Augusta Xenia Thomson

AUGUSTA THOMSON, then a graduate student at New York University, New York, New York, received funding in September 2023 to aid research on “More than One “Way?”: The Camino de Santiago in a Time of Mass Tourism and New Media Technologies,” supervised by Dr. Faye Ginsburg. The Camino de Santiago, “Camino,” or “Way,” is a five-hundred-mile Catholic medieval pilgrimage route, European Cultural Itinerary, and UNESCO World Heritage site that transects the north of Spain. While it has flourished as a multi-faith pilgrimage site and touristic journey since the 1990s, the Camino shut down during the height of COVID-19, disrupting church and tourist economies and catalyzing a shift to virtual pilgrimage platforms. Inspired by resultant questions of mediacy and immediacy, this project proposed to investigate the following questions: What is the Camino de Santiago? Who does it serve and how? How do anxieties about the future of the Camino entwine with wider preservation politics related to local landscapes, rural economies, Catholic religious practice, regional identities, European heritage, and new media? In-depth research was undertaken with the primary pilgrim association responsible for promoting the Camino in the U.K. — the London-based Confraternity of Saint James (C.S.J.). A combination of research methodologies, including participant observation, new data methodologies, video ethnography, and material processes, suggested that the Camino is understood and practiced variously by different actors, and that its power to sustain lies in continuously remediated semiotic ideologies.