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.

UC Davis anthropologists Cristina Moya and Nicolas Restrepo Ochoa are answering questions like how pilgrimages and rituals arise, how people become convinced to try something new, and what makes a place so special that it persists through time, drawing people to it again and again?

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

At Nuestro Señor de Pucara, site of religious syncretism, 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. 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.

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. 

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. It shows why uncertainty can actually give rise to new collective traditions and beliefs.” — Moya

Read the full article by Greg Watry here: How Pilgrimage Sites Arise: UC Davis Anthropologists Explore Ritual Formation in Peru