Abstract:

Pilgrimage has received longstanding scholarly attention, but we still lack a clear theory of how these rituals emerge. Current theories argue that pilgrimage acts as a signal: the effort required to engage in it might showcase the sincerity of the believer and/or their commitment to the community associated with the ritual. While these explanations can be useful for understanding the transmission and maintenance of costly rituals, they fall short when it comes to explaining their emergence. Using data from a new pilgrimage in the Peruvian altiplano, we address this gap by outlining a theoretical framework more capable of accounting for how these phenomena start. The framework of an assurance game captures the emergence of collective rituals like pilgrimage and allows us to incorporate key features of our empirical case. We then discuss two issues that can help us understand the early adoption of pilgrimages: the linkages that exist between sites in an ecology of rituals, and the social connections through which information about new practices spreads. Thus, we provide a theoretical framework through which we can understand the emergence of costly, collective rituals, and we examine the features that might characterize the early adopters of such practices.

Speaker's social media:

@nicolasrestrepo.bsky.social