Pelerinajele, între prescripțiile religioase și cultura populară
Pilgrimages between Religious Prescriptions and Popular Culture

Summary/Abstract: Pilgrimage is a universal and complex anthropological and historical phenomenon, essentially defined as a profound spiritual journey. It has shaped people’s and communities’ conceptions of the world and of life. Spiritual journeys have served as effective means of bringing individuals closer to the divine and as an impulse toward the re-enactment of the moral and ethical values of Christianity. According to Christian perspectives, human beings are travelers on earth, and the meaning of life is fulfilled through spiritual ennoblement. The proliferation of pilgrimages during troubled times (natural disasters, epidemics, wars, famine, etc.) contributed to the re-Christianization of certain communities and strengthened the sense of collective communion and solidarity.The historiography of pilgrimage is relatively recent, emerging mainly during the 1970s and 1980s. Most approaches to Christian pilgrimage have been connected to popular religion and to the ethnographic particularities of this historical phenomenon. Very few studies attempt to grasp the religious mentalities of historical periods in order to describe the symbolic meanings of pilgrimages.Some scholars observe that the historiography of pilgrimage has become an arena of contradictory discourses, revealing serious conflicts in the representation of religion in general. In historiography, as well as in sociology, pilgrimage is often analyzed together with religious tourism. The latter, however, is a secular practice pursued for cultural, economic, or leisure purposes.

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