The Glacier, the Rock, the Image

Emotional Experience and Semiotic Diversity at the Quyllurit'i Pilgrimage (Cuzco, Peru)

Bibliographic Data

ID5787771
AuthorsGuillermo Salas Carreño (0000-0003-4770-4550, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, corresponding author)
Year2014
Volume2
IssueS1
PagesS188-S214
Publication date2014-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSigns and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2326-4489 • E-ISSN: 2326-4497
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1086/674324
OpenAlexW1984140536
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited32

The Quyllurit'i (Shining Snow) pilgrimage is the most important of the Southern Peruvian Andes. The shrine is located at the bottom of a glacier and currently attracts all the sociocultural diversity present in the regional society of Cuzco. During the main days of the pilgrimage this usually quiet place is inundated by innumerable groups of musicians and dancers and by tens of thousands of pilgrims. These particularities also attract foreign New Age pilgrims, as well as researchers and film crews. I claim, discussing Durkheim's elaboration on "collective effervescence," that the strong emotional experiences of the pilgrimage are functional to the reproduction of coexisting heterogeneous ways to experience and understand the pilgrimage. Most pilgrims are vocal in expressing their experience of transcendence in Quyllurit'i, though they have different ideas about who the transcendent agents addressed by the rituals are, what their relation to the materiality of the shrine is, and how to recognize their agency. The article analyzes the different ways in which New Age pilgrims, Catholic priests, and pilgrims of a highland Quechua community frame and experience the pilgrimage through different assumptions about the nature of society and how signs function in the world

Materiality · Media, Religion, Digital Communication · Philippine History and Culture · Religious Tourism and Spaces

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