Lived religion beyond words: A denotative analysis of participant-produced photos of meaningful objects

Abstract

Can visual data provide insights that words do not reveal? Meanings of objects in visual studies are usually captured through elicitation meetings. In this article, we propose to explore them from a purely visual standpoint and assess the methodological and substantive benefits of such denotative approach. We used a database of 660 photographs produced by 225 participants in a study of everyday religious practices in three Latin American cities. Following a ‘lived religion’ approach, respondents were asked to present an object (or photograph of it) that was ‘meaningful’ for them, in relation to their spiritual practices. Analyzing these pictures without resorting to the verbal content that accompanied them proved useful to operationalize such a large corpus of visual data, facilitate the transmission of the study’s results, and build a representative classification of the types of objects most commonly brought by participants. From a substantive perspective, our analysis contributes to enlarge the spectrum of what is considered religious or spiritual in Latin American cultures, and to question certain assumptions established by conventional theories of religion, such as class stereotypes and the overstated influence of religious institutions. We conclude that a denotative analysis of participant-produced visuals ‘beyond words’ represents an untapped opportunity to challenge existing representations and elicit new research directions, which, in turn, require returning to verbal data to be elucidated.