The Virgin Mary continues to attract devotees to her images and shrines. In Moved by Mary, anthropologists, geographers and historians explore how people and groups around the world identify and join with Mary in their struggle against social injustice, and how others mobilize Mary to impose ideas and rules and legitimize acts of violence and suppression. Far from an outdated practice of little relevance to the modern world, Marian pilgrimage expresses the deep and urgent concerns of a wide range of people. With examples of Marian pilgrimages from all over the world, Moved by Mary explores the ways in which men and women of different ages and religious, political, social-economic and ethnic backgrounds empower themselves to deal with modern-day issues with Mary´s help. The ethnographic cases reveal the cultural and devotional variation of Marian pilgrimage, but also global similarities. Collectively, the contributors to Moved by Mary show how in many places religion dramatically suffuses everyday life.
Author Biography:
Anna-Karina Hermkens has a background in theoretical archaeology and cultural anthropology. She obtained her PhD in 2005 with a study on material culture and gender in Papua New Guinea (2005). Articles on this topic were published amongst others in: Shadows of New-Guinea, Arts from the Great Island of Oceania in the Barbier-Mueller Collections (2007); the Journal of Pacific History (2007) and Visual Anthropology (2007). Hermkens is currently working as a project-coordinator and researcher in the program 'The Power of Marian Pilgrimage'. This has resulted in several articles, amongst others in: Anthropology Today (2007), Culture and Religion (2007) and Oceania (2008). In cooperation with Willy Jansen and Catrien Notermans, she organized the international conference on "The Power of Marian pilgrimage" in Nijmegen (Netherlands) from 1-3 February 2007 (http://www.ru.nl/igs/powerofpilgrimage). Willy Jansen is an anthropologist and currently full professor of genderstudies and director of the interdisciplinary Institute for Gender Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen. Her anthropological research in Algeria was published in the monograph Women Without Men. Gender and Marginality in an Algerian Town (1987 Leiden: E.J. Brill) and a number of journal and book articles. Her research interest in religion is expressed in two edited books (in Dutch) on local religion and on pilgrimage in North Africa and the Middle East, as well as in various articles on topics like Arab Christian missions, sexuality and religion, conversion or contested religious identities. Together with Catrien Notermans, she is project-leader of the research program The Power of Pilgrimage. A Comparative Study. In this context she has published articles on religion and Marian devotion in the Middle East in: Gender, Religion and Change in the Middle East: Two Hundred Years of History (2005), edited by Okkenhaug & Flaskerud, in Christian Witness Between Continuity and New Beginnings: Modern Historical Missions in the Middle East (2006), edited by Tamcke & Marten and in the journals Etnofoor and The European Journal of Women's Studies. Catrien Notermans has been doing long-term anthropological research in East Cameroon, concentrating on religion, gender and kinship. At Radboud University Nijmegen, Notermans supervises two PhD projects and several MA projects on different pilgrimage sites around the world. She has published a book entitled: Multiple Stories: Women in Cameroon about Polygyny and Christianity (1999 in Dutch), and has co-edited several articles on religion and identity in Africa, such as: 'An Anthropological Approach of Identity and Religion in Africa', together with Jean Kommers, in Identity and Religion: A Multidisciplinary Approach (2003), edited by Borsboom and Jespers. Other articles in Anthropos and Ethnography are currently in press. Anna-Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen, Catrien Notermans, Simon Coleman, David Morgan, Cathelijne de Busser, Anna Niedzwiedz, Ien Courtens, Sanne Derks, Lena Gemzoe, Janine Klungel, Peter Jan Margry, Edith Turner, Robert Orsi, Jill Dubisch.
