Paper short abstract:

This paper follows the ethnographic routes opened by a holy procession in a small Aegean island. Long-lasting interaction, between the ethnographer and the research participants, will give the frame for discussing a number of ethical, experiential and methodological issues.

Paper long abstract:

Fourteen years of ethnographic fieldwork are projected into the dominant social and ritual event of the community studied; that is the yearly holy procession venerating Saint Virgin, but also tracking important landmarks for the island's local history and identities.

My own gradual integration in the procession has proved crucial for the development and the completion of fieldwork research. Symbolically, this has been elaborated in and out of the community's body: walking along together, getting more and more inside serpentine and circular collective trails of pilgrimage, and then out, back inside the households for listening to stories about ancestors and landmarks; then out again, walking alone in the countryside, recalling and trying to understand my interlocutors' collective memory.

Through this paper I'm engaged by my own relative position as a fieldworker in this collective bodily practice; initially out of it, as a reporter and an outsider, and then inside for the long years of fieldwork research. Ritual walking, following the religious practices of the community studied, has emerged as a cognitive practice and integration tool for long ethnographic fieldwork.