How a weekend becomes an ideal: pilgrimage in the breast cancer walk

Abstract

How does a weekend become a time-place marking a change from what one was to what one becomes? For some participants, the 3-day breast cancer walks are peak experiences where they enter a world of support and purpose and traverse through an event packed to bursting with significance. For some, the walks become the preferred way to fight breast cancer. In this paper, the author applies rhetorical and spatial analysis to participation, observation and interview materials to propose that the model of pilgrimage at least partly explains how a person may walk into an event on an experiment and walk out as a convert. Examining especially the event’s closing ceremony, the author shows the ways the breast cancer walk rhetorically creates a pilgrimage site and saints of place and thereby proffers itself as the best solution for the societal problem of breast cancer.

怎么样让周末变成一个人改变的标记？对于许多参与者来说，为期3天的乳腺癌是朝圣之旅使得他们充分体验到了进入了一个充满支持和目的的世界，使得他们经历了一段非常有意义的时间。对于一些人来说，散步成为抗击乳腺癌的首选方法。在本文中，笔者使用修辞和空间分析参与、观察和访谈资料的方法，所提出的朝圣模型至少部分解释了怎样使得一个人通过散步来实现转变。通过对于时间特别是闭幕式的检测，作者展示了为乳腺癌病人创造一个朝圣的地方的方法，或许可以作为乳腺癌这个社会问题的最好的解决方案。

Keywords:

• breast cancer walk
• pilgrimage
• weekend
• cause-related
• rhetorical analysis

关键词:

• 乳腺癌散步
• 朝圣
• 周末
• 起因相关
• 修辞分析

Notes

1. Susan G. Komen for the Cure™ (formerly known as the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation) will, for the purposes of brevity, be mainly referred to herein as Komen. The Susan G. Komen for the Cure 3-Day™ will, for the same purposes, be referred to as the 3-Day or the breast cancer walk or the walk. Komen’s other, and larger, major event is the one-day Race for the Cure^®.

2. This is figured by multiplying 35,000 walkers (the yearly event season total) by the sixty miles of the 3-Day. For the yearly walker figures, see Susan G. Komen for the Cure®, ‘Make Your New Year’s,’ 2010. Total participants are more than this counting crew, and the people affected by walk – family, circles of acquaintances and co-workers, and donors, at a minimum – multiply the count.

3. ‘And yet [or still] it moves’ – though Drake points out that while Galileo may have said this later, he is unlikely to have said it at his trial (1978, pp. 356–358).