A Review of Simon Coleman, Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2021, 335 pp.

Abstract

The new book by British anthropologist Simon Coleman is an ambitious attempt to highlight major issues in pilgrimage studies and point out promising directions for their further development. Based on analysis of hundreds of studies by anthropologists, historians, cultural geographers, and the fieldwork of its author, the book suggests expanding our understanding of pilgrimage and to study it in relation to other ritualised and non-ritualised activities. In particular, the author focuses on pilgrimage as a form of mobility within the framework of the mobility turn and neoliberalism. Criticising a tendency towards “singularism” in the anthropology of religion, he promotes a multi-sited ethnography that allows him to draw comparisons between religious sites and communities. In order to conceptualise the scale of pilgrimage, Coleman refers to the concept of articulation, describing the relationship between pilgrimage and other practices. He also re-establishes concepts that were already borrowed from physics, architecture, and linguistics to anthropology as metaphors: laterality, penumbra, adjacency, porosity, entrainment, etc. Coleman shows how pilgrimage scholars have benefited from these metaphors and how these metaphors complement articulations. The review discusses the pros and cons of such an approach and outlines certain prospects which could complement Coleman’s analysis.