Here is your essay on the social significance of pilgrimages.
The social significance of pilgrimages, we shall first examine Turner’s thesis on pilgrimage as a social process, where he emphasizes the communities in pilgrimages and their liminal character. We shall then see how pilgrimage is related to different aspects of social life, namely, social and cultural integration, educational, economic, and political and other kinds of activities.
The Social Significance of Pilgrimages:
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Turner holds that pilgrimage is a social process. He emphasizes the communities in pilgrimages and their liminal character. He has shown how pilgrimage is related to different aspects of social life, namely, social and cultural integration, education, economic, political and other kinds of activities.
1. Turner’s Thesis:
Victor W. Turner holds that pilgrimage has the classic three-stage form of a rite of passage:
(i) Separation,
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(ii) The liminal stage i.e. the journey itself, the sojourn at the shrine, and the contact with the sacred, and
(iii) Reaggregation i.e. the home-coming.
In this context, Turner asks us to consider two modalities of social experience as under:
(i) Of structure, and
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(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) Communitas:
On the other hand, communitas presents 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 “unprecendented potency”. Communitas 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 communitas relation, and communitas, a spontaneously generated relationship between leveled and equal, total and individuated human beings”.
Liminality and communitas 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 communitas becomes visible in the social bond which develops among pilgrims and which welds them into a group.
Relations among members of the group of pilgrims cut across the social divisions. Pilgrims are relieved for a time from the nets social structure wherefrom, they journey to the pilgrimage centre. It allows temporary release. Therefore, pilgrimage is designated as a form of anti-structure compared to the highly ordered and structured sedentary life of the place of residence.
(2) Pilgrimage and Socio-cultural Integration:
One can observe the contribution of pilgrimages to social and cultural integration of a people at three levels as under:
(i) First, pilgrimage promotes national or regional integration cutting across , group boundaries.
(ii) Pilgrimage has a impact on the group of the pilgrims in maintaining and > strengthening the values and ideals held by the group.
(iii) In many cases Pilgrimage serves to reinforce the existing patterns of social relations within the area from which the pilgrimage draws pilgrims. India abounds in diversities of rice, region, language, sect, caste etc. The pilgrimages have been a very important vehicle of the idea of essential unity of the Indian people. M.N. Srinivas (1962 : 105) writes, “The concept of unity of India is essentially a religious one”. Famous centres of pilgrimage lie in every part of the country. In the long time back when the means of communication and transport were very poor, pilgrims occasionally walked hundreds of miles across the areas full of fierce animals and dacoits and faced disease and privation. The grand pilgrimage was pradakshina or clockwise circumambulation of the territory of India. In a sacred centre like Banaras many kinds of people and many local and regional elements of culture are juxtaposed and ordered in a small place.
(3) Pilgrimage and Education:
Pilgrimage has been one of the important sources of education, information and cultural awareness for the pilgrims.
The Hindu pilgrimage affords, for instance, an opportunity to the people living in distant villages to know India as a whole and also her varying manners, life styles and customs. Karve noted three characteristics of education present in the pilgrimage:
(i) The preservation of traditional knowledge,
(ii) Its cultivation,
(iii) Its transmission to the next generation.
This education was also many-sided. It included Religion and philosophy and three arts of music, dancing and drama.
(4) Pilgrimage and the Arts:
Dance and music, architecture, sculpture, and painting receive encouragement and transmission through pilgrimage. Many of the temples in Hindu and Jain tirthas are famous for their artistic beauty and philosophy in brick and stone. The temple worship contributed to the great development and subsequent refinement of sculpture and painting, and music and dancing.
(5) Pilgrimages, Material Culture and Economy:
Pilgrimages have a role in the spread of Material culture through the exchange of ideas and goods among the pilgrims along the routes of pilgrimage. Besides, deity requirements of temporary shelter, food, articles for worship, several forms of entertainment, recreation also appear as a side-business activity.
For example, the Pushkar tirtha in Rajasthan is famous for both its sacred character and its fair, where brisk business in animal trade is transacted between buyers and sellers from a wide area.
(6) Socio-political aspect of Pilgrimage:
The close association in a common purpose, namely, the purpose of pilgrimage, of the numbers of people from different tribes, communities and localities affords the basis for the development of political unity and stability of political authority.