Liminality Wanted. Liminal landscapes and literary spaces: The Way of St. James

Abstract

The term limen was introduced to anthropological studies following Van Gennep’s theories (1960) about liminality. Among them, Victor and Edith Turner (1978) defined pilgrimage as a liminal experience, as it implies being between two existential levels that, through rituality, favours reflection. In this sense, the case of The Way of St. James (Spain) is an interesting field or research as it is loaded with contemporary meanings. Its landscapes assume the nature of spiritual and therapeutic ones; here, the physical and built environment, social conditions and human perceptions produce an atmosphere favourable to spiritual healing. On the basis of these emotions, liminality is the essence of this pilgrimage experience, not only during the same, but especially afterwards. As a matter of fact, this spiritual journey involves the search for one’s self once back home, thus acting in the process of formation of the individual. Drawing on the need for improving researches on landscape perception approach in tourism studies, we pretend to singularise the pilgrimage landscape from a liminal perspective in order to point out the need for liminality before, during and after the pilgrimage. This is achieved by exploring perceptions and emotions expressed in a corpus of travel literary production. These narrative works are not limited to describe the pilgrimage experiences; rather they make liminality a literary theme to magnify their experiences. As a result, the concept of liminal literary landscape is used to refer to pilgrims’ desire to revive liminality through the pages of travel narratives, in order to continue enjoying these emotions and feelings. These travel narratives are producing new literary modes based on the geographical exploration of the landscapes of The Way in relation to human feelings.