
Anna Niedźwiedź is a cultural anthropologist (PhD 2003, Habilitation degree 2016) who works as an Associate Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Her main research interests focus on the anthropology of religion approached through the perspective of lived religion as well as material, sensual, spatial dimensions of religious practices. Focusing on lived Catholicism in global and local contexts, she explores the relationship between what is seen and experienced as ‘religious’ and ‘secular’, between institutional and grassroots levels, and between the powerful and the marginalized. She also studies how people shape their various identities (ethnic, national, gender, generational) through complex positioning towards religious worldviews in contemporary societies. Anna has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Europe (mostly in Poland) and in Ghana. Her published works include books on Marian cult in Poland (e.g. The Image and the Figure: Our Lady of Częstochowa in Polish Culture and Popular Religion, 2010) and on lived Catholicism in Ghana (Religia przeżywana. Katolicyzm i jego konteksty we współczesnej Ghanie/Lived Religion: Catholicism and Its Contexts in Contemporary Ghana, 2015).