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The works of French sociologist Robert Hertz (1881–1915) are now staple readings in general anthropology. This study of the cult of a saint in the Italian Alps is lesser known than Hertz’s celebrated essay on the symbolism of death and sin, “Death and the Right Hand” (1907), yet it remains a model of classic ethnography. Hertz was raised in a devout Parisian Jewish family, studied at the École Normale Supérieure under Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, and later became a critical member of the famous Année Sociologique group. The influence of the Année—its concern with theoretically driven, detailed, holistic, and integrative analyses of social phenomena—can be seen in his essay “Saint Besse: Étude d’un culte alpestre” (first published in 1913 in the French Revue de l’Histoire des Religions and translated into English in 1988).¹ The essay is a painstaking, eloquent ethnohistory, locating Saint Besse intimately in divergent paths of regional history and local tradition, where Saint Besse’s shrine in a rocky Alpine overhang is, quite literally, embedded in the landscape. The essay portrays beautifully the independent spirit of popular Catholicism, especially in the flexibility of the hagiography of Saint Besse, which allows each community—whether mountain peasants or village dwellers, even church authorities—to lay claim to the saint through the qualities he is seen to manifest: the courage of a soldier, the moral stature of a bishop, and the devotion of a pious shepherd. The work is methodologically unorthodox for a Durkheimian, for Hertz not only draws on oral and archival sources, popular, local, and ecclesiastical traditions, but also has left his Parisian armchair for direct, “participant observation” in the field. In the Italian Alps, as elsewhere, a vibrant popular Catholicism evolves from pagan, telluric sources, sometimes articulating with official Catholicism, sometimes not. In typically Durkheimian fashion, Hertz describes the tremendous power of Saint Besse to knit together diverse communities of people morally and physically through collective religious devotion. In Hertz’s focus on Saint Besse as a material source and mediator of social identity we can read this work as a precursor to many other great ethnographies on Catholic saints (popular and more official), whether in Europe, Latin America, or elsewhere. But we can also read in the essay the political and moral vision of a socialist, activist—and Jewish—scholar who saw in a popular rural Catholic saint cult the vitality of community life that he might have seen as missing in his own social milieu of pre–World War I France.

In this article, the author explains the experiences and sensations of Pakistani pilgrims toward a local pilgrimage saint and tries to locate it within the broader context of the visionary aspects of Muslim religious experience. Focusing on the intersections of dreams and shrines, he expands the discussion of the social sphere to include the broader scope of pilgrimage. To understand the local pilgrimage tradition in Pakistan, the author incorporates scholarship on songs, dreams, and architecture and provides an in-depth analysis of the pilgrimage in this country.

It is hard to get close to Bruce's personality; Barbour's account is vivid but over-emphasises the chivalric qualities of the fourteenth-century ruling classes. Religious devotion played an important part in Bruce's life, if in a conventional way; he showed especial fondness for the cults of Sts Fillan, Andrew, Cuthbert and Thomas Becket (to whom Arbroath Abbey was dedicated). A domestic side of Bruce's character emerges in his decision to build a manor house with garden and park at Cardross on the Firth of Clyde, but he had only three years to enjoy it before his death there in 1329.

This chapter is about the religious and spiritual observances performed at gravesites in the Republic of Indonesia. The authors of this article have focused on the fact that some of the most important gravesites in this country attract visitors from more than one religion. They explain the non-hajj pilgrimage in Indonesia in general and then elaborately explain Mount Kawi pilgrimage center that is located in a forested hilly region about sixty kilometers from the regional city of Malang, in East Java. Drawing on theories of particularity and materiality, the authors try to bring a postcolonial state and its normative religious discourses into the picture.