Commentary: Liminality in Acculturation and Pilgrimage: When Movement Becomes Meaningful

Abstract

Movement entails both local/short-term and distant/long-term journeys to unfamiliar lands. Psychology has traditionally neglected human-beings-on-the-move to concentrate on fixed structures. Overcoming this oversight, acculturation studies shed light on human beings crossing boundaries, and the authors of these articles bring up the positive side of acculturation (without leaving out the ambivalence). I want to elaborate on these insights in the context of pilgrimages and tourism. Particularly, there are numerous tensions that are constitutive of acculturative experiences and travel in general, including the interplay between the longing for the far away and the longing for the near and familiar, structure and agency, and encapsulation and decapsulation. Liminality in travel is not static or a given, but rather is dynamic and negotiated by various social actors. Thus I also wish to briefly examine, based on pilgrimage experiences, how the sense of the extraordinary (sacred) is generated through the above dynamic processes and then relate this to the notion of catalysis in the psychological domain. Bringing in the notion of catalysts from chemistry offers an alternative conceptual tool to investigate complex, systemic, and dynamic phenomena.