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COMMUNICATIVE POTENTIAL OF A PILGRIMAGE IN MODERN SOCIETY

E. Podergina, O. Poteryaeva

Abstract

This article represents the result of research on the transformation of modern pilgrim practices. In a crisis of religious identity, defensive reactions on the level of social behavior and interaction of the various religious and pseudo-religious groups and communities become actual. According to the authors such reactions have both destructive and constructive potential that is proved by questionnaires and statistical analysis. The article states the emergence of new types of pilgrimage as a spiritual tourism, ideological and commercial cults and widespread tourism today in the guise of pseudo-religious pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is studied by the authors as a communicative technology of building inter-confessional and intergenerational dialogue with due regard for the characteristics of the social space and social time. In the author's opinion, the communicative potential of pilgrimage is the possibility of forming a single communicative space where there is an exchange of values and essences. The emergence of new values and essences takes place in the planning, organization and implementation phases of the pilgrimage. Heuristic value for the study of the communicative potential of pilgrimage is boasted by a behavioral approach, which allows capturing accurately the external, behavioral aspect of pilgrimage practices and identifying the factors that motivate the representatives of a group to participate in the pilgrimage activities as well as the importance of these activities for a person. The authors found a dual, ambivalent attitude of the pilgrims to social time and social space. Pilgrimage connects the diversity of spaces and times of the modern human being that is why the pilgrimage is regarded as one of the communicative practices of socialization and enculturation which are socially approved and personally meaningful. The pilgrimage practices can synthesize non-religious and religious, self-identification functions as implemented in a particular communication space, through special personally meaningful and socially approved behavioral communication patterns and mechanisms. The communicative potential of pilgrimage can be implemented in the practices of social assistance to "spiritual migrants".

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