Moved by Mary

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 Far from an outdated practice of little relevance to the modern world, Marian pilgrimage expresses the deep and urgent concerns of a wide range of people.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.

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).