Overview

La Santa Muerte becomes a lens for understanding how Oaxacans relate to saints, loved ones, and other “special dead.” In Oaxaca, images of saints and loved ones, as well as of victims of political or criminal violence, are seemingly everywhere. While Oaxacans relate to all sorts of “special dead,” they are particularly devoted to La Santa Muerte (Saint Death), a female reaper-like figure whose popularity has risen in tandem with violence throughout Mexico. The Intimacy of Images recontextualizes Oaxacans’ relationships with their “special dead” through the lens of La Santa Muerte, examining how devotees closely interact with what Lamrani terms “intimate images”: not only devotional effigies but also photographs, films, tattoos, and murals, and even dreams and visions. Though Mexicans have a well-known cultural familiarity with death, Lamrani argues that devotion to La Santa Muerte builds upon this intimacy even as it also participates in the production of terror and reflects political and criminal violence. Ultimately, Lamrani finds that these human-image interactions represent more than Catholic devotion; they reveal the secrets of Oaxacan political, religious, and social life, embody changing relationships to mortality and violence, and even offer insight into the practice of anthropology itself.

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9781477330012

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Reviews

Lamrani offers rich insights into the spiritual landscape of Oaxaca, exploring how La Santa Muerte, religious icons of saints and virgins, photos of ancestors on altars, public murals, and tattoos work the magic of transintimacy-connecting images to the physical and spiritual realms they traverse in order to act upon human imaginaries. The Intimacy of Images illuminates the complexity of Mexicans' relationship with death and how the current context of violence is layered upon a long history of intricate networks of meaning and connection across colonial, cultural, geographical, and spiritual boundaries. - Lynn Stephen, University of Oregon, author of We Are the Face of Oaxaca: Testimony and Social Movements Lamrani grounds the symphonic dissonance of her multi-scalar ethnography in a scintillating vortex of images. Scales mean slippages; and slippages reveal an intimacy that transcends scales. Lamrani adroitly navigates this seismic voyage through trauma and tragedy under the grim grin of a sacralized mortality. Her gripping but nuanced narrative transcends the tyranny of categories and borders, revealing how intimacy simultaneously acknowledges and resists the variegated violence that bedevils human existence everywhere. - Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University, author of Anthropology: Theoretical Practice in Culture and Society

Author Information

Myriam Lamrani is an Associate in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, where she previously served as Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow from 2021 to 2024.

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