On the Margin: The Power of Mary in Lived Religious Experiencersr_1547 241..248 MOVED BY MARY: THE POWER OF PILGRIMAGE IN THE MODERN WORLD

Despite the decline of church attendance in the West, Mary, the mother of Jesus, continues to be popular, attracting millions of people to her shrines across the Catholic world. For the feast day of Our Lady of Guadeloupe in 2010, the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadeloupe in Mexico announced that it received six million pilgrims over one weekend. In addition to officially recognized Marian shrines such as Lourdes and Fatima, people continue to sight Mary spontaneously in unpredictable places—in a desert, on a window of a house, and on the wall of a highway underpass. The two books under review make valuable contributions to the study of religion by showing the diverse ways in which people interact with Mary in different parts of the world. Using ethnographic and historical data, both books reveal the extraordinary extent to which this religious figure plays an important role in women’s and men’s lives in contemporary world. Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World is an excellent collection of essays that are both ethnographically rich and theoretically stimulating. It collects papers from an international conference “The Power of Marian Pilgrimage: Objects, Gestures and Performances” held in the Netherlands, February 1-3, 2007. Its thirteen chapters are written by anthropologists, historians, a geographer, and religious studies scholars shedding light on the lived experience of today’s Marian devotees and pilgrims. The case studies are from Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, and the Pacific. As the editors of the volume make explicit in their introduction, this book is concerned with the lived religious expressions of the people—religion as practiced, as opposed to religion as prescribed (3). The book is thematically divided into four sections, each having three to four articles. The first section, entitled “Negotiating Power through Mary’s Imagery,” discusses the several ways in which people engage with the unseen through the imagery. The first article, by Simon Coleman, deals with Walsingham in England, a pilgrimage site for both Roman Catholics and Anglicans. Bringing in also ethnographic stories of sighting of ghosts, Coleman asserts that the power of the Walsingham pilgrimage lies, for at least some of the visitors, in their engagement with the imagery of figures such as saints and ghosts. Coleman skillfully weaves his story of Walsingham, narrating various snippets of people’s lived experience with mystical and religious presence. This theme of “religious presence” is also discussed by others in this collection of essays (e.g., Orsi and Turner). Tracing the history of Walsingham from its inception in 1061 through the English Reformation of the sixteenth century and to the twentieth century, Coleman identifies a recurring theme of mimesis in Walsingham, which takes the form of a revival of the past. Most importantly, in this pattern of mimesis, individual figures play key roles. Describing Mary as a “spiritual [. ], highly complex, often contested, semiotic resource” (20), Coleman situates her in the center of “representational economies” (20) in Walsingham. Using this term of Webb Keane’s, Coleman argues that it is useful to see such things as visions, narratives, material cultures, and embodied practices “echo, distort, and translate each other” (20) in the process of sorting out “proper relations. ” This representational economy is fraught with moral implications. The figure of Mary was one of the central motifs which were razed by the iconoclastic forces of the Reformation. In the 1920s, however, a controversial Anglican priest, Fr. Patten, created a statue of Mary using an image that he found on an old seal of an Anglican priory. This statue soon