Lexington Books
Pages: 200
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9
978-1-7936-5032-0 • Hardback • February 2022 • $95.00 • (£73.00)
978-1-7936-5033-7 • eBook • February 2022 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Deana L. Weibel is professor in the Anthropology Department and the Integrative, Religious and Intercultural Studies Department at Grand Valley State University.
Chapter 1Looking Backward: An Overview of Rocamadour’s History
Chapter 2Whose Shrine is it Anyway?: Competing Local Interpretations of Rocamadour
Chapter 3 Primed for Action and Reaction: The Influence of Visitors’ Preconceptions
Chapter 4 Echoes and Energy: Rocamadour’s Numinous Nature
Chapter 5On Shaky Ground: The Shifting Identities of a Shrine
A Sacred Vertigo is an engaging ethnography that provides vivid portraits of the shrine of Rocamadour and the social interactions that surround it. Weibel’s reflexivity is refreshing, and her concept of “religious creatives” makes an important contribution to debates about the meanings of secular and sacred travel. Essential reading for those interested in pilgrimage, tourism, popular Catholicism, alternative spiritualities and France.
— Ellen Badone, McMaster University
For all its beauty, Rocamadour is a place of vertiginous conflict, where history clashes with economy and memory runs up against desire. Drawing on more than a quarter-century of ethnographic engagement, A Sacred Vertigo beautifully depicts the way in which conflicts over the meaning and purpose of this one thousand-year-old space not only reflects changes in Catholic religiosity and French secularity but also captures the way that both humans and the terrain craft one another to make a sacred space.
— Jon Bialecki, University of California, San Diego
Weibel illuminates the long-term evolution and multiple modalities of pilgrimage to the cliff-top churches and Marian shrine of Rocamadour in southwest France. Drawing on twenty-five years of fieldwork, this work delves into the contested and shifting meanings of the site to Catholic pilgrims, “religious creatives” and today's tourists. A significant contribution to twenty-first-century pilgrimage and sacred place studies, this book demonstrates how sites persistently recognized as “sublime” attract heterodox interpretations and practices.
— Celeste Ray, Sewanee: The University of the South
The Anthropology of Tourism: Heritage, Mobility and Society series editor Michael A. Di Giovine talks with author, Deana L. Weibel about her latest book, A Sacred Vertigo: Pilgrimage and Tourism in Rocamadour, France. Watch here.