By Imaging Pilgrimage: Art as Embodied Experience

Review Kathryn Barush takes us on a fascinating journey that explores the rich connectivity between people, places, images and song. A major contribution to our understanding of pilgrimage past and present. ― John Eade, Professor of Sociology & Anthropology, University of Roehampton, UKThis is a seductive book, deeply engaging to read and to think with. Kathryn Barush crosses landscapes, temporalities, and disciplines to extend our understandings of both pilgrimage and experiences of art. Her scope is wide, but her scholarship is profound. ― Simon Coleman, Chancellor Jackman Professor, University of Toronto, CanadaBringing together arts of the built environment, portable shadowboxes, songs and sounds, and site-specific installations, Imaging Pilgrimage puts contemporary art that enacts and translates pilgrimage in dialogue with the deep, embodied histories of pilgrimage. Barush emphasizes the sensorial work of pilgrimage and the work of objects to build communitas-through-culture across space, time, and difference and her work is an important contribution to critical reception studies. Barush’s analysis of localized pilgrimage practices and objects connecting pilgrims to faraway places on ecocritical grounds takes on even deeper resonance amidst the Covid-19 pandemic in which Imaging Pilgrimage emerges and points the reader towards the entanglement of these global ecological and epidemological crises. In addition to its scholarly exploration of pilgrimage and contemporary art, perhaps Imaging Pilgrimage also offers itself to readers as an object of communitas-through-culture, one that moves us towards being, feeling, and knowing together. ― Jennifer Stager, Assistant Professor of History of Art, Johns Hopkins University, USA Product Description While place-based pilgrimage is an embodied practice, can it be experienced in its fullness through built environments, assemblages of souvenirs, and music? Imaging Pilgrimage explores contemporary art that is created after a pilgrimage and intended to act as a catalyst for the embodied experience of others. Each chapter focuses on a contemporary artwork that links one landscape to another - from the Spanish Camino to a backyard in the Pacific Northwest, from Lourdes to South Africa, from Jerusalem to England, and from Ecuador to California. The close attention to context and experience allows for popular practices like the making of third-class or "contact" relics to augment conversations about the authenticity or perceived power of a replica or copy; it also challenges the tendency to think of the "original" in hierarchic terms.Imaging Pilgrimage brings various fields into conversation by offering a number of lenses and theoretical approaches (materialist, kinesthetic, haptic, synesthetic) that engage objects as radical sites of encounter, activated through religious and ritual praxis, and negotiated with not just the eyes, but a multiplicity of senses. About the Author Kathryn R. Barush is Associate Professor and Thomas E. Bertelsen Jr. Chair of Art History and Religion at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley and the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University, USA.