This interview took place between Sharenda Barlar, Susan Dunn-Hensley, and Brian Howell while they walked trails in and around Wheaton, Illinois. This is the eighth part of a series of interviews that will take place with faculty from Wheaton College as part of Susan Dunn-Hensley and Barlar's 2020 virtual pilgrimage program.
Hereafter, each individual will be referred to with their initials: SB, SD, and BH, respectively. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
SB: Today we are talking to Dr. Brian Howell, professor of anthropology. I know one of your classes in particular deals with tourism and pilgrimage. Can you talk a little bit about that and your background?
BH: I started thinking about this when I started studying short term missions, in 2005. And it was very easy to see that the short-term missions travel follows a pilgrimage pattern. Pilgrimage is a widely studied thing in anthropology, that sort of ritual structure, that sort of discussion in anthropology, so that was something that jumped out at me right away. Students were engaging in this separation, this time of liminality, the reincorporation rituals in pilgrimage. All of it was really prominent. Then, when I decided to create a course that used the reading that I had done on anthropology, pilgrimage and tourism, pilgrimage was easy to incorporate into the class.
SB: I know personally you've been interested in the Camino, and you did parts of it. I know you've studied about the Camino, and then you walked the last 100 km.
BH: That's right. I was exploring a project that looked at other forms of Christian student travel besides short term missions. Often, in a person's life, short term missions overlap with study abroad experiences, or longer-term mission-type experiences. I wanted to understand those things. The Office of Christian Outreach graciously allowed me to join the Wheaton students who were on the Camino in that last phase. It was a very preliminary study. I never ended up completing it, which is a whole other story.
Walking the Camino, though, was a great experience, and I do feel that it has enriched my understanding of contemporary spiritual practices and the diversity that you find there, and ways that people engage these kinds of experiences from all sorts of directions.
SD: I'm curious about memory, which I'm sure is a contested term in Anthropology, because some anthropologists take memory so far. There’s a sense in which the term covers so much, it doesn't mean anything. One of the things that is interesting about pilgrimage that would be possibly different from tourism (although, maybe not from short term missions) is the idea of walking in the footsteps of other people. You're going on a particular historical route that was in the material space. It holds memory. Is that also true for short-term missions? Even if your space is an unreached people group, you're still following in the steps of people who have done similar things.
To the idea of memory, I'm curious how important that would be in terms of pilgrimage. In the act of doing the pilgrimage, going through it, reintegrating at the end, is there a sense of cultural memory (used to mean penance, seeking of the miraculous, and things of that nature?) BH: I'm a strong social linguistic constructionist, and so I see these things as always getting reformed in the present, with the materials that are available to us. The idea of authenticity I've always found extremely interesting but highly problematic, obviously. I think people certainly long for the sense of transcendence and historical transcendence is one way that they achieve that. I think in short term missions, using the language of mission becomes this point of connection where they look to missionary heroes of the past and they imagine that their contemporary work is somehow linking them to that mission.
In some cases, of course, churches do have ongoing relationships with particular communities or churches in other places. You'll often hear the language "we come back here every year,” meaning one or two people go back there every year, and other people are visitors, but there's a sense of the "WE" that gets created with that. Certainly, as I was talking with people on the Camino de Santiago, there were those who easily summoned the "WE" language—"we pilgrims do this, these are the meanings of these actions and these things that we do.” It was meaningful that these very solitary people found these collectives and transcendent movements that they could then align themselves with.
SB: I know that in literature about tourism in anthropology, there's this concern about people affected by tourism. You have this concern too of course, with short term missions. The West looks at the world and we flatten it.
I know in your articles, you talk about how Europe becomes this people who are post-Christian, and you have different ways of looking at that. I'm wondering if people, when they were encountered by tourists, reinforce things that tourists were expecting. There's a certain way that people perform themselves, because they need tourists to give them money. That's their economy. And so of course, a lot of scholars are concerned about what that does to a people group when it forces them to perform that role that is actually constructed by the West.
I don't know how this works on the Camino, but I noticed on the Kerry Camino in Ireland, there was a woman who we encountered who had a "pilgrim house" sign on her house. We went to investigate--turns out she knew it was a pilgrim route and just put up the sign. But it was the beginning of something. If the Kerry Camino becomes really popular, there will be many more people adapting their own surroundings to fit the narrative. How does that work in a place like Spain, where pilgrimage is so popular, and if you perform in a certain way, you can make more money?
BH: It seems, like so many things, that it depends on the specifics of the context in terms of how much power any particular tourist has to control, resist, or reshape the narrative. Those who are in the lowest income, those who are most vulnerable and marginal to economic processes have the least amount of power to try to resist that. In Papua New Guinea, where there are some communities that are really far outside the city and are marginalized, when they do get tourists, they feel compelled to act exactly how the "primal, savage" image tells them they should. I would imagine that most people in Spain have some more options that they are able to decide how and to what level they want to engage outside perceptions, and it was interesting on the Camino. I remember one café we stopped in was being run by an immigrant family from North Africa. But it felt uber-Spanish, they had all of the tapas and the coffees, and all of the things that I would imagine as a Camino way station. I thought, "this makes sense--they're like, here's a business opportunity, how do I tap this. Let me be as Spanish as I possibly can." Whereas the cafés that were run by indigenous Spaniards were more casual--"Here's our house, we serve some coffee, sit at this table."
SB: I often use you and anthropology in tourism for my Children's Lit class. Many anthropologists talk about how when people return from their missions, they have pictures. Those pictures become a defining reality for people who haven't been on the mission trip. In Children's Lit, there's a way we do that with children's books.
If you have a young child who's never been to China, and I'm the teacher, and I show the child picture books of China, and the characters are all in native, indigenous costumes from 2000, 3000 years ago, and I give them no sense that China is now a thriving, modern nation, I've done the same thing.
We talk about how to choose books in a Children's Lit class. You can choose whatever books you want, but you should bring in more than one book and show children multiple stories. You would not believe the books I've found-- some almost celebrate the colonial impulse that tell some white person's story as they travel the globe, and these books are celebrated as ways to teach culture. They’re really just enforcing the idea that “These people do not have stories, that I as tourist have a story.” I've been trying to teach my students who will one day be teachers to be careful about those stories. You can bring them into class, but there's no trouble of bringing a book that brings pictures of contemporary China, contemporary Nigeria.
SD: We saw that phenomenon in Ireland too. In the countryside in Ireland, you walk into a pub and they might be playing American country music. You don’t see leprechauns or any paraphernalia that suggest Irishness. But when you get to a certain section in Dublin, where the tourists go, there were suddenly leprechauns and shamrocks and "traditional" Celtic music. They were performing because they wanted tourist dollars. Again, I think there's much more power in that performance than in people who don't feel like they have the power to rewrite the narrative.
SB: The fact that you did the last 100 km, I'm sure you talked to the OCO students. I often refer to those last 100 km as Disney world, because 100 km is the minimum that you have to do to be considered a pilgrim. It does reflect short term missions, in a way, because you have tour buses dropping off people with water and day-packs. I have to have a talk with the students so they aren't bitter and angry. Those who have walked a lot have reached a level of introspection and are quieter, more aware of their surroundings and how the way they interact affects others. They're a lot more hospitable. Then you get to the last 100 km and you see all these people linking arms and singing songs and wearing flip flops as they walk. I told the students, “Maybe this is all they have to give. Maybe all they have is 5 days, 6 days. We're not taking that experience away from them.”
As someone who is a missionary kid, I can understand the frustration of short term missions. There would be people who would come to our country for 2 weeks in the summer. Hey, we're here to paint, to do whatever. We were like, "Ok, we'll find something for you to do." It was like Disney world--"this is so great, look at this food, this is so interesting." Oftentimes, you'd have to fix what they had already done. As an American teenager, I remember being excited when some short term missions people would come, not so much because they were coming to help us, but because they would usually bring food and things that I couldn’t get.
BH: It's a nice diversion from every-day things.
SB: Short term missions are a nice parallel between the last 100 km of the Camino. It's significant that you did the last 100 km because if you had seen the other portion, you would see that it’s a completely different Camino. There are people that go about their lives, they might see 100 pilgrims a day, and then when you get to the 100 km mark, there's this influx of coach cars that will pick them up at the end of your walk and they stay in a hotel.
BH: This is when the ideas of authenticity get really interesting to me. Which is the real Camino--is there one? The people on the first 250 km are also visitors, there with an idea in their head of what they want, what they want out of it, what it should be. Then people who show up with their junior high class, they've got their idea of what it is, what it should be, what it’s for. One claims a historical reference. The other doesn't, but claims a social reference, “this is a moment to bond.” Neither is de-facto more legitimate than the other.
SB: I completely agree, that's something that I have to tell myself, and I have to tell the students. Both experiences are legitimate.
SD: I do think that memory becomes an important thing in contemporary pilgrimage, because there's a whole aspect of pilgrimage that deals with darker things, we have a friend who studies genocide and who calls it a peace pilgrimage. He hears the stories of those affected by genocide and he hopes that his participation in their suffering will give them a voice. There are all these things happening now in pilgrimage studies. We're looking at how do you heal memory, how do you look at memory, what do you do with memory. How do you have an authentic pilgrimage experience when all you're doing is reconstructing a historical pilgrimage? Maybe that's the memorial and the reconstruction that has always been important for pilgrimage, even if you're seeking penance or healing. There is still a sense that it's happened before on this route, therefore it could happen again.
BH: Memory is a category of culture, a way in which we're using the linguistic and material symbols of the present to evoke something, to create. It's affective. It's a feeling of connection to the past. We see it as something that was and therefore, it pulls us affectively into this transcendent community across time. I think that's super meaningful. The fact that so few people launch a new pilgrimage--it's always replicating this other thing, which is replicating this other thing. It's got to go back to some reference, otherwise people don't find it compelling.
SD: I find that so interesting, in that sense that you're talking about authenticity. When Jenny McNutt was walking with us, she talked about the fact that evangelicals have not abandoned pilgrimage, even though they don't call it pilgrimage, they no longer want to do these walks for penance. But she said that people would go to Luther's house specifically to be where Luther was, would go to Geneva to be where the Reformation happened. And that’s a form of pilgrimage, even though the purpose is very different. I wonder to what degree it is a human impulse to go to the place, to be where it happened, or were they somehow replicating the memory of what pilgrimage was? It's hard to piece together what people are doing, because individuals all have their different motivations, but enough people are doing that it could be some sort of a cultural thing happening.
BH: I think that the defining feature of human beings, and this has to be tied up in the image of God in us somehow, is this sense of transcendence. This self-awareness that we are alive, we have this sense of our own existence of teleology, purpose, and we are so profoundly worthless as individuals. We have to be in society, otherwise we can't become anything--otherwise we lay on the ground and shrivel up. This need that we have to be connected, to imagine ourselves, to understand ourselves to community, drives us to seek it across time, place, geography. In our religious lives, this is where we are most at our awareness of transcendence. It makes sense to me that everybody, evangelicals, Muslims, Buddhists, we would seek out these places that spark for us a sense of our connection across time and space.
SB: I would argue that part of Luther's reason for saying pilgrimages need to be stopped is because he felt we were idolizing saints, or idolizing objects, the idea of relics, and saints. I would even argue that there's a desire in humans to have this connection with community and to relate to material culture, to relate to something tangible. Protestant, Catholic--whatever. We could say we all could be attached to relics. In the Reformation, that relic became the Bible. Even as Christians today, what kind of material culture do we still hold dearly?
BH: That's a big part of my interest in the workout program in Wheaton’s theater program. It's this physicality--how the director finds ways to help people get back in touch with the physical and the communal that we miss all the time, and that our faith tradition often downplays or denigrates.
SB: I think that is why as a culture, if you look at the younger population of Christians, Anglican faith is growing. Why? Because we have swung all this way from "let's get rid of sacraments, rituals, or anything in the Church" to students who find comfort in the memory of liturgy.
SD: That was a big debate in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Some of the more ardent Puritan reformers wanted her to push further, get rid of the vestments, and she finally said no because it was important to her, but by the time you get to the English Civil war, that's become a critical touchpoint, because the Puritans thought not enough religious reformation had happened, and part of it had to do with material objects. Archbishop Law returning the altar rails became a huge question of theology as opposed to how he was just trying to protect the communion table from the dogs.
SB: You see altarpieces in England, where the Reformation really had a foothold, where you see their faces scratched out.
SD: The women's faces were scratched out--the men's were not, which is really interesting.
BH: Have any of you read much on the anthropology of affect? I'm enjoying it right now, but I can't pretend to have it all well in hand. It's about how social interactions create and form and shape emotions. Some people use affect as sort of a larger category, and emotion is a subcategory. Other people use it as the same thing: emotions, feelings, affect. But the question of how human emotions matter in our understandings of ourselves and others, and how those things are not just the derivative consequence of actions and culture, but can be driving forces in cultural life and ways in which we understand ourselves.
This is something I can see dramatically in Theater, where students who participate in Workout talk about the ways that it reorients them to their own emotions. That it’s ok to cry, you don’t have to comfort someone, explain yourself. This range of emotions that are permissible in this space that are not permissible in other spaces, or that require a lot more tending/work. Women often find that they have this tremendous freedom from emotional caretaking in that space. This is something I think that liminal, sacred spaces provide--a way of relating to our own emotional life. People were saying on pilgrimage, “I was surprised by these feelings.” I think that's important, how our emotional life is far more constrained and regulated than we realize until we get into a space where it seems that those rules are off or that there are possibilities that didn't exist before.
SB: I agree with you about that liminal space, where people feel safety. Where "I enter this space, and everybody is entering this space for that same purpose." The liminal space that you see on a pilgrimage is very similar. Everyone who is doing pilgrimage is doing it for some type of purpose, and instead of having these really mundane conversations that you would do when you pass someone on purpose, you go deep really fast, because you know, if you choose to walk with someone today, you have seven hours, might as well get to the root of the matter and go deep.
BH: One of the things I've run across that I like is the idea of the ritual of the subjunctive. The subjunctive is an "if, then." It's the ritual of the “if,” the possibility. We think about these rituals as being these symbols that have these transcendent meanings that we ascribe to them that then we have to adopt, but in fact there's lots of ritual life, and I think the Camino is definitely one of these. Its rituals are not that prescribed, they’re not that unambiguous. They’re really flexible and create space for interpretation. Especially these days, very few people are going to contest those interpretations. On the Camino, I found that people had all kinds of reasons that they were there, and I didn't have any impulse, and I didn't perceive this from my fellow pilgrims, any desire to correct anybody or tell them “no, that's not what it is.” It's the metaphor of the journey--wherever you are, wherever you are.
SB: There's the phrase, “you have to walk your own Camino.” We're all walking the same road but everybody’s on their own Camino. I'm not going to question your own Camino.
BH: It ramps up that sense of the subjunctive. There's not limitless possibility, but many possibilities. But then it becomes more meaningful if you actually invite or promote your own sense of it to have it interact with the interpretations of other people in some way.
SD: For women, the pilgrim route became one of the few places where women could have some form of independence. There was some criticism that women went on pilgrimage because they wanted to have an adventure and get away. If you look at Margery Kempe's pilgrim narrative, she's actually able to go many places that as a woman she would not have been able to go.
SB: Not only as a woman, as a wife and a mother of countless children.
SD: She was able to get away from those caregiving roles to focus on her own spiritual development, seeing things she hadn't seen before.
SB: You're aware of the Turners and their idea that with liminality comes a process of equalization. When you’re on a pilgrimage, everybody is on the same plane, in a lot of ways. If you look in the medieval times you had kings who rode on horses, or whatever, but this desire nowadays on the Camino is to make it as authentic as possible. The conversation doesn't come to what do you do, which is a Western/North American concept. One of the first things that you ask someone is “what's your name, what do you do?” You don't do that in other cultures. But that question doesn't come up on the Camino. They may offer that as information, but it's this equalized journey. It doesn't matter how much money you have, your position.
BH: I'm sure you've read "Contesting the Sacred," by Michael Sallnow, which I also find compelling, because I see that as well. In the town you start in as a "fake pilgrim," Saria, I saw the signs along there. People would take a stop sign, and they would write “fake pilgrims” on it, so it said “stop the fake pilgrims”, and I was like “I feel attacked.” But that contests “what is a real experience is happening on the Camino?” It's not super vigorous--I didn't feel it very often, but it's present too. There can be both communitas and contestation happening simultaneously.
SB: We can’t get away from the fact that even though the Camino equalizes everyone to a certain extent once you're there, there is a certain amount of privilege that comes into play to even do the Camino. I'm part of APOC, and we do walks in Chicago every month, and Susan and I walked with them last month, and a lot of them are retired.
BH: That was the thing that struck me, that the average age on the Camino is very high. There were not many young people.
SB: In the US, it's not cheap to get to Spain, even though it's relatively cheap to walk it. To get there, you have to have the time, the money--if you really want to do something like that, you have to have enough money that you would choose to do the Camino, and you would walk and stay in hostels, rather than using that money to go to Greece. There's that. There's also this huge disparity economically, because you look at Spaniards that walk, because that's the cheapest vacation--you can't take a vacation any cheaper than walking the Camino. That's what Franco wanted to do—he was the dictator, and he was the one who revived pilgrimage, and he said, “Don't leave the country. I'm going to name Santiago the patron saint. Go on the Camino.” There are still these youth groups that go because it’s a super cheap youth trip.
BH: Is everything shut down right now because of COVID? SB: They are opened. The hostels opened to Spaniards in June. They are abiding by all the COVID rules, so I'm making reservations now for next year because it's a holy year, but there will be less beds because to abide by the 6 feet, they’ve taken beds out of the hostels. It's going to be more expensive, as you can imagine. In July, they opened it up to EU members. They still have a couple thousand coming through every day, even though the numbers are down. So far, no huge outbreaks, which we're thankful for, because we're supposed to go next year.
People were complaining that the COVID restrictions would take away the authenticity of the Camino. If you look at history, the liber-santus, that's the first guidebook that came out in the 14th century on the Camino. It was published during plagues, during the time of famine. Because people were walking the Camino so they could eat, they changed the rules of the albergues to say that they couldn't stay more than one night unless they were sick. We see that that rule still continues. You can only stay one night and then you go. And that was implemented in the 14th century. So I could see the guidelines becoming the norm.
Brian Howell attended Wesleyan University (CT), studying in an interdisciplinary program of government, history, economics, and social theory (The College of Social Studies.) After graduating with High Honors (1991) awarded on the strength of his senior thesis on missions in the Philippines, entitled “Vernacular Christians Missions and the Protection of Minority Cultures,” Howell spent two years teaching in Los Angeles county with the Teach for America program. He then went to Fuller Theological Seminary for an MA in Cross-Cultural Studies, before attending Washington University in St. Louis for his MA/PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology. Today, Howell is an anthropologist of religion who writes and researches global Christianity, short term missions, and the intersection of theology and anthropology. In his teaching, Dr. Howell likes to explore the connections of anthropology and popular culture, tourism and travel, performance, and theater. Dr. Howell and his wife, Marissa Sabio, have three children, and currently reside in Wheaton. Some of Dr. Howell's hobbies include scuba diving, playing volleyball, and music.
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