Reflections, notes, and announcements from a research project on fan pilgrimage and tourism. I (she/her/hers) am a PhD student in Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University specializing in the study of religion and popular culture, fan cultures, and pilgrimages. I'm particularly interested in tourism and pilgrimage as practiced by fans of Sherlock, Doctor Who, and Harry Potter. Read more about me here, here, or here. When I'm being flippant I say I've made a career out of watching too much Doctor Who. Only...I'm not really being flippant at all. And there's no such thing as too much Doctor Who. More about the project... Participate in my dissertation research here!
Are you a "Harry Potter" pilgrim? If you’ve journeyed to Platform 9 ¾, to a coffee shop in which J.K. Rowling wrote parts of the series, or to sites used in the _Harry Potter_ films and experien...
I chatted about Harry Potter and pilgrimage with the crew at Reading, Writing, Rowling for their thirteenth episode back in August! (There’s also a bit of a sidebar about the ancient pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain here, which was part of my inspiration for studying Potter, DW, and Sherlock pilgrimage and tourism.)
Have something to say about traveling to places related to Harry Potter, Doctor Who, Sherlock, or Torchwood? I’m currently recruiting participants for a project about the following sites and attractions: Doctor Who and Torchwood The Doctor Who Experience, Cardiff, Wales (open 2012-2017) Ianto’s Shrine, Cardiff, Wales Sherlock Memorial to Sherlock at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London Harry Potter Warner Bros. Studio Tour, London Platform 9 ¾, King’s Cross Station, London Any filming locations or inspirations in Oxford, UK (for example, Christchurch College Great Hall, Bodleian Library, Divinity School) Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Universal Studios, Orlando, Florida If you’ve been to one or more of these places and you’d like to participate, great (and thank you)! Please click the link below to access the survey. Note you must be at least 18 years old to participate. If you want to talk about going to other places related to something you’re a fan of, feel free to send an ask. Onward to the survey!
The Fan Pilgrimage Project survey will close by the end of this week (10/26)! Please follow the link to participate, and feel free to reblog!
About the project: There and Back Again: A Fan Pilgrimage Research Project seeks to collect the stories of fan tourists and pilgrims who visit places related to Doctor Who, Torchwood, Sherlock, and Harry Potter. I am interested in how fans talk about these visits, and how they can be compared to religious and spiritual pilgrimages. To that end, I’m conducting a survey (with follow up interviews for those who wish to participate) collecting fellow fans’ stories. The stories you tell (anonymized, of course) will be incorporated into my doctoral dissertation and other publications.
Abstract: Harry Potter movie attractions are complex places that integrate money-making businesses and fan participation (ritual and original). There is a tendency to assume that commercialized destinations are somehow less “authentic” or sacred than traditional pilgrimages. However, while degrees of commercialization affect visitors’ experiences, this dichotomy is a false one. I argue that even sites that are heavily mediated--shaped by official signage, layout, or websites--still have qualities of the sacred about them. Major British Harry Potter destinations like the Warner Bros. Studio Tour, Platform 9 3⁄4 at King’s Cross Station, and the Great Hall of Christchurch College are no exception. Reflecting on fieldwork conducted in 2015 and 2017, as well as earlier personal visits, I explore the intended visitor experience and significance of these sites. Like other fan pilgrimages, they rely on the interpretive choices and activities of fans to become (for some) sacred points of contact with imagined worlds and film production, as well as focal points of fannishness.
When I first visited the Warner Bros Studio Tour in 2014—and when I first saw the line of Harry Potter fans waiting to get into Christchurch College Oxford in 2012 and decided not to visit—it never occurred to me that I would end up writing about those visits in any form but a facebook post or a blog entry. Likewise, when I first went on a journey that pretty much everyone can agree to call a pilgrimage—walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain—I had no idea that that experience would collide with my identity as a fan and my background in religious studies. But they did, and here I am. So today I’m going to talk about fan pilgrimage—my area of research—and specifically pilgrimage places related to Harry Potter that I visited before and since re-entering graduate school. I draw on both the connections between my experiences as a fan and as a peregrina (or Santiago pilgrim) that initially led me to this research, and studies of fan pilgrimage that may be familiar to this audience.
I will explore how different HP destinations with different degrees of commercialization can be seen as sacred. Referring to fieldwork conducted in 2015 and 2017, I discuss several places in the United Kingdom—the Warner Bros Studio Tour, Platform 9 ¾ at King’s Cross Station, and two sites in Oxford--that I approach as pilgrimage sites. I argue that these HP sites contain the same types of complex relationships between ritual, narrative, geography, and commerce that historically religious pilgrimage sites do. They are made sacred by special status granted them not only by owners, but by fans’ choices and agency.
It was an accident that I first visited the Warner Bros Studio Tour and undertook pilgrimage to Santiago on the same extended trip in 2014--but perhaps no accident that this happened as I was transitioning out of a career in wilderness education and into a graduate program in which I would focus on (I thought) religion in science fiction, and/or fanfiction. As it turned out, what I did in the interim both changed my research and colored my perspective on what pilgrimage is, regardless of its association with religious tradition. I’m relating this experience partly because it is a common one, as we all know, in fan studies, and it is also common in pilgrimage studies: the position of scholar is also that of pilgrim, and the experiences themselves and intellectual approaches are deeply intertwined. Thus I come to the approach I’m using in this paper both through personal experience and the way in which I’ve narrativized my pilgrimages to myself, and through theorizations of pilgrimage that recognize its entwinement with tourism and the porousness of the category.
But why “pilgrimage” and not “tourism” when we talk about fans going to places of narrative, production, or celebrity significance? I use the term with full acknowledgement that it is a sub-category of tourism, and one that some scholars working on what they prefer to call “media tourism” reject. But in turn, I reject the notion that some supposed sacred/secular divide should be at the heart of how we define and distinguish pilgrimage--especially because of the difficulty of defining religion and spirituality. Scholars of pilgrimage Eade and Sallnow (1991) acknowledge that one of the primary inspirations of pilgrimage is narrative (religious or not); Alan Morinis (1992) also argues it may also be motivated by a host of emotional, religious, narrative, or socially obligatory forces in a pilgrim’s life. According to Avril Maddrell, Alan Terry, and Tim Gale (2016) a pilgrim may move in and out of “pilgrim” versus “tourist” roles during their journey, underscoring that the sacredness of pilgrimage is dependent on affect and agency. These perspectives are not only intellectually sound, but also in line with my own experiences and people I’ve observed at the sites I’m discussing today.
One of the problems, however, in using a category whose distinction from tourism is so hotly debated is that it tends to suggest a greater degree of authenticity in pilgrim experiences--especially religious ones--than in tourist experiences. Debates about what (if anything) constitutes authenticity in tourism must also be brought to bear on pilgrimages, particularly pilgrimages that are already based on fiction and often structured by commercial interests. Even in studies of fan pilgrimage, it is much easier to recognize the pilgrimage-like characteristics of journeys to fan-created or historical shrines--the shrine to Sherlock at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Elvis’s Graceland (Alderman 2002; Doss 1991), or the memorial to Torchwood’s Ianto Jones in Cardiff--than it is to see pilgrimage in a place like the Warner Bros Studio Tour.
Fortunately recent studies of both tourism and pilgrimage have successfully upended this type of distinction. Folklorist Michael Dylan Foster (2013), writing of cultural tourists visiting a Japanese namahage festival, writes that tourists seek out not an authentic cultural encounter but the “authentic inauthenticity” of the tourist experience. Elsewhere such visitors are referred to as “post-tourists”, who actively seek out inauthentic encounters. It might seem logical, then, to explore fan pilgrims as “post-pilgrims”, but in fact, as Ian Reader (2014) shows through religious pilgrimages in Japan, pilgrimage has never existed--indeed cannot come to exist--without supposedly inauthentic mediations, commercial ventures, and a prioritization of performing pilgrimage over the supposedly inherent sacredness of the site itself.
This is not to say that a pilgrim going to Santiago, for example, could not truly believe the bones of Saint James lie beneath the altar and visiting them can create religious merit or even miracles. Rather, it suggests that, just as the Santiago pilgrimage has always been a product of careful marketing (even as early as the 12th century!), fundraising, and ritual performances, pilgrimage is defined not by purity but by the significances that both pilgrims and institutions attach to it, and what they make of it. Therefore I use the term pilgrimage not because it implies authenticity or superiority in certain types of fan experiences, but because it indicates a journey or site that involves ritual, narrative, special geography, and commerce together, as defined by both the site and its normative practices, and the motivations and actions of individual visitors. It suggests not impurity of sites like the WBST, but ways of exploring how sacredness may be created by fans and producers in the most commercial of places.
So for today, I am more interested in mediated sites than in fan-created ones. The Warner Bros Studio Tour, arguably the crown jewel of quote-unquote geographically authentic Harry Potter movie sites, is the most carefully constructed, blending specific imagined and real geographies, encounters with narrative, reenactments and rituals, and commerce to coach a certain type of visitor engagement. (I reiterate--this is not a bad or inauthentic thing.) The visitor begins with a film message from the cast, visits the set of Hogwarts’ Great Hall, and proceeds through a vast space of prop displays, set reconstructions, and behind-the-scenes information, often blended together. Near the Gryffindor common room--complete with Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s costumes displayed to evoke their presence, a flight of Hogwarts’ moving stairs is displayed in a way that highlights the green surfaces used to enable digital manipulation of the filmed image. A reconstruction of the Forbidden Forest (complete with Aragog) is intended to be so realistic there are warning signs and a bypass for people who, like Ron Weasley, are afraid of spiders. But the same space includes an explanation of how an Irish wolfhound stood in for Harry’s patronus during filming. The Hogwarts Express area includes both a recreated filming set (with lighting and cameras) and the more immersive experience of walking through the train--both facing a special Hogwarts Express gift shop.
[Image: Three visitors with their backs to the camera examine the filming set for the Hogwarts Express train. Beyond them, lighting and camera equipment is visible. The set, consisting of door-less compartments with blue seats and green-screen windows, is seen in the background.]
Near the end of the tour, fans visit the enormous scale model of Hogwarts castle used in filming, with videos available that document the model’s construction. A viewing point from the boathouse allows fans to look up at the bulk of the castle, exaggerating its size and evoking awe that encompasses both the level of detail and the experience of first-year students gazing up from their boat ride across the lake.
[Image: The Warner Bros. Studio Tour’s large scale model of Hogwarts School under blue-toned light simulating dusk. The greenhouses are in front, with the Great Hall on the far left.]
In these cases and others, production fakery and the “reality” of the story-world are presented side-by-side. Visitors are immersed in both the real-world history and fictional narrative of the Harry Potter films where the two intersected during studio filming. I have argued elsewhere (Toy 2018) regarding the Sherlock shrine at St. Bart’s Hospital that this peeking behind the curtain is not a matter of distinguishing fiction and reality, as some media tourism scholars have argued, but an opportunity to activate the entanglement of story, production, and fan experience. As such, this highly mediated site is a sacred place in the sense of religious studies scholar JZ Smith’s (1982) “focusing lens”, at which special designation and construction of a place by individuals and institutions highlights intersections of the ordinary and an extraordinary mythos. Collective rituals like entering the Great Hall together, always surrounded by gasps of excitement and amazement, enhance this experience of set-apart-ness. What’s particularly interesting here is that the exhibit is designed to do this--allow the visitor to trouble the distinction between the imagined and the real--but the experience depends on fans’ imaginative and emotional engagement. One chooses, after all, to stare up at Hogwarts from the point of view of an “ickle firstie”. To a more casual fan--and the intended audience includes many of these--the Warner Bros Studio Tour is interesting, but does not automatically create a sense in the visitor of direct encounter with Harry’s world. That depends on us.
[Image: Under a sign reading “Platform 9 3/4, a man and woman wearing Hogwarts scarves pretend to push a half luggage trolley mounted on the wall. In the foreground, a uniformed photograph takes their picture while other visitors wait in line.]
Platform 9 ¾--the Harry Potter destination in the middle of the real King’s Cross Station in London--is not as thoroughly designed to create an extraordinary experience. The site consists of half a luggage trolley attached to the wall, a long queue of people waiting to be photographed “pushing” it (complete with professional photographers and aides who toss one’s borrowed Hogwarts scarf to create an illusion of motion), and, of course, a gift shop. (I’m going to come back to gift shops in general later.) It is not intended to produce the kind of self-contained immersive experience or sense of geographic exactness that the Studio Tour does. It’s worth noting here that the King’s Cross scenes were filmed between platforms 4 and 5, not in the main hall where the trolley is located today--but that area is not accessible without a ticket on a train using those platforms. Visitors are constantly confronted with both the banality of the Muggle train station and the staged nature of the attraction--and indeed, the lack of immersion may make it less powerful for some (which was my first experience with the site). And yet, it is enormously popular--and perhaps telling that while we don’t enter Harry’s world at Platform 9 ¾ the way he himself does, we can stand on the cusp of it, tangent to the Hogwarts Express--and photographically document our proximity.
Of the examples I’m discussing today, filming locations at Christchurch College and the Bodleian Library in Oxford are arguably the least mediated. At Christchurch, model for Hogwarts’ Great Hall, there is almost no signage or acknowledgment on site--though there may have been more in the past when the films were still newly released.
[Image: the Great Hall of Christchurch College at Oxford, a large room with three long tables extending away from the camera toward a raised dais at the far end. Lower walls are wood-paneled with many closely hung historic paintings. Upper walls are arched leaded glass windows. The tables are set for a formal dinner. This room was the model for Hogwarts’ Great Hall.]
I observed this past summer that visitors obviously coming to see Potter sites were far fewer than the line of families with excited children I saw there in 2012. But interestingly, Christchurch has long been a site of religious pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Frideswide, patron of Oxford University, so it may be no accident that the university treats pilgrims of all kinds with nonchalance as long as they do not disrupt the College (although they are happy to take your £10 in any case). The Divinity School at Oxford’s Bodleian Library--site of the Hogwarts infirmary and dueling practice--has somewhat more interpretive material, including stills from the films that clearly show the Divinity School’s distinctive architecture and the layout of Duke Humphries’ Library, aka the Hogwarts library. Some of these details are also related by tour guides. As at Christchurch, there is no obvious line of Potter fans waiting to get in--but nonetheless, the site quietly attracts them.
[Image: View of the Divinity School at Oxford University, a long room with a carved medieval Gothic vaulted stone ceiling, large arched windows, and flagstone floor. Several tourists sit on wooden benches around the edges of the room.]
[Image: A clear plastic panel sitting on a stone ledge holds six film stills from the Harry Potter films, including dueling practice, Harry and Hermione in the Library, Harry and Dumbledore in the Infirmary, and dancing practice for the Yule Ball. The panel also reflects the surrounding windows and floor of the Divinity School.]
In these three examples, we see a sort of sliding scale of mediation that both shapes the boundaries of what visitors can do and enables certain types of individual affective experiences. This mediation takes the form of displays--carefully constructed or simple--videos, audio tours, live guides, photography, restrictions on access, and managed activities. Such strategies facilitate commercial interests (both moneymaking and marketing), but clearly do not create homogeneous experiences. They do create boundaries around acceptable or normative fan pilgrimage experiences--a topic I cannot fully explore here--but this itself is in keeping with pilgrimage experiences across contexts, especially in heavily visited places. Fans, like many other pilgrims, generally go along with such restrictions--but that doesn’t mean they don’t inflect sites with their own experiences. Furthermore, through reviews and photos posted online, they re-mediate these sites for fellow and future visitors, in ways that may or may not concur with the goals of owners.
I want to end by turning to the gap I’ve left in these examples: “stuff”, by which I mean merchandise, souvenir photos and videos, themed food and drinks, and so on. “Stuff” at fan pilgrimage sites deserves its own paper, so I raise these points more as provocations for future work than a way of wrapping up. Though it often seems to be taken as an impurity by onlookers, pilgrimages are rich with material goods and gift shops. (In fact, on my desk I keep a minifig of the Eleventh Doctor acquired on my first visit to Forbidden Planet in London next to an image of St. James the Pilgrim purchased in Santiago--the patron saints of my research.) This stuff does more than make money for Warner Bros. or restrict the way fans view the material culture of Harry’s world. According to Susan Stewart, souvenirs "authenticate a past or otherwise remote experience and, at the same time...discredit the present" (139)--that is, once the pilgrim goes home, merchandise in a sense makes the pilgrimage real, even more real than “the real”. Souvenirs render the narrative of pilgrimage a part of personal mythos rather than simply a trip. In fact, gift shops--which in the Potter pilgrimages cited carry site-specific goods--may make the pilgrim’s experience more real, more sacred, in retrospect. These souvenirs authenticate and mythologize a specific journey and moment of intersection between fan and narrative. While fan pilgrimages may begin at the ticket desk, their endings are ambiguous and worthy of deeper study.
[Image: A gift shop display of brightly colored Harry Potter merchandise at Christchurch, including mugs, house-themed journals, phone cases, and Hedwig plushes.]
Works Consulted
Alderman, Derek H. 2002. “Writing on the Graceland Wall: On the Importance of Authorship in Pilgrimage Landscapes.” Tourism Recreation Research 27 (2): 27–33.
Bendix, Regina. 1989. “Tourism and Cultural Displays: Inventing Traditions for Whom?” The Journal of American Folklore 102 (404): 131–46.
Brooker, Will. 2007a. “A Sort of Homecoming: Fan Viewing and Symbolic Pilgrimage.” In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 149–64. New York, U.S.: New York University Press.
———. 2007b. “Everywhere and Nowhere: Vancouver, Fan Pilgrimage and the Urban Imaginary.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 10 (4): 423–444.
Coleman, Simon, and John Eade, eds. 2004. Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion. European Association of Social Anthropologists. London: Routledge.
Doss, Erika. 1999. Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.
Eade, John, and Michael J. Sallnow. 1991. “Introduction.” In Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, edited by John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow, 1–29. London and New York: Routledge.
Eliade, Mircea. 1959. The Sacred and the Profane. Translated by Willard R. Trask. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc.
Foster, Michael Dylan. 2013. “Inviting the Uninvited Guest: Ritual, Festival, Tourism, and the Namahage of Japan.” Journal of American Folklore 126 (501): 302–34.
Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. Sussex Studies in Culture and Communication. New York: Routledge.
Lee, Christina. 2012. “‘Have Magic, Will Travel’: Tourism and Harry Potter’s United (Magical) Kingdom.” Tourist Studies 12 (1): 52–69.
MacCannell, Dean. 1976. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books.
Maddrell, Avril, Alan Terry, and Tim Gale, eds. 2016. Sacred Mobilities: Journeys of Belief and Belonging. London and New York: Routledge.
Morinis, Alan. 1992. “Introduction: The Territory of the Anthropology of Pilgrimage.” In Sacred Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage, edited by Alan Morinis, 1–28. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Reader, Ian. 2014. Pilgrimage in the Marketplace. Routledge Studies in Religion, Travel, and Tourism 2. New York: Routledge.
Reijnders, Stijn. 2011. Places of the Imagination: Media, Tourism, Culture. Franham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate.
Smith, Jonathan Z. 1982. “The Bare Facts of Ritual.” In Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, 53–65. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stewart, Susan. 1993. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.
Toy, J. Caroline. 2017. “Constructing the Fannish Place: Ritual and Sacred Space in a Sherlock Fan Pilgrimage.” Journal of Fandom Studies 5 (3): 251–66.
Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. 3rd ed. London: SAGE Publications.
See also:
Larsen, Katherine. 2015. “(Re)claiming Harry Potter Fan Pilgrimage Sites.” In Playing Harry Potter: Essays and Interviews on Fandom and Performance, 38-54. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Co.
Potts, Liza, Melissa Beattie, Emily Dallaire, Katie Grimes, and Kelly Turner. 2018. Participatory Memory: Fandom Experiences Across Time and Space. Intermezzo. http://participatorymemory.org/book/index
Here’s a cool new book for anyone interested in Harry Potter, Torchwood, or Princess Diana tourism and pilgrimage places! Participatory Memory, by Liza Potts, Melissa Beattie, Emily Dallaire, Katie Grimes, and Kelly Turner is a multimedia project co-produced by fans and fan studies academics. It integrates text, video, audio, and photos of places like Ianto’s Shrine, the Elephant House (where JKR worked on the HP novels), and Platform 9 3/4...and it’s free. Check it out!
Research projects evolve over time. You get an idea, you discover the scale of how much larger it was than you thought, you pare it down and play with one little corner of it. You feel like you’ve got that corner tacked down and then, like a jigsaw puzzle, you can start framing the rest of the picture.
That’s how There and Back Again (which actually has nothing to do with hobbits at the moment, sorry) came to be. I got interested in the concept of fan pilgrimage, realized how huge it was, and started working on one place--not one of the first I visited, but among the first I came to with a critical eye. That site, the location of Sherlock Holmes’ modern-day Reichenbach fall in Sherlock, became the focus of my M.A. paper (and the source of this blog’s banner image).
In the course of writing the Sherlock piece, I discovered that while I could say a good amount about how Sherlock fans have created a sacred space at St. Bart’s, as shown through graffiti and messages there, I couldn’t say much about what they (we) thought about it. And I’ve found the same thing as I’ve started visiting other places. I can talk a lot about what fan pilgrimage sites look like and how they’re constructed and marketed, but not much about why fans go there, how they talk about these trips, or what it feels like to be there (wherever “there” is, imaginatively and geographically). I can only speak about those things based on my own experiences. One of the challenges of doing work on something you’re a fan of, for an audience that’s mostly made up of non-fans, is that you run the risk of both overemphasizing your own preferred fannish interpretations and accidentally misrepresenting communities and networks of fans. I don’t want to do that.
Because the conceptual frameworks I’m interested in are ways of being religious and spiritual, and how being religious manifests in traveling to physical spaces (aka pilgrimage), these risks are particularly loaded. #believeinsherlock, after all, doesn’t mean Sherlock is god. Probably. After decades of Trekkers being stigmatized as crazy cultists and followers of Jediism treated as a joke*, I think it’s time to take another look at what religion could mean in the context of fandom. What can we learn from the comparison? How is it problematic? (Look for a forthcoming post about what I mean when I say “religion”, a term I use pretty loosely.)
The point of this project is to meet, survey, and talk with fans who’ve been to a short list of sites related to Doctor Who, Torchwood, Sherlock, and Harry Potter. I want to get a sense of the words, themes, and emotions that fans associate with tourism and pilgrimage experiences. What stories do they (we) tell? How do they (we) connect fiction, place, and sense of self, and make meaning from those connections? Collecting these narratives provides a body of case studies that I hope will allow me to speak more responsibly (and responsively) about fans’ experiences.
If you choose to participate in this project, yay! My goal is to work with your stories rather than focusing on mine. You become a discussion partner, not an “informant”. The point of this blog is to share what I’m learning with you as a thanks for you sharing your stories with me.
* Here’s a cool video from Elite Daily that explores the difference between how Star Wars fans who are Jedi re-enactors and people who practice Jediism as a religion perceive themselves (opens in YouTube).
The Fan Meta Reader is dedicated to bringing thought-provoking, theoretically innovative, and stylistically unique fan analysis – meta – to a wide readership. The Reader is committed to…
For those looking to dip a toe into the intersection of fan cultures and academia, this is a fantastic curated collection of meta, assembled by a scholar-fan!
