The Tourism Imaginary and Pilgrimages to the Edges of the World

Edited by Nieves Herrero, Sharon R. Roseman

Publication date:

01 June 2015

Publisher

Channel View Publications

Dimensions:

210x148mm
6x8"

ISBN-13: 9781845415235

This book examines how the growth of tourism in locations that have historically been considered geographically remote plays a major role in the consolidation and transformation of often longstanding and powerful cultural imaginaries about ‘the edges of the world’. The contributors examine the attraction of the sublime, remoteness, continental border-points, and the dangers of the sea in Finisterre (or Fisterra) in Galicia (Spain); Finistère in Brittany (France); Land’s End, Cornwall (England); Lough Derg (Ireland); Nordkapp or North Cape (Norway); Cape Spear, Newfoundland (Canada); and Tierra del Fuego (Argentina). While those travelling to these locations can be seen to be conducting some form of religious or secular pilgrimage, those who live in them have long contended with the implications of economic and political marginalization within global political economies.

1. Sharon R. Roseman and Nieves Herrero: Introduction

2. Nieves Herrero: Galicia’s Finisterre and Coast of Death

3. Charles Menzies: At the End of the Road: Reflections on Finistère, Land’s End, France

4. Michael Ireland: Land’s End, Cornwall, England

5. Lawrence J. Taylor and Maeve Hickey: Pilgrimage to the Edge: Lough Derg and the Moral Geography of Europe and Ireland

6. Jens Kr. Steen Jacobsen: North Cape – In the Land of the Midnight Sun

7. Wayne Fife and Sharon R. Roseman: Where North America Ends

8. Laura M. Horlent and Mónica C. Salemme: Finis Terrae: The End-of-the-World Imaginary in Tierra del Fuego (Argentina)

This volume inscribes itself in the emerging scholarship on the role of imaginaries in tourism and beyond. The authors take the reader on an imaginative journey to various (physical) ‘edges of the world’. Their in-depth scholarly analyses reveal how people, in the past and today, are drawn to these peripheral geographical sites as tourists and pilgrims.