Materializing Nostalgia: Feet, Youtube, and the Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela

Abstract

Every year thousands of pilgrims, most on foot, travel to Santiago de Compostela, a medieval pilgrimage destination in northwestern Spain. Recent scholarship has mapped a historical shift of the focus in contemporary pilgrimage from the relics of St. James, ostensibly held in the crypt in Santiago’s cathedral, to the journey itself as a primary site of meaning and transformation. However, this scholarship has not addressed the ways in which the meaning of pilgrimage is bound up with pilgrims’ practices relating to their own and others’ bodies. Pilgrims’ feet, in particular, have become a fraught focus of contemporary pilgrimage. Pilgrims’ practices of walking the pilgrimage, together with recorded images of their feet in social media videos, work to materialize two forms of nostalgia. The first involves the desire to return to a past time of imagined authentic pilgrimage. The second encompasses a melancholic recognition of the fragility of the present moment and longing for human connection. A detailed reading of two YouTube videos documenting the care of pilgrims’ own and others’ injured feet allows for an analysis of how recorded images of feet posted by pilgrims on social media reveal the complex relationship between bodies, social media, and nostalgia in pilgrimage.