• Home
• Projects
• What are the Impacts of Religious Diversity? Regions in Three European Countries Compared
• The Architecture of Contemporary Religious Transmission
• Ethnic Relations and Religious Mobilisation of Muslims in Europe
• Extending and Enhancing the ISSP 2008 Module on Religion
• Gender, Nation and Religious Diversity in Force at European Pilgrimage Sites
• REM – Religion, Euroskepticism and the Media
• ‘Recognizing Christianity’: How African Immigrants Redefine the European Religious Heritage
• Religious Sources of Solidarity in Europe
• Transnational Nigerian-Initiated Pentecostal Churches, Networks and Believers in Three Northern Countries
• The Emergence of Islamic Fashion as a Social Force in Europe
• Events
• Publications
• Links
• Login

Print    Email

The lived religion of pilgrims in a changing Europe will be studied by an international and multi-disciplinary (anthropology, gender studies, religious studies) team from The Netherlands, Sweden and Ireland. The researchers will follow pilgrims from different ethnic, religious and national background to the European pilgrimage sites of Czestochowa, Amsterdam, Santiago de Compostela, Lourdes, Medjugorje, Fatima, Paris, Knock, Croagh Patrick and Lough Derg.

A combination of qualitative ethnographical methods will be used to understand what actually happens during pilgrimage and how pilgrims give meaning to their acts. In an allegedly secularized Europe, millions of pilgrims visit religious shrines each year. Places like Lourdes, Santiago de Compostela or Medjugorje have become impressive meeting points where huge numbers of Europeans from all backgrounds assemble to practice religion.

This project aims to unravel the relationship between the ways in which people express their religion through pilgrimage and the new religious, social and political conditions in a rapidly changing Europe. Modern pilgrimage takes place in a context of a religious reshuffling in Europe: some new member states are less secularized than older ones, Islam is expanding, immigrants bring in variant beliefs, and Protestants and non-believers visit Catholic sacred places. What does making a pilgrimage mean in this context? How do these developments influence the expression and negotiation of religious identities at sacred sites? Also other social forces are at play during pilgrimage. Far more women than men visit these sites, and pilgrimage may both reinforce traditional feminine roles as well as empower women to change them. What discourses on gender are expressed and contested during pilgrimage?

Several pilgrimage sites had only local or national significance before, but now draw a very international public and relate to both cross-national and supra-national concerns. This raises the question of how in the restructuring of Europe, pilgrimage may constitute new identities, and how moving across Europe changes the pilgrims’ perceptions of the local and the national community as well as that of its connection with other nations and Europe. Taking together these interests, the central question of this programme is:
What meanings do modern pilgrims attribute to the ritual of pilgrimage, and how are these connected to changing gender, national, and religious identities in present-day Europe?

Methodological approach

The lived religion of pilgrims in a changing Europe is studied by an international and multi-disciplinary team (anthropology, gender studies, religious studies) that will use mainly qualitative ethnographic methods. A phenomenological (experience-near) approach to pilgrimage processes will be used. Qualitative data on what actually happens during pilgrimage, what pilgrims do and how they give meaning to their acts, will be collected through multi-sited participant observation, informal conversations, ethnographic in-depth interviews, photo-elicitation method, digital recordings of rituals, analysis of textual material like prayers, songs and guidebooks, and comparison of written texts with the verbal expressions and actual practices of pilgrims. The materiality of pilgrimage (icons, statues, sacred corpses, ex-voto’s and devotional souvenirs) and the religious meaning attributed to them will be analysed. Pilgrims will be followed to European pilgrimage sites in Spain, Portugal, France, Bosnia-Herzegovina, The Netherlands, Poland and Ireland, and for each site contextual information will be collected.

Anthropological fieldwork will be complemented with archival and literature research (to find and analyse master narratives for comparison with accounts of pilgrims and to find historical and contextual information), concise surveys (to document the pilgrims’ main sociological characteristics), and analysis of modern mass media like websites of the large pilgrimage sites, weblogs, newspapers, radio, television (to identify groups, networks and different positions concerning the central issues in relation to pilgrimage). Analysis of virtual landscapes that mimic the European contours of religious movement provide an interesting challenge for anthropologists, moving beyond Europe as a shared social space to its emphasis on the cognitive dimensions of such a large entity.

Projects

• Judith Samson, Gender and re-emerging religious voices for restoration.
• Lena Gemzoë, Secularized tourism or revitalized religion? Swedish Protestants in pilgrimage to Santiago.
• Keith Egan, Accessing spiritual repositories of power? Following the flow of Irish pilgrims in Europe.
• Willy Jansen & MA student, Shared shrines. Muslims, Christians and Marian devotion.
• Catrien Notermans & MA student, The narration of suffering, identity and home at the Marian shrine of Lourdes (France).
• Eric Venbrux & MA student, Labouré’s legacy. Pilgrimage, death and the supra-national.

Copyright © Goldsmiths, University of London 2008. All Rights reserved.
Website by Pictographic