ABSTRACT
A knee-jerk social-scientific response to such expressions of faith would be to see them “merely” as forms of fetishism, as endowing mute place with religious desire and transposed human agency. But such a bald reversal of the attribution of agency tells us little of how a place becomes animated in the imaginations of pilgrims, how it can seem to “do” things to people and to act not only on the pious, but also sometimes on the skeptical or downright hostile.
