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"This book offers a new theoretical framework for exploring contemporary pilgrimage, exploring examples ranging from the Hajj to the Camino, and arguing that pilgrimage activity should be understood not solely as going to, staying at, and leaving a sacred place, but also as occurring in apparently mundane or domestic times, places, and practices"--

AbstractMuch study of ritual has focused on demarcated spaces and times of performance, and the often spectacular features of such collective behaviour provide rich resources for analysis of formal, symbolically dense action. This article shifts attention to dimensions of ritual events that entail zones of ambiguous, diffuse, or limited engagement where the boundaries between participant and non‐participant, viewer and viewed, may be unclear. Focusing on visits to the English pilgrimage site of Walsingham, I examine multiple modalities of participation through analysing the relationships among observing, engaging in, and narrating ritual action. In doing so, I develop a lexicon for the study of performances whose ethnographic profile does not stand out in sharp relief. Key terms for my analysis are 'laterality' (as opposed to liminality) and 'penumbra' (as opposed to centre).

In this article I explore the continued salience of Durkheimian effervescence through an examination of ritual activities contained within contemporary English cathedrals. My argument focuses less on collective occasions of creative or destructive tumult and more on ritualised forms of action where modalities of engagement and participation are nuanced, reflexively negotiated and small-scale. My aim is to render more subtle – and potentially productive – our understandings of gradations in ritual intensity.

I explore the implications of example‐making for both informants and ethnographers through an analysis of the history of the refoundation of the Anglican shrine at Walsingham during the twentieth century. I argue for an appreciation of distinctions between examples as 'models' and 'instances', but also for a focus on relations between the inchoate and the specific in processes of exemplification. The paper shows how an examination of the making of examples by actors in the field can speak to the creation of examples in writing and analysis, and may introduce elements of 'serendipity' more normally associated with encounters in the field.

What does it mean to talk of the religion 'of' a given country? I reflect on an edited volume dealing with religion in Britain and consider two related themes: the secular considered as 'absence' or 'presence', and the siting of religion not in conventional denominations or ritual practices but in spaces of encounter between religions, and between the so‐called 'religious' and 'secular'.