While dominant discourses, media representations and corporate entities in China downplay the presence of Chinese mainland gambling in Macau, Beijing sanctions millions of its citizens to make the journey to Macau to gamble each year. While Macau's success is often put down to the extent to which visitors are drawn to a secular destination with integrated resorts to engage in individualistic activities, our approach explores Chinese gambling tourists' movements, rituals and behaviours along poststructuralist lines, so as to generate new insights. The analysis shows how the metaphor of pilgrimage is an important lens to address individual and communal practices amongst outbound Chinese gambling tourists and brings to light the hyper-meaningfulness, shared values, ritualization, play, risk, and liminal conditions that characterise the processes of their entanglements and the centrality of commercial and political interests. In particular, the analysis indicates the need to explore the significance of cultural, spiritual, economic and social dimensions of Chinese outbound tourism, as well as the unique discourses of power and control affecting their movement and practices. By reframing and reconceptualising gambling tourists as a Chinese pilgrimage, we account for manifestations of culture, governmentality and intentional ritualization as well as contribute an alternative construction of pilgrimage beyond euro-centric accounts, which in turn, will stimulate discussion on geographies of pilgrimage.

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Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork including participant observation, site inspections within the forbidden 'red zone' of towns such as Norcia, Amatrice and Campi, and interviews with locals, administrators, tourism industry workers, and clergy, this chapter examines the physical and spiritual impacts of the series of earthquakes in Central Italy in 2016, and explores how different stakeholders (e.g. tourist guides, local authorities, shopkeepers, priests, nuns and monks, and tourists) have framed the role of tourism in the area and how touristic practices re-signify the value of places and their associated moral ideals after environmental disasters. In addition, the chapter examines the dialectical effects of a double environmental transformation on sites: how a natural disaster - unplanned and uncontrollable by social actors - impacts the tangible and intangible fabric of pilgrimage sites, and how those subsequent social interventions likewise impact religious tourism and its stakeholders as well as the wider environment itself.

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