Introduction to Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion, eds. Simon Coleman & John Eade (Routledge 2004).

The authors note the conventionality of place-centered approaches to pilgrimages and assert that "just as we broaden our ethnographic gaze to take in more than the central shrine, so we attempt to widen the theoretical location of studies of 'sacred travel'" (3) For Coleman and Eade, emphasizing place so strongly has led to the eclipse of movement, a theme they privilege in their efforts to revitalize pilgrimage as an analytical (and not just ethnographic) category. As they hasten to admit, "we are not denying the importance of place in ethnography" (emphasis added); not surprisingly then, their discussion leaves unexplored the potential of fresh theorizations of place to invigorate the study of pilgrimage. One of the consequences of the authors' failure to include a rethinking of place within their project of "reframing pilgrimage" is the resealing up of some of the very theoretical "dead ends" they seek to unblock. An example of this comes when Coleman and Eade discuss how studies of pilgrimage might contribute to understandings of globalization. Tellingly, their illustrations stress the emergence of various pilgrimages as sites for the reassertion of localism and particularism, as if accepting what the folk model of globalization implies-- namely that the embodied forms of travel involved in specific sites of pilgrimage could a priori have no bearing on the constitution of supralocal or "global" formations.

In all fairness, however, Coleman and Eade do engage with cultural geographers such as Urry and Crang, if not around "place" and "place-making" then in regard to their analytical approaches in distinguishing various forms of "mobility" and "co-presence," both analytically and within the "semantic fields" of pilgrimages themselves. This part of their discussion is worth revisiting when I revise Chapter 3.

Distancing themselves from Turner's characterization of pilgrimage as a "liminoid" phenomenon that generates "social encounters without hierarchical constraints", the authors cite Tremlett's (2003) observation that "both Victor Turner and Mircea Eliade can be seen as 'romanticist' in their attempt to secure for religion an 'ineffable inner space of realm' that can stand as a critique of modernity and its values". All in all, the authors sharply reject the tendency to view pilgrimages as activities "divorced from daily life" (ibid).

Tremlett's "romanticist" critique mirrors Partha Chatterjee's notion of the how Indian nationalists posited an inner, spiritual Indianness within the shell of external Westernization. Both examples may suggest ways of elaborating on Filipino intellectuals' search for the inner uncolonized self, either in Chapter 3 or in Chapter 5.

First, is the positing of an inneffable inner space or realm (here yet another reference point is William James) of a piece with the disembedding of religion from the rest of social life? I think so, although they're not exactly the same thing.

Filipino intellectuals who look to Mt. Banahaw to deal with historical baggage on a personal as well as societal level are perhaps looking for a kind of religious ethos that infuses every aspect of social life and is sumultaneously Filipino. In their everyday lives as modern Catholics, spirituality is important but compartmentalized (to the inner ineffable self and to personal religious observance and charity). It is as modern Catholics that they find the ideal of an embedded spirituality deeply appealing. And it is as creolized postcolonials that they are stirred by visions of autochonous Filipino religion. Their journeys to Banahaw give them a taste of what things might be like if spirituality were embedded in every moment of one's life and if the sutures stitching and separating the precolonial past and the postcolonial present were to vanish.

Many of the travelers I know to fall in this category are more than a little reflexive about this fantasy. The knew the ahistoricity of their longing and understood the incommensurability of the contemporary folk religious milieu with the autochthonous past. Indeed, they embrace that incommensurability, which makes it possible to be modern Catholic compatible and to make practical gestures towards spirits, as well as to cherish shadowy identifications with precolonial babaylan and the ma-aram, the latter mediated through key informants like Mama Rose and Nanay Isabel.