successives et dont il importe, pour l’anthropologie comme pour l’histoire du christianisme, d’approcher l’infinie variété.

Doctorat en Philosophie
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Under the new Vision 2030 national transformation plan, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia seeks to increase number of annual pilgrims from eight million to thirty million. If oil has certain limits, then pilgrimage is framed as lasting “forever.” But this exuberant claim of “forever” belies a more subtle transformation unfolding at the level of knowledge, technology, and hospitality as Mecca and its crowds are made and re-made into a resource for a national economy. This dissertation examines the Saudi state’s efforts to manage, and ultimately intensify and optimize Mecca’s pilgrimage through new sciences and technologies of crowd management, logistics, and secular hospitality. I demonstrate how these new forms of knowledge production operate in tension with older and decidedly more Islamic ways of knowing, managing, and belonging in the holy city. Instead of approaching religious knowledge and secular knowledge as discrete spheres, my research explores their entanglements and aporias across a range of techno-political practices: navigation, hospitality, urban planning, systems thinking, crowd management, and optimization. Ultimately, I explore how in this moment of ritual intensity, the cosmopolitan logics of the holy city come to be blunted.

Space perceived and experienced through movement presents an interesting array of imagery which blends together to form a comprehensive whole. My thesis explores this dimension of spatial complexity through the public ritual of pilgrimage. This profound and deeply significant human activity connects the individual places to form an integrated sacred network. The practice of pilgrimage has developed over centuries across the globe and continues to grow and influence a huge cross section of society to come together and move en-masse towards religious centres and personal enlightenment. Public spaces demand a simultaneous co-existence of people, activities and their setting. The phenomenon of pilgrimage is central to the public realm. Its study involves an intricate layering of beliefs, customs, traditions and religion which collectively govern the people-space relationship. The transformation of a space to a place, from static to dynamic, from passive to active occurs during this activity, maintaining the traditional usage while simultaneously evolving as a product of interaction between people, rituals and spaces. In this thesis, I examine the experiential shaping of space which occurs through pilgrims' activities and their impacts on the given urban and architectural conditions. The research is based on my study of the Alandi-Pandharpur Pilgrimage in India. It is an outcome of my participation in the ritual as, both, an architect and a pilgrim. I focus on the existing public spaces and their spontaneous response to the unplanned activity of the Pilgrimage. The spatial experience transcends the criteria of aesthetics and functionality of a public space to a deeper exploration of human characteristics and convictions. From this perspective, the thesis considers the broader role of designed public spaces, the extent of inclusion of community rituals and their significance in the shaping of built environment.

This dissertation comparatively explores and critically evaluates the historical and traditional notions that are commonly held by Christian pilgrims visiting the Holy Land; and it does so by examining the archaeological, historical, and literary evidence, with specific reference to the existent material remnants that are closely associated with the burial of Christ Jesus. The research will highlight the impact that biblical archaeological findings and the results thereof have had on these identified pilgrimage sites. Both the strengths and the weaknesses of the evidence will be enumerated; and the implications for the practice and significance of pilgrimages will be set out.
Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
M.A. (Biblical Archaeology)

This chapter examines the construction of the idea of “pilgrimage” in the works of key Han kitāb authors Wang Daiyu (1590-1658), Liu Zhi (1670-1724), and Ma Dexin (1794-1874). All three advocated pilgrimage as a religious ideal, but each successive generation gave greater weight to its requirement as an obligatory observance, as Sino-Muslims gradually entered a more interconnected Islamic context. The perception of the ḥajj changed from a symbol of true belief to a potential critical practice, and it finally emerged as an essential religious duty. Wang Daiyu outlined the theological foundations of the pilgrimage and its role as a link to the time of creation and union with God. Liu Zhi underlined the physical practice of potential pilgrims, stressing the ceremonial and experiential aspects of the pilgrimage and detailing the practices it entailed. Ma Dexin emphasized the performative aspect of the journey itself, asserting its doctrinal necessity while arguing for its power to rectify and renew religious understanding.

In this article, the author explains the experiences and sensations of Pakistani pilgrims toward a local pilgrimage saint and tries to locate it within the broader context of the visionary aspects of Muslim religious experience. Focusing on the intersections of dreams and shrines, he expands the discussion of the social sphere to include the broader scope of pilgrimage. To understand the local pilgrimage tradition in Pakistan, the author incorporates scholarship on songs, dreams, and architecture and provides an in-depth analysis of the pilgrimage in this country.