Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses water in the context of pilgrimage and commemoration practices in Ethiopia: connecting mobility, worship, commemoration and healing, it spotlights how water mediates socio-divine relationships and features as medium producing and enmeshing everyday and sacred socialities.

Paper long abstract:

Water presents a central element across religious traditions: it is symbolic of life, purity, salvation and healing. It also distinguishes the sacred from the mundane, e.g. through consecration. In contexts of spiritual practice, water thus emerges as more than merely a physical resource, unfolding its social, spiritual, and sometimes political potential in manifold ways.

This paper discusses water as medium for the production of (sacred) socialities, taking the example of pilgrimage and commemoration practices in Ethiopia. Ethiopian Orthodox pilgrimage frequently centres on the pilgrim's acquisition of holy water, be it for healing, blessings or casting out demons. Simultaneously, the acquisition and intake of holy water is closely connected with grave visitations and commemorating ancestors: given the financial means, deceased are buried on a church compound, the graves being built as tiny houses. These serve as home, resting and meeting place when the deceased's relatives seek holy water and other (spiritual) services. This example shows how water becomes the medium for individual and social transformation (e.g. transforming illness into health, an unnamed infant into an acknowledged persona, facilitating the integration of an outcast, celebrating the communion) while concurrently demonstrating how water also mediates between various levels of sociality, establishing, maintaining and restoring human-divine relationships, human-ancestor relationships, and relationships among humans. The paper presents ethnographic data collected in Southwest-Ethiopia in winter 2019, and seeks to provide a basis for discussing what we mean by "sacred socialities" and how these are tied up in processes of mediation.