Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism: Commemorating the Dead

Commemorating the dead: military pilgrimage and battlefield tourism / John Eade and Mario Katic -- Military pilgrimage commemoration and reconciliation -- Healing social and physical bodies: Lourdes and military pilgrimage / John Eade -- Pilgrimage for Anglo-Japanese reconciliation: reinterpreting the past by British Second World War veterans / Kyoko Murakami -- KFOR soldiers as pilgrims in Kosovo: Black Madonna in Letnica / Biljana Sikimic -- "Maple leaf up": patriotic, historical, and spiritual aspects of Canadian Armed Forces participation in the Nijmegen March / Michael Peterson -- Military pilgrimages, battlefield tourism and contestation -- Military pilgrimage to Bobovac: a Bosnian "sacred place" / Mario Katic -- Military tourism as state-effect in the Sri Lankan civil war / Rohan Bastin and Premakumara de Silva -- Sanctified past. The pilgrimages of Polish re-enactors to World War II battlefields / Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska -- Afterword -- Sacred secular sites and their visitors / Robert M. Hayden

"Military Pilgrimage and Battlefield Tourism is the first volume to bring together a detailed analysis of professional military pilgrimage with other forms of commemorating military conflict. The volume looks beyond the discussion of battlefield tourism undertaken primarily by civilians which has dominated research until now through an analysis of the relationship between religious, military and civilian participants. Drawing on a comparative approach towards what has mostly been categorised as secular pilgrimage, dark tourism/thanatourism, military and religious tourism, and re-enactment, the contributors explore the varied ways in which memory, material culture and rituals are performed at particular places. The volume also engages with the debate about the extent to which western definitions of pilgrimage and tourism, as well as such related terms as religion, sacred and secular, can be applied in non-western contexts. "--Provided by publisher.