LA GEOGRAFÍA Y LOS VIAJES.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, mobility has become an evocative term and an established interdisciplinary field of enquiry with a powerful discourse of its own. The concept of mobility entails large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information throughout the world, as well as more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space, and the movement of material things in everyday life (Collins-Kreiner 2010; Hannam, Sheller, & Urry, 2006). In line with this view and within pilgrimage studies, Smith (1992) argues that the term ‘pilgrimage' connotes a religious journey, particularly one to a shrine or a sacred place. Coleman and Crang (2006) argue that pilgrimage movements entail both movement to and movement at sacred sites.

Many of the theories referenced within pilgrimage studies are adopted from tourism scholarship.24 _{Tourism research develops a new mobility paradigm that offers a} conceptual framework for understanding the nature not only of tourism, but also of many other practices (Bærenholdt, Haldrup, Larsen, & Urry, 2004). According to this perspective, places are seen as dynamic, as places of movement. 'Places are like ships,' note Bærenholdt et al., 'moving around and not necessarily staying in one location' (Bærenholdt, Haldrup, Larsen, & Urry, 2004, p. 146). In this thesis, following this perspective, pilgrimage spaces, such as the space of the shrine of Imam Reza or the online spaces that mediate the shrine, are understood as fluid and dynamic. The spaces that mediate the presence of Imam Reza are not stable and fixed but diverse and

24 _{For an in-depth understanding of the intersection of tourism and pilgrimage see Cohen, 1992, 1998;}

Collins-Kreiner & Kliot, 2000; Digance, 2003, 2006; Ebron, 1999; Frey, 1998; MacCannell, 1973; Smith, 1992; Timothy & Olsen, 2006; Turner & Turner, 1978; Vukonić, 1996.

multiple, and through the case studies that are explored here this diversity is unpacked.25

A recent survey of mobilities research stresses a number of important aspects of this emerging field of study, including a focus on the relationship between human mobilities and immobilities; analysis of the relationship between mobility systems and infrastructural moorings; and the interrelational dynamics between physical, informational, virtual and imaginative forms of mobility (Hannam et al., 2006; Collins- Kreiner, 2010). Although the concept of migration has gained much attention in the field of mobilities, other forms of ‘circulation,’ and in particular ‘religious circulations,’ have received less attention (Eickelman & Piscatori, 1990, p.12). The representation of the mobility of crowds of pilgrims can be seen in terms of the number of pilgrims traveling to a sacred site: for example, each year an estimated three to five million Muslims go on the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, around five million Christians go to Lourdes in France, and 28 million Hindu pilgrims visit the River Ganges in India (Singh, 2006). This number for the shrine of Imam Reza is 12 million.26

Bhardwaj’s well-known study of Hindu places of pilgrimage in India proposes that ‘[p]ilgrim “flows” are the connecting links between the Hindu population and its numerous sacred centers’ (1997, P.7). His book is about ‘the countless dedicated pilgrims whose footprints have given meaning to India as a cultural entity’ (Bhardwaj,

25 _{The representation of shrine as being diverse and not stable is in line with STS’s view that material}

objects or technologies (here a built artifact) are situated, and they are configured in relation to both human and non-humans or in other words they are not separate entities operating on their own.

1997, p. x). In his study he argues that pilgrimage journeys contribute to the shaping of a ‘pan-Indian’ Hindu holy space (1973, p. 173).

Eickelman and Piscatori (1990b) look at Muslim travelers and juxtapose the Hajj (the obligatory Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca) with hijra (emigration), rihla (travel for learning and other purposes) and ziyara (visits to shrines, Arabic for ziyarat). Their approach helps to challenge the representation of pilgrimage as ‘exceptional’ practice, not only because they argue that motives for travel can be complex and mixed, but also because they mention how not just the sacred, but also the economic geography of Muslim travel can prompt deeply felt convictions. Thus ‘[t]he need to travel to saintly shrines or [...] the need of Turkish workers in Europe to travel back to Turkey, may be as compelling as the doctrinally enjoined pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina’ (1990b, p. xiv). Similar nuances are evident in Tapper’s research (1990), where she examines connections between gender, movement and exchange in a Turkish community. Tapper shows how, in the general sense, pilgrimage can be seen as a voluntary movement for the purpose of paying respect to a person or shrine, whose authority is thereby acknowledged (Tapper, 1990, pp. 236-7).

A connected notion to the diversity of places of pilgrimage, which looks at pilgrimage spaces as socially configured, is pilgrimage landscape. Alderman (2002) introduces the term 'pilgrimage landscape' to point to the relationships between people and place. No place is intrinsically sacred and holy. Rather, pilgrimages and their attendant landscapes, like all places, are 'social constructions,' which do not simply emerge out of nowhere but undergo what Seaton (1999, p.140, 2002) calls 'sacralisation'—a process by which certain spaces are marked as meaningful, religious sites.

In recent years, many have examined pilgrimage as a ‘socio-spatial practice’ (Urry 2000, p.49) involving mobility. And, as Turner notes, pilgrimage also involves ‘kinetic practices’ of mobility (Turner 1978, p. xiii), small micro motions (such as, in the cases of this thesis, dialing and/or holding the phone towards the golden dome of the holy shrine of Imam Reza), are seen as socio-spatial experiences; these micro movements are part of the enactment and experience of pilgrimage. In this thesis I argue that pilgrimage mediated by phone, or by leaving comments on a website or writing letters, also includes imaginative and virtual movement. Urry distinguishes between the physical movement of objects, imaginative travel, virtual travel (e.g. via the Internet), and the corporeal travel of people (2002, p. 256). When there exists a vast array of ways to be ‘on the move’, it becomes important to examine the complex and interwoven forms of distance and proximity that are inherent in the practice of pilgrimage: ‘One should investigate not only physical and immediate presence, but also the socialities involved in occasional co-presence, imagined co-presence and virtual co-presence’ (Urry, 2002, p. 256). Swatos asserts in his reflections on pilgrimage (2002, p. 120) that processes of globalization can stimulate the rediscovery of various kinds of particularism and localism. With the increased use of ICTs and a rise in economic and financial issues which limit Muslims’ ability to physically travel to the shrine, many Iranians are experiencing particular and localized ways (which adhere to their culture and history) of experiencing pilgrimage. This thesis explores these particularities and localities of pilgrimage to Imam Reza.

Morinis (1992) discusses the problem of defining the ‘sacred’, proposing that ‘it is the pursuit of the ideal, whether deified or not, that defines the sacred journey’ (1992, p. 2). In this sense defining pilgrimage as a journey can be problematic since it does not take

into account the non-geographical aspect of pilgrimage or of sacred journeys more broadly. Hindu mystics and Sufis, for example, have developed a concept of the inner pilgrimage, by which the pilgrim visits sacred places within the microcosm of the mind and body. This concept provides what in Western terms seems to be a metaphorical sense of the journey (Coleman and Eade, 2004), or in Urry’s (2002) words, an imagined journey.

In sufism pilgrimage means not only traveling through geography but also travel of the mind (Nikolaisen, 2004). The journey of the mind or the soul to reach closeness to God is intimately related to bodily movement through ritual (Nikolaisen, 2004, p. 93). Examples taken from other religious traditions include the notion of pilgrimage as a metaphor for the journey of the Christian soul (Morris, 2002, p. 2) or even Bawa Yamba’s study of West African Muslims based in the Sudan. These pilgrims do not move as such, yet regard themselves as being in transit to Mecca, thus perpetuating ‘an ideology of pilgrim-ness’ (1995, p. 120). Viewing pilgrimage as a journey of the mind is accepted and practiced by Iranians Shiites. With this in mind, pilgrimage mobilities here are not necessarily about the physical mobility of the pilgrim’s body such as walking. Rather, pilgrimage mobility may include small motions in the fingers when a pilgrim scrolls or clicks through pages on a religious website, or the imagined mobility or the journey of the mind and soul to reach closeness to God or an Imam.

In order to gain an understanding of pilgrimage we need to consider all forms of movement,27 _{and not merely physical travel to the shrine. Kong (2001, p. 228) calls for} investigation of pilgrimage ‘beyond the officially sacred’ sites of religion such as the

27 _{Chapter Six for example discusses what emotions do in relation to mediated pilgrimage, this discussion}

church, shrine or temple. In this sense Morinis argues that the analytical reduction of pilgrimages to another ritual of simpler structure and form, the rite of passage, cannot do justice to the complexity and diversity of the assemblages of meaning and practices that shape the phenomenon, just as strict boundaries between pilgrimages and other forms of cultural journeying cannot easily be demarcated (1992b, pp. 8–9). Despite these cautions, Morinis does acknowledge movement as an important part of understanding pilgrimage. He argues that ‘the (pilgrimage) term can be put to use wherever journeying and some embodiment of an ideal intersect’ (1992, p. 3) and that ‘the essence of the journey is movement’ (1992, p. 12). Patterns of the pilgrimage journey may differ—sometimes taking the pilgrim from home to a sacred shrine and back, sometimes tracing more spiral or irregular movements (like the whirling Sufi dervishes)—just as differing modes of locomotion may be adopted at various points, including crawling, dancing, and so on.By a logic of opposites, the symbolic meaning of pilgrimage movement may be informed by and juxtaposed with cultural representations of its opposite, stasis and immobility (Coleman and Eade, 2004). Chapter Seven discusses the spaces of remediated pilgrimage and the (im)mobilities that shape this particular practice among Shiite Iranian Muslims.