"In A Way Together, Kathleen Jenkins offers an in-depth ethnographic study of parents and their adult children who walk the Camino de Santiago. A Catholic visitation site of medieval origins with walking paths across Europe, the Camino culminates at the shrine of Saint James in the city of Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia, an autonomous region of Spain. It has become a popular point of religious tourism for Catholics, spiritual seekers, scholars, adventurers, and cultural tourists. In 2019, well over 300,000 ...
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"In A Way Together, Kathleen Jenkins offers an in-depth ethnographic study of parents and their adult children who walk the Camino de Santiago. A Catholic visitation site of medieval origins with walking paths across Europe, the Camino culminates at the shrine of Saint James in the city of Santiago de Compostela, the capital of Galicia, an autonomous region of Spain. It has become a popular point of religious tourism for Catholics, spiritual seekers, scholars, adventurers, and cultural tourists. In 2019, well over 300,000 people arrived at the Pilgrims Office seeking a certificate of completion; they had walked anywhere from one hundred to over eight hundred kilometers. Like other sites of pilgrimage and tourism, the Camino has been deeply altered by media and digital technologies. Jenkins brings alive family stories of investing in pilgrimage as a practice for strengthening kin relationships and becoming a part of each other's emotional and spiritual understandings. The social and spiritual encounters that supported and inhibited these relational goals emerge as fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters describe walking for six hours or more each day through mountain, rural, and urban paths. They are stories are of pleasant surprises, disappointments, lessons learned, and the far-reaching emotional power that the memory of ritual failures and successes can carry. Ultimately, they present the potential for pilgrimage to foster and maintain intimate ties in today's fragile world, to build an engaged social consciousness, and to encourage reflection of digital devices and social medium platforms in the pursuit of spirituality"--
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