From Pilgrim to Tourist and Back Again: Travel as a Sacred Journey

This paper explores the gray area that exists between the semantic differentiation of the terms pilgrim and tourist. Understanding all travel in light of Graburn's "sacred journey", the importance of this semantic difference is diminished. I use original Roman itineraria (travelogues) to trace travel to the Holy Land spanning nearly 1600 years. I include my own ethnographic field observations as a modern travelogue of a visit to the Holy Land. Ultimately, this paper provides a sweeping view of travel and its ability through fleeting moments of earnest self-fulfillment, memory creation, and embodied experience to function as a dynamic (re)creator of identity