Affective stamps: the animating force of pilgrim stamps

Abstract

ABSTRACT Taking cognisance of the recent theoretical concern with relational ontologies, this contribution explores the dynamic interplay between conceptions of religion, animism, and pilgrimage by focusing on the agency of pilgrim passports and stamps as an affective force to enhance our understanding of the idea of pilgrimage as materially grounded within wider relations of human and non-human agents. Drawing on an emergent body of literature that subscribes to the new material turn, I analyse pilgrimage walks, pilgrimage events, and pilgrimage entrepreneurship in Kent, England, as complex assemblages of people, things, places, and immaterial thought. The contribution thus foregrounds the interweaving of materials, potentials, and processes in which human and non-human agency, including pilgrim passports and stamps, may all be implicated in generating ‘enchantments’ that act as an affective or animating force in the revitalisation of pilgrimage routes, and the narratives, experiential, ethical, and conceptual formations they elicit in Kent and beyond.