Pilgrimages are ubiquitous across all major world religions. From the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival on the banks of India’s Ganges River, to Mecca, the birthplace of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, millions of people travel to various sites across the globe to engage in rituals and connect with their faith.
But how do pilgrimages and rituals arise? How do people become convinced to try something new? What makes a place so special that it persists through time, drawing people to it again and again?
UC Davis anthropologists Cristina Moya and Nicolas Restrepo Ochoa are answering these questions at the ground floor. For the past few years, they’ve documented and studied a new pilgrimage taking form in the Peruvian Altiplano.
On the north side of Lake Titicaca, at the base of a small mountain, is a sanctuary site known as Nuestro Señor de Pucara. Every August, thousands gather in the area to honor an image of Jesus that appeared on the side of a rock face. First celebrated in 2014, Nuestro Señor de Pucara provides anthropologists with a test case to study the formation of pilgrimages and rituals.
“We have a rare opportunity here to study the origins of something that is really hard to come by,” said Moya, an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology. “In anthropology and more broadly in the social sciences, a lot of work has tried to explain why people engage in established rituals, often at great cost, but it’s really hard to study that initial point in the origin of a tradition.”
Origin of a tradition
Nuestro Señor de Pucara is a site of religious syncretism, a place where religious beliefs merge. At Nuestro Señor de Pucara, Catholic beliefs merge with Andean animist traditions. Pilgrims traveling to the site offer flowers to the apparition of Jesus or bottles of champagne to a stone toad or lay colorful streamers and confetti across the opening of a nearby rock formation representing a mine.
Moya first noticed the gatherings at Nuestro Señor de Pucara in 2015, when she was in the region conducting different research at a nearby field site. She investigated the gathering and asked locals about its origin. It was clear to her that the pilgrimage represented an opportunity to study the emergence of a new tradition.
“I immediately thought, ‘Okay, we have to take advantage of this and start collecting data at the site: what people are doing, where they’re coming from, and why they’re there,’” Moya said.
Through interviews with pilgrims, the researchers learned that the offerings were usually associated with asking for specific wishes. Some pilgrims buy and bless miniature versions of what they’re wishing for, like a house or a car. Farmers might ask for a prosperous growing season while miners might ask to strike gold.
“One of the main origin stories behind this site is about a gold miner successfully striking it rich after praying to an apparition of Jesus’ face on the side of the mountain,” said Restrepo Ochoa, a postdoctoral scholar with Moya’s lab who joined the project in 2022.
While it’s not the sole reason for visitation, aspirations of good fortune seem to be key to those who make the trek to Nuestro Señor de Pucara.
“But the question remains; how do people come to agree that this is a place that grants wishes?” said Restrepo Ochoa. “Unlike other new technologies that people may choose to try out and test, the material benefits of supernatural requests are, at best, difficult to ascertain.”
Moya and Restrepo Ochoa are tackling that question.
What makes a pilgrimage site successful?
With Nuestro Señor de Pucara being a relatively newer pilgrimage site, with a roughly 11-year history, there is a possibility that it won’t persist as time goes on. In a forthcoming study, Moya and Restrepo Ochoa dig into this idea, viewing it through the lens of game theory.
“Nico came up with this idea of how to model the possible origins of such a belief, which is to think about this problem of people having to coordinate and agree that this is a place that we should all go to worship,” Moya said.
The model is based on the assurance game, also known as the stag hunt. In the stag hunt game, players choose whether to hunt a hare or a stag. The former can be achieved with a single player, while the latter requires multiple people and coordination for a payoff.
Restrepo Ochoa’s model uses the assurance game as a foundation. It then takes into consideration people’s prior beliefs about the effectiveness of the pilgrimage site, how large the relevant community of prospective pilgrims is, and how uncertain people’s everyday lives are.
“This model takes seriously the possibility that people are trying to find what’s effective and what’s not, what’s rewarding and what’s not, what’s miraculous and what’s not,” Moya said. “It shows why uncertainty can actually give rise to new collective traditions and beliefs.”
“One of the coolest things about this project is that a lot of work on cultural change studies traditions and institutions that have been there for a long time, that are socially agreed upon,” Restrepo Ochoa said. “Here, we are getting to observe the onset of this process.”
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