LOVE WALKS: THE SOJOURNED SELF, SOCIAL SOLIDARITY, AND PILGRIMAGE

Abstract

My research site is pilgrimage as a space of liminality. I focus on the Camino de Santiago, particularly its Camino Frances route, a 500-mile pilgrimage across northern Spain. Specifically, I explore the experiences of people who participate in this pilgrimage liminality, focusing on both self-concept work and social solidarity formation. In other words, I investigate how people participate in pilgrimage for personal, self-care reasons while simultaneously, and perhaps paradoxically, developing solidarity with others also participating.

Tangentially, I also explore how pilgrimage may be related to social justice pursuits such as those embodied in such lived experiences of (in)famous social movement revolutionaries as: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Therefore, my main research questions are:1. How is pilgrimage used to work on the self-concept?, and 2. How does pilgrimage create social solidarity?

My peripheral research question is:3. How, if at all, is pilgrimage used as a tool of structural resistance?

Three stories appear from my participants on how pilgrimage is used to work on the Self:

1. Participants walk pilgrimage during a transitional life stage, 2. When defining “pilgrimage,” participants do describe a relationship between Self and the Other, and 3. “Good” pilgrimage experiences eclipse “bad” experiences among participants, with substantial illustrations of social connections between the Self and the Other.

Three stories that appear regarding how pilgrimage creates social solidarity include:

1. Communitas is experienced among and between participants walking the pilgrimage, 2. Participants describe the common goal of reaching Santiago as a reason for social solidarity, and 3. Participants describe why and how walking pilgrimage is way to make the world a better place.

Finally, my peripheral research question about pilgrimage as a structural resistance tool is investigated in the conclusion’s conversation about the act of walking being societal opposition.

It is my intention that this dissertation-sojourn provides insight into how pilgrimage creates social solidarity and into the relationship between self-concept, social solidarity, and social justice.