Location
Monserrat
Start Date
26-6-2026 9:30 AM
End Date
26-6-2026 11:00 AM
Description
Research on the Camino de Santiago has predominantly classified pilgrims along single dimensions: by motivation before departure, by the type of experience encountered on the road, or by the meaning derived from the journey (Cohen, 1979; Brumec et al., 2023a). What has rarely been attempted is a typological approach that treats the full biographical trajectory from departure through experience and change to return as an integrated unit of analysis.
This article develops such a process-based typology. Drawing on qualitative content analysis of 588 open-ended written responses from German-speaking Camino pilgrims, it reconstructs six ideal-typical biographical configurations following the method of empirically grounded type construction: crisis and partial reordering, spiritual seeking and deepening, challenge and self-efficacy, reduction and essentiality, relational resonance and community, and lifestyle pilgrimage and identity anchoring. Each type describes a recurrent pattern linking biographical starting point, key experience, perceived change, and return into a coherent constellation.
The analysis shows that the Camino does not function as a uniform transformative experience but as a differentiated biographical resource: a practice that serves recognisably different biographical functions for different pilgrims, ranging from reparative to transcendent, self-validating, reductive, relational, and identity-constitutive. This complements existing work on pilgrimage as a source of meaning-making and transformation (Schnell & Pali, 2013; Brumec et al., 2023b) by shifting analytical attention from isolated dimensions of pilgrim experience to the configurational logic that connects departure, experience, change, and return. Five hybrid cases illustrate how the types overlap and shade into one another, confirming their ideal-typical rather than classificatory character. The article contributes to pilgrimage and tourist studies by proposing a conceptual vocabulary for the different ways in which structured travel practices become biographically meaningful.
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Included in
G2) Pilgrimage as Biographical Resource: A Process-Based Typology of Camino de Santiago Pilgrims
Monserrat
Research on the Camino de Santiago has predominantly classified pilgrims along single dimensions: by motivation before departure, by the type of experience encountered on the road, or by the meaning derived from the journey (Cohen, 1979; Brumec et al., 2023a). What has rarely been attempted is a typological approach that treats the full biographical trajectory from departure through experience and change to return as an integrated unit of analysis.
This article develops such a process-based typology. Drawing on qualitative content analysis of 588 open-ended written responses from German-speaking Camino pilgrims, it reconstructs six ideal-typical biographical configurations following the method of empirically grounded type construction: crisis and partial reordering, spiritual seeking and deepening, challenge and self-efficacy, reduction and essentiality, relational resonance and community, and lifestyle pilgrimage and identity anchoring. Each type describes a recurrent pattern linking biographical starting point, key experience, perceived change, and return into a coherent constellation.
The analysis shows that the Camino does not function as a uniform transformative experience but as a differentiated biographical resource: a practice that serves recognisably different biographical functions for different pilgrims, ranging from reparative to transcendent, self-validating, reductive, relational, and identity-constitutive. This complements existing work on pilgrimage as a source of meaning-making and transformation (Schnell & Pali, 2013; Brumec et al., 2023b) by shifting analytical attention from isolated dimensions of pilgrim experience to the configurational logic that connects departure, experience, change, and return. Five hybrid cases illustrate how the types overlap and shade into one another, confirming their ideal-typical rather than classificatory character. The article contributes to pilgrimage and tourist studies by proposing a conceptual vocabulary for the different ways in which structured travel practices become biographically meaningful.