Book
Walking the Way Together: How Families Connect on the Camino de Santiago
(2021)
Abstract
In Walking the Way Together, Kathleen E. Jenkins offers an in-depth ethnographic study of parents and their adult children who walk the Camino de Santiago. A Catholic visitation site of medieval origins with walking paths across Europe, the Camino culminates at the shrine of St. James in the city of Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia, an autonomous region of Spain. It has become a popular point of religious tourism for Catholics, spiritual seekers, scholars, adventurers, and cultural tourists. In 2019, 347,578 people arrived at the Pilgrim’s Office seeking a certificate of completion; they had walked anywhere from 100 to over 800 kilometers. Like other sites of pilgrimage and tourism, the Camino has been deeply altered by media and digital technologies. The book brings alive family stories of investing in pilgrimage as a practice for strengthening kin relationships and becoming a part of each other’s emotional and spiritual understandings. The social and spiritual encounters that supported and inhibited these relational goals emerge as fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters describe walking for six hours or more each day through mountain, rural, and urban paths. They are stories of pleasant surprises, disappointments, lessons learned, and the far-reaching emotional power that the memory of ritual failures and successes can carry. Ultimately, they present the potential for pilgrimage to foster and maintain intimate ties in today’s fragile world, to build an engaged social consciousness, and to encourage reflection of digital devices and social medium platforms in the pursuit of spirituality.
Disciplines
Publication Date
2021
Publisher
Oxford University Press
ISBN
9780197553046
Citation Information
Kathleen E. Jenkins. Walking the Way Together: How Families Connect on the Camino de Santiago. (2021) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/kathleenjenkins/1/