tourism that occurs in sacred places.
Sacred places are specific environments that connect elements of nature with sacred values using belief systems, mythology, cosmology, history, and culture involving religious faiths. The material manifestation of places imbued with such values generates a unique spirit of place and a natural, sociocultural, and physical environment. Both the physical and metaphysical nature of these places are articulated through religious frameworks and their meanings experienced through rituals and performances. As such, travelling to engage with the spirit of these places becomes the focus of religious tourism. Travel in and of itself becomes the cause of change in the physical and spiritual nature of these places. How the environment is impacted and changes depends largely on the nature of religious mobilities and the ways in which religious and governmental institutions mediate experiences with the sacred. This process is dialectical and leads to a continuous evolution of the people who visit, the people that live there, and the institutions that manage the place.
Fig. 1.2. A conceptual model of the relationships between religion, tourism, and the environment.
This theoretical model can be illustrated using a setting of a generic pilgrim-town. In this town, there are several institutions that interact with each other to produce and reproduce the ecosystem within which religious tourism operates. These institutions can be broadly classified into five groups, which are not exclusive of each other and can have significant overlap between them. The first, and probably most significant, includes leaders of religious establishments – the gurus, and the ritual priests that form the core of the pilgrimage industry and are central to the catering for the religious and spiritual wants and needs of pilgrims. These ‘religious entrepreneurs’ seek to establish and maintain relationships of patronage with individuals, families, or community groups that invest in religious buildings and charities and engage in ritual performances. Second, the pilgrimage/ religious tourism industry is also comprised of several people engaged in supplementary trades that provide goods and services to visitors. Their activities depend on broader socioeconomic processes and factors, such as the economic status of patrons and pilgrims, patterns of visitation, modes of travel, availability and types of transportation, and the frequency of travel, among others.
Third, residents form an important institution within this pilgrim-town. Although religious entrepreneurs and tradespersons may form part of this category, residents also include devotees and other social groups that may serve religious establishments and businesses or work in other sectors of an urban economy. The fourth group of institutions are those involved in the governance and maintenance of the pilgrimage-town. These institutions may include state agencies operating across different scalar levels, such as municipalities and state government departments, as well as other corporate religious bodies and civic associations that are often classified as non-governmental organizations (NGOs). One notable example of this is the Sathya Sai Baba Trust in Puttaparti in Andhra Pradesh, India, that was established in 1972 by a highly revered guru named Sri Sathya Sai Baba. This trust has contributed significantly to the building of infrastructure and environmental services in the town of Puttaparti. Consisting of more than 10,000 employees, the trust runs an independent university and implements charitable projects providing social welfare in the region. One of its much discussed environmental projects is the water supply project that it has developed in partnership with the state government and a private sector company to provide drinking water in 750 villages in the Andhra Pradesh state (Parthasarthy, 2002). The fifth institutional group are the pilgrims that visit the pilgrim-town. Depending on their economic status, some pilgrims may exercise substantial influence on the pilgrimage centre through their patronage of religious establishments and funding of charities, temples, and public services for fellow travellers. Religious tourists can also be included in this group because of their importance to the continuing economic growth of these destinations in both the religious and secular sectors.
The creation and growth of any pilgrimage site depends on the extent to which these institutions interact in a positive manner to reinforce the religious importance of the place. The ritual practices performed by religious intermediaries, the services and artefacts provided by supporting trades, and the symbolism of various religious events and festivals sustain the religious identity and sacrality of sacred places. But pilgrimage, as both ritual practice and economy, is not independent from the changes in the broader socioeconomic and political realm within which it occurs and is therefore likely to change and consequently transform the religious environment (Shackley, 2001). These changes, as noted above, may be visible in the reorganisation of ritual performances, changes in seasonal patterns of pilgrimage flows, and the characteristics of visitors and religious investments that both shape, and are shaped by, the physical and built environment of the pilgrimage centre. Transformations in the socioeconomic and physical environment of pilgrimage centres are also shaped by changing representations of religiosity, piety, and sacredness of the pilgrimage landscape. These representations are articulated by religious institutions through discourses that interpret the changing environment of pilgrimage in different ways. Some may invoke mythological stories or past traditions to criticize or challenge the changes occurring in the built environment, while others might claim that the degradation of the physical environment reflects moral degeneracy and defilement of the sacred site. Other still might embrace religious symbols to argue for the modernization of religious traditions and pilgrimage sites. Together, these competing discourses of change produce new institutional spaces and configurations for regulating, managing, and sustaining the material landscape and cultural symbolism of the place.
Chapter Contributions
This quick review of the existing literature around the key concepts of tourism, religion, and environment shows that while each of these areas has its own exploratory domains, the relationships between these concepts have received varying degrees of attention. Of these connections, tourism—environment relations have received the greatest amount of attention and yielded basic conceptual frameworks to understand these relationships. However, the role of religious values that influence both positive and negative impacts between tourism and the environment are largely missing. The connections between tourism and religion only sparingly discuss environmental aspects, and regarding the relationships between religion and environment, the appeal of nature and ethical calls for environmental stewardship are quite evident, but investigations into the actual interactions of the various aspects that underpin these relationships within the material world are still lacking.
The chapters included in this volume elaborate on some of the core aspects of this theoretical model presented in this chapter that views ‘the environment’ of pilgrimage as a dynamic process shaped by the activities, forms of control, perceptions, and representations of the actors involved in the production of sacred sites. Some chapters focus on the environment as a resource or generator for religious tourism, while other chapters discuss the environment as a recipient of impacts of religious tourism.
In addition to this introductory chapter, there are eleven contributions in this book. In Chapter 2, Daniel Olsen examines the relationships between pilgrimage, religious tourism, biodiversity, and natural sacred sites, and how religiously motivated travel to these sites affects the natural environment. After highlighting the views of nature by several major faith traditions, Olsen turns to examine how natural sacred sites are defined and categorises these sites into sacred mountains and volcanoes, caves and grottoes, water, trees and groves, and plants and animals. The author then notes some of the impacts of pilgrimage and religious tourism on natural sacred sites, and finishes by discussing attempts at different scales to maintain the sanctity and sustainability of these sites through governance frameworks that focus on the preservation of biodiversity.
In Chapter 3, Kiran Shinde engages in a comparison of six religious tourism destinations in India through the analytical categories of environmental processes, institutional responsibility,
