La conchiglia di San Giacomo

This article explores the pilgrimage practice connected to the Way of St. James in Galicia, Spain, by looking at the use of the scallop shell along the French Camino route, from an ethnosemiotic perspective. By combining a semiotic and ethnographic approach, and discussing current literature from the anthropology of pilgrimage, the article analyses the concept of "metasymbol". Metasymbols will be defined here as symbols of symbols, in which semantic threads (“isotopies”) are condensed and accumulated, encapsulated into an overarching plane of expression, and finally converging into an object of value (Greimas 1987), the scallop shell. We will show how the scallop shell - worn during the pilgrimage as a sign of distinction for the pilgrims, used as an indexical sign on the road to mark the way to Santiago, and even embodied by practitioners as food or tattoo - becomes an “apparatus of capture” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), diagrammatically embedding the virtual memory of emerging relations generated during the pilgrimage. The sense of the scallop shell will thus progressively emerge as the ending point of a cumulative network of meaningful relations between people and events, condensing a semiotic "form of life" on this metasymbol: an aesthetics of walking and an ethics of becoming, a valorisation of the event and a new philosophy of life, characterising the experience of the pilgrims.