ABSTRACT

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.

chapter 1|12 pages

Commemorating the dead

Military pilgrimage and battlefield tourism

part 1|69 pages

Military pilgrimage commemoration and reconciliation

chapter 2|19 pages

Healing social and physical bodies

Lourdes and military pilgrimage

chapter 3|16 pages

Pilgrimage for Anglo-Japanese reconciliation

Reinterpreting the past by British Second World War veterans

chapter 4|15 pages

KFOR soldiers as pilgrims in Kosovo

Black Madonna in Letnica

chapter 5|15 pages

‘Maple leaf up’

Patriotic, historical and spiritual aspects of Canadian Armed Forces’ participation in the Nijmegen March

part 2|64 pages

Military pilgrimages, battlefield tourism and contestation

chapter 6|15 pages

Military pilgrimage to Bobovac

A Bosnian ‘sacred place’

chapter 8|22 pages

Sanctified past

The pilgrimages of Polish re-enactors to World War II battlefields

part 3|9 pages

Afterword