the social significance of Pilgrimages

 1. Turner’s Thesis:

Victor W. Turner holds that pilgrimage has the classic three-stage form of a rite of passage:

(i) Separation,

(ii) The liminal stage i.e. the journey itself, the sojourn at the shrine, and the contact with the sacred, and

(iii) Aggregation i.e. the home-coming.

In this context, Turner asks us to consider two modalities of social experience as under:

(i) Of structure, and

(ii) Of cornmunitas.

(i) Structure:

In structure people are (a) differentiated by social role and (b) Position and linked in an often hierarchical political system.

(ii) Communities:

On the other hand, communities present itself in an Undifferentiated community of equal who may recognize each other in an immediate and total way. Cornmunitas “is almost everywhere held to be sacred or holy”. The reason may be that it transgresses or dissolves the norms that Govern structured and institutionalized relationship and is accompanied by experiences of “unprecedented potency”. Communities emerge where social structure is not and reaffirms the bonds of essential unity upon which the social order ultimately rests.

The intervening period and flow of activities between departure from home for the pilgrimage centre and return there from to the familiar world is marked out by “liminality, the optimal setting of communities relation, and communities, a spontaneously generated relationship between leveled and equal, total and individuated human beings”.

Liminality and communities constitute anti-structure. Anti-structure is the source and origin of the all structures and their critique. It gives suggestion to new possibilities. In the pilgrimage situation the ethos of communities becomes visible in the social bond which develops among pilgrims and which welds them into a group.

Relations among members of the