ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three areas of Max Weber’s works, including his ideas on religion, bureaucratic organisations, and his methodological use of ‘ideal-type’ analysis, which has already been usefully adapted in segmenting religious travellers. It focuses on perspectives from the newer field of mobilities , first named and theorised within sociological thought in the 1990s. Belief systems are thus top-down articulations that then pass through lower discursive levels of interpreters, organisational functionaries, and crusading mediators, before reaching a broader public that will constitute the community of believers. Time, place, and travel have typically played a relatively small part in studying belief systems, though a more prominent one in the organisation of rituals. Organisational functionaries come and go as the roles they occupy are created, change, or disappear. A different monastic influence on the imaging of travel and tourism came from the one group of monks who did not take vows of stability and could officially travel.
