Darius Liutikas – författare

This illuminating book explores the pivotal role of sacred landscapes in today’s globalized world, analysing the latest research of how political, social, and historical factors influence their creation, preservation, and transformation. It examines the significance of sacred landscapes in shaping social identity and community history, providing valuable insights into their rich heritage and evolving traditions.Darius Liutikas brings together renowned scholars to discuss religious rituals, practices, and sanctuaries, comparing sacred sites from different religions and revealing the cultural and spiritual importance of these spaces across diverse regions. Contributors discuss globalized challenges, and outline theories, concepts, and practical examples relating to the anthropological and sociological backgrounds of sacred landscapes. Exploring the nexus between religion and geography, the book demonstrates how sacred spaces adapt to meet the needs of evolving societies, highlighting the relationship between religious traditions and their spatial expressions.Geographies of Religious Spaces and Sacred Landscapes is a thought-provoking and highly accessible read, designed for students and academics in cultural sociology, human geography, religious studies, and pilgrimage studies. Its discerning insights will also greatly benefit practitioners in cultural anthropology and tourism.

Values-rich journeys can be described as pilgrimage, spiritual travel, personal heritage tourism, holistic tourism, and valuistic journeys. There are many motivations for undertaking these journeys; the most important being personal values, life experience, personal and social identity, lifestyle, social and cultural influence. This book presents contributions that address pilgrim motivation, identity and values as they are shaped by the broader sociological, psychological, cultural and environmental perspectives. The focus of the book is the travellers themselves and their inner world through the lens of their pilgrimage. The research presented focuses on the typology of pilgrim journeys as ways in which identity and values are presented to a post-modern consumer society, providing interesting and challenging perspectives on the identity of pilgrims in the 21st century. The book: - Provides a framework for understanding the impact of values and identity on the motivation and behaviour of contemporary pilgrims. - Presents a comprehensive review of the latest research, a collection of case studies and models of practical applications. - Discusses the perceptions of tourism and pilgrimage in the age of value transformations and identity challenges.

Is it possible to identify the positive and negative effects of globalization on religious tourism or to estimate the transformation of the internal and external constructs of pilgrimage by these effects? In order to address these questions, this book highlights the importance of the search for identity and transformative experience during religious tourism. It also looks at how, recently, globalization has played a part in the changes of the concept of personal and social identity and the transformative experience of pilgrimage. The chapters, consisting of carefully selected case studies, analyse possible effects including the adoption of different new rituals, new pilgrims' values, changes of tradition, acceptance of technologic innovations, development of new business models, and other environmental and sociocultural changes. The book provides: · a conceptual framework for understanding the impacts of globalization; · integrated cross-disciplinary approaches; and · an insight into major religious travel practices in the age of identity challenges and worldwide transformations. It will be suitable for researchers and students of religious tourism, pilgrimage, identity tourism, as well as related subjects such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, theology, history and cultural studies.