40. Rubén Camilo Lois González, Belén María Castro Fernández, and Lucrezia Lopez, “From Sacred Place to Monumental Space: Mobility Along the Way to St. James”

From Sacred Place to Monumental Space Mobility Along the Way to St James

Sometimes an article turns out to be not quite what I expected. That’s the case with “From Sacred Place to Monumental Space: Mobility Along the Way to St. James,” co-authored by three academics from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. I had hoped it would help me think about the relationship between space and place along along the Camino Francés pilgrimage route in Spain. Instead, it revealed aspects of the Camino’s twentieth-century political history that I would rather not have known.

The authors state their purpose at the outset: they intend to think about tangible and intangible religious cultural products in relation to the Camino. Their approach is interdisciplinary. “From a geographical perspective, we explore how the progressive anthropisation of sacred spaces has transformed them into monumental spaces, where cultural assets have become references symbols for a particular identity,” they write (771). But, from an art history perspective, they “seek to fill the current vacuum regarding the monumental history of the twentieth century, based on identifying interventions made along the Way of St. James in Spain and in the historic centre of Santiago de Compostela” (771). Their interest is in “how the heritage of St. James has contributed to creating the imagery of Santiago de Compostela and of the Way within the cultural landscape,” and in “the contemporary revitalization of the Way of St. James,” particularly the restorations and embellishments of sites along the Way and in Santiago de Compostela in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s (771). These sites became “tourist attractions . . . as they became part of international networks that share the common purpose of rediscovering artistic and cultural heritage,” they write, and as a result, “many historic-artistic sacred places ended up becoming touristic-artistic places” (771). These “physical interventions have allowed the successful recovery of the Way of St. James as the leading pilgrimage route in Western Europe” (771).

First, our authors discuss the figure of the contemporary pilgrim, “someone whose entire tourist perspective . . . is developed based on the countryside and visual milestones of the route, and who deliberately chooses slow movements that establish a new relationship between body and place” (771). “This pilgrim enjoys walking,” they continue, “as part of a spiritual, codified experience, both as a metaphor for new values inspired by the nineteenth century (romanticism, reflection and escapism) and with recourse to a series of consumer products associated with trekking (e.g. walking trousers, maps, anoraks and shorts)” (771). I see myself in that description: walking trousers are important because they dry quickly, maps keep you from getting lost, waterproof jackets are helpful when it rains, and so forth. Those “consumer products” are helpful if one is to stay relatively warm and dry during one’s “spiritual, codified experience.”

Next comes a definition of pilgrimage: it is “a movement and a journey of people and ideas, which keep the sacred value of the space and place alive, and which create spatial relationships” (772). “By means of these logics of spatial creation,” they continue, “pilgrimage creates a sacred space in which religious and secular discourses are encountered, in addition to debates within a religion itself” (772). The journey, the authors write, “is essential in this sacred space, a journey made on foot by pilgrims, in most cases, as a spiritual and leisure activity” (772). “In this regard,” they suggest,

it has been observed that the perception of the place–a central concept–on this contemporary pilgrimage resides in the idea that the landscape cannot be properly appreciated unless there is a true expenditure of energy to understand it, and without returning to the slow mobility of our ancestors. (772)

Here they cite John Urry’s 2000 book, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century, which I should probably look at, since I am convinced that understanding the land does require a slow movement, such as walking.

The Way of St. James is, they contend, a sacred space, but it is also one of the world’s first tourist itineraries, and since it was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, it has become a new tourism product, with hospitality provision and infrastructure. “The sacred space linked to St. James”–that is, the pilgrimage path and the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela–“is a polysemic space. In other words, it performs a number of different functions: a sacred space, a current pilgrimage route and an extremely important cultural tourism route” (774-75).

“The true protagonist of contemporary revival of the Way is, unarguably, the pilgrim,” they write, who must walk at least 100 kilometres of the route and can be awarded a certificate for having done so (775). “These attributes differentiate them”–pilgrims–“from a conventional tourist, even though both groups share the characteristics of being motivated by relaxation, contact with nature and the countryside, rediscovering the self and discovering a community of people with similar interests” (775). “The modern pilgrim,” they continue, “is a wholly contemporary individual, very different to the medieval one as far as their values and perceptions are concerned” (775). The contemporary pilgrim’s context is post-secular, and they share many characteristics with tourists, although at the same time “they form part of a clearly differentiated group” (775). The motivations of contemporary pilgrims are varied, “although returning to the place and a yearning to walk and reassert themselves in the environment form part of their personality and staunch search” (775). They tend to be more interested in the journey than their destination, the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, and many continue walking on to Cape Finisterre (775).

Here, the authors shift into a discussion of the monumentalization of sacred values, which is, they write, a “form of appropriation and symbolisation” (775). In human geography, monuments are considered emblems and symbols of a place, and they contain “a system of values and beliefs” which contribute “to representing the geographical space and its contents” and evoke “a particular view of the world and safeguards the permanence of values” (775). The “sacred structures dedicated to St. James,” along with “other artistic, historic, human and cultural elements found along the Way of St. James[,] symbolism and sanctify this space,” they write (775-76).

However, the twentieth-century monumentalization process, the restoration of the Way of St. James, began under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco “as a tool for creating and transforming collective memory” (776). This is the part about the Camino that nobody talks about: the way its revival is rooted in Spain’s Fascist past. During the restoration process in the 1950s and 1960s in particular, monuments were altered extensively, particularly at Padrón, O Cebreiro, Tui, and Portomarin (776-77). From the 1960s onward, the Spanish government promoted the way as a tourist route, and it therefore took on political connotations (777). Travel on foot was discouraged; the emphasis was on modern means of transportation, which were suitable to the modern nation-state Spain had become (777). Hotels were built, tourism information offices opened, and historic sites along the way received aesthetic improvements, including sites located as far as 50 kilometres off the traditional pilgrimage path (777). I suppose everyone wanted part of the tourism bonanza the government was expecting. Meanwhile, aesthetic improvements were made in the centre of Santiago de Compostela (780): historical heritage sites were restored, pavements improved, signage installed, and “electric cabling removed from the façades of buildings” (781). The airport at Santiago de Compostela was upgraded as well, and historic buildings were restored and embellished. As a result, the Camino “became immersed in political discourse. The State used the Way to convey messages of a patriotic nature and show that people, even when scattered, were united through faith” (783-84).

None of this seems to shock the article’s authors, although it surprises me, and leaves me wondering how I could have been so ignorant of what appears, in hindsight, to be quite obvious, particularly in places like Portomarin and O Cebreiro. In fact, their conclusion is quite neutral:

The polysemy of St. James and the Way has been ever-present throughout the history of their existence. In scarcely 50 years, the Way has re-emerged from the oblivion in which it found itself at the start of the twentieth century and its identity has continued to flourish. During the Franco era, the discourse it faced was nationalistic, autarchic and religiously traditionalist. With the arrival of democracy, the phenomenon of St. James, far from weakening, has enjoyed a new golden era, in this case with a series of references that are more open, more contemporary and more diverse. The ideological framework that, from the end of the 1970s, sustained the discourse of the Santiago pilgrimage movement is no longer an authoritative discourse regarding pilgrimage to St. James, and the Way has now recovered the European nature that characterised it from the Middle Ages. Today, the Way of St. James is a pilgrimage route in fine health. It consists of a personal journey, whose essence is somewhat unique. The warrior St. James has unequivocally given way to the pilgrim St. James. Today, an alliance of experts on the Way, associations of friends of St. James scattered all over Europe and public bodies keen to contribute to the promotion of cultural and historical tourism for their towns and regions have built a powerful movement, which justifies the present success of the Way of St. James and all that is Jacobeo. (784-85)

So, although I did not find in this article a clear articulation of the distinction between space and place in pilgrimage, I learned a lot about the history of the Camino de Santiago, and I discovered references to books by John Urry that will likely prove useful in my research. I’ll call that a win on this rainy afternoon.

Works Cited

González, Rubén Camilo Lois, Belén María Castron Fernández and Lucrezia Lopez. “From Sacred Place to Monumental Space: Mobility Along the Way to St. James.” Mobilities, vol. 11, no. 5, 2016, pp. 770-88.

39. Noga Collins-Kreiner, “Dark Tourism As/Is Pilgrimage”

dark tourism

My friend Matthew Anderson sent this brief research note my way as part of a batch of papers on pilgrimage he has found useful. It takes a look at a phenomenon I’d never heard of–dark tourism–and compares it to pilgrimage. Its author, Nora Collins-Kreiner, begins by noting that in the current century, pilgrimage is “metamorphosing to encompass secular pilgrimage in addition to its traditionally religious content” (1185). At the same time, tourism focused on death, disaster and horror, which has come to be known as “dark tourism” or “thanatourism,” “the act of travelling to and visiting sites of death, disaster, and the seemingly macabre,” is a growing form of travel (1185). Dark tourism is a new phenomenon, and there is little clarity or agreement about its terminology or definitions (1186). Collins-Kreiner’s goal is to assess whether dark tourism is something new, or “whether researchers are now simply observing the same phenomenon from new vantage points based on different theories” (1186). In addition, Collins-Kreiner sees “clear linkages” between pilgrimage and dark tourism, “from aspects related to supply and demand and site development to the nature of the phenomena themselves” (1186). Some of those linkages are theoretical, others empirical (1186). Nevertheless, both dark tourism and pilgrimage “emerge from the same milieu to include the sites of dramatic historic events that bear extra meaning” (1186). According to Collins-Kreiner, “pilgrimage is currently portrayed by the literature as a holistic phenomenon with religious and secular foundations that include sites that are ‘dark’ in character and that can emerge from both religious and secular contexts” (1186). The phrase “by the literature” is important, because in many respects Collins-Kreiner’s research note is a literature survey, and that fact, along with the way it broadens the definition of pilgrimage, is what makes it particularly interesting and useful.

Collins-Kreiner contends that both pilgrimage and dark tourism sites are social constructions which are marked as meaningful through social processes (1186). She clearly disagrees with any claim that such sites have any essential or inherent meaning. Moreover, the relationship between pilgrimage and tourism is not one of opposition: “it is common to view pilgrimage and pilgrims as one of the oldest forms of tourism and tourists,” she writes, a view that is even more pervasive among those who see religious pilgrimage as the forebear of dark tourism (1186-87). It doesn’t matter, then, if participants in either phenomenon do not see themselves as tourists; by traveling to sites that, for them, have meaning, they are tourists.

There many similarities between pilgrimage and dark tourism, Collins-Kreiner argues. The motives for visiting pilgrimage and dark tourism sites are similar; they include a desire for personal growth, empathy, an interest in spirituality, and “a quest for a strong sense of unity and involvement,” she writes (1187). Ritual processes exist in both phenomena, “as both religious and secular pilgrims and dark tourists often share the trait of searching for mystical, magical experiences which they describe as transformations, enlightenment, and life-changing and consciousness-altering events” (1187). In addition, participants often feel that words are inadequate to describe their experiences (1187). In both phenomena, as in other forms of tourism, participant experiences are not homogenous (1187).

In fact, pilgrimage and dark tourism are so similar that “[t]he current literature is experiencing increasing difficulty differentiating among religious pilgrims, secular pilgrims, dark tourists, heritage tourists . . . and even other kinds of travellers such as nature tourists seeking the mythical and magical” (1187). The word “pilgrimage,” she continues, is increasingly used “in broader secular contexts,” and as “the differences between tourism and traditional pilgrimage are fading,” the literature on them is paying closer attention to their similarities (1187).

Erik Cohen’s typology of tourism modes may be a useful way of examining the relationship between dark tourism and pilgrimage, Collins-Kreiner suggests. The experience of participants in both types of travel “can be regarded as modes of emotional desire and quest to visit meaningful sites that lie beyond the regular tourist experience” (1187). Indeed, “in the constantly expanding secular world with its countless number of individuals lacking any element of religion or faith, uncertainty appears to be causing many to seek out meaning, self-awareness, and identity at different sites” (1187).

Collins-Kreiner concludes that “the two ostensibly distinct categories of dark tourism and pilgrimage may actually be much more similar than they are different,” (1187-88), and that they may, in fact, be approached as a single phenomenon (1188). “[T]he time has come for contemporary rigid terminology–such as the identification of religious travellers as ‘pilgrims,’ vacationers as ‘tourists,’ and travellers interested in death as ‘dark tourists’–to shift somewhat to allow for broader interpretations,” she writes, a conclusion that is “consistent with previous calls to make more room for cultural, social, and political pluralism in tourism in general” (1188).

What surprises me about Collins-Kreiner’s research note is its frank acceptance of secular pilgrimage, and its suggestion that both secular and religious pilgrimage are simply two different forms of tourism. I wonder how common her approach–its erasure of the distinctions between pilgrimage and other forms of travel, including tourism–might be, or if her perspective on pilgrimage, as someone who studies tourism rather than pilgrimage, is different from the scholars I expect to encounter in Ireland in July. It makes me wonder whether pilgrimage is becoming an empty vessel into which one can pour one’s choice of content. In addition, as a literature review, the research note is invaluable for someone like me, who is new to the scholarship on pilgrimage. I discovered recent titles in her bibliography that I hadn’t known about before–E. Badone and S. Roseman’s 2004 anthology Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, J. Digance’s 2003 article “Pilgrimage at Contested Sites,” and J.P. Margry’s 2008 collection Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World: New Itineraries Into the Sacred–and they could turn out to be important as I continue to research pilgrimage and its relationship to my own walking practice.

Work Cited

Collins-Kreiner, Noga. “Dark Tourism As/Is Pilgrimage.” Current Issues in Tourism, vol. 19, no. 12, 2016, pp. 1185-1189. DOI: 10.1080/13683500.2015.1078299.

38. Simon Coleman and John Eade, eds., Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion

reframing pilgrimage

When I finished Ian Reader’s short introduction to pilgrimage as a field of inquiry, I decided to dive headfirst into the literature on the subject. My first stop: this 2004 anthology on mobility and pilgrimage, edited by Simon Coleman and John Eade. Coincidentally, as I was reading the essays collected by Coleman and Eade, my friend Matthew Anderson, an expert on pilgrimage, as a scholar and a practitioner, suggested Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion as one possible starting point, which reaffirmed my decision to crack open this book.

The most useful part of this anthology, for me, is the editors’ introduction, “Reframing Pilgrimage,” which begins with a discussion of Victor and Edith Turner’s 1978 book Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, which occupies an outsized place in the literature about pilgrimage—and which I have yet to read. According to Coleman and Eade, the Turners consider movement in pilgrimage—the topic of Reframing Pilgrimage—as an “embodiment of populist, spontaneously articulated ‘anti-structure,’” although the Turners’ argument is “largely place-centred”—that is, centred on the sacred place that is the pilgrims’ destination (2). (How interesting to see the term “populist” used approvingly.) The essays Coleman and Eade have assembled pick up on that interest in movement in pilgrimage, focusing on “various forms of motion—embodied, imagined, metaphorical—as constitutive elements of many pilgrimages” (3). Those essays, they continue, “examine both movement to and movement at sites (and sometimes from sites as well), and in certain cases trace the ways in which mobile performances can help to construct—however temporarily—apparently sacredly charged places” (3). This emphasis on movement is “intended to move the study of pilgrimage away from certain aspects of conventional anthropological discourse on the subject” in an attempt “to widen the theoretical location of studies of ‘sacred travel’” (3).

Much of this introduction wrestles with the significance of the Turners’ work on this subject. For example, Coleman and Eade note the resonance of the “Turnerian notion of pilgrimage as a liminoid phenomenon, which is productive of social encounters without hierarchical constraints” (3). I’m sure the Turners explain what they mean by “liminoid” in their book on pilgrimage, but not having read it (yet), I found myself wondering what the distinction between this new (for me) word, “liminoid,” and the word “liminal” might be. According to an essay by Victor Turner that I stumbled across online, “liminoid” and “liminal” mean very different things, although they both derive from the same Latin root, which means “threshold.” “Optation pervades the liminoid phenomenon, obligation the liminal,” Turner writes. “One is all play and choice, an entertainment, the other is a matter of deep seriousness, even dread, it is demanding, compulsory” (74). Turner is discussing different forms of rites of passage here (building on the notion of the threshold, a movement from one place to another), and in some cultures those rites of passage are obligatory, or liminal, while in others they are optional, or liminoid. Turner continues:

Liminal phenomena tend to predominate in tribal and early agrarian societies possessing what Durkheim has called “mechanical solidarity,” and dominated by what Henry Maine has called “status.” Liminoid phenomena flourish in societies with “organic solidarity,” bonded reciprocally by “contractual” relations, and generated by and following the industrial revolution. (84)

In addition,

Liminal phenomena tend to be collective, concerned with calendrical, biological, social-structural rhythms or with crises in social processes whether these result from internal adjustments or external adaptations or remedial measures. Thus they appear at what may be called “natural breaks,” natural disjunctions in the flow of natural and social processes. They are thus enforced by sociocultural “necessity,” but they contain in nuce “freedom” and the potentiality for the formation of new ideas, symbols, models, beliefs. Liminoid phenomena may be collective (and when they are so are often directly derived from liminal antecedents), but are more characteristically individual products, though they often have collective or “mass” effects. They are not cyclical, but continuously generated, though in the times and places apart from work settings assigned to “leisure” activities. (85)

Turner’s third point about the distinction between “liminal” and “liminoid” phenomena suggests that the latter is marginal and experimental:

Liminal phenomena are centrally integrated into the total social process, forming with all its other aspects a complete whole, and representing its necessary negativity and subjunctivity. Liminoid phenomena develop apart from the central economic and political processes, along the margins, in the interfaces and interstices of central and servicing institutions—they are plural, fragmentary, and experimental in character. (85)

Unlike “liminal” phenomena,

Liminoid phenomena tend to be more idiosyncratic or quirky, to be generated by specific named individuals and in particular groups—”schools,” circles, and coteries. They have to compete with one another for general recognition and are thought of at first as ludic offerings placed for sale on the “free” market—this is at least true of liminoid phenomena in nascent capitalistic and democratic-liberal societies. Their symbols are closer to the personal-psychological than to the “objective-social” typological pole. (85-86)

Finally, liminoid phenomena can participate in social critique; they can expose “the injustices, inefficiencies, and immoralities of the mainstream economic and political structures and organizations” (86). So, if pilgrimage is a liminoid phenomenon, it would be optional or voluntary; focused on the individual at least as much on the collective; marginal, fragmentary, experimental, and plural; and playful or “ludic” to some degree, rather than being obligatory, collective, central, and serious. I’m not sure, though that leads to “social encounters without hierarchical constraints” (Coleman and Eade 3), or what the relationship between pilgrimage as a liminoid phenomenon and Turner’s notion of communitas might be. Clearly I’m going to have to read the Turners’ book about pilgrimage, which I’ve ordered, since it’s for some reason not held by this university’s library.

I didn’t intend to get carried off on such a tangent, but that’s sometimes what happens when one is reading about something that requires an understanding of specific and even idiosyncratic terminology. In any case, the point Coleman and Eade is making, I think, is that the Turners’ suggestion that pilgrimage is a liminoid phenomenon is useful and productive, while at the same time, their paradigm risks “taking studies of pilgrimage down a theoretical cul-de-sac, both in its all-encompassing character and in its implication that such travel could somehow (or at least should ideally) be divorced from more everyday social, political and cultural processes” (3). The dialectic the Turners construct “between structure and process,” Coleman and Eade continue, “has provided an inflexible analytical tool, according to which the relationship between pairs of dichotomized variables is seen as a zero sum—the more of one, the less of the other” (3-4). Coleman and Eade wonder “whether pilgrimage needs by definition to be seen as ‘exceptional,’ and to ask whether a different approach can help the topic emerge from a theoretical ghetto that is still contained largely within the anthropology of religion” (4). In particular, Coleman and Eade want to think about the importance of mobility, of movement, in pilgrimage. They note that James Clifford and Zygmunt Bauman argue that the figure of the pilgrim is “emblematic of aspects of everyday life,” and that “the era of unconditional superiority of sedentarism over nomadism and the domination of the settled over the mobile is grinding to a halt” (5). Of course, that notion of the pilgrim is a metaphorical one, and as we see in contemporary politics, the valorization of rootlessness and nomadism provokes a powerful (and populist) response in favour of fixed identities (national, ethnic, and/or religious). To be fair, Coleman and Eade do not claim that pilgrimage “can be brandished as an all-purpose metaphor for ‘our times’” (6); rather, they are “more interested in the fact that certain forms of travel, labeled pilgrimages (or the rough equivalent) by their participants, appear to be flourishing in many parts of the world,” and that such journeys “prompt further investigation into the specific cultural, social and economic dimensions of these examples of contemporary travel” (6). Nevertheless, Coleman and Eade do find two aspects of Clifford’s and Bauman’s thinking useful. First, “the assumption that both mobility and change are chronic—or at least not unusual—conditions of many people’s lives goes some way towards challenging dichotomies (evident in Image and Pilgrimage) between structure and process” (7). Second, “when mobility can be regarded as mundane, pilgrimage—as either metaphor or institution—is less likely to be seen as rigidly exceptional or set apart from society” (7). In fact, “[s]ocially informed examination of the history of travel has also tended to emphasize the need to understand pilgrimage in the context of other, roughly parallel activities, and this has sometimes blurred the boundaries between genres of mobility” (9). The distinction between pilgrimage and tourism, for instance, is one of those boundaries that becomes blurry when one ceases to view pilgrimage as something set apart from other genres of travel.

Coleman and Eade also discuss Nancy Louise Frey’s ethnographic account of pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago, another book I need to read. They note that in Frey’s account, distinctions between religious and non-religious travellers (or religious and non-religious forms of pilgrimage?) are not significant, and that reaching a specific sacred place (such as the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela) is often less important than the mode of journeying (for most pilgrims on the Camino, that means walking). Walking, according to Frey, is a form of self-sacrifice and a way to engage with the past, as well as a way of subverting or transcending “the rushing, mechanized world of modernity and postmodernity” (11). Frey’s arrival in Santiago de Compostela is anticlimactic, and she barely touches on the shrine in her book (11). According to Coleman and Eade, “the intense experience of the journey almost blocks out interest in the destination, and renders overtly analytical (and necessarily distancing) techniques of writing problematic” (12).

Another account of pilgrimage which focuses on movement rather than destination is Michael J. Sallnow’s Pilgrims of the Andes, “a detailed account of a group pilgrimage that is also a kinesthetic mapping of space” in which the style of movement—the pilgrims dance, rather than walk—“has symbolic significance” (12). Sallnow’s work, Coleman and Eade contend, “shows how pilgrimage can indeed provide a release form the everyday, but is also a recurring event, building up local memories and putting down strong roots in local networks of cooperation and competition. In this context,” they continue, “pilgrimage emerges as deeply embedded in peasant life, rather than as an isolated social phenomenon” (13). Many medieval pilgrimages in England were similarly part of everyday life; they often did not take pilgrims more than a few days from home, and were more routine and regular activities than the lengthy, distant, and one-off pilgrimages the Turners describe (13).

Literal movement need not be a part of pilgrimage at all, according to Coleman and Eade, referring to the work of Alan Morinis. For example, some Hindu mystics and Sufis “have developed a concept of the inner pilgrimage by which the person visits sacred spaces within the microcosm of the mind and body” (14). Therefore, “to gain an understanding of any given journey we might well need to consult a number of possible semantic fields, and not merely . . . those associated with movement” (14). Moreover, according to Morinis, the symbolic meaning of movement in pilgrimage “may be informed by and juxtaposed with cultural representations of its opposite, stasis, and so for Morinis a good part of the meaning of sacred journeys is uncovered in culturally sensitive analysis of this central opposition” (14). Therefore, Coleman and Eade write, returning to the Turners, it is possible to view the

opposition of structure to anti-structure/process as consisting of a contrast between fixity and fluidity that is powerful both symbolically and in rhetorical terms, even if it fails to take into account the much more complex and mutually enmeshed relations between continuity and transformation, home and homelessness, so-called “everyday life” and sacred travel. (15)

There is a larger significance to this discussion, one I’ve already touched on: studies of globalization suggest that there is a “precarious balance . . . between ‘global flows’ and ‘cultural closure,’” and that being aware of their involvement in open-ended global flows may trigger, for some of us, a search for fixed points of orientation and efforts to affirm old boundaries and construct new ones (15). In other words, “Build that wall!” Isn’t this what motivates Trump and his base of supporters? It might motivate some pilgrims as well: “many pilgrim sites, rather than being contexts for the cultivation of anti-structure, can provide arenas for the rhetorical, ideologically charged assertion of apparent continuity, even fixity, in religious and wider social identities” (15). In other words, globalization can “stimulate the rediscovery of different kinds of particularism and localism,” and the construction of such ideologies within pilgrimage discourses may act in opposition to those who, like Marc Augé, celebrate the “‘non-places of super-modernity” or other examples of postmodern rootlessness (15).

“These perspectives on movement clearly do not yet add up to a discrete analytical debate,” Coleman and Eade write, “in contrast to the ways in which communitas and contestation have often been explicitly juxtaposed in pilgrimage studies” (16). Instead, they provide a number of distinct but not necessarily mutually exclusive understandings of movement in pilgrimage. One is the notion of movement as performative action: “the sense that movement can effect (not always consciously) certain social and cultural transformations” (16). Here Coleman and Eade refer to de Certeau’s claim that walking can be constitutive of social space the way that speech acts constitute language. “Performative,” here, doesn’t mean performance; rather, “performative” is being used in the sense of a performative utterance, a speech act that makes something happen, like “I now declare you husband and wife” or the Biblical “Let there be light!” Another is movement as embodied action, or the way that pilgrimage can provide “the catalyst for certain kinds of bodily experiences” (16). A third is movement as part of a semantic field: “the need to contextualize the meaning of ‘pilgrimage’ within local cultural understandings of mobility” or “such terms as place, space and landscape,” or to recognize that “a given style of mobility may take on particularly charged meaning as a marker of difference (just as the label ‘pilgrim’ may be adopted in rhetorical contradistinction to that of ‘tourist’),” so that “the movement involved in pilgrimage may invoke, play on, appropriate, domesticate, sometimes even negate another form of journeying, such as tourism or migration” (16). “The broader point,” Coleman and Eade suggest,” is “that we must avoid essentializing movement as a category” (!6). Finally, movement can be understood as a metaphor: “the ways in which pilgrimage-related discourses may evoke movement rather than require its physical instanciation,” including the idea that pilgrimage is a metaphor for the journey of the Christian soul (17).

“Is there any connecting thread that might link these dimensions of mobility?” Coleman and Eade ask. “One is that we see both informants and ethnographers coming to regard movement as a marked activity: it becomes an object of attention and reflexivity, and is transformed from a largely taken for granted physiological act into a cultural performance,” they write. “Much of this book is precisely concerned with such processes of translation, within a framework that seeks to understand actors’ own models of pilgrimage or sacralized travel but does not assume that such marked travel is, by definition, divorced from other aspects of social, cultural or indeed religious life” (17). “If pilgrimage can be seen as involving the institutionalization (or even domestication) of mobility in physical, metaphorical and/or ideological terms,” they continue,

such a focus can be located on various levels. Within the macro-context of the political economy of travel and the globalization of (religious) cultures, dynamic interplays between transnational, national and regional processes may be evident. Theorizing around themes of mobility and movement can also be located within—and integrated with—micro-level examinations of the embodied motion inherent within pilgrimage practices, combined with analyses of the sacred geographies and architectures that provide the material and symbolic background to such motion. In such cases, the focus on pilgrimage as ritual and performance is to the fore, with it involving sometimes unpredictable encounters between liturgical forms, personal imagination and memory translated into acts of the body. (17)

The essays they have collected view the phenomenon of pilgrimage from the perspective of movement, although movement is not the only way to think about pilgrimage: “there are many paths for us to trace,” they write (18). The essays in the anthology explore diverse cultural and religious contexts, although “each case study involves diverse processes of sacralization of movement, persons and/or places” (18). In addition, the essays they have brought together explore “movement within movement”—“particular styles of episodes of motion within the broader framework of a journey”—to show “how pilgrimage can provide opportunities to reflect upon, re-embody, sometimes even retrospectively transform, past journeys. We therefore examine journeys about journeys, and which in the process often turn history into both myth and ritual” (18).

For me, the case studies Coleman and Eade are somewhat less useful than their introduction, although they do suggest the range of activity that can be captured by the term “pilgrimage” and their authors suggest additional readings that would broaden my understanding of pilgrimage. In “‘Being There’: British Mormons and the History Trail,” Hildi Mitchell discusses the importance of embodied knowledge, which is “central to the way in which Mormonism works” (26). That embodied knowledge is produced by visiting places associated with Mormon history, including museums, as a way that “Mormons are able to actively participate in their theology and cosmology” (26). Her essay is divided into three sections. The first explores Mormon history and its central importance to Mormon theology. The second considers how this relationship “echoes the interplay between persons, place and both text and object in wider Mormonism, most especially in Mormon temples and in the Mormon practice of testimony bearing” (26). The third examines “how this Mormon engagement with temples and testimonies works to shape their interaction with historical sites, thus illuminating the extent to which pilgrimage activities are different or similar to everyday religious action” (26). Her purpose, she writes, is “to show how embodied memory acts as the interface between individual experiences and wider religious structures, which perhaps helps to integrate the apparent opposition of the individual/structure dichotomy” (27). For example, she suggests that emotion should be considered “as an embodied and collective phenomenon” (32) as a way of explaining collective religious experiences (32-33). She also uses Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to think about this embodied knowledge (36)—yet another sign that I need to read his Outline of a Theory of Practice. Mitchell concludes that British and American Mormons experience historical objects and sites “not merely as secular travel, but as faithbuilding explorations of sacred places and feelings,” and that “embodied memories are important in giving rise to religious feelings,” as well as an entry point to the history of their faith (43).

In “From England’s Nazareth to Sweden’s Jerusalem: Movement, (Virtual) Landscapes and Pilgrimage,” Simon Coleman examines two separate pilgrimage events: the annual Anglo- and Roman-Catholic pilgrimage to Walsingham in the UK, and Swedish evangelicals of the Word of Life church who travel regularly to the Holy Land. His aim is to demonstrate how these two groups “reveal significantly different attitudes towards ritual, time and materiality,” and “to show how they are united in their focus on movement itself as a marked activity, as a cultural performance that incorporates performative action” (46). These two very different constituencies can “be seen as providing significantly divergent ways of negotiating the relationship between macro-processes associated with the political economy of travel and micro-level forms of actual physical mobility” (46). Like Mitchell, Coleman refers to habitus in order “to show how rigid distinctions between supposedly sacred and supposedly secular actions cannot be sustained once one sees how forms of worship become embodied dispositions that cannot be shut off once the believer leaves a service” (46-47). He also wants to explore “how ‘non-pilgrimage’ activities and assumptions leach into those making up sacralized travel, not as forms of ‘impurity’ but as constitutive aspects of the travel itself” (47). It’s easy to see the connection between his case study and the book’s introduction: Coleman’s interest is in contextualizing pilgrimage activities, rather than in seeing them as exceptional or special.

Unlike the pilgrims who travel to Walsingham, the Swedish evangelicals are developing “a charismatic theory of idealized global action,” with people travelling overseas for mission work, and with guest speakers arriving from elsewhere (53). “In travelling to all continents,” Coleman suggests, the Word of Faith believers “are delineating a landscape of evangelical agency, where faith is shown to transcend barriers of culture, territory and nationhood” (53). One distinction between the pilgrimages he is discussing, then, is the distinction between the global and the local that he and Eade made in the book’s introduction. After all, one of the important activities at Walsingham is walking—through the town and between various important religious sites (56-57). Yet both groups of pilgrims are seeking legitimacy for their faith through travel—the Walsingham pilgrims by invoking history (65), and the Word of Life pilgrims “through a global landscape of missionization oriented theologically and imaginatively, temporally and spatially, towards Jerusalem” (63). “If Catholics seek a kind of ‘recurrence’ of history,” he suggests, “charismatics look more to a metaphorical and literal ‘progression’ towards a future that leads ultimately to the Last Days” (65). At the same time, both groups use pilgrimage “as a form of witness, a defence of identity in relation to religious and secular alternatives” (65). There are, he concludes, “many ways to move, just as there are many ways to be modern” (66).

For me, the most valuable part of Coleman’s essay is his brief discussion of walking and slowness, particularly in relation to pilgrims walking to Santiago de Compostela:

The bodily and temporal modes involved in slow, effortful travel appear to subvert the rushing, mechanized world of the present, allowing space a kind of victory over time and helping to produce a sense of contact with the past. If the contemporary world appears to be about the compression of time and space, pilgrims to Compostela are entering a kind of sacred decompression chamber. (66)

Slowness and effortfulness (which my word-processing software tells me isn’t a word) are essential aspects of walking as a form of travel, and along with a sense of contact with the past, I would argue that walking may also provide a sense of contact with the land through which one is walking.

In “‘Heartland of America’: Memory, Motion and the (Re)construction of History on a Motorcycle Pilgrimage,” Jill Dubisch explores the Run for the Wall, a cross-country motorcycle rally from California to the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, DC, as a pilgrimage of connection (107). Although the Run for the Wall is arguably a secular pilgrimage, Dubisch argues that it has a “sacred destination” and “combines the individual search for healing and identity with the creation of a collective narrative” (107). Through the construction of that narrative, the Run for the Wall becomes “a ritual performance that constructs a collective view of the past as well as contributing to the construction of a common identity” (107). However,

this narrative and this collective memory are not developed in the context of the pilgrimage alone. Although the riders are the ones who are making the journey, the ones who are moving across the ‘heartland,’ this heartland itself is created by the many individuals and groups along the way who host the Run, who honour the veterans, and who utter the words that have become part of the ritual of the Run: “Welcome home, brother.” (107-08)

A repeated pilgrimage event, the Run represents issues—PTSD and healing, and POW/MIA accounting (109)—as well as provides an opportunity for a search for belonging or acceptance that Vietnam veterans feel was denied them when they returned from the war (109-10).

Dubisch provides her definition of pilgrimage early in her essay:

Pilgrimage usually involves the conjunction of a moving body or bodies of individuals with a specific geographic location, or locations, which will have their own cast of characters involved in various ways in the pilgrimage. In addition, a specific pilgrimage is an ephemeral production (although much the same could be said for any social activity) and certain pilgrimages . . . may take place only once a year, or in some cases even less frequently. (111)

Unlike Coleman and Eade, Dubisch acknowledges that pilgrimage may be one of the “extraordinary and exceptional events that may radically shape individual and collective lives” (112). The Run, she recounts, generates experiences of “liminality, communitas, the power of ritual, suffering and transformation,” and even though she is not a Vietnam veteran, she was able to experience these concepts “in a vivid emotional, even physical, way,” providing her with “an understanding of pilgrimage I am not certain I would otherwise have had” (113).

Participants in the Run for the Wall identify themselves as pilgrims, and that identification is collective rather than idiosyncratic: “the run is not mere travel, but a journey with a mission, contrasting with trips taken for novelty and pleasure” (113). That sense of mission, of being serious travellers and not just tourists or sightseers, is what makes the Run a pilgrimage (114). This description, however, does not suggest “that seriousness is always a defining characteristic of pilgrimage, nor that there is no time for fun or socializing during the course of the Run. Rather, what is important here is the participants’ own view of what distinguishes their journey from other mundane trips, and particularly from purely recreational motorcycle rides” (114). In addition, the Run is transformative: it transforms meaning, history, and the emotional states of those who participate (114). It also creates a sense of communitas through shared experiences and common goals (116). Through her participation in the Run for the Wall, Dubisch concludes,

It also became clearer to me . . . that pilgrimage can be many, even contradictory things at once: a political movement and a personal journey of healing, a celebration of the warrior and a memorial to the tragedy of war, an experience of liminality by the marginal and a mode of integration and the overcoming of marginality, a place of communitas but also riven with divisions and conflict, a journey and a coming home. (128)

That description resonates with my own pilgrimage experience on the Camino de Santiago, as well as on other walking journeys that I have characterized as pilgrimages. That complexity is, I think, part of what makes pilgrimages so powerful, and which leads people to want to repeat the experience.

In “Coming Home to the Motherland: Pilgrimage Tourism in Ghana,” Katharina Schramm notes that there is a struggle over the meaning of homecoming and pilgrimage versus tourism, particularly for African Americans seeking their roots in Africa. “The recent literature on pilgrimage has shown that the framing of pilgrimage within the discourse and practice of the tourism industry is far from unusual,” she writes. “Rigid distinctions between (serious) pilgrims—always on a journey to a sacred site—and (playful) tourists—always on a trip to places of secular pleasure, has become blurred” (134). Strict divisions between sacred and secular are therefore called into question (134). Pilgrimage and tourism are also “brought together within wider theories of travel and identity” (134-35), such as Zygmunt Bauman’s suggestion that pilgrims and tourists are “opposing metaphors, each standing for a distinct conception of identity”: pilgrims as metaphors for the modern subject, “constantly preoccupied with the building and sustenance of an identity through which he can give meaning to the confusing world around him,” and tourists (like strollers, vagabonds, and players) as metaphors for the postmodern subject, for whom “fixation needs to be avoided and identities must be prevented from ‘sticking’” (135). Still, Schramm continues, a longing for a stable identity is not outmoded, even if, as a goal, such stability cannot be reached: “as I would like to demonstrate in my discussion of homecoming,” she writes, “the promise of fulfilment and arrival lingers in the notion of return to Africa—even though such expectations may be unfulfilled and the journey towards an ‘African identity’ may have to continue” (136).

Neither tourist nor pilgrim are fixed or one-dimensional identities, Schramm argues: “Both categories are open to transformation and inclined to internal diversification and hierarchy” (136). She refers to Erik Cohen’s writing on the phenomenology of tourist experiences, which may work as a way to grasp the continuum of tourism and its motivations. Cohen divides travel into five types: recreational, diversionary, experiential, experimental, and existential. “For my discussion of homecoming,” Schramm writes, “the categories of experiential and existential tourism are the most significant” (136). Experiential tourism suggests a quest for authentic experiences and meaning, whereas existential tourism suggests the traveller is engaged spiritually, although that engagement may be marginal to his or her society and culture (136). The notion of centre is important here: “the pilgrim is seeking to reach the centre of his own world, no matter how far away it might be in place,” and the “archaic pilgrimage,” where distance isn’t spatial but temporal, is a special case: “This archaic centre is associated with a pristine existence and is mythically constructed as a paradise forever lost—never to be fully restored, yet always longed for” (137).

According to Schramm, African Americans who travel to Ghana in a search for their roots have many different motives and aspirations, and therefore their activities cannot be grouped together in a single category (137). This heterogeneity “is mirrored in varying understandings of the meaning of homecoming as well as the perceptions of the actual process,” she continues (138). As a result, “the ambivalent meaning of pilgrimage tourism becomes particularly clear” (139). This complexity is also revealed by Paul Basu in “Route Metaphors of ‘Roots-Tourism’ in the Scottish Highland Diaspora,” a discussion of genealogical tourism in Scotland. Participants in such tourism tend to refer to their journeys as pilgrimages, homecomings, or quests (151). Basu’s objective is “to explore the dominant ‘root metaphors’—which are, inevitably, also ‘route’ metaphors—through which roots-tourists in the Scottish Highlands and Islands typically characterize and understand their journeys” (152). He examines the denotative and connotative qualities of these metaphors—pilgrimage, homecoming, and quest—which, he contends,

together provide a more appropriate ‘grammar’ (including a repertoire of actions and attitudes) for roots-tourism than tourism itself is able to offer: a grammar, furthermore, which has the potential to bear fruit and empower these journeys with the capacity to effect personal transformations, rendering them quite literally ‘life-changing’ experiences for many participants. (153-54)

Such metaphors, however, can obfuscate as well as illuminate, so it’s important to be aware of “the potentially misleading persuasiveness of metaphors” (156).

Basu suggests that “as roots-tourists leave behind the ‘ordinary’ world of their diasporic homes and enter the ‘non-ordinary sphere’ of the ancestral homeland,”

they do appear to enter a ‘liminal’ zone where they often report supernatural occurrences and altered states of mind (feeling ancestral presences, having premonitory dreams, etc.). Such other-worldly experiences add to the transformative potential of these rites of passage, and roots-tourists may return to their ordinary homes significantly changed, sometimes experiencing difficulties re-adjusting to domestic routines and commitments or else determined to resolve outstanding problems. (168)

I find myself confused, again, between the related concepts of “liminoid” and “liminal,” particularly since the latter term is used by Dubisch and Basu to describe pilgrimage experiences, while Coleman and Eade use the former. Clearly, despite my brief reading of Turner, I have more work to do in order to understand the distinction between these terms.

For Basu, roots-tourism journeys are “are once homecoming, quest and pilgrimage,” and “qualities of these differently symbolic ‘other’ genres of travel and their respective destinations are clearly ‘active together’ in engendering meaning and transformative potential” (173). As pilgrimage, these journeys are simultaneously literal, or “terrestrial,” and metaphorical (173). As homecomings, they are journeys “to the source, to the cradle of belonging” (173). And yet, as quests, their destinations remain “essentially elusive and incommunicable” (173). “By implicitly and explicitly drawing on the route metaphors of homecoming, quest and pilgrimage to provide a composite grammar for roots-tourism,” Basu concludes, “roots-tourists are also provided with a repertoire of appropriate actions and attitudes for their journeys . . . and their vague, incommunicable longing is thus given form” (173-74).

One can’t expect that every essay in an anthology will speak to one’s interests. Two of the essays collected here are primarily useful to me for their citations of other writers on pilgrimage or travel. For instance, Eva Evers Rosander, in “Going and Not Going to Porokhane: Mourid Women and Pilgrimage in Senegal and Spain,” refers to John Urry’s typology of movement—physical, imaginative and virtual, and corporeal (70), which might be helpful in my research. Similarly, Bente Nikolaisen, in “Embedded Motion: Sacred Travel Among Mevlevi Dervishes,” discusses the introduction to the second edition of John Eade and Michael J. Sallnow’s Contesting the Sacred, which suggests that no universal definition of pilgrimage is likely to be useful (93).

In any case, thinking seriously about pilgrimage is useful for me, because it helps me distinguish my artistic walking practice from the very different practice of pilgrimage. These two types of activity are related, but they are different, and being able to understand pilgrimage literally, rather than metaphorically, is something I very much need to be able to do. At this point, I am thinking that my walking practice appropriates the form of pilgrimage while focusing on a very different style of content—although as I continue to read and think about this topic, I will no doubt change or refine that notion. In any case, being able to discuss pilgrimage coherently will be essential preparation for my conference paper on the subject, which I will be writing over the next few weeks. Until then, I have time to continue my research into this subject.

Works Cited

Coleman, Simon, and John Eade. Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion. Routledge, 2004.

Turner, Victor. “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology.” Rice University Studies, vol. 60, no. 3, 1974, pp. 53-92. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/63159.

37. Ian Reader, Pilgrimage: A Very Short Introduction

pilgrimage a very short introduction

If I’m going to write about pilgrimage, or consider my walks to be pilgrimages, I’m going to need a clearer sense of what pilgrimage is, even though I’ve made one recognized pilgrimage: the walk to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. That’s why I turned to Ian Reader’s short book on the subject, part of Oxford University Press’s “Very Short Introduction” series. Reader, a retired professor at Lancaster University and the University of Manchester, is an expect on pilgrimage, and Pilgrimage: A Very Short Introduction is a useful starting point for my reading on this topic.

According to Reader, “Pilgrimage is a global phenomenon found almost universally across cultures,” and large numbers of pilgrimage places have flourished both historically and in the contemporary world (1). These places of pilgrimage range “from major religious institutions with national and international reputations, to regional shrines and local copies of major pilgrimages,” including Catholic pilgrimage centres such as the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico and Lourdes in France; the Islamic holy sites of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia; the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, the terminus of the Camino de Santiago; pilgrimages to cities like Hardwar and Varanasi, sacred to Hindus, in India; the trek to the cave-temple of Amaranth, sacred to Shiva, also in India; and the 1,400 kilometre circuit of the island of Shikoku in Japan, which encompasses 88 temples and follows the Buddhist holy man Kōbō Daishi (1-3). Books, movies, and television shows have made some pilgrimages into media phenomena (2). According to Reader, these pilgrimages “are but a small sample of the many pilgrimage sites around the world and across religious traditions that have prominent reputations and are attracting pilgrims in the present day” (4). In fact, there are examples of pilgrimage within virtually every religious tradition, according to Reader (4). Some sites, such as Jerusalem or Sri Padi and Kataragama in Sri Lanka, are sacred to more than one religion, a situation that can generate feelings of mutual harmony, or of tension and conflict “grounded both in differences of faith and because of competing ethnic, religious, and political claims” (6).

Many pilgrimages, however, are local in nature; there are several hundred local pilgrimages in Japan, for example (7), and local shrines and holy wells in England were available for medieval pilgrims who could not afford to travel to Canterbury (7-8). There are local shrines in India as well that function as pilgrimage sites (8). Local pilgrimages can be replicas of more famous and distant ones; small-scale replicas of temples such as Varanasi’s Sri Vishwanath are found widely in India, often in the courtyards of other temples, to enable those who are far from Varanasi to visit (8). In Japan, there are replicas of the 88-temple Shikoku pilgrimage (8). At Walsingham in the UK, a replica of Jesus’s family house in Nazareth was built during the Middle Ages, and it became the centre of a Marian cult that survived suppression during the Reformation and remains a major English pilgrimage site for Catholics and Anglicans (9). Replicas of the Lourdes grotto have been constructed in the US, Japan, and the UK (10).

Reader notes that “[t]he popularity of pilgrimage is not just a modern phenomenon. Many of the pilgrimages that have been mentioned have long histories of attracting pilgrims,” such as Santiago de Compostela, Ise shrines in Japan, Canterbury Cathedral in the UK, and Lourdes (11). The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela flourished in the Middle Ages, for example, and although it became almost moribund in the nineteenth century, it was revived after the restoration of Spanish democracy in 1975 (11-12, 47-48). And there are 600 historical pilgrimage sites in the Netherlands, of which 250 are still visited (12).

In addition, there are secular or nonreligious pilgrimage sites as well, “places that have no religious affiliation but whose visitors may refer to themselves as pilgrims and who perform actions that resonate with what goes on at places such as Lourdes, Santiago, and Shikoku,” such as the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, DC, and Graceland in Memphis. In addition, “existing sites may be adopted by newly emergent traditions,” such as Glastonbury in the UK or Sedona in Arizona, both of which have become centres of pilgrimage for New Age devotees (12).

According to Reader, pilgrimage has become a major industry, promoted not only by religious authorities but also commercial concerns, such as tourist agencies and transportation concerns, which provide infrastructure used by pilgrims (13). Whether it is known as “spiritual tourism,” “religious tourism,” or “pilgrimage tourism,” such travel generates a great deal of economic activity, with some pilgrimage centres, such as Lourdes, dependent on it (13). “This has led to concerns about the apparent commercialization of pilgrimage and its transformation from a seemingly ‘spiritual’ activity into one centred around markets and tourism,” Reader writes. “One should not, however, think that such developments or commercializations are simply products of the modern day any more than one should think that pilgrims were necessarily only interested in spiritual issues in earlier eras” (13-14). In fact, “[c]omplaints about corruption and commercialism, the clusters of souvenir shops around shrines, and the behaviour of visitors, who appear to be little more than tourists, reverberate across history” (14). Part of the reason for such historical complaints is the fact that in earlier times, pilgrimage was often the only way that people could travel; mobility was restricted in feudal societies, and therefore going on pilgrimage was the only legitimate people could give for travelling (15). So, while pilgrimage has always had a devotional element, it also contained tourist elements from the outset (15). In addition, the need for services, such as food and accommodation, has always generated economic activity that resembles tourism (15-16).

“Pilgrimage practices may differ across religious traditions and countries, and be enacted by people speaking different languages, expressing different faith perspectives, and even at times appearing to be less interested in formal religious orientations than in devotion to a deceased rock star,” Reader writes, “yet, at the same time, there is a readily discernible coherence and commonality across traditions” (16-17). For example, pilgrims often wear particular items of dress to identify themselves as pilgrims. In addition, pilgrimage shrines often require specific forms of activity. Reader suggests “that there is enough common ground across the spectrum for us to talk of pilgrimage in universal terms, as a common human phenomenon spanning cultures, religions, and continents” (17). He concludes that pilgrimage is “a global phenomenon that nowadays is attracting large numbers of people who manifest many feelings and attitudes in common” (18).

Pilgrimage predates Christianity; there are sites in ancient Greece, China, and India (20). “Thus,” Reader suggests,

pilgrimage as a concept and practice incorporated themes of people leaving home, going to and performing acts of veneration at places where holy figures from their tradition had been, where significant events associated with them had occurred, and where their spiritual presence could, it was believed, still be felt. From early on, too, it contained a sense of performing spiritual exercises to bring the pilgrim closer to the divine. This did not, however, mean that pilgrims saw their journeys solely or even primarily through such a lens. Many, perhaps the vast majority, viewed their pilgrimages as a means through which to gain graces and merits that would benefit them both in life and, through the eradication of sins, after death, while praying for all manner of worldly benefits, particularly miraculous cures from maladies. They were also inspired by the idea that being in places that were marked out as specially sacred because of their links to saints and other holy figures, enabled them to directly encounter those figures and receive their grace. Other themes that accrued to the idea of pilgrimage included that of penance; by the 6th century CE, Christian ecclesiastical and other courts began to sentence wrongdoers to perform penitential pilgrimages in order to expiate their sins. (20)

There is a commonality in pilgrimage practices across history, according to Reader, and many of the themes he sees in ancient pilgrimages are still prevalent today.

The English word “pilgrimage” derives from the French pèlerinage and the Latin words peregrinus, meaning “foreign,” and per ager, meaning “going through the fields” (20). Thus, Reader notes, “it indicates the idea of journeys, travelling, leaving the comforts of home, and being a stranger in the lands through which one journeys” (20). He also examines words in different languages that translate into English as “pilgrimage,” and concludes that pilgrimage and related terms, such as junrei in Japanese and tirthyatra in Sanskrit,

contain notions of crossing, sacred geographies, movement between states of being, the integral nature of travel and worship, and of journeys to get to and be in places that are considered holy. They further indicate that pilgrimage involves both the places themselves and the practices engaged in on the way to them. They also point to a tension that often exists in pilgrimage between movement and place, and about whether the essence of pilgrimage is located in travel to a sacred place or primarily in the actions engaged in when there. (22-23)

For example, those who walk to Santiago de Compostela tend to emphasize the journey, while those who travel by train or plane tend to emphasize the activities they perform at the cathedral, a division that exists in other pilgrimage traditions as well. “In essence,” he continues, “both journey and place can be key elements in pilgrimage. However, different pilgrims, depending on how they do their pilgrimages, may emphasize different aspects of it (23-24). In addition, some sites, like Lourdes and Mecca and Hardwar, lend themselves to an emphasis on the destination rather than the journey there (particularly in a contemporary context) (24). This question is one that interests me very much. While I was moved by my arrival in Santiago de Compostela when I walked the Camino Francés, that experience was nothing compared to the long walk to the cathedral. Moreover, at the moment I am particularly interested in whether walking pilgrimages can make the space through which one travels into place.

According to Reader, “[t]he themes of itineracy,” of movement, “and being in foreign lands relate also to basic human conditions of being restless and wishing to seek new horizons and see new places” (24). Such themes, he continues,

express feelings that impel many travellers and pilgrims: that one’s everyday circumstances, routines, and social contexts are restrictive, that one needs to escape from them in order to find new meanings and change one’s life, that the truth is “out there” somewhere, and that one needs to break away from one’s normal life in order to find it. Pilgrimage has long provided a prime mechanism through which people have striven to deal with such feelings. Indeed, in many religious contexts it has been interpreted symbolically as an externalized enactment of a spiritual journey through life, perhaps as a journey to God or to enlightenment. (24)

These suggestions are very true; in my own pilgrimages in Spain and in Canada, I have experienced both a desire to see new places (or to re-experience in a different way places I already know), and to find new meanings. However, as Reader also points out, “[b]eing a pilgrim also offers people the opportunity to temporarily cast off their normal mundane status and become akin not just to the sacred figures, in whose footsteps they walk, but also to religious specialists” (24). This theme is powerful in Buddhist pilgrimage, where pilgrims temporarily become like monks or nuns (24). Pilgrims may also be, symbolically, “temporarily dead to the everyday world. The pilgrimage clothing worn by Japanese pilgrims in Shikoku, for example, is redolent with the symbolism of death” (24-25). Such death symbolism, Reader continues, “is also suffused with images of rebirth and renewal, in which the pilgrim, on completing the pilgrimage, is spiritually reborn and returns, reinvigorated, to the mundane world” (25).

“While pilgrimage reflects the human condition of restlessness,” Reader writes, “it is not aimless: there is somewhere specific to go, a goal and destination, often (as with the Santiago Camino or the Shikoku pilgrimage) a route to follow along with ritual actions to be performed” (27). In abstract terms, that goal “may be associated with spiritual union or enlightenment,” but in practical terms,

it invariably means going to and being at specific places that have particular resonances for the pilgrim and his/her faith, where, it is believed, spiritual forces and deities can be encountered and venerated, where their powers and the worldly benefits that flow from them can be assimilated, and/or where pilgrims can stand in the place where their spiritual leaders stood. (27)

Places associated with the origins of a faith and the figures at the faith’s core often become places of pilgrimage, such as the Holy Land, Mecca and Medina, and Bodh Gaya in India, where the Buddha achieved enlightenment. Sites are also commonly associated with apparitions from another realm, such as Lourdes and other Marian shrines (31). Relics and tombs are also important (31-33). “Places of pilgrimage do not rely on just a striking physical location, story, or narrative linking them to saints, apparitions, or the like,” Reader argues. “Almost invariably they also develop a built environment that enshrines the central facet of their spiritual alure” (34). That aspect was missing from my pilgrimage to Wood Mountain last summer in honour of poet Andrew Suknaski; when I arrived in the village, there was little there, and certainly no tangible evidence that Suknaski was from there.

Along with themes of devotion or encountering the divine or seeking spiritual advancement, however, pilgrimage has always included elements of entertainment and tourism, Reader argues. “Particularly as pilgrimages have been popularized and as sites have become more accessible, the facilities to cater to pilgrim needs and wishes have also grown,” he writes. “As they have done so, they have increasingly offered scope for more than austere behaviour” (36). Pilgrimages involve elements of play such as eating and drinking. In addition—and this is something that was missing from my pilgrimage to Wood Mountain, and my walk through the Haldimand Tract in southwestern Ontario—pilgrimage is a social affair, performed in groups, in which participants develop “a sense of common belonging” (36-37). One drawback of inventing one’s own pilgrimages—in my experience, anyway—is that they tend (or have tended) to be solo affairs, without the overarching meaning (the sense of connection to other pilgrims traveling the same path in the past and present) or sociality that are typical of conventional pilgrimages.

“In essence pilgrimage incorporates three main elements: travel and movement, veneration in some form, and a special place or places considered to have some deep significance (often associated with sacred figures or founders) that makes them stand out from the world around them,” Reader contends. “Similarly,” he continues,

those who perform pilgrimages—pilgrims—are people who travel to and perform acts of meaningful significance such as praying and performing rituals at and on the route to such special places. These may be built places (churches, temples, shrines, tombs) as well as natural features (such as mountains, caves, and river-crossing places), although usually such locations, too, are marked out by physical buildings that have been built there. (40-41)

“What remains constant,” he continues,

is the notion of people making their way to and seeking to be in such places, in the ambit of the special figures associated with them. The journey can have both real and symbolic meanings: a movement to a physical place and a metaphorical journeying to a spiritual destination. Pilgrimage thus can be universal in meanings as well as highly localized. Within this framework pilgrimage can provide the setting for expressions of individual development and self-awareness along with group-related senses of togetherness and belonging, and yet also provide potential for contest and conflict. In such ways pilgrimage encompasses a wide variety of themes and meanings, frequently dependent on individual interpretations and volition, that are sometimes (for instance, in simultaneously offering pilgrims scope for a sense of communal harmony and a means of expressing difference) contradictory. (41)

“It is this complex richness of potentialities and scope that is so central to its appeal,” Reader concludes, “and to the seemingly simple act of leaving one’s normal life and, and the Latin term expresses it, ‘going through the fields’” (41).

Along with tales of miracles and apparitions and associations with religious leaders, pilgrimage sites need to be accessible; the development of Lourdes, for example, was assisted by train travel (43-45), and Camino routes to Santiago were developed in the Middle Ages (45-47). Regarding the Camino de Santiago, however, Reader notes that the way that many pilgrims no longer have religious motivations has led to accusations that it is turning into “a hiking route as much as a path of pilgrimage” (48). Contemporary pilgrims, he writes, “may well eschew any overt associations with faith and religion and see their pilgrimages more through the lenses of personalized spiritual search, the challenge of hiking and issues of cultural identity” (49). “Everyone has their own Camino” is a saying I heard often among pilgrims in northern Spain, and everyone has their own reasons for making the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela—or other pilgrimages, for that matter. I would argue that those who demand some kind of uniformity in the motivations of pilgrims are unlikely ever to be satisfied, and that, as Reader’s book suggests, multiple motivations and experiences have always characterized those who engage in pilgrimages (70):

While it is thus difficult to express all the reasons while people become pilgrims, studies of pilgrims in numerous settings have produced very similar results, showing that generally they express multiple reasons for so doing, and that a number of fairly common themes can be found cross-culturally. In some cases it may be the appeal of communal worship, of being together with and forming a bond with fellow-believers. . . . Returning to a centre of one’s religion or to sites associated with its holy figures provides and intensification, reaffirmation, and reinvigoration of faith. (70-71)

At the same time, “[t]he symbolic notion of pilgrimage as a metaphor for life and as a journey to enlightenment or spiritual transcendence may be significant for some pilgrims, although it is more common for them to express more pragmatic reasons for their journeys, linked either with making things better in this life or the hereafter” (71). Making pilgrimages for the benefit (or in honour of) deceased family members is a common motivation (71); I met many people walking the Camino for that reason. In addition, some pilgrims “are motivated by the wish to leave their personal problems behind by escaping from their ordinary existence and going on the road, where they may then confront their problems on their travels” (72-73). Others seek emotional or physical healing (72-73). Some are looking for assistance with daily concerns (75-76), and others are experiencing anxieties about mortality (77-78).

The conclusion of a pilgrimage, for many pilgrims, may also be a starting point for the rest of their lives (77). However, many seek to repeat the experience (77-81), something Reader describes as almost an addiction (80). “The recurrence with which people perform pilgrimages, sometimes becoming permanent pilgrims on the road, treating pilgrimage places as second homes to return to again and again, or becoming residents of sites they have journeyed to,” Reader suggests, “shows that pilgrimage need not be an exceptional activity that happens rarely or perhaps just once in a lifetime” (81). The compulsion to repeat the experience of pilgrimage suggests something of its power, I would suggest. I would love to return to Spain and walk a different Camino route, for example, and I hope that someday the opportunity to do that presents itself.

Pilgrimages, Reader suggests, are not only spiritual experiences: “Relaxation, celebration, and entertainment are often woven into pilgrimage structures, with pilgrims who may have been abstemious while on pilgrimage subsequently ‘letting off steam’ at the end of the journeys or on the way home” (83-84). Souvenirs are important, and complaints about their tackiness miss the point, because their significance is not aesthetic but rather resides in the meanings they carry for pilgrims (95). Souvenirs “contain and represent the spiritual presence and essence of the site or deities visited,” Reader writes (95), which makes me wonder how pilgrimage souvenirs are any different from other mementoes of travel. For many participants, pilgrimage is not “a hermetically sealed activity separate from pleasure,” but rather is “intertwined with (and in many respects thus inseparable from) tourism” (97). “As such,” Reader contends,

it is difficult to clearly separate pilgrimage and tourism, especially when the same people stop their buses to pray earnestly at a shrine and then drop by at a scenic place or beach to take photographs or bathe. Such is the significance of sightseeing that tourism and cultural heritage have become a central marketing theme in many contemporary pilgrimage contexts. (98)

That certainly reflects my experience on the Camino de Santiago; the separation between pilgrimage and tourism in that pilgrimage, I would argue, lay in the mode of transportation, walking. However, as Reader pointed out earlier, “complaints or contrasts between walkers and others are unreasonable, as are notions of who is or is not an ‘authentic’ pilgrim” (67). My sense that walking somehow guaranteed my experience of the Camino as a pilgrimage, then, may be untenable.

Most of Reader’s book discusses religious pilgrimages, but he notes that, in modern contexts, pilgrimage has also

become widely associated with places that have no specific religious affiliations or links to formal religious traditions. Many of the themes associated with pilgrimage may be visible in a variety of settings that include visits to the graves and homes of deceased celebrities, war memorials, places associated with seminal political figures, and itineraries relating to the search for cultural roots, identity, and heritage. Moreover, those who participate in such visits may refer to their activities as pilgrimages and to themselves as pilgrims. (100)

This is the kind of pilgrimage that interests me; the pilgrimages I have made, at least since I walked the Camino Francés, have been secular in nature. According to Reader, such pilgrimages are

especially, and perhaps increasingly, prevalent in the modern day, and particularly in Western contexts, where the term “pilgrimage” is nowadays widely used by the mass media to describe such practices. Academics, too, have applied the term ‘pilgrimage’ to activities that occur outside of formal religious contexts but that incorporate modes of behaviour and phenomena similar to more traditional forms of pilgrimage. Frequently, too, the terms “secular pilgrimage” and “nonreligious pilgrimage” have become widely used in such contexts. (100)

Reader notes that people make pilgrimages to Graceland (102); the graves or death sites of talented and charismatic figures are often “memorialized and visited in ways similar to those of pilgrims to the tombs of saints” (103). War graves and the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial are also pilgrimage sites (103-05), as are Robben Island in South Africa (105-06), Lenin’s Tomb (106-07), and Mao’s mausoleum (107-08). In addition, journeying to places “associated with one’s ancestral roots is frequently seen as a modern form of pilgrimage associated with issues of quest, personal search, and identity. Such ‘roots pilgrimages’ are particularly poignant and important for those who are aware that their ancestors were immigrants” (108). Many African Americans, for instance, make pilgrimages to Africa (although it is incorrect to refer to enslaved Africans as immigrants). Fan culture also occasions journeys that can be considered pilgrimages, such as trips to Liverpool to visit sites associated with the Beatles (109). Hiking trails can also be pilgrimages. The obvious example is the Camino de Santiago, but St. Olav’s Way in Norway and St. Patrick’s Way in Ireland can also be considered to be hiking trails that function as pilgrimages. That suggestion, however, suggests that those who walk those pilgrimage paths are without any religious devotion or spiritual engagement—a claim that would be difficult to support.

Reader also discusses the New Age pilgrimages to Sedona and Glastonbury as examples of contemporary pilgrimages that are outside of traditional religious structures. He cites Phil Cousineau’s book on pilgrimage, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred, as an example of a New Age approach to pilgrimage, because Cousineau presents pilgrimage as a “spirit-renewing ritual” and suggests ways of transforming ordinary journeys into sacred ones (112). I’m not interested in New Age spirituality, but I do like Cousineau’s book, because it suggests ways that the notion of pilgrimage can be broadened, and that by approaching journeys with a spirit of gratitude (he suggests that travellers keep a journal in which they express gratitude for the things they encounter, something I practiced on the Camino) their meaning and significance can be deepened. For Reader, these examples “indicate that pilgrimage need not be just about formal religious traditions” (117). The themes he locates in religious pilgrimage—“landscapes and places imbued with deep meanings and as sources of special powers and graces for those who visit or walk through them, of associations with special and emotionally significant figures, and of travel to and through such places”—are, he notes,

also present in secular contexts and at places with no formal religious connections. So are practices commonly associated with pilgrimage to religious sites, such as memorializing and paying reverence to a special figure, communing with the dead, making physical journeys that are spiritually symbolic, seeking emotional healing and searching for inspiration and personal meaning. (117-18)

“What is certainly recurrent and seemingly unchanging,” Reader concludes,

is the desire of people to get away, even if temporarily, from their everyday circumstances, to look for new meanings and reaffirmations of personal identities, and to go to places that they feel can help them in such quests. So, too, are their hopes that this will enrich their lives, offering them spiritual and other benefits, and enabling them to encounter and commune with figures and powers that they believe reside and can be accessed in the places they go to. Pilgrimage offers such opportunities, which is why so many places have developed and been sought out by pilgrims and promoted by religious and other authorities over the ages. It is why new places of pilgrimage are continually being created, and why communities that move across cultures and environments . . . feel the need to recreate their traditional pilgrimage sites in their new homelands. (119-20)

Pilgrimage, then, “has been a recurrent theme in religious contexts, and nowadays increasingly in more clearly nonreligious ones, that offers scope for self-development, escape, faith, and hope, as well as play and entertainment” (120).

Reader’s book does its job; it is a useful introduction to the concept of pilgrimage, and the chapter on secular or nonreligious pilgrimage is important for my research. I wonder, though, whether it is possible, in Reader’s opinion, to develop one’s own pilgrimages, or if the collective or communal nature of pilgrimage requires following examples that have been already established. At the same time, someone must have been the first to consider a journey to Sedona or Glastonbury or Robben Island a pilgrimage. Perhaps I ought to return to Cousineau’s book, although it’s not particularly scholarly, as I recall, for examples of journeys that become pilgrimages through the attitudes, purposes, and motivations of the travellers involved. I would argue that many of the walks I’ve made since returning home from Santiago de Compostela have been pilgrimages, from the 35 kilometre walk to the town where my father grew up and where my grandparents lived to my walks through the Haldimand Tract and to Wood Mountain. What I hope to get from my reading over the next couple of weeks will be a firmer sense that it’s appropriate to consider such journeys as pilgrimages. Reader’s book is a step in that direction.

Works Cited

Cousineau, Phil. The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred. Conari, 2012.

Reader, Ian. Pilgrimage: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2015.

36. Iain Sinclair, London Orbital: A Walk around the M25

london orbital

After I read Thelma Poirier’s Rock Creek, I found myself thinking about a book that is, in many ways, its opposite: Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital: A Walk around the M25. But how am I going to find time to read Sinclair’s epic 550-page account of a 120-mile walk around London, tracking the route of the M25 superhighway? I asked myself. The answer was simple: I would find the time by finding the time, I would read Sinclair’s book by reading it. And so I did.

It’s a good thing that I read Sinclair’s book, too, because I’ve learned a great deal from it. The territory Sinclair circumambulates is, one would think, an obvious example of space, as Yi-Fu Tuan describes it: abstract, undifferentiated, open and potentially threatening, defined by movement, and (unlike place) unknown and not endowed with value (Tuan 6). The perimeter suburbs of London, and the orbital highway that encircles the city, are closer to what Marc Augé describes as “non-places,” spaces of circulation, consumption, and communication. And yet, I would argue that Sinclair, by walking and thinking and researching and writing about that territory, turns the kind of location that Tuan would describe as obdurate space into place, something experienced “through all the senses as well as with the active and reflective mind” (18). In fact, I think that London Orbital has answered my question about turning space into place by walking. It’s true that walking, by itself, isn’t enough to make space become place. But walking and research and writing (or some other kind of response to the experience, the memory, the narrative of the walk) appears to be sufficient. Sinclair, in fact, discloses his method of working at the beginning of the leg of the walk that starts at the former Leavesden Hospital in Abbots Langley, the point where the previous walk ended: “Since our last visit I’d read up on the history of the estate; I’d looked at maps and plans, drawings by the original architects John Giles and Biven of Craven Street, London—who produced the successful application in March 1868” (175). Later in the text, he’s even more specific: “Memory is a lace doily, more hole than substance. The nature of any walk is perpetual revision, voice over voice. Get it done, certainly, then go home and read the published authorities; come back later to find whatever has vanished, whatever is in remission, whatever has erupted” (272). That process is the source of all of the esoteric historical and literary and biographical and architectural information with which Sinclair layers his account of walking; those elements in the text come from research. No wonder every section of the walk takes place at least a month after the previous journey. The lag isn’t to allow blistered feet to heal; no, it’s an opportunity for uncovering the significance of locations visited on the previous walk, to revisit them if necessary, and to begin writing together memory and fact. However the conference paper I am delivering in Ireland this July at the Sacred Journeys 6th Global Conference begins, I’ve found the conclusion.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. London Orbital begins and ends with Sinclair’s antipathy to the Millennium Dome (now the O2)—both to the architecture itself and to the financial folly of the project. In between, though, the book tracks two separate sets of walks. The first set, made with musician Bill Drummond and photographer Marc Atkins, takes Sinclair and his companions up the Lea River valley, which separates London from its eastern dependencies, past the Lea Navigation canal and the former armaments factory at Enfield (now, like almost every other complex of Victorian buildings in London’s green belt, being redeveloped for housing, despite the contaminated soil on the site). These walks serve as a preamble; they whet Sinclair’s appetite for more:

I think we can assume that we have penetrated the Lea Valley’s recreational zone. Boats. Wet suits. Easy access to the North Circular Road, the broken link of an earlier orbital fantasy. This border is marked by a permanent pall of thick black smoke. Urban walkers perk up; we’re back in the shit. The noise. The action. (60)

The descriptive sentence fragments, the tone of cynicism verging on paranoia: that is Sinclair’s operative mode. Passing the “retail park” where the North Circular Road crosses the Lea Valley, taking in the colours of warehouses and road, of river and sky, Sinclair declares:

I love it. I like frontiers. Zones that float, unobserved, over other zones. Road users have no sense of the Lea Navigation, they’re goal-orientated. Going somewhere. Noticing Atkins, foot on barrier, perched in the central reservation, snapping away, drivers in their high cabs see a nuisance, an obstacle. A potential snoop. They’d be happy to run him down. Atkins sees a speedy blur, abstractions, the chimney of London Waste Ltd blasting steam. (60-61)

I must make a confession: I made an attempt at London Orbital, several years ago, but for some reason was defeated by Sinclair’s idiosyncratic prose. This time I enjoyed its inventiveness. By completing the book, I feel I’ve had a significant change in my perception of Sinclair’s writing.

The second set of walks is announced near the beginning of the text. During a walk on New Year’s Day, 1998, Sinclair stops for a break and makes a momentous decision:

I sit, comfortably, with my back to one of the piers, munching my sandwiches and deciding that, yes, I want to walk around the orbital motorway: in the belief that this nowhere, this edge, is the place that will offer fresh narratives. I don’t want to be on the road any more than I want to walk on water; the soft estates, the acoustic footprints, will do nicely. Dull fields that travellers never notice. Noise and the rush of traffic, twenty-four hours a day, has pushed “content” back. An elaborate scheme of planting (two million trees and shrubs, mostly in Surrey and Kent) would hide the nasty ditch with its Eddie Stobart lorries, its smoke belchers. The M25 walk was the next project. The form it would take and the other people who might be persuaded to come along, to liven up the tale, was still to be decided. (16)

Sinclair’s 12-part walk (an essential number, associated with literary epics from Homer to Milton) will be, he tells us, a “pilgrimage” (31)—a key word for my work (and for the conference paper I have to write this month). And that walk, and the writing and thinking and research that it occasions, turns that “nowhere” into somewhere, space into place. London Orbital becomes the “fresh narrative” Sinclair was hankering for, the new story the city has to tell.

I read London Orbital without a London street map beside me, and because I don’t know that city very well, many of the place names Sinclair enumerates, rapid-fire, have little significance for me. Nevertheless, you would have to be sleep-reading not to get the gist. Take this example, a description of a highway heading east, out of London:

East India Dock Road, with its evocative name, has a secondary identity as the A13, my favourite early-morning drive. The A13 has got it all, New Jersey-going-on-Canvey-Island: multiplex cinemas, retail parks, the Beckton Alp ski slope; flyovers like fairground rides, three salmon-pink tower blocks on Castle Green, at the edge of Dagenham; the Ford water tower and the empty paddocks where ranks of motors used to sit waiting for their transporters. The A13 drains East London’s wound, carrying you up into the sky; before throwing you back among boarded-up shops and squatted terraces. All urban life aspires to this condition; flux, pastiche. A conveyor belt of discontinued industries. A peripatetic museum, horizon to horizon, available to anyone; self-curated. The wild nature graveyard in Newham. Inflatable, corn-yellow potato chips wobbling in their monster bucket outside McDonald’s in Dagenham. River fret over Rainham Marshes. (45-46)

Is that a description of an edge city or an inner suburb? I’m not sure it matters: what is important is the claim that urban life—and the life of the edge cities through which he and his companion, artist Renchi Bicknell (and occasional walkers writer Kevin Jackson and Atkins) will perambulate—is “flux, pastiche,” a “peripatetic museum, horizon to horizon, available to anyone; self-curated” (45-46). Sinclair and his companions curate their own museums of the territory near the M25; their writing and photographs (for Sinclair is not the only one to respond creatively to this experience) will constitute their individual records of the walk:

Drummond’s account, should he give it, would sheer away from mine. Marc’s considered prints would contradict my snapshots. The memory of the memory slips. We invent. New memories, unaccountable to mundane documentation, are shaped. The dream anticipates the neurotic narrative. (116)

London Orbital does not pretend to objectivity, to facticity, but its subjective account of the walks Sinclair and his companions make is, I think, a true one.

Much of the territory these walkers cover is part of London’s green belt, land that is, Sinclair believes, under an assault by developers and government rationalization:

In December 1999 the Cabinet Office issued a consultation paper, the green belt had created an undesirable “moat effect.” A moat or ditch or ha-ha to keep out, as architect Nicholas Hawksmoor wrote of the denizens of Whitechapel, “filth Nastyness & Brutes.” The document was, in effect, an early warning on behalf of the developers, the mall conceptualists, the rewrite industry. Government was pure Hollywood: hype, the airbrushing of bad history; dodgy investors, a decent wedge in disgrace or retirement. A pay-off culture of bagmen and straightfaced explainers. (83-84)

The government’s explanation of its proposal echoes neo-liberal rationalizations everywhere:

A sweeping away of fussy restrictions. “A planning system more supportive of an enterprising countryside.” The only way the countryside could become enterprising was to cease to be countryside: to become “off-highway,” a retail resort (like Bluewater), a weekend excursion that depended on a road that we were being advised to avoid. (84)

In order to save the countryside, it must be destroyed. This is, for Sinclair, a disaster: “Metropolitans need this green fantasy, the forest on the horizon, the fields and farms that represent a picture book vision of a pre-Industrial Revolution past” (84). I found myself thinking about Doug Ford’s promise to allow development in Ontario’s Green Belts, and whether populism and New Labour come together at the point where developers make political contributions.

That sense of the green belt’s future, or its lack of one, is a recurring theme in London Orbital; it seems that every estate, every disused hospital and asylum and estate near the M25 is being redeveloped as a housing estate for commuters who will use that expressway to drive into the city for work. Shenley Hospital, for instance, a former asylum whose extensive grounds are being turned into tract housing, occasions these ruminations:

History is being revised on a daily basis, through the northern quadrant of the motorway, by copywriters employed by the developers. “The historic village of Shenley combines excellent local interest with outstanding travel convenience.” Much is made of the “pleasant undulating countryside” and the “fine views northward over the historic city of St Albans.” To qualify as “historic” you need green belt development permissions, new estates across a bowling-green from an old church. History is an extra zero on your property prices. (151)

The destruction of the green belt occasions a certain paranoia, I think, which is reflected in Sinclair’s accounts of walking where no one is supposed to walk:

Whatever it is they don’t like, we’ve got it. NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY. Footpaths, breaking towards the forest, have been closed off. You are obliged to stick to the Lee Navigation, that contaminated ash conglomerate of the Grey Way. Enfield has been laid out in grids; long straight roads, railways, fortified blocks. Do they know something we don’t? Are they expecting an invasion from the forest? (69-70)

One of Sinclair’s early walks took him and his companions from Waltham Abbey to Mill Hill, where German conceptual artist Jochen Gerz (an associate of Joseph Beuys and Reiner Ruthenbeck) was giving a lecture on art in public spaces, and the juxtaposition of hospital and artist brought out Sinclair’s suspicions:

But the hospital block on the summit of Mill Hill is a real marker, generator of paranoid imaginings. I’m always uneasy when covert research, generously funded, starts to cosy up to subversive art. There’s something awkward about the relationship. To access the art manifestation (conceptual corridor, lunchtime lecture) you have to blag your way into the Pentagon, into Langley. Surveillance swipe, signature in book, electronic barrier, phone call to a higher authority. (103)

It doesn’t take institutional security precautions to generate those “paranoid imaginings,” however. Trying to get to the village of Otford, for example, involves dodging speeding cars on a road without room for pedestrians:

Ugly motors eager to do damage. Rage pods caught between hedges. Better to head off, dodging oncoming traffic in the fast lane of the motorway, than stick with the Pilgrims Way. It’s a rat run, the revenge of the commuters. Deserted villages are coming to life: it’s madness, so we’re told, twice a day. And death-in-life the rest of the time. Lights on, blue TV windows, dogs to walk.

We manage to get off the road—which has no verge—and into the fields, the heavy earth, but we’re soon returned. There is no other route. Every third car is a red Jag: either they’ve been watching too many episodes of Morse, or they want to hide the roadkill on the paintwork. Otford, with its quaint High Street, its proudly timbered survivors, its pond and Tudor ruins, is notable, so far as we’re concerned, for one feature: the railway station. (408-09)

I’ve been in similar situations before, walking from Marlborough House into Oxford, where a gap between footpaths meant walking along a road, a situation where speeding cars forced me into a thorny hedgerow; or last summer, trudging on the broken shoulder of Highway 2 towards Assiniboia: the place where every car seems to be aiming right for you, as if every driver is playing a macabre video game in which points are given for each pedestrian maimed or killed. What must make this situation even more infuriating for Sinclair is the fact that the Pilgrims Way is supposed to be a walking route. Clearly not a very good one.

After the preliminary walks in the Lea Valley, the main event commences:

Here it begins, the walk proper. No detours. No digressions. We decided to take Waltham Abbey as our starting point, the grave of King Harold, and to shadow the motorway (within audible range whenever possible) in an anticlockwise direction. We wanted, quite simply, to get around: always carrying on from where we left off at the finish of the previous excursion. From now on the road would be our focus, our guide. We’d snatch days whenever we could (when Renchi’s shifts permitted) and get it done before the millennial eve. (125)

“The structure of our walk is elegaic: discontinued rituals, closed shrines,” Sinclair writes. “The funeral service, the emptied pond. The horse-trough near Theobalds Grove station filled with flower petals. Fenced off monuments and gates that are not gates” (133). But if the walk is elegaic, it is also mystical. Sinclair is a psychogeographer, and as such he has a taste (as does Renchi) for occult interpretations of the landscape: ley lines, fields of force, invisible axes, “invisible threads of influence” (144-45). “The markings on the motorway are shamanic,” he states. “Noise takes us out of ourselves into a dispersing landscape. Giddy, we enter movement. We could do the whole thing here, on the ramp. We could dream it” (133). Or take his comparison between the M25 and Avebury Circle: “Think of the motorway in terms of Maiden Castle or Avebury, earth engines, machines designed to provoke enlightenment. The hoop of continually moving light is a gigantic crop circle, visible from space. A doughnut of powdered glass. A winking eye” (530). Such occult or “shamanic” mysteries provide Sinclair with another layer to go along with the history and art and literature and lives of those who have lived in the places through which he walks; an unnecessary layer, I would suggest, but that’s perhaps a matter of taste and my own lack of faith in such things.

Sinclair compares this walk to walks undertaken by French labourers in the nineteenth century, walks he read about in Ian Hacking’s book Mad Travelers (Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses). That book, he writes, “offered one perfectly reasonable explanation of our orbital pilgrimage: an hysterical fugue—attended by the sort of minor epileptic seizures (electrical storms in the consciousness) Renchi suffered in Dublin” (146). There are no seizures, as it turns out, but Sinclair continues to argue that the notion of fugue is the best way to describe the walk:

I found the term fugueur more attractive than the now overworked flâneur. Fugueur had the smack of a swear word, a bloody-minded Tommy muttering over his tobacco tin in the Flanders trenches. Fugueur was the right job description for our walk, our once-a-month episodes of transient mental illness. Madness as a voyage. The increasing lunacy of city life (in my case) and country life (in Renchi’s) forced us to take to the road. The joy of these days out lay in the heightened experience of present time actuality, the way that we bypassed, for a brief space of time, the illusionism of the spin doctors, media operators and salaried liars. The fugue is both drift and fracture. The story of the trip can only be recovered by some form of hypnosis, the memory prompt of the journal or the photo-album. Documentary evidence of things that may never have happened. The fugue is a psychic commando course . . . that makes the parallel life, as a gas fitter, hospital carer, or literary hack, endurable. (146-47)

In contemporary representations of the fugue, Sinclair continues, “the walker disappears from the walk:

Landscape artists Richard Long and Hamish Fulton erase the trauma, along with the figure of the troubled pedestrian. Minor interventions are tactfully recorded; a few stones rearranged, twigs bent. The walker becomes a control freak, compulsively logging distances, directions, treading abstractions into the Ordnance Survey map. Scripting minimalist asides, copywriting haikus. (148)

By contrast, Renchi’s paintings “merge walker and landscape”:

Chorographic overviews, diaries. In earlier times, the brush-strokes were looser, the paint thicker. Walks were shorter, paintings fiercer. As the fugues extended—London to Swansea, Hopton-on-Sea to St Michael’s Mount—the records were calmer; there was more of a narrative element, transit across landscape remembered in chalk, flint, granite, slate. (149)

Sinclair continues to think of these walks as fugues throughout the book, imagining himself as a “mad traveller”: “We were discovering a useful genealogy: gas fitters, painters, novelists. Through the suburbs and night, the motorway verges by day, we were there, heel-and-toeing it, sucking water from a plastic bottle, trying to find some way to unravel the syntax of London” (158). I really like that last phrase; I wish I had thought of it as a way of describing my own walks, here and elsewhere.

Reaching Heathrow called to mind, for Sinclair, novelist J.G. Ballard, one of the inspirations for the walk:

You couldn’t help being drawn into the tremble, the jet roar, the throb of traffic streaming in every direction. M4, M25, A4, A30; slip roads, link roads, trunk roads, deleted coach roads. Two hundred thousand vehicles a day used the section of the M25 between Junctions 13 and 14. Ballard was absolutely right: if you set aside human interference (aka life), London was a mausoleum. Kensal Green Cemetery with the walls knocked down. Pompous monuments, redundant public buildings, trash commerce, heritage tags. Oxford Street was a souk. Charing Cross Road a gutter. [new paragraph] The city, in its Victorian overcoat, the muck of centuries on its waistcoat, bored Ballard. He promoted this new place, the rim. The “local” was finished as a concept. Go with the drift, with detachment. The watcher on the balcony. Areas around airports were ecumenical. They were the same everywhere: storage units, hangars, satellite hotels, car hire companies, apologetic farmland as a mop-up apron for Concorde disasters. If you see the soul of the city as existing in its architecture, its transport systems, its commerce and media hot spots, then Ballard’s championship of the suburbs is justified. But they’re not really suburbs if they don’t feed on the centre. The Heathrow corridor has declared its unilateral independence, that’s what makes it exciting. The abdication of responsibility and duty; glossy goods, ennui, scratched light. (214)

Later, Sinclair interviews Ballard. “I don’t need what Ballard says, I know what he says, I’ve read the books,” he writes. “What I need is the chance to pay homage, in the course of this mad orbital walk, to the man who has defined the psychic climate through which we are travelling. It’s a romantic foible on my part, the impulse that once had De Quincey tramping off to the Lake District to make a nuisance of himself in Wordsworth’s cottage” (268).

Ballard is not the only literary figure who ends up in these pages; Sinclair writes about H.G. Wells, George Tomkyns Chesney (author of The Battle of Dorking), William Blake, Bram Stoker, and poet John Clare, who walked 120 miles from London to Northborough without a cent to his name, eating grass, drinking nothing except a pint of beer purchased with coins thrown to him by migrant farm labourers (533). “Fugue as exorcism,” Sinclair writes: “Clare’s walk successfully performed the ritual we were toying with. He’d been in the forest long enough to understand the peculiarity of its status as a memorial to a featureless and unreachable past, a living stormbreak at the limit of urban projection” (534). But there is an essential difference between Clare’s walk and the one Sinclair and Renchi are making: “The Great North Road was still a route down which everything and everyone travelled; coaches, gypsies, farmers, the military, masterless workmen. The M25 goes nowhere; it’s self-referential, postmodern, ironic. Modestly corrupt. It won’t make sense until it’s been abandoned, grown over” (534-35).

That isn’t going to happen any time soon. The walk continues. According to Sinclair,

A good day on the hoof should include: (1) a section of river or canal, (2) a Formica-table breakfast, (3) a motorway bridge, (4) a discontinued madhouse, (5) a pub, (6) a mound, (7) a wrap of London weather (monochrome to sunburst), (8) one major surprise. So far, so good. (230)

The surprise on that day—at West Drayton, near Heathrow—is discovering an unlocked church, which occasions mystical ruminations:

Being inside a church, after the locked doors of the northern quadrant, is a minor shock: the 800-year franchise works its spatial and temporal magic, the narrow building detaches itself form its surroundings, the bluster of West Drayton.

Hats off, from custom or superstition, we creep and whisper. Cruise the usual circuit, interrogating the fabric: in expectation of some clue or sign. Or confirmation. Thicker air. Stone-dust and candle grease. Stained light. (230-31)

On a later trip back to West Drayton, Sinclair was able to climb the church tower, providing him with a panorama of the land to the north:

To see for myself how the land opened out: the path to St Mary’s Church at Harmondsworth. The crop of torpedo graves. The M25 with its constant flickering movement. We had stumbled on an active, but little used, pilgrims’ path. The Avenue. Heading, through a tunnel of pink blossom, towards the motorway and the site of a Benedictine priory at Harmondsworth. The sequestered principality of Heathrow. (232)

I was collecting references to pilgrimages as I read London Orbital, and this is one of the important ones, from my perspective, because here we see Sinclair once again inventing a pilgrimage, rather than confining himself to pilgrimages blessed by authorities—and a pilgrimage in an unlikely place, under Heathrow’s flight path.

England is known for its walking paths, its National Trust-approved green spaces, but Sinclair, cantankerously, wants nothing to do with them:

Why let someone else nominate sites that are worth visiting? If you want a shop, you should find a shop. Sainsbury’s (Cobham) has a better servery than Box Hill. The space underneath Runnymede Bridge is more exciting than the National Trust recommended Runnymede Meadows (with “popular tea-room”). Don’t take my word for it, don’t bother with my list of alternative attractions—Junction 21 of the M25, the Siebel building in Egham, Hawksmoor’s gravestone in Shenley; discover your own. In the finding is the experience.” (318-19)

One unrecognized attraction is a footbridge over the M25 in West Drayton:

The footbridge trembles and vibrates. If it ran across the Thames between St Paul’s and the Tate Modern, they’d close it down. The West Drayton bridge isn’t a tourist attraction, not yet. It ought to be. All the powers and thrones and dominions of transport are here, angelic orders of diesel, jet fuel, crop spray, animal and human shit. Burial grounds of lost villages. The Perry Oaks Sludge Disposal works. (233)

For Sinclair, such places say more about the contemporary moment than Runnymede Meadows. They are the reason for the walk, its purpose and its payoff.

Nevertheless, Sinclair and Renchi occasionally find themselves engaged in “the kind of walking that guidebooks promote” (368). It’s a contradiction, perhaps, but a productive one, I would argue. Those guidebooks include The London Loop, The Green London Way, Country Walks Around London, The Shell Book of British Walks. Sinclair finds the latter “a bit odd,” wondering about how those hikes came to be sponsored by a Dutch oil company. “I’m fond of these books with their selective maps, line drawings that try to look like woodcuts, topographic views,” he writes, describing most of the walking books I own (368):

The walking they promote is benign: it begins at a car park, saunters, by way of a quaint church and some “typical high downland scenery,” to “the highest point in south-east England.” Hikers are discreet, eyes averted from contemporary horrors, tutting from time to time at the excesses of developers or upwardly mobile vulgarians. These are strolls for the visually impaired, guided tours with checklists of flora, fauna, archaeological remains. The walk is an interlude of “somewhere between and hour-and-a-half and three hours.” It’s good for you. And it brings you back to the point from which you set out. To the car. (368-69)

Of course, it’s (at least in part) the “contemporary horrors” and “excesses of developers” and “upwardly mobile vulgarians” that interest Sinclair. Why else walk across St. George’s Hill—once the site of the radical Diggers, now the home of mobbed-up Russian emigrés—despite the high security? Why else, in fact, decide to walk through London’s edges? Why else explore the link between golf courses and the illegal dumping of toxic waste (370-71)? Why else walk where they aren’t wanted?

We are on our own in country that doesn’t want us. It’s a strange feeling, climbing and descending, in and out of woods, views across ripe fields of corn, and being unable to get any purchase on the experience. Our walk is compromised. We’re pulled between the territorial imperatives of Surrey, Kent and Greater London. The old Green Way is barely tolerated, a dog path, a route that might, if you stick with it, offer accidental epiphanies. It’s more likely to lose heart, be swallowed by a disused chalk quarry, an agribiz farm, a radio mast. Some unexplained concrete structure, fenced in, and surrounded by tall trees. (375-76)

They are walking in places where walking is unknown (as many walkers find themselves doing). Renchi asks a girl in a corner shop how far it was to Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s country place. “She couldn’t do distance, miles, metres; didn’t understand the concept,” Sinclair writes (391) She could only report that it was a five minute drive away; the notion of walking there was incomprehensible to her. “These days, as the girl in the newspaper shop so shrewdly recognised, distance has no meaning,” Sinclair continues. “Miles only matter to horses and pedestrians. We have to deal in drives measured by the hour. Units of nuisance between pit stops. Road works, accidents, congestion: a geography defined by junction numbers on the M25” (392).

On the way to Otford, near the end of the walk, Sinclair loses his glasses (forgotten on a bench after a brief stop), and his camera breaks. The resulting imagery—photographic and purely visual—strikes him as wonderful, and is worth reproducing at length here:

Focus, which had been playing up since we left Merstham, gave way entirely: into the Valley of Vision. My spectacles were lost, abandoned, and my camera had a bad case of the Gerhard Richters: Richter pastoral. Snapshots with the shivers. The results, from here on, were truer to the way I felt, the way I really saw the road, than all my previous impersonal loggings. Incompetence meant: insight. Inscapes. The photograph of ‘Renchi on the Pilgrims Way’ is a painterly stew, not an identity card. The abandoned blue shirt, hanging across the white ground of the T-shirt, is a squeeze of Vlaminck.

There is liberation in these soft images. The road sign I recorded, PILGRIMS WAY, is now a long thin shape that defies interpretation; you can’t tell if it’s stone or tin. But the green that surrounds it, busy with black smears, white floaters, has a wondrous ambiguity. I’ve never (on our orbital walk) had the courage to let go in this way, the economics of photography require a visible return. I’m only doing it to keep a record of where we’ve been, the provocative details I’m sure to forget. (403-04)

The blurred images his broken camera creates push Sinclair “into territory explored and espoused by visionary filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage” (404). But they do more than that:

The blurred images, first, simplify the narrative—then worry me towards a deeper, more considered sense of place. What doesn’t matter—script, commentary, hierarchy of significance—vanishes. It seems that the “faulty” camera is now dictating the terms: I didn’t pass it over to anyone met on the road, no such person existed. And yet, here we are, developed print in hand: Renchi and I in the same image. Two figures standing in a gap in the hedge. Distance is realised by bands of colour. The white lines on the road float free—like angelic footsteps. The camera, unprompted, has produced a double portrait. (403-04)

“The rest of our walk is recorded on the same terms: soft shapes, ripe colour, more dream than document,” Sinclair concludes (404). Perhaps this episode is a lesson in photography for walkers (like me) who try to record their walks with a camera.

Past Dartford, “a town that can’t be negotiated on foot” (450), Sinclair and Renchi approach the River Thames:

We moved on towards the bridge. Heavy clouds hugged the shoreline, black at base, blooded as the sun climbed above the Littlebrook Power Station. Backlit dredgers. Two skeletal towers, one on each short, carrying power lines. They never fail: river, marshland, the pier that looks like a concrete boat. All the sensory buttons are pushed. Space. Flow. Dereliction. New estates springing up. The thick tongue of oil on the shoreline, its ridges and patterns. (490)

“All the sensory buttons are pushed”: like other walkers, Sinclair is trying to capture the sights, smells, and sounds of the walk. Such sensory data, such witnessing, is a feature of the walk, from its inception to its conclusion at Waltham Abbey on a cold night in December, 1999:

Church and grounds are painted with searchlight beams. Renchi, at long last, pilgrimage completed, finds an unlocked door. We have to witness the astrological ceiling, the wall-painting in the side chapel (a fifteenth-century Doom mural). Unseen, it predicted our journey. In darkness, we set out. And in darkness we returned. (536)

From there, like good Englishmen, they repair to a pub, where they celebrate the conclusion of the walk with double brandies and bandages for their blistered feet.

It’s impossible to summarize a book of such scope as London Orbital, and I have merely scratched the surface of this text, I know. Nevertheless, this book will be important for my research. I intend to follow Sinclair’s methodological example, for one thing. And the freedom of his prose makes mine seem pinched and stultified by comparison. In fact, London Orbital might be an exemplar of the kind of work I intend to do here. I’m going to read Sinclair’s other books about walking as well. But that will come later. My next task is to read about pilgrimage, something I know about as a practitioner, but not as a theorist—which could be a problem for the paper I have to write this month about walking and pilgrimage.

Works Cited

Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. Second edition, Verso, 2009.

Sinclair, Iain. London Orbital: A Walk around the M25. Penguin, 2003.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. U of Minnesota P, 1977.

	Steve Craig on Last Training Walk Before the…
	Ken Wilson on 31. Simon Armitage, New Cemete…
	Lorne Daniel on 31. Simon Armitage, New Cemete…
	Ken Wilson on Last Training Walk Before the…
	Steve Craig on Last Training Walk Before the…