Becoming More Grounded: The Enduring Appeal of Ancient Pilgrimage for the Contemporary Seeker

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

A stimulating article, one of the advantages of it being the detailed presentation and explanation of the author's research method, motivation for choosing these and thought process, which are generally still too briefly mentioned in publications.  

I'm also very interested in the risk taken with the interdisciplinary approach. I believe that more of this type of work is needed! The targeted co-construction of knowledge between the author and the pilgrims is an interesting mingling of 2 approaches dear to modern anthropology, where on the one hand, the researcher as a person with all his sensitivity, subjectivity, etc. is placed at the center of the data collection, reflection and writing process, and where on the other hand, the research participants/informants are granted an active role in the same through participative working tools. A little more elaboration on this co-construction (how did the author exactly work in this regard? what were the challenges? what was the add-on value of this method?) would have been welcomed here!

I placed a few commentaries in the text regarding form. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you for your observations and suggestions.  I will get working on those.  

PS. I did not spot your longer hand response until just now and it is greatly appreciated.  The comments above were in relation to your 'form' suggestions.  Thank you so much for this.  In my revisions I will pay attention to that elaboration on the challenges that you believe would be helpful.  

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The paper covers very intriguing perspective on contemporary pilgrimage as practice and embodied experience that still grounds people and potentially having the same ritualistic meaning for participants even if they are not religious in the classical sense of the word. However, because of the complexity of issues raised and questions opened, I think the author still needs to work on the argument to make it stronger and clearer.

Starting from the title. The title suggests that contemporary pilgrims/travellers by visiting ancient pilgrimage sites and routes are finding a portal to the sacred and reconnecting with Earth. However, from the research results presented, very small number of informants reflects religious motivations, or the idea that they are trying to find the sacred, however we define it. Most were motivated by crisis in their lives or by new experience. Very few mentioned the idea of connecting to the nature and Earth. Moreover, there is no clear explanation on what author means by “ancient pilgrimage”? We don’t even get an explanation how the author approaches pilgrimage in general, although in the introduction the author claims that the paper findings require a review of definitions and descriptions of pilgrimage from contemporary literature. How are and why Camino de Santiago and St Patrick`s Purgatory ancient pilgrimages? The author does not address the important issues, especially in the case of Camino, of reinvention of the pilgrimage to suite contemporary demands of pilgrims, that are key informants of the paper at the same time.

The research approach of the paper comes from two perspective: psychology and theology. It is not clear why are these two approaches relevant and others are not? For example, geographers and anthropological approach? Especially, since the focus is on pilgrimage experience. While psychological interpretations of the embodied experience are relevant and well explained, it is not clear how theological approach helps to understand this, especially when that approach is more text focused rather than experience. At the same time, we have geographers that research and discuss embodied experience, such as work of Avril Maddrell and Richard Scriven (2016) on contemporary embodied practices of Celtic pilgrimage that author does not address at all. Or recent work of anthropologist Anna Fedele (2012) on alternative pilgrimages to Catholic shrines in contemporary France, that discusses many aspects raised in this paper. Because of the approaches chosen by the author that are more oriented toward interviews, I am not sure does the paper address the embodied experience of the pilgrims, but rather their ideas about the embodied experience. In the methodological section, the author outlines two questions of the paper: How do pilgrims both embody and interpret their pilgrimage? How do psychology and theology interpret their experience? The first question is covered with interviews and analysis of informant’s narratives, but it does not address their embodied experience, but their motivations for going on pilgrimage. At least that is what we get from two findings out of five listed. The author writes about motivation in these two findings, and we learn nothing about the actual embodied experience of the pilgrims, not even a description. I believe this is the result of particular methodology that does not address embodied experience, and I believe ethnographic approach would be more appropriate to understand and interpret experiences. The author clearly states this in the conclusion writing how in the paper the study is on embodied experience based on twenty pilgrims narrating their experience, from this we can conclude that the paper is about narratives of the pilgrims, from which we learn about their motivation, and at the end not about the experience itself.  

Moreover, I don’t think it is appropriate to list five findings that was supposed to argue your main ideas, but present and address only two, and write that others will be in another paper. Based on my experience this is not how a scientific paper should be developed.

In conclusion, I suggest the author needs to make major revisions of the main argument and interpretations of the paper.

Author Response

Thank you for taking the time to review my submission.  I note your comments with interest.  I appreciate and agree that doing the findings in two rather than one article poses problems for the reader in terms of comprehensiveness and a full picture.  At the time of constructing the article it seemed like a means of giving substance without undue length.  In my own argumentation of my findings in my original doctoral theses I did indeed include human geography and anthropology and both authors your named - Maddrell and Scriven - were included.  It seemed too much to include all of that in a shorter piece of writing.  However, it is clear that I will have to review all of it.  I am not sure if 'appropriateness' is the category to describe what it deprives the reader of, but yes I will review. 

You seemed to have missed my reference to (and consequently some critical connection to) my previous article with its extensive discussion on struggles with definition, (and my own included  in the Notes),  so I will need to revisit how that omission was possible for the reader.   

I have to stress I was not attempting to write "a scientific paper".   Science as a mode of knowledge creation has its own methods and rigours and they have much to teach us and they are incorporated into much contemporary research.  Psychology is one of the human sciences yes but the whole point of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis is about offering a way of gathering and reviewing human experience from a different perspective and indeed value base.  

In terms of theology, hermeneutical enquiry is an accepted mode of enquiry and a conversation with existing texts is a critical component of it.  The idea of the pilgrimage experience being a portal endeavoured to capture the theological harvest/outcome of the experience - I was never trying to suggest that it was always or even frequently the motivation.  

I find it difficult to understand how you are not reading about and hearing the embodied experience.  I included significant detail about in the article.  You suggest instead that I am simply discussing ideas about embodied experience and not actual embodied experience.  The pilgrim interviewees offered their accounts of their experience of the body on pilgrimage  and I reflected on those experiences and made some connections, offered some insights as well as fresh definition of embodiment.  You seem to suggest that these are just 'ideas' and that they not grounded in anything. There was so much data on embodied experience that I endeavoured to summarise it in the info-graphic rather than a detailed section on each one.  I will therefore re-think this and perhaps I need to switch back to more written detail.  

Again thank you for your time to read and then to submit a detailed review.  In my experience they almost always lead to an improved article. 

 

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors Dear author, thank you for accepting my comments and suggestions and revising paper. All of my comments were well indented aiming to make your paper stronger in argument. I still have issue withe the paper, however, I was struck when I read in your reply that you had no intention to write a scientific paper! It seems to me than that you send your paper into a wrong journal and I should not be doing this review. But your paper has all the elements and intentions of a scientific paper and it was sent in Q1 scientific journal? I am coming from anthropological background and methodological approach that makes a paper into interpretative and critical endeavour is very important to us. It seems to me that methodological approach is where we differ. I still think that you are actually discussing about your informant's ideas of embodied experience not actual embodied experience. I did not write that they are not "grounded in anything", as you got the impressions. You paper is grounded in the interviews with your informants; however, their embodied experience is then being meditated by their narratives and their idea how was their embodied experience, but its post factum ideas. What I am trying to say, is that you should try to have these embodied experiences yourself and then come back to you informants' description of their experience, I am sure your understanding would change. Anyway, I am doing similar research and I am dealing with similar issues that is why I was very intrigued by your paper and tried to push you to think about your ideas more. However, I understand your position, and as fellow author I know how reviewes can be frustrating. I think you did your best to revised your paper and it deserves to be published. What I wrote here would perhaps be useful for your future research. All the best.