Apprenticeship Pilgrimage: Developing Expertise Through Travel and Training

In our ongoing work on capoeira (Griffith) and ballroom (Marion), we have both drawn from the scholarship on embodiment, tourism, and apprenticeship—but have also encountered a gap related to our research experiences and findings. This book is our response. Recognizing that current thinking on the anthropologies of tourism, education, leisure, and identity construction can only provide a partial explanation of what we encountered in the field, we offer a new model that bridges the gap between these existing fields of anthological study. We start by asking the very simple question, “why do people travel?” As our materials make clear, the answer can be quite complex: often, it is not just to get somewhere, but also to get something—this text examines what in cases where “it” is skill and expertise. As such, we introduce the concept of apprenticeship pilgrimage to help explain why performers travel to places both near and far in an attempt to increase both their skill and their legitima