Lecture Two

‘Spirit and Blood: Between Communitas and Kinship’

[Wednesday 8 May, from 5:15 to 6:45 pm, Harris Lecture Theatre, Oriel College]

The Turnerian concept of existential communitas famously presents the pilgrim as temporary stranger to the world, disciplined within liminal or liminoid spaces to render the self open to universal and anonymized others. Blood yields to spirit, friendship to fellowship, presaging later anthropological concerns—especially in studies of both Christianity and modernity—over inherent conflicts between mediation and transcendence. In this lecture, I reverse these analytical polarities, emphasizing the significance of intimate intersections and calibrations between pilgrimage and kinship, the spiritual and the social, optation and obligation. Exploring blood as central metaphor of connectedness and flow as well as sacrifice, I present a vision of pilgrimage as ritualized, embodied refraction of relations among kin, whether living or dead.