"The Aura of Pilgrimage: Traveling Toward Santiago de Compostela in Modern Spain" by Jennifer Naomi Sime

Jennifer Naomi Sime

Deposited 2009

Abstract
In this dissertation, I examine present-day practices of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, attending to the ways in which a generalized sense of loss of the "authentic" and the hope for the recuperation of this loss are dramatized on the pilgrimage route. The search for authenticity opens up questions about history, memory, and cultural heritage. But in order to understand the representation of history in the present and how history itself becomes an object of desire as well as why "cultural heritage" is seen as cohering in the Camiño de Santiago and the city of Santiago, I contend that the pilgrimage must be understood as a modern phenomenon, not an unmediated return to the past. It is precisely particular forms of mediation that give rise to both the aforementioned sense of loss and the promise of its recuperation. I draw out the ways that different media both shape and make possible different kinds of (religious) experience. These media themselves take on different forms: relics, commodities, ruins, and technological media such as photography. In order to trace the modern genealogy of the pilgrimage, I move from contemporary practices to the nineteenth century excavations in the cathedral and the rediscovery of the relics of St. James, then examine the place of the pilgrimage in the Spanish Civil War, the early decades of the Franco dictatorship and the period of opening up in the later years of the regime. In this way, I trace the recent historical and contemporary relationships between faith and doubt, appearance and essence, and mediated returns to religiosity that would seem to secure the future.