Researching religion: the iconographic elicitation method

Introduction

There seems to be a tension between the use of standard sets of conventional qualitative methods in anthropology and the plurality, variability, and unpredictability of the ethnographic fieldwork practice. While certain methodological handbooks tend to suggest that a variety of research problems can be tackled with the same toolbox—containing in-depth interviewing, informal talk, participant observation, and just hanging-around—the unpredictable, confusing, and multidimensional realities of ethnographic fieldwork often ask for ad hoc solutions: methodologies appropriate to the often peculiar research contexts. As one can never predict what will happen in the field, much of the methodology depends on the researcher, the society, the people studied, and the conditions in which the fieldwork has to be carried out. However, personality, idiosyncratic adjustment, and creativity, the essential ingredients of ethnographic fieldwork, are hardly (or only partially) reflected upon in the methodological accounts of fieldwork. ¹ Yet, too often, fieldwork is codified as a method for collecting qualitative data, normatively tied to well-established conventions. However, as Brice Heath and Street (2008) state, ethnography underwent developments ‘critically distinct’ from qualitative methodology in general (p. 29). Notwithstanding a tendency in favor of ‘positivist restoration’ as reaction to the so-called postmodern period, a strong undercurrent of ‘corridor talk’, often putting in perspective or even revolting to codified research procedures, remains central to the rite de passage of anthropological fieldwork (Van Maanen, 1988: xi).

Pool (1995) discussing the problematic representations of the fieldwork practice states,

Fieldwork is basically a matter of being there, but not just of being there. You have to be at the right place at the right time. You need to have the necessary social skills and communicative competence, you must have an eye and an ear for the right kind of things, you need to be creative and flexible, able to adapt to new and unexpected situations and anticipate what is and is not going to be important later. And all this in spite of often difficult cultural and language barriers. Why should not the anthropologist give the reader some idea of this creative and often exciting process of discovery? (p. 116)

Pool argues that anthropologists have to give clarity of what they have been doing in the field. Reflexivity, one of the main characteristics of postmodern anthropology, generally concerns the representation of fieldwork in texts and not so much the practice of ‘being in fieldwork’ (Castaneda, 2006: 91). Due to the literary turn in anthropology, more attention has been paid to innovative textual strategies, but related experimental methodological strategies are still largely ‘field in the making’ (Denzin and Lincoln, 2008: 45). Postmodern anthropology does not seem to have had serious consequences for ethnographic fieldwork. For example, Davies (2010) referred to current handbooks noting that they did not succeed in opening ‘new doors to the pertinence of affectivity and emotion’ in the field (Davies and Spencer, 2010:12).

Joining recent debates, we think that the ‘performativity’ or ‘the doing of fieldwork’ (Castaneda, 2006) needs much theoretical and methodological attention. Doing fieldwork implies more creativity and instigation than the position of, for example, ‘hanging-around’ suggests. Recent discussions about fieldwork as ‘embodied epistemology’ (Keith Alexander, 2008; Kouritzin et al., 2009, to mention just a few relevant publications) are eye-opening. Here, we will mainly focus on one aspect of ‘the art of fieldwork’ (Wolcott, 1995), touching directly on what Geschiere (2010, following Epstein, 1967) called the ‘craft’ of ethnography: the creation and innovation of context-depended methods in anthropological fieldwork. By presenting the method used during the final stage of a research dealing with Marian pilgrimage, we hope to offer some contribution to that ‘craft’. ² This method, called the iconographic elicitation method, unexpectedly came into being when the researcher failed to gather the necessary data. The aim of the research was to discover the meanings Dutch Lourdes pilgrims attribute to Mary. However, Mary appeared to be so intimately and intensely involved in people’s personal sorrows that they were unable to express themselves in consistent stories about her. The elicitation method finally enabled the researcher to elicit the narratives that gave insight into the personal meanings attached to Mary and in the way those people experienced their Marian pilgrimage. By inserting different iconographies of Mary in the interviews with Lourdes pilgrims, it proved to be possible to restore communication, to stimulate people to recall experiences, and to trigger the information that was lost in silence during earlier attempts (see also Bunster, 1977).

The iconographic elicitation method is certainly not new (cf. Fernandez and Herzfeld, 1998; Herzfeld, 2003) but a variation on the photo elicitation method and psychological techniques such as the classic Rorshach test. Although other kinds of images can also be used, most elicitation studies use photographs. Photo elicitation is a visual research strategy based on the simple idea of inserting photographs into a research interview; it elicits additional information compared to interviews based on words alone (Harper, 2002: 13). Harper argues that the potential usefulness of photo elicitation is huge but largely unrecognized, partly due to the fact that scholars using the method do not present it as such in their methodological account.

According to Castaneda (2006),

Fieldwork is in itself a strategic trigger comprised of multiple series of tactical and procedural provocations that range from ‘passive’ observation, asking questions (systematically and otherwise), to providing verbal cues or ‘probes’ that aim to further stimulate speakers. Fieldwork is, therefore, a strategically deployed series of triggers that provoke, not only spect-actors, to engage or disengage with fieldworkers but, through this dynamic, the ‘elicitation’ of relevant information or data that can be gathered. Trigger, then, is the methodological principle and concept of being in fieldwork in order to accomplish the doing of fieldwork as gathering data. (pp. 90–91)

By explaining our ‘trigger’, the use of the elicitation method, and how it developed throughout the fieldwork process, we will illustrate the importance of methodological improvement and creativity in the field. First, we will go into some methodological troubles of researching religion, in general, and pilgrimage, in particular. Second, we will introduce the fieldwork with Dutch pilgrims going to Lourdes and the iconographic elicitation method used. In the Netherlands, the pilgrimage to Lourdes has a long tradition and there are still many organizations involved. It is a pilgrimage traditionally aiming at miraculous healing of diseases of the body but, in fact, often treating emotional suffering and the pain of loss (Notermans, 2007). Finally, we will present some of the results of working with this method and come back to the proceeds of the elicitation method.

The study of religion and its methodological difficulties

Anthropologists often focus on religious experience and religious meanings, and these were exactly the domains that gave the researcher such difficulty. Yamane (2000) discusses the methodological limitations in studies of religious experience and expresses his dissatisfaction with conventional methods presenting the same tools for very different research jobs. Yamane (2000) wants to find ‘the right tool for the job of religion studies’, which is, according to him, the narrative approach:

When we study religious experience we cannot study ‘experiencing’—religious experience in real time and its physical, mental, and emotional constituents—and therefore must study retrospective accounts—linguistic representations—of religious experience. (p. 173)

Yamane (2000: 177, 182) argues that to understand religious experience we need to know how people make religious experience meaningful. Narratives, in this perspective, are the keys to understand the meaning of religious experience. Some authors even consider narratives as ways par excellence to approach ‘the deep meanings in human life’: according to them, stories have ‘the power to heal or destroy’ (Kouritzin et al., 2009: 193, compare, however, Grimes, 1990). To capture the pilgrimage experience, researchers also participate in rituals and observe people praying, making gestures, handling objects, or moving through the landscape, but narratives remain important to capture the meanings pilgrims attach to that experience. Although we recognize the value of a narrative approach, our problem was that exactly in the domain of religion—and pilgrimage in particular—we experienced that words may fail. Why is this so, and what strategies do we develop then? What media can we use to elicit the missing words and narratives?

There are several reasons that may explain the peculiar difficulties researchers will meet when focusing on religious narratives. When approached by using standard methods, such as questionnaires or interviews, researchers as well as the people concerned tend to become trapped by conventional language (Bruce, 1996; Stringer, 2008). This is one of the main reasons why new, ‘unexpected forms’ of religion (Sylvan, 2002) largely remained unnoticed by sociologists and anthropologists focusing on, for example, the consequences of secularization.

Another problem results from the fact that religion often touches upon people’s ‘invisible wounds of the soul’ (Dubisch, 2004). Emotional suffering, personal traumas, and intimate loss that are often under taboo and beyond words are frequently dealt with in the domain of religion. When pain or suffering destroys one’s capacity to communicate, it can be memorized through religious practice (Notermans, 2007). Emotional pain is a vital element of pilgrimages, in particular: away from home and everyday life, people may experience and celebrate painful memories that would otherwise remain undisclosed, surrounded by secrecy and shame. In this way, pilgrimage may heal the pilgrims’ emotional wounds. The journey may also evoke emotions and memories not anticipated before, inducing a feeling of physical or mental improvement. Not only visual symbols but also symbols that communicate through music, sound, smell, taste, and bodily gestures may evoke emotions that give religion the power to heal (cf. Dow, 1986). In our study, we are not after emotions as such, but we are interested in emotions as ‘agent’, as a factor in anthropological research that may mitigate or stimulate response, dependent on the strategy in use.

One more reason elucidating the difficulty to penetrate into narratives during fieldwork particularly concerns peoples’ mobility during pilgrimage and their massive presence at the shrines. Meanings experienced during the event may be highly situational and the interpretation of out-of-context phrasing of these meanings may be problematic. It is missing the ‘conversation’, the ‘exchange-in-performance’ (see Pattie, 2007). Preston (1992) claimed that ‘something is intrinsically difficult about studying transitory phenomena like pilgrimages’ (p. 32), and he was right. Pilgrimage challenges the conventional anthropological notion of the field as a bounded space, preferably a small-scale, homogenous sociocultural unit, where one does long-term participant observation in order to gain a view from inside. ³ Pilgrimages are unbounded phenomena entailing the movements of individuals and groups from unlimited points of departure (Coleman, 2002: 358). Such a transit place does not allow the researcher to spend many hours chatting or sharing all kind of activities with pilgrims. Pilgrims generally lack time (and privacy) to speak at length with a researcher because of a full ritual program, a limited time schedule, and the custom of journeying in groups.

Concerning the Lourdes pilgrimage, a 1-week pilgrimage may be considered a long-lasting journey because such a pilgrimage usually lasts 1, 2, or 3 days. During this pilgrimage, time is too short for the anthropologist to build a confidential relationship with pilgrims, which is necessary to uncover people’s experiences during pilgrimage, to listen and collect meaningful narratives. As said earlier, religion can be a very intimate experience and people often go on pilgrimage to heal emotional suffering. This pain and inner wounds are carefully concealed and are not revealed in short-term conversations with strangers. When pilgrims only stay for some days, they lack time to speak at length with the researcher and they also lack privacy. They often travel together with relatives who may easily intervene in the conversation. All this implies that research beforehand or as follow-up may be necessary, but both are ‘out-of-context’. This may be problematic because of various reasons: in the case of the (sick) Lourdes pilgrims, emotions seriously hampered responses during initial interviews held at home and in a study about pop and rock festivals as potential milieu for the emergence of religiosity, responses did not escape conventional religious language, in contrast to reactions in situ (Kommers, 2011; Rojek, 2006: 416).

As Notermans traveled to Lourdes with pilgrims who lived in the same Dutch province, she was able to interview the pilgrims in their homes before and several times after the pilgrimage. In the next section, we introduce the pilgrimage and the pilgrims to answer our question of how to overcome the noted methodological problem: what strategies can be developed to elicit the missing words and narratives, to exceed conventional phrasings, or to ‘restore’ experiences as lived during the performance?

Dutch pilgrims journeying to Lourdes

In June 2004, Notermans participated in a 6-day pilgrimage to Lourdes, organized by a Dutch medical insurance company for about 265 chronically ill pilgrims. The group included both ailing pilgrims and many solicitous volunteers, among whom were managers and employees of the insurance company, priests, medical doctors, nurses, and trainee nurses. All the sick pilgrims presented complex clinical pictures, combining different major and minor diseases with social isolation, limited mobility, and the prospect of continuing physical deterioration. All had gone through a pathological process of 10 years or longer. The pilgrims came from various regions in the Netherlands, albeit mainly from the southern, predominantly Roman Catholic provinces of Limburg and Brabant.

Although it was impossible to get to know all the 265 pilgrims, the researcher closely followed the ones with whom she shared the hotel and, as a result, their daily ritual program. This group consisted of 34 pilgrims and 14 volunteers. The pilgrims ranged in age from 50 to 86 years, the average age being 65 years, and most of them were women (28 women, 6 men). They all came from the city of Venlo and the surrounding villages in the mid-southern region of Limburg. To solve the problem of lack of time and privacy of shrine-oriented research, the pilgrims were also interviewed several times at home. Before going on pilgrimage, a group of 20 pilgrims was selected with whom in-depth interviews were done 1 week before and several times after the pilgrimage (from 1 week to 2 years afterward). Among them were five married couples, two mothers traveling with their daughters, two friends (women), and four women journeying alone. With only six exceptions, all of them were visiting Lourdes for the first time. Following the interview meetings at home, some pilgrims were accompanied on their visits to local Marian shrines in Limburg.

The pilgrims claimed to be religious and even Catholic but not to be regular churchgoers. When describing their everyday religious practice, they cited as the main features occasional pilgrimages to Marian sites, frequent visits to local Marian chapels and to the graves of deceased loved ones in churchyards, the many candles they lit in both local chapels and their own homes, and the regular prayers they offered to Mary. For all of them, the loss of health meant the loss of mobility and old age meant the loss of loved ones, resulting in an overwhelming feeling of being sidelined, disrespected, and growing lonely in society. These feelings of loss and disempowerment became central during the pilgrimage, rather than their physical condition or the expected miracles that would heal them.

The Marian shrine of Lourdes, situated in the French Pyrenees, is probably the best-known modern Marian site in the world. In 1858, 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous reported appearances of a young woman who, throughout a series of 18 encounters, came to be seen as the Virgin Mary. Since then, the small village of Lourdes has developed into an international religious tourist center, receiving an estimated six million visitors each year. In the heart of this multifaceted ritual center is the grotto where Mary appeared to Bernadette and where a statue has been erected representing Mary as a young woman with lowered eyes, wearing a shiny white dress tightened up with a blue sash, holding a golden rosary, and joining her hands in prayer. This dominant image of the shrine is multiplied in millions of copies and dispersed on a global scale.

In his study The Power of Images, David Freedberg (1989: 100) states that the central focus of every pilgrimage journey is the shrine and the central image at the shrine that makes miracles happen. Consistent with Freedberg’s statement, it is generally thought that the popularity of Lourdes has to do with the Lourdes shrine and the world-famous statue of the Lady in the grotto. The ailing Dutch pilgrims, however, were not unanimously attracted by the main image of the shrine. The pilgrims who were interviewed before the pilgrimage did not express any particular affection toward the Lady of Lourdes. The stories they told were about their illness, their problematical relationships with doctors and specialists, and about their families. When asked for what reason they wanted to travel to Our Lady of Lourdes, they often replied that they did not journey because of her. No further stories on Mary were elicited during these interviews. Even during the pilgrimage, these stories did not grow. The statue of the Lady did not seem to have much appeal and meaning to them. When asked if they wanted to have a photograph in front of the statue of Mary, one pilgrim even replied that he thought it was the statue of Bernadette. Another pilgrim said that the Lady of Lourdes had little appeal for her, ‘as she had not been raised with her’, but that she ‘intensely loved’ the Lady in the chapel next to her home in the Netherlands. It was not because of the Lady of Lourdes, she said, that she went on this pilgrimage. Although all the pilgrims were devoted to Mary and harbored profound feelings toward her, their motivation to go to Lourdes (as overtly stated before) was not directly related to the dominant and miraculous image of the Lourdes shrine. Due to a strong Lourdes tradition in the Netherlands, Catholics who decide to go on pilgrimage travel to Lourdes, especially when they are ill. Replies concerning the ‘choice’ for Lourdes then remained highly conventional, such as ‘I wanted to make a pilgrimage to distance myself from my sickbed at home’, ‘I wanted to have some time for myself’, or ‘I wanted to see the place my great parents visited earlier’. As stories about Mary were not told during the pilgrimage, pilgrims have been interviewed afterward at home. Even during these interviews, the pilgrims obviously felt uncomfortable when asked to articulate their feelings toward Mary. They often fell silent or burst into tears, keeping the interviewer from asking further questions. Although the meanings of Mary were not disclosed in this way, the weeping pilgrims showed that Mary moved them. Words, however, failed to express what they felt for her. These silent reactions to questions about the personal relationship with Mary can be clarified in three interrelated ways. One reason is that people’s personal communication with Mary often also lacks the words. It is mainly a language of thought and herewith an inner and silent communication (compare with Stringer (2008) about communication with the deceased). Another reason is that when people speak aloud with Mary, they often articulate standard prayer texts such as Hail Mary and do not look for own words to express their relationship with her. ⁴ A final and most relevant reason is that to the pilgrims who have been interviewed, Marian devotion is an intensely emotional practice. Mary evokes thoughts that are tightly connected with troubles that are silently kept as family secrets rather than publicly expressed in everyday life. Mary mirrors the excessive pain people experience in everyday life, and that pain is hard to tell. To get over this problem, the researcher reacted to people’s changing attitude toward different images of Mary and decided to use different images of Mary as interview stimuli in a final phase of the research.

Inserting images of Mary in interviews

In 2006, 2 years after the pilgrimage, the 20 selected pilgrims were interviewed again, this time using the iconographic elicitation method. For this method, the researcher used a box containing about 30 cards with different visual representations of Mary. These icon cards were shown to the pilgrims during the in-depth interviews in their homes. The images in the box represent Mary with different appearances (as an independent woman, a mother, and a queen), in different kin relationships (with her child, Jesus; her mother, Anne; her husband, Joseph), and expressing different emotions (happiness, sadness, grief, and self-confidence) and characteristics (humble, superior, reigning, protective, rich, simple, worrisome, and contemplative). The iconographies represent among others Our Lady of Lourdes, the Pietá, Mater Dolorosa, the Holy Family, and Our Lady of Perpetual Help. These different iconographies were meant to elicit different stories and emotions.

As during the research, one pilgrim decidedly stated that she did not like the Lady of Lourdes at all but intensely loved the local Lady of Geloë, the researcher added also some local and most familiar images of Mary to the box. These icons are housed in Limburg chapels, such as Our Lady of Genooy in Venlo, our Lady of Geloë in Belfeld, Stella Maris in Maastricht, and Our Lady in the Sands in Roermond. The most significant iconographic difference is that the Lourdes icon represents the Lady standing alone, whereas the local icons represent her as a mother holding a child.

All icon cards were presented in sets of five and the interviewees were asked to explain which particular image pleased them, which not, and why. At the end, all selected favorite images were put together and the interviewees were asked how they would describe Mary’s characteristics on the basis of these images. During the period that the elicitation method was used, the box’s content continuously changed: images that seemed to have no value for the pilgrims—like a Chinese, Indonesian, and African Madonna—were taken out and images mentioned during the interviews that appeared to make sense to the pilgrims were added to the box. The box was also given to colleagues and students studying pilgrimage in other places, and they also had to adapt the box to specific contexts by adding local images and leaving out others.

The elicitation method helped the researcher in two different ways: first, to discover how pilgrims select from various icons and what reasons they have for loving particular ones ‘very much’ and others ‘not at all’, and second, to overcome the problem of reticence encountered when asking about personal relationships with Mary. The icons helped both the pilgrims and the interviewer to elicit the stories that otherwise would probably not have been told.

Harper (2002), using photos as interview stimuli, states,

Photo elicitation mines deeper shafts into a different part of human consciousness than do words-alone interviews. It is partly due to how remembering is enlarged by photographs and partly due to the particular quality of the photograph itself. Photographs appear to capture the impossible: a person gone; an event past. That extraordinary sense of seeming to retrieve something that has disappeared belongs alone to the photograph, and it leads to deep and interesting talk. (pp. 22–23)

The images of Mary also worked in this way: they retrieved the many losses the pilgrims felt confronted with. As the pilgrims were often interviewed in couples (spouses, mothers and daughters, and friends), the elicitation inspired collaboration between the two people discussing the meaning of images and trying to figure out something together (cf. Harper, 2002: 23).

Bunster (1977) calls the use of still photography combined with open-ended interviewing, a ‘talking pictures’ technique. She also states that ‘relying solely on verbal communication, through interviewing, is not the best way of understanding the subjectivity of informants who have difficulty with language’ (p. 279). To tap into an inner world of feelings, values, and significance, and to restore communication, she successfully used the ‘talking pictures’ technique. Her female informants seeing the photos were often moved to tears and strong outbursts of emotion:

Experiencing the photographs, they released and discovered hidden dimensions of the ways in which they structure and conceptualize their life cycle. (p. 290)

The technique exposed her to ‘hitherto stifled dimensions of their battered existence’ (p. 290). The same success was achieved by using the elicitation technique in the pilgrimage research. Deeply hidden emotions, relational trouble, and unspeakable pain became released during the interviews and both interviewer and interviewees were happy about it. ‘It was nice, like playing a game’ some pilgrims commented afterward, and they felt relieved by all stories that were told and listened to. In the same way, other researchers using visual methods (cf. Young and Barrett, 2001) report how successful the technique is in producing long and productive interviews.

The elicitation method, finally, also made it possible to study Marian images from an ethnographic rather than an art perspective. Art historian Freedberg (1989) argues that a detached iconographic reading of images, which speaks of images in terms of form, color, handling, and composition, does not explain why people can be so moved by them, ‘even kiss them, cry before them, or go on journeys to them’ (p. 1). Even when religious images are not considered high art, he states, they evoke emotional responses that must be taken into account and can best be studied with a close ethnographic method. By presenting different images of Mary to the Lourdes pilgrims, it was possible to explore how and why people select from and respond to different Marian images and what personal meanings they attach to them. From a dominant theological perspective, Mary is easily seen as always representing the Mother of God, irrespective of her visual appearance in art and popular culture. In daily devotional practice, people appear to differentiate between the numerous representations of Mary, attaching high emotional value to some and resolutely rejecting others.

Reading images of Mary: the stories elicited

Of the various images of Mary, the primus inter pares for all pilgrims was the icon closest to them in space: the icon venerated in the chapel next door. People in Belfeld, a village now connected to the city of Venlo, may passionately love Our Lady of Geloë, who is housed in the local chapel, and not even recognize the icon of Our Lady of Genooy, who roughly looks the same, but is housed 15 km away in Venlo. When a pilgrim from Belfeld was shown the urban icon, she resolutely said, ‘I don’t recognize her; if you say that it is Our Lady of Genooy, I understand that I don’t know her, her chapel is too far from here’. Janna, 34 years old and the youngest pilgrim in the research group, weekly visited the chapel of Our Lady of Geloë. When looking at the image of her favorite Lady, she told,

I feel safe with her because I have grown up with her. She knows me from childhood. This is where I came with my parents and my grandparents. Our Lady has listened to all our sorrows and prayers, that’s why I feel at home with her. The chapel gives me rest. In a world where everything is changing quickly, this place enables me to dwell on the past and to cherish the happy memories of my childhood. In the chapel, I remember my grandparents, who visited the chapel together. They came by tandem bike because my grandmother was blind. I feel no need to travel a thousand kilometers to see the Lady in Lourdes when my own, familiar Lady is housed next door.

At home, Janna had put a small copy of the Geloë icon on a wooden shelf over the dining table. Right next to the icon, there were two photographs on the wall: one of her grandparents and one of her grandparents’ house. The latter photograph showed the house, Janna explained, in its original and unaffected state. ‘It reminds me’, she said, ‘of the past, when everything was still peaceful and untroubled’. The image of Mary in the village, close to people’s home, thus elicited narrated memories of the past, childhood, and of deceased family members.

People’s favorite image was often also the image that had been venerated and passed on by their mother and consequently had the power to evoke memories of her. Roos, 59 years old, stated that the image of Our Lady of Perpetual Help was her favorite and most powerful one because of her mother, who venerated this icon:

Every time I pray, I pray to Mary. I never see God when I pray, I never had that experience. I always see Our Lady of Perpetual Help. My mother also prayed to this Lady. She had a very hard life. She became an orphan when she was four years old. Her brother had a heart disease and died at the age of eight. My mother grew up in an orphanage. From the age of twelve onward, she lived with outsiders. Formerly, you could hire yourself out and do the housekeeping or some farm work, just to have some small payment. Sometimes, my mother was lucky to find a nice family but she also lived with families who only wanted her to work. My mother often told me about these hard times, but only afterwards did I really understand her suffering. When I was small, I couldn’t really imagine what it was to suffer like that, but when I grew old and became a mother myself, I actually understood what her stories were about. When my mother married, her life became better. In the beginning everything was fine. But then the war took everything away from them and my father got depressed. He was always sitting under the pear tree. My mother had to handle it alone and suffered with so many children. She had many miscarriages and finally lost an adult child. My brother died in an accident when he was twenty-four years old. When I also lost my adult son, my mother could hardly handle it. She warned me that the pain would never leave, that it would hurt me for ever. My mother never went to bed before praying to Our Lady of Perpetual Help. When I was in Lourdes, I bought a small souvenir of this Lady. I have put it on my bedside table because my mother also prayed to her before going to sleep.

Roos’ story illustrates how the worship of Mary by one’s mother influences one’s own visualization of Mary. Mary, representing the mother, bridges the worlds of daughters and mothers, the living and the dead, and links memories of suffering and pain between generations. Roos and her mother shared the experience of having an unsupportive husband and losing an adult son by accident. This shared experience converged in the image of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and made the image emotionally strong.

Some images of Mary also elicited stories about people’s conjugal relationship. For three out of five couples, the pilgrimage to Lourdes was meant to commemorate their many years of marriage, to thank Mary for still being together, and to ask her ‘keep the family together’. The conjugal relationship of these pilgrims can be characterized as the relationship between a strong, caring wife and a sick, dependent husband. Although the caring wife often had serious illnesses or complaints, too, it was the husband who came first. This division of roles caused problems for both husband and wife. When looking at the image of the Holy Family, Arno, 75 years old, became angry, stamped his foot, and said, ‘That is how I have to be, a strong man who is responsible for his family and cares for his wife and children. But here I am, like a child and totally at the mercy of my caring wife’. When looking at the image of the Pietá, showing Mary holding the suffering body of an adult man, Arno took this card as his favorite one and said,

This is how I feel. I feel like him, like a powerless person, leaning on the lap of my wife. My wife suffers for me. When I need help, she is there to help me. Mother Mary, she is my mother and my wife.

Like Arno, the other ailing husbands also identified with Christ as the suffering child. They did not identify with a powerful or authoritarian Christ but with a deathly ill, suffering Christ who has been totally beaten and is in the hands of his mother, who looks after him. In their interpretation of Mary’s image, it is not Mary who reminds us of the power of Christ, but Christ who reminds us of the power of the mother.

The wives, for their part, also identified with the icon of the Pietá. Each admitted that she cared for her husband as for a helpless child. Leen, 59 years old, worried about her husband, who had difficulties breathing, was losing weight, and sometimes even fainted. ‘In the hospital’, she said, ‘they do not allow him to be ill, they send him back home, and then it’s up to me to keep him alive. My concern is to feed him, to give him food, good food that makes him strong. I am always scared that something will go wrong with him’. Leen also had her physical pains. Rheumatism, tiredness, and stomach trouble made her constantly feel bad, but being her husband’s only nurse, she did not give much attention to her own physical condition. ‘You have to be strong’, she said. ‘I am not in a position to complain and show my weakness. The doctors leave it all to me’. When looking at the different images of Mary, Leen took the Lourdes image as her favorite one because of her austerity. She said,

Mary is simple. She doesn’t take a superior position but stands next to us. I tell her my trouble and show her my weakness. She is the only person to whom I say what I feel inside, who knows that I do not always feel strong enough to keep my husband alive, that I am not the strong person I seem to be in everyday life. I ask Mary to help me and she accepts me as I am. She takes me seriously and listens to me.

Women like Leen, who are self-effacing in the daily care of their husbands, feel relieved to relate as a needy person to Mary in their turn. Mary for them means the strong mother who gives them a shoulder to cry on and who accepts their vulnerability. Seeing Mary as a strong woman, even stronger than they are, these women did not appreciate the image of Mater Dolorosa, showing Mary with tears or in a depressive posture. The women did not interpret Mary’s sadness as their own sadness, because in everyday life, they deliberately did not cry about their trouble but hid their tears in order to be strong. Mary then also has to be strong and not cry. ‘When both of us cry’, one woman said, ‘who peps us up?’

The pilgrims also identified with Mother Mary themselves. Looking at the image of the local Lady of Geloë, Tiene, 76 years old, told me: ‘When I pray I always turn to Mary because she knows how it is to be a mother. When I pray to her, I am sure she understands me’. This mutual understanding was explained as the shared experience of nursing a suffering child or mourning a dead child. The mothers placed themselves on an equal footing with Mary, saying that ‘as one woman to another, they understand each other, as they know how it is to lose a child’. ‘That suffering’, 69-year-old Andrea said when looking at the image of the Pietá, ‘is drawn from real life’, and she started to tell the narrative of her sick adult daughter, who lived with her. The image evoked her narrative of pain from beginning to end. Because the loss of a child defies the imagination of people who have not suffered it, both men and women said to feel relieved to share their pain with Mary, who experienced the same loss and knows how deeply it hurts. Tiene selected the image of Our Lady of Lourdes as her favorite one. From the bottom of her heart she said, ‘This Lady is the most beautiful Lady I know. She is so simple and so tremendously fine, she is the one and only for me’. Then she narrated in detail what happened to her 40 years earlier:

I was eight months pregnant when I felt that the baby was not moving anymore. I went to the doctor who said it was nothing, that I had no reason to complain. But it hurt so much. The doctor wanted me to have contractions before helping me to get the baby out. I knew the baby was dead, and it felt like I was carrying a stone in my womb. For three weeks, I was in terrible pain, from morning till evening. When I visited the doctor again, I told him that I would not leave the hospital anymore. That day, nine minutes after eight in the evening, my child was born. It was July 20, 1964. I never saw my baby. They took him away immediately after delivery. He got no name, no monument. I knew that he was buried at the cemetery of Tegelen and I often went there to look for him, but there was no grave, no remembrance. My husband and me, we called him Rob. When remembering this pain, I always turn to Mary because she knows how it is to be a mother and to lose a child. When I pray to her, I am sure she understands me.

This story illustrates how the image of Mary brings back memories of pain over the loss of a child. While in daily life this pain had to be concealed and the child seemingly forgotten, the mothers want to have their pain recognized and their children remembered.

Meanings of Mary

For the pilgrims, the most powerful Marian images appear to be those that elicit kinship memories. People’s responses to the images then can be seen as remembering, and Mary’s image, as visualized family memory. The closer an image comes to family history and home ground, the more easily people identify with it. This identification gives Mary the power to stir up family memories and to connect, within families, the living and the dead, the past and the present. Mary’s presence in the family makes her a first witness of both joys and sorrows of intimate family life. This is why feelings of belonging, continuity, warmth, and closeness, as well as pain, suffering, rupture, and loss, come together in Mary’s devotion.

Ancestor veneration is at the very heart of Marian devotion, as people approach Mary to remember and to mourn deceased loved ones. Religion in general can be seen as fulfilling people’s needs to be in contact with the dead (Margry, 2008; Stringer, 2008). In Dutch society, churches have been gradually losing the role of helping people to venerate their deceased loved ones. Pilgrim Arno who deeply loved our Lady of Lourdes narrated this as follows:

When I look at the image of our Lady of Lourdes, I feel moved. I think about my mother and I think about the many people who are lost in the family and I miss them so much. My mother, my father, my parents-in-law, my three sisters who died at a young age, and my brothers who died recently. It’s only my younger brother and I who are left. Mary helps me to remember the deceased loved ones. I feel in need of this because we lost so many people. They still belong to the family, they are one of us, but in church, their names are lost. The priest no longer remembers them in Mass like in former days, when he mentioned their names on All Souls’ Day. Then, we remembered all beloved people and we felt that they were present with us. The church has done away with all these rituals, but I do not accept that my dead relatives also disappear. When I pray to Mary, I think of them, I remember them, and I keep their presence alive.

This illustrates how looking at Mary and the commemoration of the dead converge in Marian devotion. Secularization and the feeling of being disconnected from the church threaten people’s connections with deceased kin. Now that the churches no longer connect people to their past and their deceased relatives, it is Mary who provides continuity rather than the church. Being in contact with Mary is being in contact with a cherished past to which the deceased family members belong. Mary helps with sustaining the mutual dependence between the living and the dead: the dead need to be remembered by the living and the living need the dead in order to feel wholeness and continuity in life. In this way, Mary creates intergenerational continuity in times of discontinuity, multiple losses, and social and physical disempowerment.

Conclusion

Contrary to initial interviews and discussions during the stay at the important Marian pilgrimage site, the final interviews using images elicited many intimate narratives in which meanings attributed to Mary appeared to offer clues to a variety of social and religious dimensions. However, here we limit ourselves to some methodological remarks.

Through focusing on people’s interaction with Marian imagery in the interview sessions, we wanted to know why some images have the power to evoke stories while others did not. What stories could be elicited by the images and what meanings of Mary could be derived from them. Given the many intimate stories that were elicited by the images, the method appeared to be successful in solving the specific problems of this study of (mobile) religion. The images made Mary present in people’s stories, in a way she had never been present before in the fieldwork process. Via the religious images, people were able to phrase memories and their views on social relations. The case did show how useful it is to make context-dependent methodological improvements in the field: in response to people’s silence about Mary and their affection for particular images, the elicitation box was created and constantly adapted to new insights.

Next to the explanations that other scholars already gave for the success of the elicitation method (e.g. Bunster, 1977; Harper, 2002), there is another aspect we would like to mention: in people’s perception, the icon cards were not just images or technical tools to keep the interviews going on; the images themselves were the religious material they usually worked with in their religious lives. ⁵ Religion and material objects are closely intertwined (Meyer, 2008). In people’s lived religion—that is, religion as practiced in everyday life, opposed to formal religion as prescribed by the Church and religious authorities—things are central and given high importance: images, statues, rosaries, holy water, incense, candles, and photographs are necessary media to fulfill religious ends. The religious value of objects does not come from their materiality but from the way people deal with them and their power to mediate the relationship between believers and the divine (cf. McDannell, 1995; Meyer, 2008). During the interviews, the icon cards were not merely representations of Mary but images that made the actual presence of Mary perceptible. The interviewees did not treat them as symbols that had to be read or interpreted, but perceived (some of) them as an embodiment of Mary. In this way, the looking acts of those interviewed worked as a ‘religious sensational form’ that induced sensations of being touched by Mary (Meyer, 2008: 708). The methodological use of the images thus perfectly fitted into people’s religious use of the images. When the method was used in other cultural settings where the different images of Mary were less easily available than in the Netherlands, people often wanted to keep their favorite images after the interviews, telling how important the images were in their religious practice.

The success of this particular collection of images, however, was mainly limited to the fieldwork in which the collection came into being. The boxes given to colleagues and students studying pilgrimage at other sites did not produce the same success. ⁶ The images often did not sufficiently appeal to the people concerned or people were more eager to claim the images rather than to speak about them. This makes clear that the box with iconographic images could not be considered a ‘technical toolbox’ for other purposes without being adapted to a specific research problem and local setting. Rather than using the same standard methods time and again, one has to find ‘the right tool for the right job’ (Yamane, 2000) by reacting to what happens in the course of the research. In the case of the elicitation method as presented here, the stimuli were carefully selected and tested to fit the specific research object.

In a current research about religiosity in rock festivals, a like procedure has been developed. Rock performances abound in references to religious images (albeit often ‘heathen’ ones). Discussing these in situ was hardly possible, if alone because of the overwhelming sound. Thus, postfestival interviews in which the researcher tried to evoke authentic experiences were essential. When using verbal expressions, respondents tended to react in conventional religious language (usually rejecting every link with institutionalized religion). But when using a careful selection of images, respondents appeared to narrate about aspects of their lives, which relate to their worldview (see also Petersen, 2009). But what is more: like in the pilgrimage project, respondents substantially cooperated in selecting the images and in suggesting other stimuli. In this case, they drew the researcher’s attention to particular social media like Hives and Facebook. Many people reacted to pictures by enthusiastically exclaiming: ‘You should see my YouTube presentation’, followed by spontaneously phrased elucidations and personal narratives.

The ‘toolbox’ technique greatly underscores the importance of the active contribution participants may offer to the research process. In the pilgrimage project, this resulted in a better understanding of particular meanings people attributed to specific images of Mary; in the festival project, the participant’s suggestions about other stimuli resulted in the discovery of meanings significantly differing from ‘overt meanings’. At first glance, those festivals may be considered only a ‘replacement strategy’ for religion (Rojek, 2006), but it was in the elicited narratives that religiosity in anthropological sense could be discovered (Sylvan, 2002). Although iconographic elicitation is just one out of various possible strategies, in research in which people themselves are acquainted with—and make use of—major aspects of the research strategy, like the religious images described here, it may be a fruitful procedure. A research procedure that may be called ‘emancipating’ while it explicitly recognizes the contribution participants may offer to field research.