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Northeastern experts debate whether 10 million Swifties were part of a cultural pilgrimage and whether support for the pop star crosses into religious activity.
LONDON — More than 10 million people from all over the globe flocked to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour during the 21-country extravaganza across two years.
“Swifties” massed for the musical icon. They wore cultural artifacts like friendship bracelets, they embraced the challenge of traveling to her concerts and shared the communal act of singing along to her songs.
Could you call the tour a pilgrimage? It certainly held many of the same traits as what are regarded as traditional pilgrimages, says Northeastern associate professor Lars Kjaer.
The concept of a pilgrimage evokes images of pious people marching to holy sites. In the modern day, that idea still holds pulling power.
Each year about 2 million Muslims take part in Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, while a record-breaking 446,000 pilgrims in 2023 completed the 500-mile walking route into Spain as part of the Camino de Santiago (“The Way of St James”), a journey that has its origins in medieval times.
But pilgrimages do not only have to be about religion, says Kjaer, who teaches anthropology and history on the university’s London campus. The rituals, the journeys and the shared goal manifested in the religious endeavors are also found in cultural phenomena such as the Eras tour, he points out.
Social media was awash with stories of U.S. fans traveling to Europe to see their pop hero — and vice versa. Then there was the ritual of swapping bracelets and the forging of community — a coming together to be part of the crowd-choir at one of Swift’s 152 shows.
Kjaer says the ritual and traditions found in pilgrimages transcend religion and are ingrained in human nature.
“We have come to think that rituals are only really meaningful when they are about the divine and when they are about religion,” Kjaer says. “But throughout human history they have been central to everything that is not totally tangible. We need ritual to make the things that we can’t touch real — things like community, family.
“And what social anthropology has been increasingly showing is that religions are part of that, but there’s so much else that’s also part of it and that can do something similar to us emotionally — for example, football matches are also quite pilgrimage oriented.”
In much the same way that soccer fans, come rain or shine, gather together at home and away games to support their team, Swift fans get to take part in a similar ritual and pilgrimage when they attend her shows, Kjaer argues.
And not dissimilar to what happens when Christians gather for church, Swifties get to have their community made real at her shows. That was certainly true when Swift played eight nights at London’s Wembley Stadium during the tour.
“You could see it happening on the Tube in London,” Kjaer continues. “You would see people who were going and spotting each other, going: ‘Yay, we’re doing the same thing.’ But there were also people who had been to a previous show and when they saw someone else who was going, they would be saying: ‘I’ve been; I’m also a fan.’”
Carie Hersh, a Northeastern teaching professor in anthropology, has experienced firsthand the community that the Eras Tour built. “We visited some good friends this summer and they have a teenage daughter, and she and my daughter were instantly like, ‘Taylor Swift bracelets!’” Hersh recalls.
Fans at the Eras shows would swap friendship bracelets that were typically made of beads and spelt out words and catchphrases. Some focused on representing their favorite song titles, lyrics or even the fandom’s inside jokes.
Hersh, based at Northeastern’s Boston campus, says these were examples of “cultural artifacts” from the tour that “tied this community together” in a way that is comparable to items worn by religious believers.
Hersh adds: “Our daughters were instantly able to identify what the bracelets meant: ‘Oh, you’re a fan of that person — OK, we’re part of the same group.’ So those are definitely artifacts worth noting, just like wearing a cross or a Star of David or something.”
Hersh is reluctant to label the Eras shows as a form of pilgrimage due to the economic barriers involved. “I don’t see it as a pilgrimage, because that would perhaps suggest that everybody, regardless of situation, is able to access this,” she says.
“There is quite a bit of social class built into this. The [online] watchalongs opened it up to people who couldn’t afford her tickets or people who couldn’t afford to travel [but] it has become this new middle class thing — or maybe upper-middle — among Americans at least, to travel to take your kid to see a concert someplace else.”
But Hersh, pointing to modern anthropological definitions of religion, says there are traits of Swiftie fandom that would match scholarly descriptions.
“When you look at definitions of religion today, interestingly enough, they often don’t talk about belief or practice,” she says. “Clifford Geertz, a famous American anthropologist, described religion as rituals that juxtapose the real world on top of an ideal one, and force it into alignment — it tells you what reality is.
“To bring that back to Taylor Swift, I think that those aspects of religion, if we pick those apart, are really relevant to her following, in the sense of building a community and having a moral order.
“She both talks about how terrible life is — bad breakups, terrible people, stuff like that — but she also talks about the world in an ideal form. There’s a ‘beautiful world’ aspect to her work as well, so she can put those two things together and be like, ‘Life stinks, but it can be amazing.’ I think it is similar in some ways to the idea of ‘Life is hard and we suffer, but there is an ideal purity to whatever religious form you are looking at.’”
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift)
A post shared by Taylor Swift (@taylorswift)
Self-professed Swifties can certainly see the comparison between their level of fandom and religious worship, says Catherine Fairfield, a visiting teaching professor in English at Northeastern.
Fairfield, who previously taught a class looking at gender and storytelling in Swift’s discography, says fans are aware of the “ritualistic elements” and even the “worship” that their support can contain. For them, the 35-year-old Swift can feel like the “mythos” at the center of their world.
Speaking to Northeastern Global News with her vinyl copy of Swift’s much sought-after “The Tortured Poets Society Department: Anthology” behind her, Fairfield says: “What comes to mind often for me is that phrase, ‘Americans don’t have saints, we have celebrities.’
“I think of that all the time when it comes to Taylor Swift. Even in my own home, just like anybody who is a Swift fan, I have icons of her up around the house. We collect objects and totems that have her face or her lyrics on them, whether it’s magazines, decorations, clothing or images.
“These are things that make fans feel close and connected to that celebrity at the heart of everything. There is definitely ritual in how fans connect with and return to certain lyrics within songs — not just the song itself, but also capturing specific lyrics that you want to have on a friendship bracelet or use in your social media bio.”
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Fairfield says plenty of fans who attended the Eras Tour spoke about how “singing the bridge of ‘All Too Well (10-Minute Version)’ in a crowd of however many thousand people was like a religious experience.”
But the expert says it is fans rather than Swift who have cultivated the image of her as an icon and that the musician has distanced herself from the idea.
The song “Clara Bow” on Swift’s most recent album, with satirical lyrics such as “You’re the new god we’re worshiping” and “It’s hell on earth to be heavenly,” can be taken as evidence that the singer “would rather not romanticize the idea of being on a pedestal,” Fairfield argues.
“I do think that it’s important to differentiate,” continues Fairfield, “between fandom and the person at the heart of the fandom — the celebrity or the artist at the heart of it. Because I don’t think that Taylor Swift is looking for or would even be comfortable with the idea of being compared to a religious figure, or a figure that’s put on a worship pedestal at all.”