Gender, Nation and Religion in European Pilgrimage

Willy Jansen is an anthropologist, professor of gender studies at Radboud University Nijmegen and member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is particularly interested in religion as an important cultural code for gender, and has published widely on topics connected with this theme. Catrien Notermans is an anthropologist at Radboud University Nijmegen. She has been doing long-term anthropological research in East Cameroon, concentrating on religion, gender and kinship. In Europe and South Asia she has conducted fieldwork on pilgrimage, focusing on the ways in which women use religion as a powerful practice in less powerful circumstances, such as illness and migration. Together with Willy Jansen she has supervised the comparative research project ’The Power of Pilgrimage’. Her most recent research concentrates on gender and ethnicity in the Lourdes pilgrimage of African migrants in Europe (and especially France) and is part of the European project entitled Gender, Nation and Religious Diversity in Force at European Pilgrimage Sites.