Bertalan Pusztai Religious Tourists

Copyright © , by University of Jyväskylä ABSTRACT Pusztai, Bertalan Religious Tourists. Constructing Authentic Experiences in Late Modern Hungarian Catholicism Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2004, 256 p. (Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities ISSN 1459-4331; 27) ISBN 951-39-1990-0 Finnish and Hungarian summary Diss. This study deals with the subject of religious tourists. It therefore focuses on a group created from without: for even if religious tourism exists — as many doubt — we never find anyone professing to be a religious tourist. The subjects of this study identify themselves mostly as tourists or pilgrims, but never as ‘religious tourists’. To the public mind, the subjects of this study are not pilgrims but tourists if we are talking of ‘pilgrimage’ as such, and they are not tourists but pilgrims if we are talking of ‘tourism’ as such. From an academic point of view religious tourists are group travellers with religious motives making use of the services of professional travel organisers. Understood in this way, religious tourists as a group exist; indeed they are quite numerous and are present in all world religions. However, because of the powerful concepts which lie behind the terms ‘tourist’ and ‘pilgrim’, they are rarely perceived or examined. The Hungarian religious tourist constitutes the subject of this investigation. I wish to present a ‘locality’ of contemporary Hungarian society, a pilgrim travel agency and its denizens, the travellers. This locality is both extraordinarily new, sporadically occupied (used only occasionally by individuals) and part of a multi-layered supra- national system. This study focuses on the travellers. I am interested in how they interpret the places they visit. I aim to reveal the motivations of religious tourists. I seek to explore how their perceptions change during a trip and how the physical and spiritual journeys are related to each other. I wish to analyse how participants define themselves (as pilgrims, as tourists, as both or as neither) and, to be more precise, I will attempt to reveal how the modern European believer conceives of his or her identity as pilgrim. Key areas to be explored: 1, the relationship between individual, group and faith; 2, the significance and meaning of religious tourism in the internal sense of devotion and external travel experience; 3, the function of religious tourism as a spiritual movement and as a mode of consumption for modern Western man granted the opportunity of choice; 4, where modern Western man can find and how he constructs his self-image; 5, what ‘material’ he has available for this. All in all, what is the meaning of being a pilgrim today? Keywords: pilgrimage, religious tourism, religious tourists, late modern Catholicism in Hungary, authentic experience, interpretativism, constructivist anthropology Author’s address Bertalan Pusztai Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology University of Szeged, Hungary 6725 Szeged, Egyetem utca 2. [email protected] Supervisor Professor Bo Lönnqvist Department of History and Ethnology University of Jyväskylä Finland Reviewers Marjut Anttonen PhD, researcher Department of Ethnology Åbo Akademi University Finland Professor René Gothóni Department of Comparative Religion University of Helsinki Finland Opponent Professor Arne Bugge Amundsen, Institutt for kulturstudier University of Oslo Norway PREFACE In retrospect, the present study on religious tourism may be seen, in fact, as a logical result of my intellectual development. By means of memory that systematises the past in a logical order, the years that passed from the end of my university studies (or rather from the beginning of my university studies) until the present paper was born, might be considered as the one possible outcome. However tempting it may seem to create an individual mythology, it would simply not be true. Religious tourism is not the only topic I have been interested in. Neither is it the only theme I have been preparing for, or dealing with, during the near decade that has passed since I graduated. (This may partly be the cause, why we had to wait so long for this paper to be written.) In spite of this, the initial sentence written above is true, as religious tourism seemed to be a suitable research topic for me, since in this field I could use and make the most of all my knowledge and studies, as well as the possibilities provided by my environment, together with the theoretical-methodological problems I had been interested in. In this way elaborating the present topic was in fact a logical result (among several others) of my intellectual development. Once I have driven myself to an unavoidable “discursive field”, perhaps exactly at this point, in the most personal context of the most humanistic and subjective science, it is worth saying a few words about this “intellectual way”. My highly respected and beloved grammar school had the effect – hidden for outsider observers - in late Socialism, that it educated us to think critically. This is rather surprising from a denominational school – at least for those formulating their opinion not on personal experiences, but on their images instead. In my opinion encouraging the students to think and judge clearly was not only a reaction to the already exhausted (but still hostile) regime, but it was also characteristic of the Piarist Order, of the Piarist monks. Participating in a school competition I had the possibility of experiencing the wonderful human gifts of qualitative cultural research, and it became clear for me that I should study something similar to that, where I could do something like this. At the university for a while I was amused by the evolutionist and statistical description of what was at that time an extinct and staged peasant culture, presented as the ethnographical reality. Yet, being interested in religious studies, especially in the problems related to Catholicism so well known to me, I soon started to feel, rather than understand, that studying culture in fact means studying human cognition and imagination. Studying religion as a non-material phenomenon – in other words due to human restrictions it can be comprehended solely through the mind of another individual - made it clear to me that qualitative culture research should aim at revealing individual interpretations and meaning-creations. It was only one step further from this position to realize that interpretations are in fact individual constructions – creations – which are naturally dependant on other social processes that also provide meaning. All these revelations naturally led to the adoption of a critical position with regard to the identity-creator romantic ethnography, a phenomenon so potent in Central Europe, and also turned my attention towards the present. All in all it logically led from the romantic idyll of searching for a normative cultural picture to the acceptance and enforcement of a different definition of culture in my research. It follows from the foregoing that religious tourism seemed to be an excellent research topic, as hopefully this work will demonstrate. Besides my graduate university studies, my years at the Invisible College (1992-1996) in Budapest, my summer scholarships spent at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Collegium Hungaricum (1994, 1995), together with my postgraduate studies at Åbo Akademi, Department of Comparative Religion and Folkloristics in Turku (academic year of 1996/97), and finally my teaching experience at Szeged University all contributed to the fact that I have devoted some years on studying religious tourists. These experiences all helped me to realize that at the intersection of pilgrimage and tourism, two phenomena so full of meaning, there is something that can be studied only with the critical thinking, methodological sensitivity and theoretical devotion provided by contemporary European ethnology, cultural anthropology. To what extent this was realized, the reader will judge. This paper was not written in the easiest possible way, or in places closest to home or under the most comfortable circumstances. All this was my deliberate decision. I thought it was worth seeking an understanding of the core of contemporary European ethnology from one of its outstanding representatives. At the end of this process now it has become clear to me that it was worth joining Professor Bo Lönnqvist to get to know first-hand the human and contemporary face of mainstream ethnology. Professor Lönnqvist’s perceptive guidance made me realize what message ethnology – step-by-step leaving behind the task of identity creation – has for our contemporaries. Besides the fact that being close to his engaging personality is always a great experience, I must thank Professor Lönnqvist for teaching me several basic lessons; first of all that of faith in man. Thank you, Bosse, for keeping my integrity and my researcher’s self-esteem alive when times got difficult. I must also place special emphasis on the support of Professor René Gothóni, from whom I profited not only via his excellent books, but also through his supportive pre-evaluation of my paper. The other reviewer of this paper, Dr. Marjut Anttonen, has helped me in my work by analysing and evaluating the manuscript with her usual accuracy and clear vision. Independent of this, through analysing with an ethnologist’s eye the difficulties of integrating in another society, as well as through her true friendship, she on many occasions helped my family and myself to survive spiritually. Here I should remember several of my teachers and colleagues. In the first place I should mention my colleague, Associate Professor Gábor Barna’s decade-long general support and attention. It is undoubtedly due to him that the present paper is linked to the field of pilgrimage. I must mention my workplace, the Faculty of Arts at Szeged University, which provided me with the necessary study leave to accomplish my work. I will always cordially remember my discussions with Professor Ulrika Wolf-Knuts in Åbo.

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