FOOTSORE IN GALICIA.

Pilgrim Stories On and off the Road to Santiago Nancy Louise Frey University of California Press, $17.95, 326 pp.

Three years ago I walked 1,000 miles across France and Spain in the company of strangers. What brought us together was that we were all doing something rather strange, namely making a medieval pilgrimage to the tomb of a saint who next to nobody today believes is entombed there.

The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain-to the tomb of the Apostle Saint James the Greater, son of Zebedee and brother of John-has enjoyed all kinds of strange fortunes in its twelve-hundred- year history, and the last thirty or so years have brought yet another surprising turn. As the anthropologist Nancy Louise Frey documents in her new book, the pilgrimage has been resurrected from the dead to life in a new and perplexing form. In 1996, when I was making my pilgramage, Frey reports "between 23,218 and 30,000 pilgrims made it to Santiago" by foot, bicycle, or horse. She asks two basic questions: Why people today do it, and what they're "saying about the world," explicitly or implicitly, in doing so.

To begin with the basics, Santiago is Saint James. Santiago de Compostela is a city of 87,000, about thirty-five miles from the Atlantic and fifty north of Portugal, in the region of Galicia. The pilgrimage, which many present-day pilgrims call the Camino or "Way," runs down through the Basque country and back up through Castile. Legend has it that the tomb of Saint James, abandoned and forgotten, was rediscovered by a hermit sometime in the ninth century. How Saint James got to northwest Spain is told by another tale, which seems to have originated in the seventh century. After Pentecost, James was sent by the Virgin Mary to preach to the Iberians. He was not, however, very successful in his mission, and also evidently not very persevering, for Acts 12:2 records his death back in Jerusalem during the persecutions of Herod Agrippa, who ruled from a.d. 41 to 44. The saint's body was subsequently translated to Spain in a stone boat.

The meaning of the pilgrimage today is not any simpler than the legends about its origins, but here is where Frey's book is helpful. As she remarks, "pilgrims frequently have a difficult time explaining why they are making the pilgrimage"; not the least reason is that there are so many different and conflicting answers to this question. Frey gives order to this cacophony. Some talk of the pilgrimage's historical interest, say, its role in the development of the concept of Europe. Others won't stop talking about the pilgrimage's symbolism. Still others won't talk at all, because they're afraid of what other pilgrims might say or think, because they don't know what they themselves think, or because they couldn't care less what motivates other pilgrims and don't want to hear about it. The pilgrimage brings people together, but it also drives people apart.

Frey makes this point somewhat clumsily: "The pilgrimage is a 'realm of competing discourses' in which each person's life-world (personal, social, cultural, etc.) influences what he or she finds, values, criticizes, or rejects." She further argues that the meaning of the pilgrimage is constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed along the way. "Motives...change over the course of the Camino," she writes, as pilgrims struggle with the question of what they're doing and why. Motives change because, for many, the pilgrimage takes on a life of its own. Walking the five hundred or so miles from the Pyrenees generally takes between four and ten weeks. During this time and across this space (mountains and plains and mountains again), suffering of some kind-physical or psychic or both-is for most people inevitable. But the pilgrimage also builds people up in ways they had not expected.

Frey suggests that the "wish for transformation" may be what most draws people to the pilgrimage. In this wish she further discerns both a "critique of modern society" and the deeper meaning of the pilgrimage's reanimation. "I call the modern pilgrimage a journey of the suffering soul," writes Frey. As she understands it, the reanimation of the pilgrimage bespeaks "an unspoken lack" and a need to escape the "disheartening aspects of modern society," among others the domination of technology and the breakdown of community. (Here it may be worth noting that, though pilgrims come from far and wide, the pilgrimage is on the whole a middle-class phenomenon. It does not cost a lot to do, but does require the privileges of free time and spare cash.)

This argument is not, however, adequately developed. Pilgrim Stories gives the reader much information, but it is unduly repetitive. Also, the writing is sometimes ungainly, even unintentionally comic. ("How," Frey asks, "do you say good-bye to a man whose presence made your ovaries pitch and turn one night simply by being in the next bed?") But the biggest stumbling block is theoretical. Frey discusses at length (and several times over) what she calls the "cult of authenticity," the struggle over what makes an echt pilgrim. She is generally critical of this struggle, and rightly so, for it is often at once silly and destructive. Yet the rejection of authenticity leaves Frey in a bind. She wants to speak of the meaning of the pilgrimage, but she is suspicious of claims to authority. The upshot is that she goes back and forth between making judgments and decrying judgmentalism. On the one hand, she is willing to criticize a Dutch pilgrim who rejects the free meal offered by the Hostal de los Reyos Catolicos in Santiago. His assessment of the meal was that it was fit not for a pilgrim, but for a dog. Frey gives the reader to understand that, rather than "reject the gift as inadequate," the Dutch pilgrim should have "recognize[d] it as such." (I ate that meal: his assessment of it was correct.) "The Camino gave him an opportunity to apply his accumulated knowledge and new sensibility"-to be an echt pilgrim-but he did not take it. Yet, on the other hand, Frey observes that "there are many types of pilgrims, many ways of going, and many ways to interpret what it means"-which is less than helpful. She further writes that the Camino provides the opportunity to develop "a personal metaphysics." Ugh!

It would be a mistake, though, to give frustration the last word. A pilgrim asked her, Frey writes, to "tell us about ourselves," and this she does better than anybody I have read in the gigantic body of literature on the pilgrimage.

Bernard G. Prusak is a graduate student in philosophy at Boston University.