The Labyrinth, Postmodernity and Ritual

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Tourists and Pilgrims

St Paul's Cathedral has in the region of 5000 visitors a day. These largely fall into two categories: tourists and pilgrims. Some tourists arrive in coach loads and have a guided tour of the cathedral, others are on their own or in small groups, going round at their own pace. The week of the Labyrinth in March coincided (intentionally) with the beginning of the season of Lent. In amongst the tourists there were clearly a good number of pilgrims, especially on Ash Wednesday, when many had come for the service to be marked with ash on their forehead.

Zygmunt Bauman is wonderfully evocative and perceptive in his descriptions of people's 'life strategies' in postmodern times. His analysis of the times (as concluded above) is that consumption has taken centre stage and become 'the integrative bond of society'. One of the themes he returns to time and again is the construction of identity. He contrasts modern and postmodern approaches to identity concluding 'the hub of postmodern life strategy is not identity building but the avoidance of being fixed'.

He sees the pilgrim as an appropriate allegory for identity-building under the conditions of modernity. The pilgrim knows where he or she is going and weaves each event or site of pilgrimage into a coherent 'sense-making story' and is living with a purpose of fulfilment. The tourist (along with the stroller, vagabond, and player) is the most appropriate metaphor to describe postmodern life strategy as avoiding being fixed. 'The tourist is the epitome of such avoidance. Indeed tourists worth their salt are the masters of the supreme art of melting the solids and unfixing the fixed. First of all they perform the feat of not belonging to the place they might be visiting; theirs is the miracle of being in and out of place at the same time.'

The tourist is a systematic seeker of new and different experiences, but needs to keep moving, travelling light. Relationships with locals are likely to be skin deep and mustn't tie the tourist down. They must be able to get up and move on and shake off the experience whenever they wish.

Some of the considerations of 'situation' then for the Labyrinth are that it is in postmodern times in a time of increased hunger for spirituality but decline in institutional religion. Situated in a time when consumption has moved to centre stage, it is visited both by pilgrims who will be looking to make some meaningful connection with the ritual and their life story and tourists who will have the experience and attempt to move on. Both may be treating it (and religion) as a cultural resource to weave into the meaning routes they construct through the postmodern maze. This is 'strategic', the next aspect of practice.