ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the problem of religious world-making. Religions provide an experiential, ideological, moral, social, and cosmological reality that adherents accept as true. Models of temporality and senses of place are essential for establishing this reality. Whether it is a matter of placing a community in history or defining sacred space, these axes are crucial for religious adherents as they engage the social processes of constructing, maintaining, challenging, and defending their religious world. Being in time and in place is certainly about a cosmological orientation, as seen with the spiritual lives of Beng babies. Pilgrimage as a rite of passage is a definitive example. The chapter considers three anthropological explanations for pilgrimage: communitas; contestation; and, intersecting journeys. It demonstrates how the making of religious worlds is a social process with high stakes, and an ongoing process that is open to contestation.
