I am about to set out on my fan pilgrimage next week to Canada to see Great Big Sea in concert. The band will not be coming anywhere close to where I live so I have to travel to them (That is distinct from stalking and following them around as I am only attending two concerts). I am not the first fan to make a pilgrimage to see their favourite musicians or artists perform. Fans undertake all kinds of pilgrimages from sports fans visiting the home ground of their favourite sporting team or visiting the scenes of some of their favourite movie or television shows or some other pilgrimage associated with fandom. So I feel it is appropriate to explore the concept of the fan pilgrimage and what type of pilgrimages fans undertake.
The research distinguishes two types of pilgrimages, those religious followers make to sacred sites and those made by anyone including music and sporting fans to a site of significant personal interest. The Princeton University site distinguishes between religious and cultural pilgrimages “ A modern phenomenon is the cultural pilgrimage which is also about a personal journey, involves a secular response. Destinations for such pilgrims can include historic sites of national or cultural importance and be defined as places of “cultural significance; an artist’s home the local of a pivotal event or an iconic destination”. Examples include a baseball fan visiting Cooperstown New York. Destinations for cultural pilgrims include examples such as Auschwitz concentration camp, Gettysburg Battlefield, the Ernest Hemingway House or even Disneyland. Cultural pilgrims may also travel on religious pilgrimage routes such as the Way of St James with the perspective of making it a historical and cultural pilgrimage rather than religious experiences”.
The webpage Music Pilgrims makes an interesting observation about music pilgrims “Music fans make pilgrimages to a range of sites that can be seen as culturally significant or scared depending upon the view of devotion. The sites visited include gravesites, homes, special locations and significant events associated with musicians dead and alive. As described in the website about deities, some music fans today seem to worship their favourite musicians for many of the same traits that religious followers worship their deities. Since deity is often viewed as another term for a god or goddess, isn’t the pilgrimage of fans to a famous (ie sacred) location pertaining to their favourite artist and of wanting to be in the presence of a God?
This is where the ‘secular’ pilgrimage comes in. The secular pilgrimage can be described as the journey to a “contemporary special location” and the memorial sites and graves of special individuals (Margy 2008). Margy makes the argument that these visits have a religious dimension and may even be religiously motivated (2008)…
Fan pilgrimages are big business whether they are tourist organisations running fan based tours or universities offering courses in examining the phenomena. The Study Abroad program at the George Washington University in America offering summer programs (at a cost of around $8000 for a unit) examines this phenomena and makes some interesting comments “The tourists have a bad reputation. We are encouraged to look at their experience as necessarily inauthentic, doomed to superficiality at best, and at worst an ongoing opportunity to insult other cultures. The fans of popular culture also have a bad reputation. Even though the media assures us that we are in the middle of a “Geek Revolution” that same media is also quick to characterise fans as over invested, sometimes creepy, but more often just sad people who need to ‘get a life” (there is no reference for this quote). They raise a whole lot of questions but the most interesting is what constitutes an “authentic” experience for the fan? Fans that are prepared to invest time and money in these types of tours and events usually have a great a deal of knowledge about the fandom already. If the experiences offered were not authentic, word would spread quickly throughout the fandom network and they would be avoided by genuine diehard fans. I think the more interesting question is what kind of fans take these tours and are they really genuine diehard fans. The reading list for this course looks interesting and a great place to start for a bit more investigation.
My ‘pilgrimage’ will be nothing quite so organised or expensive, just a couple of concerts and a good time. Everybody wants something different from the pilgrimage they take. For me I hope to visit some beautiful spots, meet some great people and experience the culture, hear and celebrate some fabulous music and have a good old fashioned time.
References
‘Pilgrims’ at www.princeton.edu /…pilgrims viewed 8 April 2013
‘What is a pilgrimage?- Music Pilgrimage: Religious Like Devotion to A God’ at www. Musicpilgrimage.webs.com viewed 8 April 2014
