The Seductions of Pilgrimage explores the simultaneously attractive and repellent, beguiling and alluring forms of seduction in pilgrimage. It focuses on the varied discursive, imaginative, and practical mechanisms of seduction that draw individual pilgrims to a pilgrimage site; the objects, places, and paradigms that pilgrims leave behind as they embark on their hyper-meaningful travel experience; and the often unforeseen elements that lead pilgrims off their desired course. Presenting the first comprehensive study of the role of seduction on individual pilgrims in the study of pilgrimage and tourism, it will appeal to scholars of anthropology, cultural geography, tourism, heritage, and religious studies.

This book explores the paradoxes of Self–Other relations in the field of tourism. It particularly focuses on the 'power' of different forms of 'Otherness' to seduce and to disrupt, and, eventually, also to renew the social and cosmological orders of 'modern' culture and everyday life. Drawing on a series of ethnographic case studies, the contributors investigate the production, socialisation and symbolic encompassment of different 'Others' as a political and also an economic resource to govern social life in the present. The volume provides a comparative inductive study on the modernist philosophical concepts of time, 'Otherness', and the self in practice, and relates it to contemporary tourism and mobility.