Tourist gaze at Arbaeen: an anthropological study of changes in Arbaeen walking culture regarded on pilgrims' touristic expectations

In less than two decades, the Arbaeen walking ceremony attracted many enthusiasts from all over the world, including about 3 million Iranians. Much has been said about the achievements of this ceremony for the Shiite world. But naturally, such a population can cause harm for the ceremony, too. One of these damages is the touristic view that some pilgrims have of the Arbaeen walking ceremony; That is, sometimes they expect the same services that are provided on a leisure trip to be available to them on the Arbaeen pilgrimage. The purpose of this article is to show the negative impacts of the touristic gaze in addition to examining the contexts and dimensions of the formation of such a level of expectations.The main research method was ethnography, which used participant observation (the author's experience of attending the Arbaeen ceremony) and semi-structured interviews with 62 people. The collected field data were categorized and finally content analysis was done along with the documentary data.In this way and based on the approaches that have investigated the concept and behavior of "Tourist Gaze" in anthropology of tourism researches, an attempt was made to address the impacts of the prevalence of this gaze among Arbaeen pilgrims. The findings show that the change in the subculture of performing this ceremony based on the pilgrims' expectations and marginalization of the religious and epistemic authenticity of this ceremony is one of the main harms and impacts of the spread of this view in the Arbaeen walking ceremony.