Tracking Historical Changes in Personal Religious Practice on the Examples of Votive Prayers
Tracking Historical Changes in Personal Religious Practice on the Examples of Votive Prayers

Summary/Abstract: The main goal of this paper is to show how vows as personal prayers of Croats in Croatia and other countries have been constantly re-created through time, depending on some of the changes in the society and in Catholic Church. From the viewpoints of the anthropology of religion, the paper is based on Geertz’s interpretive theory of culture and Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. Therefore, personal votive prayers as a religious practice will be observed within culture in the broadest possible sense of the latter term. More specifically, as personal prayers analysed in the paper are closely connected to pilgrimage, they will be interpreted from the standpoints of the anthropology of pilgrimage and anthropology of Christianity. I rely on the Turnerian notion of liminality in pilgrimage (1978), broadening it by the inclusion of discontinuity in this anthropological interpretation of Christian practices (Robbins 2007). I also include in my discussion the notions mainly used in pilgrimage studies, such as sacred place, body and person (Eade, Sallnow 1991), movement (Morinis 1992), sacralization processes (Coleman, Eade 2004), pilgrimage sites (Margry 2008) and (sacred) self in relation to the sacred other (Csordas 1994, Pandian 1997, Hermkens et al. 2012).

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