Enchantments of stone: Confronting other-than- human agency in Irish pilgrimage practices (original) (raw)
Related papers
International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, 2020
Responding to calls for critical interrogations of pilgrimages, our paper examines how different religious meanings are (re)inscribed in spaces through the performance of annual events in a post-secular context. This focus reveals how pilgrims' embodied practices are fundamental to continuing definitions of these locations as sacred places. Using accounts of the Croagh Patrick and Our Lady's Island pilgrimages in Ireland, we trace the movement of people in these spaces focusing on how meanings are forged, refracted, and challenged through the performances. These mass embodiments assert traditional understandings of Christian worship and looser spiritual interpretations, while simultaneously involving secular concerns. The paper advances discussions of pilgrimages through an examination of the processes of embodied place-making found at two Irish pilgrimage sites informed by considerations of the increasingly complex religious-spiritual spatialities. We contend that the processes of inscription centre on the corporeal spatial practices which sustain, enhance, and unsettle the (re)creation of these places as sacred.
Rethinking archaeologies of pilgrimage
Journal of Social Archaeology, 2018
Pilgrimage instigates relationships between phenomena that produce hierophanies, or sacred, enchanting experiences. In this paper I argue that pilgrimage scholars should focus on the relational qualities of pilgrimage in order to rethink and produce more detailed, sensuous descriptions and analyses of this practice. This can be done by employing ''relational approaches,'' seen here as perspectives that recognize and prioritize the interconnections among persons, places, things, and substances. I further suggest that focusing on movement, the vitality of places and materials, and the senses is useful in thinking about the relational aspects of pilgrimage. Moreover, archaeologists are well-situated to investigate these phenomena and thus can and should push pilgrimage studies in new directions. I provide a case study of the Emerald Acropolis, an 11th-century Cahokian pilgrimage center. Cahokians traveled to Emerald on certain occasions and, while there, manipulated particular substances—earth and water—in ways that gathered otherworldly powers in affective ways.
The field of pilgrimage studies is complicatedly cross-disciplinary with significant literatures in many fields -not least history, theology, art history, anthropology, sociology and archaeology. These disciplines do not always talk to each other and are often at cross-purposes, in part because of different axiomatic starting points, different disciplinary protocols or different methodological practices. Indeed, different national traditions of study hardly talk to each other in this field. 1 A good example of the disciplinary problem is the interdisciplinary conference on pilgrimage at Roehampton in 1988, which ultimately gave rise to the important anthropological collected volume, Contesting the Sacred. 2 The conference descended into a fight between 'the deconstructive impetus of anthropological analysis' (this was, after all, the 1980s) and the defenders of the 'category of pilgrimage . . . as a bounded entity' (primarily historians and theologians), with the anthropologists ultimately leaving and producing their own book. 3 Within this mix of scholarly investments -many charged with not always compatible views about what religion is and what it should be -material culture has always had a peculiar place. For while major works of art and architecturefrom temples, churches, mosques and other places of worship to prime objects of devotion such as statues, icons or relics encased in reliquaries -have always been among the most impressive surviving remains of pilgrimage activity, patronage and enthusiasm in the past, 4 and while archaeological evidence is among the most suggestive and intriguing ways of exploring the actual structures and configurations of the great sites of the past, the disciplinary thrust of those who have dominated the field of pilgrimage studies -especially anthropologists and historians but also theologians -has been resolutely textual, especially if we include oral accounts by informants under the heading of 'textual' (in the sense that after recording they are written down and are not material-cultural). That is, our understandings of the material culture of pilgrimage are framed by a narrative either constructed from living informants' accounts or from written sources (whether scriptural and exegetic) or from all kinds of documentary data, including firstperson writings, epigraphic instructions on site, the invocations on souvenirs and amulets, and so forth. The question of the relation of archaeology to text -one 15031-0593-FullBook.indd 265 11/17/2016 9:14:59 AM 266 Jas' Elsner of the great and problematic theoretical issues in all visual and material-cultural study -is fundamental to any exploration of 'excavating pilgrimage', and it is not simple. It should be said that the rise of pilgrimage studies as a scholarly category of Greek and Roman religion succumbs to precisely this pattern -it is founded on readings of specific texts (such as Pausanias, Lucian's De Dea Syria or Aelius Aristides' Sacred Tales), 5 or historical accounts that are grounded in a range of written sources and inscriptions. 6 Among the weaknesses of such textualism in pilgrimage studies -something this volume actively strives to resist -is an emphasis on the views of literate elites (or elite attitudes to observations of 'popular piety') and a reduction in the range of possible practices and empirical data for the study of pilgrimage.
Barefoot and Rosary-in-Hand: A Geography of Pilgrimage in Ireland
2014
Pilgrimage is one of the fundamental structures a journey can take-the quest in search of something, if only one's own transformation, the journey toward a goal.-Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking Departure Bare feet treaded carefully on gravel. Staves sounded rhythmically against the path. Backpacks, filled with diluted orange drinks and sandwiches, were tightened on backs. The pilgrimage had begun. Just after dawn on 'Reek Sunday', the last Sunday in July 2012, I had started my climb of Croagh Patrick along with thousands of other pilgrims from across Ireland and further afield. Toddlers and octogenarians, whole families and groups of friends, youth clubs and lone walkers, all merged into one in the ascent of this conical peak in Co Mayo. We were participating in the continuation of ancient customs stretching back millennia, although the modern pilgrimage centres on the belief that St Patrick spent 40 days in prayer on the summit. As each person embarked on the journey up the mountain, they became a 'pilgrim'. Simultaneously, their beliefs, emotions and performances imbued the mountain with significance and sacredness. The place defines the people and the people define the place: people becoming pilgrims, a mountain becoming a sacred space. My research is about pilgrimage and this dynamic process that shapes the people and places involved. Understanding Pilgrimage From the car park at Murrisk, a well-established path winds its way up the ridge on the southern shore of Clew Bay towards the 'Reek', as Croagh Patrick is known locally. As the path stretches out before me, I paused to take in the crowds flowing up and down the hillside: children holding on to their parents, rosary beads swinging gently in hands, weary pilgrims leaning on their staves for support. Croagh Patrick, recognised as being one of the best examples of large scale traditional pilgrimage in Western Europe, reminds us of the continuing role of pilgrimage in the contemporary world. In recent decades, with improved transport systems and increased
Pilgrimage and Materiality: Places, Bodies, and Collective Experiences
The worldwide practice of pilgrimage embodies the conference theme of dialectical tension between the universal and the particular, as individuals seek transcendent experiences through collective journeys. Salamanca – a way-point on the Camino de Santiago – is a fitting place to contemplate recent developments in pilgrimage studies. Pilgrimage practices are particularly multi-layered and complex in the Americas where, in many instances, Catholic and indigenous practices have intertwined and informed one another – hence, they constitute rich contexts from which to fruitfully elaborate on commonalities and differences. In pilgrimage contexts, the materialities of the shrines, the objects that circulate in them, and the bodies of the pilgrims are usually entangled through different semiotic ideologies and/or ontological presuppositions. Close attention to these materialities opens ways to explore the inherent multiplicities present in any pilgrimage. Transformative, meaningful, emotional experiences happen along pilgrimage journeys as well as at destinations. These are inscribed in different materialities, and thus their examination creates novel possibilities for exploring such multiplicities and the tensions, conflicts, and contestations that their relations suppose. Through paying special attention to the multiplicity of materialities, we propose to reexamine the types of politics that take place in pilgrimage practices. In this session, we will examine anthropological and archaeological studies of pilgrimage in the Americas, taking into consideration the new ways in which materiality is being examined, to shed new light on this widespread and truly global, yet profoundly emplaced, practice. Ponencias 12:00-12:30 Estados peregrinos y corporalidad en peregrinaciones de los desiertos mexicanos. neyra patricia alvarado solis El Colegio de San Luis A.C., México El análisis de peregrinaciones en los desiertos mexicanos resalta la corporalidad como el operador de transformación de los diferentes estados del peregrino y de los peregrinos, de las personas, animales, espacios y objetos (que pisan, tocan o con los que entran en contacto). El trabajo ritual que los peregrinos efectúan es la clave para la comprensión de estos fenómenos. En esta participación me interesa abordar cómo se efectúan los procesos de transformación del individuo y de la colectividad, en los diferentes estados peregrinos y de su entorno (personas, objetos, animales, plantas, lugares, entre otros) en peregrinaciones de los desiertos mexicanos. En estas transformaciones los peregrinos están en contacto con fuerzas ambivalentes y/o ambiguas (imágenes santas, ancestros familiares, animales y plantas, desierto, entre otros), permitiendo comprender esos complejos procesos. 12:30-13:00 Bodies' matter. An analysis of pilgrimage in contemporary indigenous Mexico Federica Rainelli Università degli Studi di Padova / École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Italia In the mountains of the Eastern Highlands, the Otomì Indians carry out numerous pilgrimages to the top of their sacred hills with the purpose of propitiating the arrival of the rainy season. These routes trace a sacred geography, which shapes an anthropomorphized landscape inhabited by the petrified bodies of the ancestors. Moreover, the ritual practices performed during the pilgrimage testify the central importance of the body conceived in its material aspect not as an obstacle, but as the conditio sine qua non necessary to transcendence. In the light of the above, the aim of this paper is to propose an analysis that will make the body the focal point in the attempt to account for the ideological presuppositions entailed by the bodies' multiple materialities: namely, 1) an ontological assumption by which a transcendent spiritual principle common to all living beings might be embodied in various tangible media; 2) an ethical imperative asserting a reciprocity principle based on a 'dynamic' conception of the cosmos; and 3) the socio-political consequences engendered by recognising a genealogical link between landscape and human beings. En esta ponencia propongo que existe una forma predominante de aprender y recordar entre los quechua hablantes andinos, la cual se centra en la unidad o relación intrínseca entre los sentidos de la visión, la audición y del movimiento (cinestesia). Desarrollo este argumento analizando de cerca la experiencia de la caminata durante la peregrinación al santuario del Señor de Qoyllor Rit'i (Nieve Resplandeciente) en Cuzco, Perú, que realizan por varios días los grupos de danzarines que participan en este evento anual. Durante esta peregrinación los participantes aprenden y recuerdan una serie de conceptos/sentimientos centrales en su sociedad. En la ponencia me centro en el concepto/sentimiento de pampachay el cual ha sido traducido al español como " perdón " desde los comienzos de la evangelización española. Exploro de cerca la experiencia de cargar piedras en la subida a las Apachetas (lugares de veneración) y depositarlas allí así como el recibir latigazos en estos lugares para lograr el pampachay. La caminata y las ceremonias en las Apachetas se realizan con el incesante acompañamiento de música de flauta y tambor. El santuario es el más alto del mundo, situado en las faldas del nevado Qollquepunku cerca de los 5,000 metros sobre el nivel del mar. He realizado esta peregrinación con los pobladores del pueblo de Pomacanchi en tres ocasiones 2,006, 2,008 y 2010. Pilgrimages involve journeys – movements and displacements – as well as spiritual encounters and social transformations. From the Turners' forays into 1970s liminality, to contemporary ethnographies of tourism, cross-cultural anthropological investigations into pilgrimage have focused on symbols and sacred places, communitas and contestation. But what of pilgrimage's materiality, as experienced by moving bodies? In this paper, I adopt a phenomenological perspective to consider bodies in motion; objects carried, venerated, deposited or left behind; clothing worn and gear adopted; trails, markers, and transportation; food and lodging. My goal at the end of this phenomenological journey is to shed archaeological light on the 11th century experience of pilgrimage to Chaco Canyon – the center of the ancient Pueblo world, in northern New Mexico.
From enchantment to agencement: Archaeological engagements with pilgrimage
Journal of Social Archaeology, 2018
This commentary springs from insights gleaned from two sources. The first involves my archaeological research into the ancient pilgrimage center of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico; the second includes lessons learned by walking the medieval Camino de Santiago. The four papers in this volume describe enchanting destinations reached by archaeological pilgrims engaged in ambulatory knowing. I frame my discussion of these papers using DeLeuzean concepts of assemblage/agencement, emphasizing the emergent properties of pilgrimage, and underscoring how archaeologists can study pilgrims in motion.
Pebbles and Peregrinatio: The Taskscape of Medieval Devotion on Inishark Island, Ireland
Medieval Archaeology, 2018
SINCE 2008, the island of Inishark, Co Galway, Ireland, has been the subject of archaeological research by the Cultural Landscapes of the Irish Coast (CLIC) project, directed by Ian Kuijt of the University of Notre Dame. The CLIC project’s excavations have produced new evidence for the use of water-smoothed pebbles within monastic and pilgrimage practices on the island. Using a relational perspective centred on the concept of ‘taskscape’, this article traces the formation, acquisition, manipulation, and deposition of these pebbles by human and non-human agencies and suggests how the stones may have facilitated worshippers’ embodiment of penitential devotion — peregrinatio — by evoking the divine governance of hydrological forces. Relational theory, although inspired by non-Western indigenous perspectives, is shown to be effective in shedding light on the interplay of bodies, language, objects, and environmental phenomena in early medieval and medieval Irish Christian practice.
Pilgrim and path: the emergence of self and world on a walking pilgrimage in Ireland
cultural geographies
This article foregrounds the pilgrim, as a relational identity, to explore the co-emergence of self and world through embodied spatial practices. The pilgrim, as a liminal and mobile figure, is aligned with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological concept of the ‘flesh’, which presents subject and object as co-incipient. An auto-ethnographic study of the Croagh Patrick pilgrimage in the west of Ireland combines interview accounts from research participants and my own fieldwork experiences. This journey into the performative and liminal aspects of pilgrimages examines of how pilgrim and path emerge in an intermeshing of body and landscape, the spiritual and material and culture and praxis. In mobilising the figure of the pilgrim, this article contributes to disciplinary discussions concerning phenomenology/post-phenomenology, while highlighting the significance of pilgrimage as a purposeful performance.
Sacralising the Landscape: Water and the Development of a Pilgrimage Shrine
This chapter will explore the ways in which Roman Catholic institutions seek to control nature in the form of water through the process of sacralisation. I begin with an historical overview of sacralising the landscape through Catholic pilgrimage and then introduce two theoretical approaches within pilgrimage studies (the phenomenological and relational) towards this process in the context of contemporary pilgrimage. This leads to a detailed case study of Lourdes, one of the most popular European pilgrimage shrines, where the landscape has been radically altered through the process of sacralisation where two types of waterthe spring uncovered by St Bernadette during her visions in 1858 and associated with 'miraculous' healing and the river Gaveplay an ever-present and potentially disruptive role.
UNCOVERING ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN BODY AND EARTH: PILGRIMAGE, WAYFARING AND RELATIONAL EPISTEMOLOGIES
Is there a relationship between the wayfarer and the physical geography traversed during pilgrimage along the Camino? Does relationship with the landscape inform the process of transformation, often alluded to in pilgrimage theory? Using Victor and Edith Turner’s theory of liminality and communitas as a starting point, this research explores potential ways in which the landscape exists as a relational entity, as ‘personhood’, within various wayfarer narratives. It examines the hypothesis that the terrain traversed imprints itself upon the wayfarer, critically alters perspective and contributes to the oft referred to transformational aspect in pilgrimage. It is proposed that the liminal quality of a shift in time proffered through pilgrimage, alongside the rhythmic movement of walking the Camino, allows for a shift in perspective, which brings the landscape into view. It is suggested, that where the physical geography is invested with significance, the relationship becomes one of interdependence, where the outer landscape becomes part of the wayfarers’ inner landscape and by extension the inner part of the outer. This co-constitutive exchange or self-in-relation epistemology is examined within the lens of place and personhood. This master thesis articulates an interpretive reading of nine narratives taken from three ethnographic studies. The narratives and ethnographies are read through the lens of recent debates around emplacement and personhood, specifically some recent theory pertaining to animism. It examines what it means in our exchanges of care (or absence of), in our stewardship of the earth to hold the perspective of a relational epistemology. What questions are raised if the landscape simply does not exist within much of the treatment pertaining to pilgrimage and religious studies? What does it lay as groundwork for the relationing (or absence of relationing) with the landscape and the elements of which it is comprised? This thesis proposes that the habitual treatment of landscape as a painterly surface has often obstructed any examination of a relational exchange. This relational exchange is shown to be a characteristic of emplacement in a sentient world. It is also a complex skill set (or literacy) which can be cultivated or lost over generations.