Abstract
This paper considers ascending mountain peaks as a complex behavior in the domain of the sacred; a contemporary form of pilgrimage explored in my Ph.D. thesis, whose working title is “The Theology of the Mountains.” My autoethnographic research highlights how pilgrimage has been deconstructed, and reframed from a variety of perspectives, and how walking becomes the privileged tool for an ethnography of the present. By shifting the focus of the conversation from the nature of pilgrimage to the nature of walking - as knowing the world through the body and the body through the world - we avoid the sacred-profane dichotomy and shift the focus to the praxis of walking, which becomes the “boundary object” that allows us to address contemporary processes as they emerge in space, particularly in the processes of becoming and not exclusively in the processes of mobility in the spirit of interactive sociology, but becoming in terms of trajectories that people take through social space and to comprehend if they become trajectories through sacred space. My case study on the italian Apuan Alps, exploited by the marble quarries, explores how walking towards these mountains in particular can be seen as a spiritual journey, a contemporary pilgrimage that seeks common interaction between different actors and develops knowledge of new horizon and its liminality, and how photography can become a tool for auto-ethnography as well as one for creating images of contemplation.
Presenters
Maria Grazia CantoniPhD Student, Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Pilgrimage, Sacred Spaces, Boundary, Spirituality, Walking, Visual-Anthropology, Autoethnography, Photography
