Encounters with the Other: Orientalism and Religious Feeling of a Madeiran Pilgrim, Maria Celina Câmara (1899)

Abstract

Abstract This paper analyzes the travel journal of Madeiran author Maria Celina de Sauvayre da Câmara, De Nápoles a Jerusalém [From Naples to Jerusalem],3 dated 1899, from a Cultural Studies perspective. The present study focuses on pilgrimage, a physical and spiritual journey, as a ritualistic and mystical performance which, by means of staging and writing, composes a practice that allows physical and spiritual deterritorialization and reterritorialisation and the negotiation, through the sacred and through religion, of tolerances, concessions and availabilities of the subject regarding the acceptance of the Other’s religious difference, giving rise to new senses. The treatment of pilgrimage as a means of promoting contact with the Other(s), leading to deep processes of self and hetero-knowledge linked to rituals that contemplate sacred and profane space(s) and time(s) and binomial or culturally constructed representations, wherein discourses of power emerge, is inextricable in this discussion. The travel journal is a testimony to the articulations between sacred and profane and a mechanism perpetuating hegemonic and orientalist discourses derived from intrinsic relations and practices of power in the sociocultural context of individuals. We envisage pilgrimage as a transforming practice and a means of (re-)cognition and (re)construction of the Self/Other, through a personal and sacred/profane cartography promoted by writing and exalting the feeling of religious community.