Pelos caminhos de Santiago: dicotomias em uma experiência de peregrinação midiatizada

Abstract

This research aims to understand how contemporary media processes are integrated into the pilgrimage experience, with the Camino de Santiago as the place of observation. The mediatized pilgrimage takes place on multiple fronts: in the expressive materials that circulate in the media where a pilgrimage is created at a distance crossed by logics external to the ritual; in media practices incorporated into the pilgrim's daily life that institute ways in which the making of this experience is affected and reframed and in the multiple paths, including symbolic ones, that are constituted and intertwined in extensions of the Way itself. The investigation made use of concepts such as experience, narrative, circulation, media logic and mediatization logic and diverse analysis techniques articulated to an ethnographic inspired outlook. Thus, through interviews, application analysis and interactions in Facebook groups dedicated to the Camino de Santiago, forms and participatory research on one of the pilgrimage routes (the French Way), we sought, through these multiple analytical entries, to investigate what type (s) of experience (s) emerge in contemporary mediatization. The paths of mediatization are marked by tensions and ambivalences whereby a ritual that has been historically constituted as external to social structures is increasingly invaded by media injunctions in its experience. There is no denying the existence of harmonic media processes, but it was the dichotomy between practices that lead the individual to experience, on the one hand, an idealized pilgrimage and, on the other, practices that distance him from it, is that it manifested itself as a dubious force characteristic of mediatization when it is part of an experience in which the search for a return to the traditional is done through grammars of the present time. This thesis reveals constant negotiations involving the Catholic Church, the political field, the economic field and, especially, the social actors themselves who reinvent their journey and, therefore, the very notion of the Way and the sense (s) of a pilgrimage.