Religion or Fandom? Secular ritual in pop-culture pilgrimage

Abstract

This paper aims to consider the meaning of secular ritual in pop-culture tourism, and to clarify the role of social media as a tool for making and transmitting secular ritual, focuses on Asian fans’ pilgrimage of Japanese mixed media Love Live! School Idol Project. The paper first introduces contemporary sacred meaning-making as a theoretical framework. Then, based on anthropological research, the paper analyses how secular ritual is made and transmitted, focuses on Asian fans’ popular-culture pilgrimages. The specific popular culture work chosen, after five years of participatory research in Japanese popular culture-related pilgrimage, was an event related to the Japanese media franchised work Love Live! School Idol Project (Love Live!). In this paper, it has clarified that social media plays a significant role in making the secular ritual. Nevertheless, the social media makes difficult to determine whether some fan performances are a sacred activity or attempts to follow current trends.