Walking as Resistance to Hypermobility: The Camino de Santiago Pilgrimage

The Camino de Santiago (known in English as The Way of Saint James) is enjoying a surge of popularity. In ethnographic interviews, U.S. pilgrims report experiences of sacred time, profound friendship and community, and connections to nature. This contrasts sharply with circumstances in the U.S. captured by the term "hypermobility," where the need to travel far, frequently, and fast erodes encounters with landscapes and neighbors, and accelerates the mistreatment of both nature and vulnerable members of our communities. Pilgrims who travel the Camino perform an act of resistance to hypermobility and enact a kind of utopia where they re-imagine their connection to the land, to each other, and to the divine.

INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF HYPERMOBILITY

Walking is built into our genes and physiology. It is the most basic way to travel and carries symbolic weight in the Christian imagination, through images of the Exodus, exile, discipleship as following in the footsteps of Jesus, and the pilgrim Church that journeys toward God. Walking connects us to landscape, neighbors, and especially through sacrament and ritual, it brings Christians closer to God. Yet it is the least valued mode of transport in the industrialized world. This is especially true in the United States, where people walk significantly less than their counterparts in other countries.¹ Since walking slows us down, it can re-orient our imaginations and relationships toward hospitality, ecological sustainability, and community. Walking thus becomes a form of resistance to hypermobility.

Hypermobility names the host of ways that travel, both local and long distance, no longer supports human dignity. Having adequate means of moving about and going places enables a full and free life, however, we suffer when mobility requires us to go faster and farther, with more frequent, expensive, and time-consuming trips. The effects of hypermobility are everywhere: businesspeople often spend as much time in airports and hotels as at home; parents endlessly shuttle between errands and after-school activities; we try to see our friends, and find we have to schedule a date weeks in advance; there are neighbors on our street that we have never met; and in all of this, we frequently wear pedometers to remind ourselves to walk. With this love of wide-ranging travel options comes a certain level of weariness and disconnect.

While hypermobility frustrates middle-class Americans, it devastates the natural environment as well as people in marginalized communities. Whether we consider greenhouse gases generated by the transportation sector (which make up 27% of all greenhouse gas emissions),² urban neighborhoods divided and gutted by highways, or the disproportionate exposure to car pollution suffered by communities of color,³ mobility comes at an intolerably high cost. It damages the "integral ecology" promoted by Pope Francis' environmental encyclical, Laudato Si'.⁴ The challenges of hypermobility oblige us to pause and be mindful of how we move about. In the words of Pope Francis,

We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build.⁵

Pope Francis' phrase regarding "decisions about the kind of society we want to build" bears further reflection. The ability to imagine a reality shapes decisions about it. Charles Taylor calls this the "social imaginary." "Social imaginary" refers to "the way ordinary people 'imagine' their social surroundings," and this imaginary is usually "carried in images, stories, legends, etc. . . . It incorporates a sense of the normal expectations that we have of each other, the kind of common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices which make up our social life."⁶ Our social imaginary enables us to envision certain possibilities together, and also makes it difficult to conceive of other possibilities. Hypermobility manipulates our social imaginary. It distances us physically and mentally from our homes. It allows us to abandon one place for another, zip through or above the landscape, think of any particular...