SOMETHING ELSE TO PONDER while walking this autumn: how right were Victor and Edith Turner about Christian pilgrimage? These American anthropologists, writing in the 1970s, considered its deepest essence to be the state of ‘liminality’ – which is to say, a state of being on the outside of society, set apart, free from hierarchy, in transition, one supposes, to something better or at least more meaningful.
The Turners were themselves out of the Catholic tradition but they had studied African societies and hoped this would give them sufficient objectivity. They were students of pilgrimage, not participants, and more interested in structure than in individual experience, but in their own defence they provided a classic defence of participant observation, or at the least participant thought processes: ‘When the deeper levels of the self, deeply tinctured by culture, are reflexively engaged, the knowledge brought back by the encounter between self as subject and self as object may be just as valid as knowledge acquired by neutral observation of others’. The language is not very pretty but it helps to justify the diary-writing so vigorously practiced among pilgrims, so long as we are writing about something a little more than just oursselves.
The concept of ‘liminality’ originates with Arnold van Gennep in his classic analysis of rites de passage, those moments of transition within tribal society when young men, to take an obvious example, draw apart into a ‘sacralised space’, perform the proper rituals and ceremonies and live in a specified style, later re-emerging as fully-fledged warriors. He called the three phases they go through ‘separation’, ‘liminality’ and ‘aggregation’. Latin ‘limen’ means ‘border’ and aggregation meant for van Gennep a return to society as a changed person with a new relationship to that society.
Much of the Turners’ book, which is a weighty one, consists in analysis of how far the tribal model fits the Christian. This is really a matter for professional anthropologists. What might count more for us today is the working out of the idea of liminality within the Christian tradition – the invention of liminality on the hoof as it were, unintended, as pilgrims pulled out of their strictly localized life and set out into the great beyond, aiming for Rome or Jerusalem or Santiago or one of the other great shrines like Cologne or Tours as members of a fluctuating, classless, self-constituted community following the routes that criss-crossed Europe. (Nowadays, of course, it’s not just Europe, far from it – the Christian world is a real laboratory for modern anthropologists.)
The Turners’ descriptive analysis applies best to the poorer sort of pilgrim since the wealthy had plenty of mobility anyway, even in the Middle Ages, and it certainly does not apply to those many pilgrims who travelled involuntarily, sent by ecclesiastical courts for some dire misdemeanour, clanking along in chains sometimes and generally shunned by the greater mass.
I think there is no doubt that the modern pilgrim experiences the Camino as a community, a ‘village’ it is often called, with news travelling backwards and, mysteriously, forwards. We are removed from our normal concerns – though much less so now digital devices rule, bringing us weather and news and emails and social media. We are relatively classless, we transcend, as best we can, normal boundaries of language and ethnicity and polity. It all seems to fit, after a fashion.
The Turners go further, however, seeing arrival at the shrine, with its intensity of imagery and reference to the sacred, as transformational. The once-liminal pilgrims become a ‘communitas’, a body which in the Turners’ view is anti-hierarchical, potentially anarchic, founded on its very own communal values. As such it is generally deplored by a church aching to impose its own structure and which has often done its best to discipline its disciples – the pilgrims.
How many times have I heard the priests or bishop in charge on the day insist that when the great botafumeiro – the famous giant thurible – swings in Santiago Cathderal, belching out flames and incense, it is a supremely religious moment, not theatre? Will people please refrain from applauding, cries out the master of ceremonies? They don’t of course. The cameras held aloft by the multitude flash and flash and the applause is sometimes thunderous. This is a small example of what may be a general trend: authority of the church versus the freedom of the pilgrims. Pilgrims may feel it out for themselves.
I should mention that my elder son, a veteran walker, believes the pilgrimage reinforces hierarchy (nodoubt tending to bind pilgrims into a unified religious community, something the church no doubt desires). In this he may be echoing earlier anthropologists than the Turners – the structuralists, sons and daughters of Durkheim – and it seems to me beyond doubt that full-on Catholic pilgrims, of whom there are still a goodly proportion, value the rites and rituals of the church, the sacraments, especially as they reach journey’s end.
But still I hanker for a bit of liminality and a degree, at least, of anarchic communitas.
The Turners work crackles with other interesting ideas. They were among the first to note that the regular working hours imposed by factories in the Industrial Revolution meant that religious observance passed into people’s leisure hours, becoming both something else – religion as recreation first breaking surface here? – and far more voluntary. This obviously impacts on pilgrimage.
They were not the first to note, however, that what the Catholic reformers objected to about pilgrimage, from Langland and Wycliffe to Erasmus (who made a celebrated trip to Canterbury) and not excluding Luther, definitely a Catholic to begin with, was the fact that pilgrims had so much fun – the ludic aspects of pilgrimage. Their celebrations were often quite riotous – as witness clerical objections to raucous noise and singing at Santiago itself – and centred above all on the great fairs, which, in the major shrines, usually coincided with the saint’s day. How much fun do pilgrims have today? Quite a lot, as I am sure fresh pilgrims will discover.
Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture; anthropological perspectives Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Blackwell, 1978
See also as an example of more recent anthropological commentary, particularly the introduction: Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage. Eds. Eade, John, and Michael J. Sallnow. Routledge, 1991.