Secular Pilgrimage

"In the 1970s, scholars of the (natural and built) environment tended to explore the deep connections between personal identity and the landscape, defined as ‘the arrangement in physical space of artefacts and activity’ (Duncan 1976: 391), with reference to relatively stable and traditional phenomena such as family, religion and social structures. While it was acknowledged that humans engage in relational processes with their environment(s) and that individual and social identity can alter as a result of changes in the physical setting in which it was acted out, the normative dimensions of human interactions with spaces and the consensus meanings associated with what James S. Duncan, Jr called ‘very public landscapes’ received disproportionate attention (Duncan 1976: 396). This contrasted sharply with the radical approach adopted by scholars of tourism in the very same decade. For example, Dean MacCannell deconstructed the physical environments that tourists interacted with in terms of artificially constructed ‘attractions’ and ‘staged authenticity’ (MacCannell 1999[1976]) and Erik Cohen connected tourism to religious journeys and pilgrimage through his development of a five-dimension typology of ‘tourist experiences,’ which distinguished tourists in terms of their relationship with a ‘centre.’ Fascinatingly, Cohen’s typology turned on the degree to which personal identity was determined by adherence to a centre, and the issue of whether that centre was the centre of the tourist’s own society, that is, to what extent is ‘modern man … normally a conformist’? (Cohen 1979:181). These pioneering observations of MacCannell and Cohen have grown in relevance as the social sciences have strongly asserted the primacy of the self in Western late modernity, and the decline of traditional institutions as authorities for personal identity, religion, spirituality, and as sources from which the self is constructed.

This article explores the affect that travelling to and being among urban ruins had on gay male experience and identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century city. Along with other places on the margins of regulated space, urban ruins operate as points of transition, passages from Enlightenment rationality to Romantic myth, portals revealing the magic that exists at the interstices of ordered space. In this article we suggest that the affective and sensual feelings and memories conjured up by ruins acted as a catalyst for the creation of alternative ways of being for gay men that contrasted with the constrained ways of being that prevailed across a majority of the ordered, everyday spaces of the late twentieth century Western city. Thus journeying into ruined spaces became a type of secular pilgrimage, where ‘pilgrimage’ is understood in Justine Digance’s terms as a journey “redolent with meaning” for the individual (Digance 2006: 46), who undertakes it to experience transformation. According to Victor Turner, pilgrimage is best understood as a rite of passage, in which the pilgrim separates from his or her community and enters a liminal phase in which there is the experience of sacredness and of communitas, a special camaraderie that is felt among groups of pilgrims (Turner 1972: 191-192). Upon re-integration into the community, the pilgrim (like the initiate) manifests a changed status due to the ritual process. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, religiosity and spirituality have been de-coupled from religious institutions, just as sexuality has been liberated from the imposed order of socially-assumed hetero-normativity, and ritual has become individualised and focused on the achievement of an authentic self, through activities which may include sport, shopping, and participation in dance and musical subcultures, among other phenomena. Thus, it is asserted that journeying to urban ruins constitutes a relationship with an alternative ‘centre’, and that Cohen’s phenomenological classification of tourists can be used as a lens through which to analyse such sexual ‘pilgrims’."