Faith and agency on the Camino: walking between shared 'substance' and cultural (dis)appearance

Journal article

Debates in the anthropology of pilgrimage are often centred around the pilgrim/tourist binary, while religious commodities are said to collapse the distinction between substance and appearance. The present study is based on fieldwork conducted on two sub-routes of the Camino de Santiago: the Camino francés in northern Spain, and the Via podiensis in southern France. In highlighting the role of movement, the way can be considered the goal. Drawing on literature on infrastructure, I contrast European cultural hegemony with ‘the spirit of the Camino', which I conceptualize as pilgrim-agency. Commoditization, framed around locality, dominates in small municipalities that depend on external support, whereas ‘particular' owners of gîtes and albergues conduct a form of gift-exchange rooted in the ‘spirit of the Camino'. The Camino can thus be classified as a distinct place enacted by the pilgrim through contrasting processes of selective attention to and fetishization of the path. Finally, I refer to Actor Network Theory to combine the actors and processes previously analysed into a cohesive framework. As an actor-network, the Camino comes to stand on its own, losing its ‘European' notion; yet it extends over its particularity. This ANT framework can be applied to the concept of agency (entailing attribution), but it also transcends the New Age notion of ‘I' and, when applied to pilgrim's beliefs, comes to unite contrasting motifs. Such an approach highlights the fact that anthropological research need not be stuck on fixed binaries.

Authors: Berg, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Anthropological Society of Oxford
• Journal: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford Online
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 14-43
• Publication date: 2020-01-01
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-xkjbgqrz1
• ISSN: 2040-1876
• Language: English
• Keywords: JASO