Paper short abstract:

The Pilgrimage is one of the oldest stories in literature; Chaucer wrote about this in 1392 and Paulo Coelho in 1992. Today, in a more secular world, we find secular pilgrims. Route 66, the world's most-visited road, continues this tradition with material culture and other forms of folk culture.

Paper long abstract:

The pilgrimage, the devotional voyage of a stranger, is one of the oldest stories in Western literature. In the fourteenth century, on the pilgrimage described by Chaucer, those venturing from London to Canterbury departed "with full devote courage," their voyage an honor and a rebirth. Skipping ahead 600 years, Brazilian fabulist Paulo Coelho imagined a pilgrimage to Compostela, similarly seeking enlightenment. The essence of pilgrimage lies between these literary goalposts: a voyage of honor, redemption, and magic; a pilgrimage to heal the soul. Today, we find more secular pilgrimages. If we are to track changes of a changing world, we must reimagine what it means to be a pilgrim. There are few better examples of this secularization of travel than Route 66. As Angel Delgadillo, the barber of Seligman, Arizona, put it, "I see the foreign tourists get off their tour bus…go down the steps of the bus, and kneel and kiss the ground: 'This is the true America.'"

Route 66 is arguably the world's most famous road. As the Mother Road approaches its centenary, 66 shows how technologies new in human history - the train, the automobile, the motor courts turned into motels - have evolved to service the secular pilgrim. Route 66 contains multitudes of folklore: ritual, joke cycles, material culture, and vernacular architecture. Route 66 pilgrimage is intimately tied to tourism and consumerism. Still, the original idea persists: to seek, to search, to dream, to explore a sacred track or create one inside oneself.

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