Travelling is the art of motion, motion results in moments of human encountering, and such moments manifest themselves in unsettling linguistic repercussions and crises of meaning. Places of arrival also function as inscriptions of such meaningful repercussions, inscriptions of the past crossing the present, of the other crossing the self. The contributions in this book explore places, rituals, texts and scriptures as religious or secular inscriptions – “topographies” – of such “arrivals”.

Each arrival happens, and its very place manifests itself only as a momentous component of the process itself. An arrival is an event of conclusion as well as of urgency for subsequent explorations of new meanings to be read from the topography of the place, mirroring thus a signifying dynamic for the metamorphosis of the traveller’s self: the ”topodynamic” of arrival. In this vein, this book investigates for the first time the dynamic of cultural formations of space, an aspect of spatiality that since the “spatial turn” in cultural discourse has mostly been neglected.