Shadowdance 009: Out of this World: Conventions as Pilgrimage
Anthropologist Victor Turner made his career observing and analysing the rites of passage and the process of pilgrimage as special, liminal experiences within a culture. Traditionally, these processes are connected with religious experience, but according to Turner and many other thinkers in his field, experiences that take us beyond our ordinary reality so that we can reframe our relationship to our everyday world are a crucial part of our society and our development as individuals. In a secularized society, do we still have pilgrimage? What experiences do the people in our generation seek in order to achieve that transformational state of liminality? Do we find it in gaming, in fantasy conventions, on the Internet? How does the nature of these places impact the overall experience? Can pilgrimage happen completely removed from the context of a religion?
October 9th, 2006 at 2:09 am
I’m going to have to listen to this one a second time, to catch everything that was being said. I did notice that the mood really shifted downward once you two got out of conventions and into generational experiences.
December 11th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
Excellent episode. Wondered if we could catch an mp3 of the closing song by Deos?
September 13th, 2007 at 9:22 am
This was a particularly profound episode. It was personally significant for me on many levels - as a religion and anthropology student, as a gen Xer, and just on the heels of this year’s DragonCon. I think the message you are putting out though transcends personal significance and I hope your audience comes away with some sense of that – of grasping the numinous in everyday life and not just in those liminal spaces, and especially not just in religion.