Irene Stengs on a Quarter Century of Research into Contemporary Rituals and Culture

In January 2026, anthropologist Irene Stengs bids farewell to the Meertens Institute, after a quarter century of research in the ethnology department. Her fascination lies with the question of how people express their emotions through material objects, such as flowers, candles, letters or crosses.

Read more: Irene Stengs on a Quarter Century of Research into Contemporary Rituals and Culture

By: Britt van Sloun

In 2002, Irene Stengs joined the Meertens Institute as a researcher, at a time when debates about Europe, immigration and national identity were intensifying. These social tensions formed an important backdrop for her work. From the outset, she focused on ethnological and anthropological research into rituals, material culture and popular cultural practices, with particular attention to how rituals function in modern society.

Over the years, Stengs’ role within the Meertens Institute grew. She became a senior researcher and took on managerial responsibilities, including serving as chair of the research council and head of the ethnology department. Alongside her work at the institute, she was appointed in June 2017 as professor by special appointment in the Anthropology of Ritual and Popular Culture at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Surprises Through Fieldwork

When asked why she enjoys conducting fieldwork, Stengs says she likes being surprised. “Anyone who doesn’t want to be surprised might as well just read books,” she says. On the first day of her fieldwork into the popularity of André Rieu, she fell into conversation with a man on a terrace who turned out to have been Rieu’s ‘violin carrier’ for four years. She had no idea Rieu employed such a person. “Anthropologists go into the field precisely for these unexpected encounters. That’s how you learn about your subject in ways that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.”

Another unexpected and memorable fieldwork moment occurred during research into carnival in Amsterdam. “Together with carnival association De Geuzenkneuters, I arrived singing with a street-cleaning band at the Sloterparkbad swimming pool. Elderly swimmers and pool staff, dressed in carnival costumes, joined in,” says Stengs. “Outside the water, a conga line formed, with some swimmers leaving the pool to join. It was a touching research experience.”

Public Commentary Is Part of the Job

Stengs enjoys sharing knowledge. She is a sought-after expert in newspapers, television and radio programmes, offering commentary on rituals, festivities, traditions, national identity and commemoration culture. “Journalists follow the annual cycle: Christmas, Easter, King’s Day. They ask questions like: ‘Why do we do this?’ I find that question intriguing, because it assumes a homogeneous Netherlands. Yet our research shows there is no single ‘we’.” Sometimes the assumptions are more concrete, such as a question about why Dutch people supposedly don’t wear good rainwear. “That was one of the strangest questions I’ve been asked,” she says. “I don’t even know if it’s true. The waterproof jacket has been around for a very long time, after all.”

In media appearances, she tries to introduce nuance and challenge assumptions. “Not everyone does or thinks the same thing, and that’s impossible anyway,” she says. According to Stengs, public commentary is part of the profession. “Many academics don’t sit in their ivory towers but want to contribute to a broader understanding of culture and identity.”

Ritual as a Mirror of Society

Societal debates about immigration, for instance, prompt people to ask what ‘the Netherlands’ actually means. “In such times, people often reach for symbols and rituals. Festivities, flags and commemorations become moments in which national sentiments are confirmed or called into question,” she explains. As a researcher, she tries to show that such rituals do not only say something about tradition, but especially about change and social tensions. “During a ritual, existing societal issues are often magnified.”

Her curiosity about how rituals reflect feelings and social tensions initially led her to Thailand, where she conducted her doctoral research. She studied the veneration of King Chulalongkorn (Rama V), who had died at the beginning of the twentieth century but was suddenly being celebrated as a cult figure by the end of it. “In a time of globalisation, this king became the symbol of a proud, independent nation,” she says. Central to this is the narrative that Thailand, thanks to this king, was never colonised. “The cult of the king revealed not only pride, but also fear of loss in changing times.”

Sacred Rubbish

Just before Stengs joined the Meertens Institute, Pim Fortuyn was murdered. On television, she watched the memorial rituals at the spot where the politician had been shot. People brought red roses, cigars and bottles of wine. “That struck me, because I had seen the exact same attributes at altars for King Chulalongkorn in Thailand,” she says. “The same ritual objects, but in a completely different context and with different meaning.” That moment marked the beginning of her fascination with the material aspects of memorial culture.

Once an object becomes part of a memorial site, its status changes into emotionally charged commemorative material

This sparked her interest in what we now call roadside memorials. Somewhere in the 1990s, a shift took place. People no longer wanted to grieve privately or in silence for those who had died in the public domain through traffic accidents or violence; instead they wanted to display their emotions and make the loss visible by marking the site of tragedy with flowers, candles, letters or crosses. She refers to the objects left there as ‘sacred rubbish’. Everyday things such as flowers or soft toys acquire a different meaning through ritual action. “Once an object becomes part of a memorial site, its status changes into emotionally charged commemorative material,” Stengs explains. “It lies there in the rain and decays, but it cannot simply be thrown away as rubbish.”

The Meertens Institute Preserves Part of the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Material

In her work, Stengs examines this tension between preserving and discarding: who decides what is kept or designated as rubbish? What are the criteria? There is no protocol for clearing memorial sites. Families, municipalities or institutions must each time decide anew what to do with the objects. “In some cases, part of the material is regarded as historically or culturally valuable. It is then stored in museums or archives, such as the Meertens Institute, where a selection of the Fortuyn memorial material is preserved.” “As a result, this material has acquired a new status as heritage. This makes it easier to discard another part — for example, the deteriorated soft toys.”

Flowers decay, but that does not necessarily mean they are thrown away. There are examples where flowers are composted and then ritually scattered. “A good example is the Pim Fortuyn commemoration ten years after his death, at which the ‘Friends of Pim’ had constructed a fenced-off ‘neo-memorial site’ from objects they had preserved from the 2002 memorial sites — objects that are therefore not in the Meertens collection. A sign on the fence announced that flowers laid there would be composted and then scattered.”

New Forms of the Sacred

Sacred rubbish appeals to Stengs because it evokes a contradiction: how can something that is sacred also be rubbish? “People think they have control over matter,” she says, “but sacred rubbish shows that commemorative material exerts a compelling force: it resists simply being thrown away.” The ‘sacred’ in sacred rubbish shows that sacrality need not be confined to religious frameworks. From a contemporary social-scientific perspective, there is no strict boundary between the religious and the secular. “Secularity is not the absence of belief,” she says, “but encompasses new or different ways of experiencing the sacred.”

Many people in the Netherlands are leaving the church and subsequently creating their own rituals around birth, love and death. In recent years she has studied a variety of examples, including the musical Easter narrative The Passion. In it she sees how old religious themes acquire new meanings. “In The Passion, religion, entertainment and heritage intermingle. The songs are secular, but within the performance they take on an almost sacred power.” Together with Ernst van den Hemel, she examined the symbolism and materiality of The Passion: how meaning is evoked through music, images and emotions. The Passion is nowadays presented primarily as a universal story about connection and friendship, more than as a performance emphasising the religious.

Looking Ahead: Research Does Not Stop at Retirement

Although Stengs is retiring, she will remain active as a guest researcher at the Meertens Institute and as professor emerita at the Vrije Universiteit. She still has a great deal of material about funfairs and home exhibitions that she may yet do something with. “The fact that people call this ‘naff’ or old-fashioned says a great deal about taste, class and identity, and is also part of everyday culture into which relatively little anthropological research has been done.”

Stengs is also interested in the changing relationship between people and trees, a shift that is particularly visible in ritual dealings. For many people, trees are emotional, understanding beings: living, growing and dying. That is to say, people generally enter into a personal relationship with a specific tree, not with ‘all trees’ or ‘the forest’. People sometimes try to keep such trees literally alive through healing rituals, or to let them live on by taking cuttings and growing seedlings, or by making a keepsake from the wood. “In this way, new sacralised objects come into being,” she says. “It is an example of how heritage is made.”

So she is far from finished with research. What will she miss most about her work at the institute? “The interaction with colleagues. The conversations over coffee, a spontaneous exchange of ideas about developments in the world or an unexpected tip are just so valuable.” She speaks enthusiastically about how she always enjoyed the diversity of people she got to work with. “That interplay is what I will really miss,” says Stengs. “Sharing knowledge is multiplying knowledge, and that happens through interaction.”