ABSTRACT
As I was originally trained in Semitic philology and then became a historian of religions, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, is a favorite example of mine when presenting the multifariousness of religious phenomena to students. Of course it is (if you accept the terminology, that is) a “pilgrimage,” as we normally understand and interpret this action complex, with rites, cosmology and sacred history, but it is also just as much a social, cultural and psychological fact, and it is often politicized. There is a lot of economy involved, and it is an immense complex occurrence of infrastructural requirement when more than a million participants must eat and drink, wash and go to the loo. It is also an instance of sexual harassment when female participants (according to various testimonies) get pinched on the bottom along the way. In our context of theories here, it is obviously important to see the Hajj as an individual, psychological and cognitive phenomenon where intentionality, perception, emotion and body are involved in a ritual as part of the activation of a total narrative cosmology. The participants become actors in the story, the program and the schemata of which the total ritual consists. There is, accordingly, enough to take into consideration when you aim at a “thick description” of anything that has to do with religion. To do so, we need to use all kinds of tools from various theoretical and methodological repertoires. Such a course of action, as already mentioned, is not without its problems, and I shall, therefore, attempt to place some of the issues that we work with in a relevant theoretical setting.
