Spiritual Geographies: Pilgrimage, Sacred Space and Geopolitical Meaning

Abstract

This article explores pilgrimage as a spiritual practice performed across geopolitical landscapes that are historically layered and ideologically contested. Based on a diachronic reading of three prominent travelogues representative of their historical contexts—Egeria’s Travels (4th century), The Book of Margery Kempe (15th century), and Kathryn Harrison’s The Road to Santiago (2013)—the article argues that pilgrimage persists not because sacred sites themselves remain stable in meaning, but because such places are continuously re-signified through the pilgrims’ embodied movement and textual reconstruction. Across changing historical and geopolitical contexts, pilgrimage emerges as a performative practice that repeatedly re-writes space into meaning, negotiating tensions between spirituality, power and cultural identity.