| dc.description.abstract | Far from being a neutral backdrop or innocent bystander, landscape exerts a powerful emotional as well as physical agency over the lives of those who dwell therein, influencing not just where we live but how we go about living: we shape the land, the land shapes us.
Making extensive use of autoethnography and experimental methodologies, this research explores the relationship between landscape, walking and spirituality through the lens of deep topography, incorporating elements of liberative theological thinking, and relating to personal encounters with the landscape walking several branches of the Camino de Santiago over a period of four years. It examines how landscapes evoke emotional, spiritual or religious experiences and assesses the crucial role of walking as a performative act in co-producing affect and emotion.
Of principal interest is the idea of ‘landscape experience’ which I describe as a two way process in which there is no subject or object but a fusion between two active agencies. It’s this interaction – this transition from being to becoming – which opens up affective potentialities, from moments of fleeting sublimity to life-changing Damascene conversions.
I turn to pilgrimage as a means to develop further these dynamic themes, acknowledging and accounting for the influence of time and space in both momentary and cumulative form. Following Mandoki (1997), I suggest that the Camino de Santiago, a politically, culturally and religiously contested sacred space loaded with over a thousand years of human experience has the Camino have the capacity to ‘bend’ time and space. Put simply, the landscapes of the Camino can ‘do’ things other landscapes can’t. Furthermore, it’s the journey, not the destination that exerts this affective energy.
Finally I consider the wider theological implications of this transformative human/landscape encounter. If the spiritual or religious is indeed numinously present, is this experience restricted to the individual or personal spiritualities or does it have the capability to effect wider social and political change? | en_GB |
