Joe Decker was awarded both the East Asian Studies Center Travel Award and funding from the Katherine A. Cunningham Graduate Research Fund to attend the Annual Symposium for Pilgrimage Studies at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Joe’s paper “Contemporary Pilgrimage Guidebooks: Scripting the Pilgrimage Experience in Shikoku” explores guidebooks as text objects, and how the act of reading impacts pilgrim readers. Joe argues that framing pilgrimage in terms of textuality offers an avenue to explore how religious identities are curated, experienced, reinvented, and reassigned through a complex relationship that is dependent upon travel, material culture, reader, and text.
The College of Arts