Afterword: what staffs and paths do – a new animist contribution to studying pilgrimage

ABSTRACT Interest in material culture has already enriched the study of pilgrimage. It has encouraged attention to more than beliefs, intentions, and meaning-making. More recently, especially with the popularisation of walking for health and wellbeing, scholars have widened their view to consider interactions with the larger-than-human world. This afterword proposes that new animism and related scholarly ‘turns’ might provide new perspectives on the relations between humans and other existences which together define pilgrimage.