Embodiment

"A phenomenon is made into being by performance." Nothing is real until you enact it in your body, until you make it physically real in yourself. It is one thing to hear about something happening, it is quite another to actually do it. The idea of embodiment is probably one of the most important aspects of a pilgrimage class. The reason for the pilgrimage is the what separates it from leisurely travel. Now that we've talked about embodiment and given it a name, I am seeing how it has continually come up and been used during the class as well. When we did our own little Hajj on campus, that was a form of embodiment. Not only was it and effective tool to help us to remember its components, our participating in the actions made it more real and really deepened my understanding of it. By coloring the Hindu gods, our actions gave at least a little more life to something that I had almost no experience with. Visual aides are used in almost all of the classes, even the pictures of the statues and Hagar Qim help to embody, to some extent, the places and things which we are talking about in class. Of course, in a class about pilgrimage, we can't fully embody the pilgrimages of Muslims, Hindus, and all of the other religions that we have covered because that would require actually going on the pilgrimage, which would take more time and money than the course allows but even what embodiment has been done has made the pilgrimages more real than just a verbal explanation of each pilgrimage.