Pilgrimage and Ambiguity: Sharing the Sacred

Journal of Contemporary Religion ISSN: 1353-7903 (Print) 1469-9419 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjcr20 Pilgrimage and Ambiguity: Sharing the Sacred Ian Reader To cite this article: Ian Reader (2019) Pilgrimage and Ambiguity: Sharing the Sacred, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 34:1, 218-220, DOI: 10.1080/13537903.2019.1585054 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2019.1585054 Published online: 23 Apr 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 11 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjcr20 218 BOOK REVIEWS and emotionally exhausting task, as Casselberry shows, leaving women perspiring, hoarse, and drained by the time a worshipper is granted the gift of tongues. Women also do a good deal of ‘aesthetic’ work. One particularly eloquent section of the book on ‘the beauty of holiness’ explores the importance of the presentation of the female body in worship so that the racist demonisation of the black female body can be exorcised by the spiritual ‘style’ of the women ‘saints’ and their self-presentation as fit vessels for the Lord’s indwelling. The church was established at a time of intensifying racial conflict and COOLJC’s founding theology, enunciated by Robert Clarence Lawson, claims that the blood of black women ran in Jesus’ veins through the Hamitic line so that the saving blood shed on the cross involved the blood of black women. This intimate inclusion of black women’s blood in the atonement carries both a high spiritual status and concomitant duties. The dress code for women, which forbids jewellery and revealing clothing and requires head covering in church, rather than oppressing women, has produced a proud tradition of women’s ‘style’ in which COOLJC women dress to be ‘fit for Jesus’. They have several church outfits because worship is so strenuous and Sunday services so long that a clean outfit is essential for each Sunday or weekday worship. The different women’s auxiliaries co-ordinate their colours for each occasion, which entails a good deal of washing and pressing—women’s labour to be proud of. Women also sing and play instruments to energise worship. Casselberry recounts many occasions on which a woman starting up a hymn or chorus acts inspirationally as the agent of spiritual encouragement, comfort or healing to others or as reinforcement to the preacher’s message. The Labor of Faith is an important addition to the growing literature that corrects easy condemnation of Pentecostal ‘patriarchy’. Casselberry makes a point of the success of Black Apostolic women in the meritocratic ladder of secular employment, not just as a praiseworthy achievement, but also as a spiritual duty enthusiastically undertaken. The ‘women-driven patriarchy’ of the church is a riposte to the hard time the world outside gives black males, who include their brothers, husbands, and sons. Apostolic women use their spiritual powers and emotional skills to re-make their brethren and fit them for authority and leadership. This ought to be recognized as being, in its own way, as radical as other drives for black emancipation. Bernice Martin Royal Holloway College (Emeritus), University of London, Egham, UK [email protected] © 2019 Bernice Martin https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2019.1585052 Pilgrimage and Ambiguity: Sharing the Sacred, edited by Angela Hobart and Thierry Zarcone, Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing, in association with The Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, 2017, viii + 242 pp., £25.00 (pb), ISBN 978–1–907774–77–5 One of the topics now attracting attention in studies of pilgrimage relates to sites that share clienteles across religious boundaries. Pilgrimage shrines have long been recognized as spaces into which various actors and interest groups insert their own JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RELIGION 219 agendas; while some sites are religiously exclusive, often (and especially through tourism and new modes of religious expression) they attract a multi-dimensional clientele. This is certainly so in cultural settings where people may have multiple religious belongings (as is the case in much of Asia, as some essays in this volume indicate) and in which pilgrims from different persuasions might converge on a single site, reading and interpreting it from their own religious perspectives while being aware of, and perhaps fascinated by, the rituals of pilgrims from different traditions. The questions that arise from such sharing include whether this produces syncretic cults and practices. When people share a sanctuary, are their practices and attitudes influenced by those of different religious persuasions at the same place? Or are their differences intensified? While the volume under question looks at shared sanctuaries using the frameworks of pilgrimage and ambiguity as its terms of reference, it does not present any cohesive response to such issues. The editors’ introduction does seek to address the wider topic, notably by drawing attention to the work of William Hasluck (1878–1920) whose pioneering studies of sanctuaries and pilgrimage sites in Anatolia and the Balkans, to which both Christians and Muslims came, led him to speak of “ambiguous sanctuaries” (1). Many sites Hasluck studied developed from one faith and were absorbed by another, frequently between Christianity and the Sufi tradition, with elements of the former being incorporated into the latter. While the editors use this to raise some intriguing questions about religious figures who span traditions (and whom they call ‘dual saints’), they do not develop these ideas to any degree and instead rely on a number of assumptions and vague assertions. It is not clear exactly what is meant by “prereligious sacredness” (3) and “pre-religious saint” (7), save for the view the editors project that the ‘sacred’ is somehow an innate, inherent quality of some places that preexists any religious tradition coming there. There is no consideration of the possibility that the ‘sacred’ itself might be a construct. Later chapters barely pick up on these ideas. The chapters cover a wide geographical range, from the Mediterranean region to IndoPersia and China, along with a chapter on the Arawak peoples of Amazonia (a chapter that reads well as an ethnographic description of Amazonian Indian practices and myths but does not really fit with the remainder of the book). Some chapters attempt to develop theoretical issues further and some present interesting ethnographic discussions of their respective subject areas. Dionigi Albera, for example, builds on Hasluck’s work to discuss ambiguity in more depth, arguing that it and the sharing of sanctuaries should not be seen as aberrations from a normative singular religious affiliation but as something more common. As he notes, it is largely the result of monotheistic traditions emphasising exclusivity that the notion that a religious site should only be associated with one religious tradition has developed. The chapters on Asian sites help articulate this point, notably Isabelle Charleux’s study of Wutaishan, a mountain sacred to Tibetan, Chinese, and Mongol Buddhists. As Charleux indicates, sharing a broader tradition (Buddhism) and site produces interactions between these ethnic groups but also gives rise to resentments and awareness of difference, notably as they compete for resources and complain that the other ethnic traditions are either favoured over them or are hostile to them. Charleux’s chapter expresses what is perhaps the volume’s main finding: that shared sanctuaries rarely produce wholesale syncretic amalgamations of practices and that tensions and enhanced awareness of difference are more common. This point is also expressed well in Manoël Pénicaud’s chapter on the creation of a Christian-Muslim pilgrimage focused on a small chapel in Brittany, which occurs every July in order to bring about interfaith reconciliation. The well-meaning efforts by Catholic intellectuals and activists to incorporate Muslims into the pilgrimage (e.g. by having an imam read 220 BOOK REVIEWS a sura during a religious service and sharing a communal North African meal) suggest some form of syncretic engagement. Yet, as Pénicaud shows, numerous tensions undermine this; the region is predominantly rural Catholic and (some) locals resent the Muslims. Local Muslims sense the resentment and feel marginalised in the pilgrimage, especially as the Catholic activists control the agenda and decide, for example, what topics will be dealt with in the annual discussion that accompanies the pilgrimage. In various ways the Muslim community, seemingly invited to share in a common endeavour, ends up feeling reluctant to participate. Jürgen Wasim Frembegn’s short chapter on Sufi cults and saints in Pakistan presents another angle on ambiguity by examining how such figures cross boundaries (both religious and in terms of gender); it does not, however, address the topic of pilgrimage in any sense. Thierry Zarcone presents an account of a mountain in Kyrgyzstan where earlier Buddhist influences and legends have been absorbed into the later Islamic cults that have taken over the region. Thus Muslim saint veneration and legends in the region are infused with the vestiges of the earlier Buddhist saint cults. While such chapters offer some interesting insights into ambiguity (although less on pilgrimage), others (not cited in this review) are less focused on such issues or do not speak to the editors’ overall themes. This may be because the chapters were originally presented as papers at a conference; some appear not to have addressed the themes that the editors outline as the focal points of this volume. As a result, the book reads more as a collection of conference papers dealing with a broad theme than a coherent volume focused on the themes its title implies. Ian Reader Japanese Studies (Emeritus), University of Manchester, Manchester, UK [email protected] © 2019 Ian Reader https://doi.org/10.1080/13537903.2019.1585054 Orthodox Christian Renewal Movements in Eastern Europe, edited by Aleksandra Djurić Milovanović and Radmila Radić, 2017, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature, Christianity and Renewal: Interdisciplinary Studies, 339 pp., £109.99 (hb), ISBN 978–3–319–63353–4 (hb), ISBN 978–3– 319–63354–1 (eb) Orthodox Christianity’s contact with modernity may be dated back to the nineteenth century. As Meic Pearse indicates in his “Prologue” (chapter 1), in the Orthodox case, modernity evolves from contacts with secular Western ideologies, such as nationalism, science, industrialisation, and the Catholic and Protestant churches. These new ideas and phenomena divided Orthodox people and resulted in several kinds of reactions, which are referred to in this volume as ‘renewals’ and which the editors sum up, in their introduction (chapter 2) by stating that the book examines what the term ‘renewal’ means in the Orthodox context (16). To my knowledge, this is the first English-language study in this field, although studies on individual countries and movements exist.