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Walking as Spiritual Practice: The

Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela

SEAN SLAVIN

The relationship between pilgrimage and religious or devotional practice seems

tenuous in contemporary Western societies. The term has been appropriated in
modern parlance to mean almost any kind of journey that has an abstract dimen-
sion, or even one that is repeated at regular intervals, such as an annual holiday.
Yet every summer in Spain thousands of pilgrims, many of them agnostics or
atheists, don boots or mount pushbikes and travel up to 800 kilometres across
the north of the country to the tomb of St James in Santiago de Compostela.
Their motivations are often vague and rarely expressed in religious terms, yet
many are eloquent in speaking of their journey as spiritual.
This article is an attempt to address the spiritual experience of these pilgrims
from the point of view of the walking body, which is taken as the basis for
pilgrims’ reinterpretations of the self as well as something that ‘reinterprets space
and place’ (Edensor, 2000: 82). This article seeks to explicate pilgrims’ walking
practices in order to understand the phenomenological and social implications for
their lived experiences of pilgrimage.
Conventional anthropological approaches to pilgrimage generally take into
account the work of Victor Turner (1969, 1974), which centres on the notion of
liminality. Turner was interested in how pilgrimage produced liminal identities in

Body & Society © 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 9(3): 1–18
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pilgrims and liminoid social spaces in relation to surrounding society. Turner

believed that the experience of pilgrimage produced a special kind of social bond
amongst pilgrims he called ‘communitas’, something that, paradoxically, placed
pilgrims and pilgrimage centres at the margins of society. This phenomenon is
still observable, according to Hetherington (1996: 39), at such ‘new age’ pilgrim-
age sites as Stonehenge. More recently, writers such as Eade and Sallnow (1991)
have criticized this view as overly idealistic. They argue that pilgrims actively
contest meaning among themselves as well as with broader social structure. Other
writers such as Edensor (2000: 88–93) have further elaborated this approach in
dealing with other forms of walking. I have chosen to sidestep this somewhat
dualistic argument in preference for addressing the experience and meaning of
pilgrimage in terms of the body, and what pilgrims call ‘inner’ experience. This
is not to deny that such experience is social but it is to take seriously the stated
attempt by many Santiago pilgrims to transcend social boundaries. While the
body is socially and culturally inscribed and produced these things do not deter-
mine it. On the contrary, its limitations seem to invite the pursuit of transcen-
dence or immanence – two paradoxically similar ideas (Bataille, 1989, 1990;
Turner, 1996).
Writers such as Murray and Graham (1997) see the pilgrimage to Santiago as
a consumptive tourist experience. Buzard (1993: 33–5) sheds light on the
historical and discursive distinction between travellers and tourists by emphasiz-
ing, amongst other things, that tourists are commonly held to rely on machine
transportation. They move about at speed on trains and buses whereas travellers,
of which pilgrims are an example, take their time and are thus afforded better
access to nature and, by implication, authentic experience. Instead of reproduc-
ing this distinction, which the pilgrims themselves also deploy, I prefer to see the
body and the practice of walking as productive and generative. I also reserve a
‘place’, in Casey’s (1993) terms, prior to social structure. This is a complex onto-
logical issue that will unfold throughout the article, at this point I only wish to
announce a certain methodological bias. The frameworks and assumptions used
by Victor Turner, on the one hand, or Eade and Sallnow on the other, preclude a
place that is specifically prior to social structure and time. Likewise, these frame-
works demand that the capacity for belief and the idea of God be interpreted as
expressions of culture: as signifiers of things, rather than things in themselves. I
propose a different kind of approach, one that does not position the (etic) anthro-
pologist outside the (emic) field, and takes the work of writers such as Jackson
(1989, 1998), Desjarlais (1992) and Stoller (1989) as inspiration. This phenom-
enological departure point is a way of respecting the integrity of the pilgrims’
experiences, as well as their own thoughtful and critical reflections, while also

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maintaining a perspective on the social meanings they produce. Through this

approach I will produce arguments of relevance to the ongoing anthropological
debates surrounding pilgrimage and Victor Turner’s legacy without becoming
caught by its dualism, Cartesian at heart. This approach allows for an account of
the particular bodily practice of walking and its relation to spirituality that ulti-
mately undoes the distinction between the two.
Santiago de Compostela has been the destination of pilgrims on the Camino
de Santiago, or Way of St James, since the early Middle Ages. Pilgrims tradition-
ally travelled on a variety of routes by a variety of means. The most popular
contemporary route is the Camino Frances, or French Way, originating in the
Pyrenees and passing east to west through the provinces of La Rioja, Burgos,
León and Galicia, keeping just to the south of the Cordillera Cantabrica
mountain range. A variety of landscapes are traversed from dramatic alpine
valleys, to dense woods in Navarre, seemingly endless miles of vines in La Rioja,
the arid planes of Burgos and León, ending in Galicia’s fertile dairy country. The
Camino Frances currently sees around 15,000–20,000 pilgrims travel to Santiago
over the course of each summer, with the majority walking and a significant
minority cycling. A large proportion begins on the Franco-Spanish frontier from
where the distance to Santiago is roughly 800 kilometres.
During the summers of 1995, 1996 and 1998 I conducted ethnographic field-
work along the Camino Frances and in other places where people or artefacts of
interest were located. This included walking the route in 1995. Fieldwork
consisted of structured, tape-recorded in-depth interviews with pilgrims, partici-
pant observation, key informant interviews and numerous informal interviews
and site visits.
Walking the route myself seemed a good method of research as it offered a
good pace for speaking with people along the way as well as taking notes and
recording interviews. Importantly, assuming I matched their pace, it also enabled
me to track a group of pilgrims along the whole length of the route and follow
the development of their ideas in relation to the journey, thus demanding a
conceptualization of the field site as mobile. Finally, apart from anything else, I
considered myself a good walker and always suspected that walking and thinking
were especially fine companions. For, among other things, ‘I like walking because
it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an
hour’ (Solnit, 2000: 10).
This choice was affirmed later when I discovered that only certain modes of
transport are recognized as proper to the pilgrimage – walking, cycling or horse
riding. People who drive are not considered pilgrims, either by the cathedral
authorities in Santiago, or other ‘proper’ pilgrims. Bicycles are very popular.

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According to the diocesan records in Santiago in an average year about 70 percent

of pilgrims walk and 30 percent cycle (Compostela, 1994–6). Almost none are on
horseback. Among those on foot, cyclists were not generally regarded as ‘real’
pilgrims. Many commented that it must be difficult to be meditative at 40 kilo-
metres per hour. While on one level this is a pointed social demarcation it also
announces what was for many pilgrims, the central reason for walking: to engage
in a meditative practice. One focused upon the journey and the self as opposed
to the destination. This kind of walking Thoreau (1982) calls a ‘return to the
senses’.
My fellow walkers were of mixed ages and nationalities. According to the
cathedral’s own publication, Compostela: Revista de la Archicofradia del Glorioso
Apostol Santiago (1994–6), about 70 percent of pilgrims are Spanish. Of the other
30 percent the vast majority are western European, primarily French. A small
minority come from the Americas and a tiny handful from Australia and New
Zealand. The pilgrims I met generally had some experience of hiking but their
motivations for beginning the pilgrimage were varied and sometimes ambivalent,
not necessarily framed in terms of physical recreation but usually referring to
tourism in one form or another. Either they were interested in the art and archi-
tecture of northern Spain, or the country’s landscapes. I spoke to no one who
gave explicitly religious reasons for doing the journey. However, as will be
discussed, these motivations became blurred in the process of walking itself.
I began my journey in Burgos, welcomed by the volunteers staffing the local
refuge and was issued with a pilgrim’s passport – a small sheet of card on which
to collect stamps that validated each stage of the journey so that a pilgrim’s certifi-
cate or ‘Compostela’ could be issued at the end. After a fitful night’s sleep in an
unfamiliar bed in a dormitory full of snoring, smelly bodies, I was unpleasantly
surprised to realize that pilgrims rose with the sun, around 5 a.m., in order to get
a few hours walk in before the heat became impossible. As I shivered in the chilly
morning and slung on my over-stuffed backpack, I realized there was not much
holiday frivolity amongst this earnest bunch. I followed in the swirling wakes
they made through the mist hanging low over the river, trying to make out the
small path marked by occasional painted scallop shells or arrows, out into the
west.

Walking and the Process of Pilgrimage

What follows is a close examination of the process of the pilgrimage or Camino
to Santiago de Compostela. Because I focused on pilgrims who walk in my field-
work, I am unable to offer a comparison with other modes of travel. Pilgrims

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who cycle no doubt have spiritual experiences of their own. It is my argument,

however, that walking generates its own particular kind of experience and so it is
this particularity that will be explored.
This starting point, the experience of walking and the walking body, is in a
sense phenomenological. I acknowledge that structural elements, both social and
religious, affect the ways in which the walking body is constituted. This point
will become clearer in the examples that follow. The walking body is a cultural
body, rendered through the social, but it is also much more. It is not totally deter-
mined by these aspects. In Bryan Turner’s (1996: 66) terms, ‘the body is simul-
taneously an environment (part of nature) and a medium of the self (part of
culture)’. It is this nexus, between environment and self, I am primarily interested
in here.

Walking Reflexively
Walking is not taken for granted by the walker. Pilgrims arrive at the walk by
first unpacking other aspects of the pilgrimage, by critiquing traditional religious
assumptions and the obvious structure of the pilgrimage itself. It was the
pilgrims’ ability to think critically and reflexively about the journey that was
initially striking to me as an ethnographer in the field.
This reflexivity initially contains three aspects. The first is expressed doubt
about the presence of the body of Saint James in Santiago, regarded by most
pilgrims I spoke with as plain ‘common sense’. This doubt is bolstered by the
various pilgrimage guide books that refer to the transportation of the Saint’s
headless body from Palestine to Spain, in a stone boat blown by angels, as mytho-
logical rather than historical. The acceptance of this doubt as ‘common sense’
establishes the possibility of a metaphorical relationship between truth and the
pilgrim. Because something seems obviously untrue, in a literal or historical
sense, does not automatically make it false in a literary or metaphorical way. Such
a proposition initially bolsters rather than challenges the pilgrims’ modern,
rational standpoints. Such scepticism is a common starting point and one that
allows thinking around spirituality to occur separate from any need to engage
with organized religion on the journey.
This implies the second aspect of reflexivity – doubt about the effect or
outcome of the pilgrimage. Santiago is not a thaumaturgic centre as is Lourdes,
for example. It does not produce miracles. No pilgrims I met believed the act of
pilgrimage or arrival in Santiago would cause any kind of material change or
healing. Nor did they expect any sudden or dramatic spiritual change either, often
explicitly rejecting metaphors of salvation.
This leads to the third aspect of reflexivity. As a result of ambivalence about

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the destination and its effects, pilgrims adjusted their aims in significant ways.
Rather than focusing on a material outcome or a concrete, spatial goal, pilgrims
turned to examine the very process of the pilgrimage, the journey. This invari-
ably involved an awareness of the embodied self in relation to the journey. The
following quote, from a Spanish pilgrim in his early 40s, reveals some of these
themes of reflexivity.
At the beginning I was only thinking about arriving either in Santiago or at the next tourist
monument. Then I started to find different spiritual themes and ideas surfacing. You start to
walk and as you do you look inside yourself . . . you do that and you realize the Camino is
teaching you spiritual things. Only when you take one day at a time do you start to realize
this. But I also saw that many people wanted to experience belief and contact with the spiritual.
I wanted to get away from that. I am not religious and I was suspicious of people who were.
(Alfredo)

Alfredo is reflecting here on a shift that occurred for him a few days into his trip.
He expresses a set of complex ideas coalescing around an inner/outer distinction
that is both deployed and unpacked.
He says his journey began with a focus on things of ‘significance’ that existed
in the future, both temporally and spatially: ‘Santiago or the next tourist
monument’. Monuments, objects that are limited in space but endure through
time, and monumentality are equated with significance. Soon, though, his focus
shifted from material things, particularly ‘significant’ things, towards spiritual
‘themes’ that came to the ‘surface’. A theme, in contrast to a monument, is non-
spatial as well as possibly extemporal. The metaphor of coming to the surface
implies that these themes pre-existed Alfredo’s awareness and possibly his self.
Walking is what revealed them. Overlaying this with a metaphor of sight, ‘you
look inside yourself’, he peers within from a particular vantage point. In this
reflexive moment he describes himself as subject and object, an agent and a thing.
This offers the conditions for attributing an external origin to spiritual themes.
He says they arise from the Camino – that it is the Camino teaching him.
Spirituality is thus both an aspect of the inner self and the journey, which is
neither material nor external. Rather than describe the Camino as an object,
Alfredo links it instead to the temporal order: ‘Only when you take one day at
a time do you start to realize this.’ By which, he implies a slowing of time, a
careful sequencing of things as opposed to the fast juggling common in everyday
life. To emphasize the overall point he then distinguishes this notion of spiritu-
ality from what he regards as the vulgar spirituality of others who desire a thing
they lack. As if spirituality were something that lay about on the Camino waiting
to be found.
In this statement Alfredo succinctly expresses a set of complex ideas common

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among walking pilgrims. He captures the shift in focus away from the material,
spatial world towards a spiritual and non-spatial one. At the same time he
surmises that if the spiritual is qualitatively different to the material then perhaps
it shares something obscure with the temporal order. Paradoxically, it is precisely
the physical or material practice of walking that leads him to this realization.

‘En el Camino’ – Space and Time

Alfredo talks about the Camino in a deliberately ambiguous fashion that is
frequently exploited by pilgrims in both Spanish and English. ‘El Camino’ trans-
lates as ‘the Way’, but this can also simply mean ‘the way’, from here to there.
The Camino is both the path to Santiago, a town in western Spain, but also a
metaphorical path not bound to space. It is the ‘between’ of ‘from’ and ‘to’. For
Alfredo it also operates between inner and outer, self and world. In so far as the
Camino is ‘between’ it is marked as temporally indeterminate. Alfredo responds
to this indeterminacy by wanting to take ‘one day at a time’. The verb form of
camino, caminar, means to walk. The temporality of this way would then seem
very specific, about 5 kilometres per hour.
Being ‘on the way’ starts with a feeling of being isolated from surrounding,
settled society. This is compounded for pilgrims not from Spain, but even the
Spaniards quickly find themselves in foreign areas with different dialects and
customs. Pilgrims are therefore structurally distinct, in so far as they are foreign,
and temporally distinct, in so far as they ‘pass through’. This is reminiscent of
Turner’s (1974) notion of the liminal – a non-place or an in-between place.
Pilgrims are ‘on the Camino’, ‘on the way’, but to and from where? I wish to
depart from Turner in so far as I regard pilgrims as not so much in no-place or
even a marginal place but rather in a place radically, ontologically different from
places bounded by space and time. To expand on this, Turner’s notion of limi-
nality relies on the observation that, from the point of view of social structure,
the pilgrim lies outside or on the edge of society and culture. Eade and Sallnow
(1991: 9–10), in their work on pilgrimage, question this aspect of Turner, pointing
out in the first instance that no place is a place outside culture. They lay empiri-
cal stress on the conflicts they observe among pilgrims and, between pilgrims and
settled societies, as well as between communitas and structure (Eade, 1991: 75;
Sallnow, 1987, 1991: 147–8). What, though, if Turner is on the right track? What
if we simply take at face value the following observation by Espé, a woman from
Madrid in her mid-30s?

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The point is not to go to Santiago, the point is to be in the Camino. The Camino is . . . abstract.
You shouldn’t be too literal. Yes you walk across the earth but the earth walks itself across you.
[laughs] Don’t I know after a day like today.

Espé here expresses two important themes. She first reiterates the placement
of self outside conventional space. The self is in the Camino rather than in any
particular place or even oriented to a particular place such as Santiago. She also
stresses the temporal aspect of placing oneself outside linear time, ‘The point is
not to go . . . the point is to be. . . .’ She also clearly articulates an orientation to
the metaphorical pilgrimage as opposed to the literal journey, in a similar way to
Alfredo, across space and through time. Yet she similarly rejects the notion that
the Camino is a metaphorical lens through which to view the self in a kind of
therapeutic self-analysis. By asserting that the Camino works on the self, the
earth walking across you, she establishes a paradox that resonates with a different
possibility: the dis-placement of space and time themselves. She finally resolves
this in the joke about her physical exhaustion by acknowledging the importance
of the body as nexus, both of place and displacement. This is significant because
it refuses the simple explanation that the Camino is only an inner journey.

Place
Pilgrims I encountered rarely spoke of arrival in Santiago until the last couple of
days. It was almost considered bad luck to assume the destination would be
achieved before it was certain. This bordered on superstition at times and I was
frequently regaled with stories about pilgrims who came to sticky ends. The
message of these stories seemed to be again, not to get ahead of oneself. The only
certainty from one day to the next was the journey itself and the mode of that
journey, feet, legs and forward movement. This meant walking the journey, not
in the sense of getting somewhere but in being a walker, by concentrating on the
action and rhythm of the walk to the exclusion of all other thoughts.
This also allowed pilgrims to become aware of projection in the psychological
sense. Both Alfredo and Espé insist on the idea that spirituality arises from the
pilgrimage. Pilgrims are aware of this binary tension and when questioned about
it often refer to experience, in a phenomenological sense, as the bridge between
self and world where spirit is felt to arise through both. The dualism of
inner/outer is inadequate for describing a place of origin, so often pilgrims
displace the opposition, as well as the self in relation to the opposition. These
paradoxes point to another set of important distinctions between space, time and
place.
Displacement is a movement away from the spatial and temporal orders of the

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everyday. In this sense Turner’s (1974: 96) notion of a space outside structure has
significance. Turner falls short, however, in his ability to then say what this place
is. He remains bound to its expression in the negative – as marginal or non-place.
The evocative work of Edward Casey (1993) is useful in trying to find a positive
expression of place as well as explaining more clearly the difference between place
and, space and time.
For Casey (1993: 13–16), place precedes both space and time as well as provid-
ing an intrinsic limit and possibility for them. Place is intrinsic to being and
without it there could be no being. Every specific combination of space and time
relies on it in order to create ‘this place’ and while space and time are dependent,
place can occur without either. It is the condition of all existing things and thus,
according to Casey, it is possible to conceptualize God as a place. In this sense,
the place that Alfredo and Espé point to precedes the space of social structure as
well as the time of social action.

Walking in the Present

Pilgrims were commonly cautious about getting ahead of themselves. This might
occur through thinking about Santiago, that evening’s destination, or it might
arise as a kind of projection that is focused on going rather than being. Such a
projection leads away from the self and creates a gap between where one is, in a
particular moment, and where one wants to be. In order to counter this tendency,
Espé and Alfredo are emplaced in the Way rather than focused on destination.
They are neither here nor there, not now or later.

Rhythm
Walking at about 5 kilometres per hour, an aerobic level of exercise is reached
after half an hour or so. The first half hour of the morning is often painful as stiff
joints, aggravated tendons and blisters all begin the day reluctantly, but, as
muscles warm up, the pain decreases. This feels both physical and psychological,
as the mind is often as reluctant as the body to arise from bed. Once beyond this
initial period it is quite easy to walk for hours at a time with only brief rests. The
walk becomes meditative as the body falls into a rhythm. José talks about this
directly:
Initially I didn’t do very well physically. I didn’t think I would be able to continue. But then
I learned to pace myself. I fell into a rhythm of walking. I found a good rhythm but I also
learned to have rests at regular intervals. That carried me along.

What carried you along?

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The rhythm. It’s like when you sing. The time passes more easily. (José)

The expression ‘fall into a rhythm’ reveals something important: that rhythm
is external to the body or mind and cannot be controlled. In falling we are subject
to gravity, released from the need or the possibility of control. The fall in Eden
was related to Eve’s humanity, and when we fall in love we do so on similar
grounds. In walking we give ourselves to a rhythm allowing it to control the body
like an involuntary movement. So, as the heart beats consistently and the breath
draws in and out, the legs take measured steps. Yet walking is not a naturally
involuntary act, it seems to lie halfway between what can be willed and what can
direct itself. We learn to walk but it also seems natural. People develop individual
and characteristic walks and manage to move about without conscious thought.
Yet the intermediate status of walking is affirmed when we need to mind our step
over rough or unfamiliar terrain. The walk may be familiar but new terrain must
be mapped.
This may be an unknown landscape or a new relationship with the body, as
José expresses. He says the journey presented physical difficulties but it was in
finding a rhythmical relationship to his body and the walk that it became
possible. To him it was like singing, suggesting the rhythm that suits the walk is
also harmonious. This rhythmical dimension is an important way of centring the
self during the pilgrimage, especially when confronted with many kilometres of
undistinguished track drawn straight across a plain. Rhythm is a process combin-
ing submission and control.
This became important for me on an especially desolate and hot section of the
route from Sahagun to León. On the one hand I tried to control thoughts that
continually drew me away from the present task of walking. I pulled myself back
from dissociated thoughts dancing around in the future, thoughts of a cool spot
in the shade near a spring with running water. One pilgrim advised me to gently
pull myself back to the rhythm when this occurred with the thought, ‘This is
what I have, now and forever. Only the walk.’ This simple exercise is a way of
overcoming dissociation and, in order to be oneself more fully in the present,
other selves imagined in the past and future must be put aside. Stabilization in
the present begins with a simple node of concentration, the rhythm. Rhythm also
announces something else, a kind of mediated mode of embodiment which is less
‘taken for granted’ than the everydayness of habit. Rhythm is more self-
consciously a practice.
Abraham (1995) suggests that the ‘rhythmising attitude’, one that is sensitive
to rhythm in the world, actually suspends the ‘positional act’. For him there is
not a perception of rhythm but a ‘rhythmisation of perception’. A sui generis

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expressive consciousness is produced which is both immanent and transcendent.

In other words, the binary of perceiving subject and external object is under-
mined. Rhythm is both a creative act and an objective thing in the world (1995:
21–2). Offering support to this idea is the fact that modulations in rhythm can
produce significant variations in affect. Making oneself walk slower than usual is
interesting as it initially focuses on the action of walking but soon leads on to an
awareness of what is around in the environment. If thoughts of arrival become
obsessive this can be a very difficult but useful exercise in bringing oneself back
to what is immediate. By taking note of the trees and bushes, the type and shape
of rocks on the path, the formation of clouds and the dappled shades of sunlight
dancing through the branches, one comes back to one’s senses. The effect of
projection into the future is to place the self somewhere it is not – Santiago, the
next town or home. The point of walking is to bring oneself back to the present
moment – to be present to the world as well as oneself. If thoughts are fixed on
the future then why not take a bus directly to Santiago? Why be on the ‘way’ at
all? This approach is clearly a technique, but a paradoxical one as the aim of the
exercise, slowing down and becoming aware of the world, often frustratingly
produces its opposite. When this occurs it is necessary to begin the process anew
with falling into rhythm and coming back to the senses. By submitting to the
rhythm of the walk and its involuntary nature, a way of seeing and organizing
thoughts and experiences emerges. Letting this system establish itself is the first
step towards grounding oneself in the present and then commending oneself to
something deeper, simpler and more fundamental.
Rhythm is a powerful aspect of becoming present to oneself and the world –
a kind of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Csordas, 1994: 9–10). Rhythm is both inner (of
the body, of the mind) and outer (of the social, the collective, the walking
together), and crosses between these two.

Sociality
Constantino, a Basque man in his late 20s, addressed the sociality of walking
directly.
You realize you can walk with an other but you can also be alone. You don’t have to talk. If
you do talk you can do so in a way that maintains this solitude. You don’t have to delve into
each other. You can talk about the flowers by the road, for example. (Constantino)

In one sense Constantino expresses the fact that solitude, as opposed to loneli-
ness, is predicated on sociality. This being with oneself while also walking beside
others was regarded by many pilgrims I spoke with as the ideal way to conduct
social relations on the pilgrimage. This kind of presence to oneself is complicated.
In the first instance it is socially established by delimiting borders. For example,

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it was common to walk alone, physically distant from other pilgrims or, alterna-
tively, with other people in silence. It was also done through certain conversa-
tional styles. Constantino offers an example by suggesting topics located in the
environment. Pilgrims generally avoided talking about the future or the past
beyond the Camino itself. Specifically, despite pilgrims usually becoming very
sociable with each other, they rarely engaged in conversations where personal
histories were discussed. The only way they might was if they had some bearing
on the pilgrim’s motivation for doing the Camino. Conversations generally
avoided references to lives outside the journey. One of the most significant
mechanisms for maintaining these limits was the diversity of cultures and
languages. The most common languages among pilgrims were Spanish and
English, without a lot of proficiency by most non-native speakers. It was thus
linguistically easier to stick to concrete and present topics of conversation. This
was also a useful way of getting rid of chatty or annoying pilgrims: simply feign
a lack of language skills.
Before I worked out these rules, people seemed unduly reserved. Interview-
ing pilgrims about their lives prior to the Camino was often like talking about
distant places or memories. Sticking to concrete and shared experiences and ideas
in conversation came to make sense, in the light of Turner’s (1974) notions of
liminality and communitas, which he argues have the effect of diminishing differ-
ences between pilgrims’ status or class. While I do not claim to have observed
instances of communitas amongst pilgrims to Santiago, they did create common
ground with each other by sticking to simple conversations about present events.
They would commonly talk about the landscape, the day’s events, the history and
myths of the route and, sometimes, deeper issues of theology and philosophy. In
all of these conversations there was a tendency towards topics that could be
discussed impersonally and ex tempore. Not only was this a way of sidestepping
issues of status that might have come between people in other circumstances but
it was also a way of being inclusive. One did not need to have pre-existing friend-
ships or even foreknowledge of a topic in order to get involved in conversations.
It was a simple means of anchoring sociality in the shared present of the pilgrim-
age.

Making the Journey

This notion of presence is central, not only to the social dynamics between
pilgrims but also to the way in which the pilgrimage is imagined. Many pilgrims
were hesitant to talk of their reasons for walking. This is linked to the ambigu-
ity of the pilgrimage itself and its lack of a thaumaturgic locus. It wasn’t known

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what to expect at the end, so the end was put aside. Instead pilgrims concentrated
on developing a simpler consciousness of presence to self, of mindfulness. With
hindsight, the journey becomes a metaphor with different stages, difficulties and
joys. Maria was a woman in her early 30s from Madrid who confided to me that
she had recently left a violent marriage. The Camino quite practically represented
a border or limin in her life.
The arrival in Santiago represents the end of a difficult stage in my life. The Camino itself
represents a stage in my life. Now I have to reinsert myself into the ‘normal’ way of doing
things.

Did you know the Camino would be like that when you started?

No, not at all. I just did it. I thought about the things I did each day . . . but . . . you really only
obtain a point of view when you look back over the journey as a whole. For me that was at
the end. (Maria)

Maria is here suggesting two things: that the Camino is distinct from everyday
life and that it is made into a journey in some way. First, the pilgrimage is actively
distinguished from everyday life in a variety of ways both individual and social.
For Maria this was centred on the possibility of entering into a journey where
she had previously associated everyday life with feelings of entrapment and stasis.
The act of walking through the countryside largely fulfilled this purpose for her.
For other pilgrims, distance from the everyday was created through an active
avoidance or rejection of certain things associated with modern life such as
commercialism, industrial landscapes, highways and noise. No one much enjoyed
the sections of the Camino where they were forced to walk on the roadside.
Despite numerous motorists waving and blowing their horns in gestures of
friendly encouragement, it was ultimately hard not to become annoyed by both
their cars and good cheer.
This attitude also explains why many pilgrims were apprehensive about arrival
in Santiago for, the closer they got to the destination the denser were the ubiqui-
tous signs of tourism. Such things as signs, advertisements and specially
constructed paths were mostly innocuous in themselves, but contributed to a
sense that the route was a tourism opportunity for local and provincial govern-
ments. Santiago, it was commonly feared, would be the culmination of all this
pernicious banality.
This did not prove the case for me. The cathedral of Santiago de Compostela
is one of the wonders of Romanesque art and architecture and little could have
diminished its impact. Other pilgrims I spoke with were sometimes disappointed;
many disliked the obvious power and symbolism of the Church as expressed in

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the cathedral itself and the handling of pilgrims. I felt something like disappoint-
ment later, upon boarding the bus to leave the town. Seeing the landscape rush
by I had a strong feeling of poignant loss, one I often associate with travel. I now
conclude that travel is not the cause but the mode of it. Bus, train and aeroplane
trips are so banal these days they rarely appear to be journeys in themselves but
the means of getting somewhere else from which to begin a proper journey. Such
journeys, like the Camino are usually slower, more self-directed, sometimes diffi-
cult, and they subtly change the person who makes them.
In suggesting that the Camino is made into a journey Maria says, significantly,
that this capacity to narrate the whole comes from the perspective of the end, or
with a sense of an end. This points to a tension between narrating the journey as
a complete thing, with, in Aristotelian terms, a beginning, middle and end, and
the desire expressed by many pilgrims to exist in the moment within the journey,
without any particular consciousness beyond the moment.

Techniques, Technologies and Narrative

Assisting pilgrims in their narrative efforts is a vast field of what Michael (2000)
calls intervening or complicating technologies. For Michael, these are the
practical, material aids such as boots and equipment. My experience, along with
many other pilgrims, was a gradual unburdening of such material technologies.
Many of us discovered, for instance, that cheap runners were far more comfort-
able for walking on roads than expensive hiking boots, so we sent our boots home
in the mail. Likewise books, stoves, tents, just about everything except what we
could wear, got put in the post. By the time I got to Santiago my pack weighed
a blissful 4–5 kilograms. This paring down assisted pilgrims in narrating them-
selves as simple and self-reliant. Recreational walking has a different sense of
destination to pilgrimage and is uncommitted to hard work for its own sake
(Solnit, 2000). This allows the possibility that intervening technologies may be
both useful, and pleasurable things in themselves. The technologies intervening
in the Camino are of a slightly different order. I have already said that rhyth-
mizing is a technique and therefore bears some relation to technology, as does
narrative. More particularly, discursive tools in the form of maps, guidebooks,
pamphlets and signage, swamp the Camino and narrate the journey in very
particular ways. The effect of these tools is to spatialize time and place. Maps
offer a particular kind of perspective, linear, from a bird’s eye vantage point
looking over the landscape. They encourage the viewer to see the shortest
possible route between two points, ‘as the crow flies’ but not as the walker walks
(Casey, 1993: 25). Guidebooks add to this effect by literally narrating the day on
the road according to recognizable landmarks in order to ensure that the pilgrim

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does not get lost. This is necessarily crudely linear. Even if the guidebooks place
an emphasis on the spirituality of the journey, which few do, they tend to rely
on prescriptive forms of advice-giving. Added to this are frequent road signs that
give the distance to the next town to the nearest 100 metres, as though the only
thing that will keep a weary pilgrim going, is realizing s/he only has 3,800 metres
to go before lunch.

Time
This suggests a tension between this kind of narration, which is usually linear and
technical, and presence, which is neither. Many pilgrims resolve this quandary by
thinking of the narrative and the journey as whole, singular and present. This is
similar to the way that Augustine (1989) resolved the paradox of linear time,
presented as an apparent contradiction between the fact that the present is
singular, excluding both the past and the future, yet the past persists in memory
and the future is evoked in expectation. Augustine conjectured that it was his
mind that extended through time to encompass past, future and present. This also
evokes Casey’s (1996: 9) distinction between space and place. The difference,
however, is that Augustine proposes that time is an aspect of mind that can be
consciously directed (Lloyd, 1993). For Casey, place and time are sui generis
aspects of the world. This is an extrapolation of what Bergson (1924) calls
duration, a kind of coexistence of past, future and present in the way that
upstream and downstream are still a part of the singular thing we call a river. Such
a river is also marked by its flow, or becoming nature. In becoming there is per-
sistence within time, both of mind as well as the past itself. The past is not lost
or non-existent simply because it is past. Bergson (1970) argues that we mistake
the past’s lack of usefulness for its non-existence. The present is not that which
is, but rather that which is being made.
This issue is important because it goes to the heart of the paradox between the
Camino as a journey, something with a beginning, middle and end, and the
experience of presence in walking. In Bergsonian terms, presence becomes itself
in duration.

Embodying the Journey

If I now return to the question of maps and mapping, this philosophical perspec-
tive suggests an alternative approach, one in which an embodied map is produced
through the act of walking, rather than paths followed on a static, topological
representation. For example, I remember a difficult descent down a dry riverbed
on the way into the village of Samos. I had to leap from rock to rock and many

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of the footholds were unstable. I was acutely aware of the danger of falling. The
care needed for each step allowed me to concentrate entirely on the task at hand,
to become completely absorbed in it and leave no other residue, physical or
mental. I was one with the task and thus entirely present in both the thing I was
doing and the moment in which I was doing it. Paradoxically, only in such
complete absorption in the present does a trace of history and thought remain. I
could now return to that place several years later and almost certainly retrace my
steps on the very same rocks I used before. Every metre of the way would be
familiar. This seems similar to the way in which musical instruments are learned
or perhaps even riding a bicycle, through the production of body memory that
does not easily get forgotten. In such action as leaping down the riverbed, the
landscape is mapped by becoming part of my inner landscape and it is through
presence of mind and self that I lay down such memory. When thoughts wander
into past or future the miles slip by without consequence, and thus the great
effort required to recover them, to notice the effervescence of things when all
there seemed to be was a dull horizon. There is one caveat; the mapping of a land-
scape is never complete. What is not occurring is the projection of self onto land-
scape; the self is not identified with the environment and is not commensurate
with it. Rather the radical otherness of the world is what impresses itself. Even
though I may dissolve myself in the act of walking, the landscape will always
remain other. The moment is both absolute and finite.
In walking I open myself to something within, which is also something in the
world – something that speaks of infinity, the Milky Way, the dreams of a single
night, the path unfolding past, out into the future. Still – in the moment. Yet each
moment, each present, comes and goes from one infinity into another and is
contained in that idea, infinity. This process reveals the importance of paying
attention to the immediate, to what is present to us at any given moment. When
the infinite, in all its intensity, can be apprehended then the finite nature of exist-
ence is revealed. The moment ‘is’ no more. The pilgrim is a walker walking, and
the landscape is no longer a path but truly ‘there’ as something entirely for itself.
The experience of walking to Santiago was, for many pilgrims as well as
myself, a significant spiritual and social experience. The practice of walking
allowed us to understand and explore a nexus between the body, self and the
world. It thus demonstrates the many complex ways in which the body, situated
within specific material circumstances, helps to produce experiences that are
profoundly spiritual. These experiences are not opposed to the body, nor do they
transcend the body. They respect its materiality and its presence, but also allude
to a mystery beyond.
This suggests some further implications for social science approaches to

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spirituality. Dualism, despite the many critiques of recent decades, is still a

powerful mode of thought in the West. The pilgrims to Santiago were attempt-
ing to construct various paths out of and away from a plethora of divisions such
as between body and mind, movement and stasis, immanence and transcendence.
Such paths were produced from the practice of walking. This highlights, in a more
general sense, the importance of the negotiations that people are necessarily
engaged in between bodies, practice and lived social worlds, and the importance
of an impetus towards congruence rather than dissonance in such processes. The
field of anthropological pilgrimage studies is particularly bound to a dualistic and
dissonant view of structure and anti-structure that insists pilgrims must be within
social structure as they cannot, nor can anyone, be outside it (see Coleman, 2002).
This is the basis on which many in this field have criticized Victor Turner (see
Eade and Sallnow, 1991). While I acknowledge a range of limitations in his work,
I maintain that liminality in particular, is one of the most nuanced and useful
concepts available to social scientists for thinking about many forms of alterity
and marginality. A subtle understanding of the liminal dimensions of bodies in
particular, reveals the redundancy of dualism, and bodies as things that can be in
two places simultaneously, within and outside social structure.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Ignacio Menes, Ann Daniel, Asha Persson, Jeanne Ellard and Gary Dowsett.

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Sean Slavin is an anthropologist working at the Australian Research Centre in Sex Health and Society,
La Trobe University. His current research interests include drug use and contemporary forms of
intimacy.

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