Well, trail... (an ethnography)

Introduction: The Field Site and the Research Question

Like many of my projects, I set out to study another Other and ended up studying myself. Though I occasionally experience science, art, emotions, thoughts and/or moments as “spiritual” (by which I mean profoundly sublime, harmonic and elegant), I am innately skeptical of representations (especially mass produced and distributed ones) of such experiences. When I first read how some market Cusco as a mystical center of “cosmic energy”, I laughed: I scorn such vague, bland assertions of localized sanctity and Cusco’s touristy center seems far from a holy center. However, during the course of a failed quest to participate in a New Age full moon ritual in the hills above the city, I experienced moments of beauty, tranquility, and elation due to a chance convergence of various symbolic and spatial elements. Though I won’t pretend that I underwent any kind of religious awakening, the experience helped me understand why some tourists might project mystical qualities onto Cusco as well as how the concepts of authenticity, commodification, and space conflict and intersect in the field of spiritual tourism.



The Description


We – four American students in Cusco, Peru, layered in sweaters and coats and beanies for the chilly night – turned off of a street near calle Choquechaca up a stone stairway that held a sign welcoming us towards “Hospedaje Cristo Blanco”. With the full bright moonlight to illuminate our path, we struggled against the steep steps and thin air towards Cristo’s open arms. The staircase died maybe 100 meters from the top, but we found a dirt path winding between the bushes that led us up to a road overlooking Cusco. As we ascended the path, red and gold fireworks exploded over the dotted yellow lights of the city. I could hear the city shuddering below, a white noise euphony of cars purring, dogs yowling and reggaeton blasting from bars.

blurry cusco at night

Once on the road, we encountered a few Cusquenos who asked if we were looking for a taxi or the Plaza de Armas. When we asked about the “templo del mono” they pointed in a general direction down the road that we followed, before veering off onto another dirt path up a sloping hill. After wandering through a wood and down a small valley, we encountered a gravel path that wove through a field of stone. Eventually, we came upon a huge jutting stone cave that we entered with hushed voices, flashlights on, in giddy awe of our discovery. There was a cube carved into one side; one of us speculated that it was an altar. The path through the cave was well polished, obviously well used. Later, I learned that we had stumbled onto the ruin of Sacsayhuaman. When we emerged on the other side, we walked out into a field where we could see Cusco’s lights below, the white moon beaming above and a white column of clouds flash occasionally off in the distance. While one of us (who shall not be named) wandered off to relieve himself/herself, another deposited on the ground orange peels (which had been brought as an offering for the ritual) out of a plastic bag.

Having mostly given up on finding the ritual, we continued to wander, down a large valley toward a huge stone. One of us questioned, “Why are we going down here?”; another immediately answered, “Well, trail…” In the valley, we encountered various mysterious phenomena: old concrete hatches, a (grave?) stone with a name etched in white, rectangular pits carved into the hillside, a stone half-cylinder (tomb?) with a iron door that was buried shut. Not knowing what any of it meant, we eventually wandered down to a road, where we found a stone staircase heading back into the noise and lights and commotion of Cusco’s center.


Interpretation and Findings

This experience made me think a bit about authenticity. I associate authentic experiences with those that express agency and creativity and those that defy instrumental rationality and superficial, commodified relationships and identifications. In these respects, I think I can label our adventure an authentic experience. However, authenticity also always relates to the specific context in which it is identified or performed; as such, our traipsing about through property and ruins we had no prior knowledge of or respect for can be understood as patently inauthentic; or, rather, an inconsiderate colonial encroachment, a defiling invasion of a sacred historical space to fulfill shallow aspirations of adventure.

But this second understanding, like the first, is overly simplistic. The Sacsayhuaman ruins are sold daily to foreign tourists who might conceive of their consumption as adventurous and spiritual, and the ruins as a magical space where they can be transported back in time to an imagined ideal past. The marketing and selling of this space to those who can afford it is far more exclusive and symbolically violent than our transgression of the owner’s property rights. Still, if commodification perverts the experience of this space by idealizing its history to market it and by excluding the dispossessed with an abstract transaction, and yet our subversion of this commodification remains destructive (as commodification and exclusion is to a certain degree necessary to preserve the ruins), is an authentic experience of this space possible at all? Is nothing beautiful or true in this world?!?

The afflicted ambivalence of these questions necessarily reminds me: these are all just words. Authenticity, commodification, space: each can be constructed, collectively and individually, however we like. There are infinite interpretations and experiences, and there isn’t much point fretting over whether I have felt something real or symbolically reproduced a colonial relationship when far more blatantly exploitative power structures are creating, draining and destroying people right now. Certainly, these words have very real implications in the struggle against the fucked-up situation we’re in and need to be addressed. But wrestling with the ambiguity of a well-intentioned but plastic-wrapped offering to the earth or a friend needing to crap near an ancient ruin isn’t going to save anything except maybe my own already over-inflated ego.

Still – to not totally discard the value of this ethnography – I think we can see a seed of the complex and contradictory nature of tourism in my group’s well-intentioned and decently conscientious exploration of the hills of Cusco. The vain struggle for a relatively-defined authenticity, the perversion and necessity of commodification, the exclusivity of locally significant spaces… each concept is essential in grasping towards an understanding of how tourism transforms localities and lifestyles.


Conclusion: Reactions and Reflections

Overall, our journey was goddamn authentic because I say so (with the authority of the author who constructs such meanings out of the relations between symbols). The physicality and purposelessness of the hike, the texture and tranquility of the natural setting, the coincidence of beautiful climactic phenomena and mysterious discoveries… each of these elements and more combined to generate an awesome experience that many might label “spiritual”. At the end of the hike, I could sympathize with those who project a divine cosmic significance onto this city, even as I pitied their contradictory justifications of genetically embodied and localized spirituality. For me, if anything at all is spiritual, then it is everything everywhere. I don’t need a specific person or place or drug in order to find myself or my world, or to see how amazing and beautiful and absurd and terrifying these things are.

(On a side note: Taking any drug is always a religious experience (even if not culturally accepted) in that it shifts your personality, revealing that you are not in control and that identity can only be defined by change; it is a powerfully felt manifestation of the (apparently) perpetually kinetic, transformative nature of the universe. But you don’t need drugs to realize this.)

Still, many people do need spiritual centers or drugs or storytellers in order to find some kind of meaning in their lives (we all need a myth…). And that is totally okay.