Myriam Lamrani | Book Talk: "The Intimacy of Images: Saints, Death, and Devotion to La Santa Muerte in Oaxaca"

In Oaxaca, images of saints, loved ones, and victims of political and criminal violence are everywhere. Oaxacans cultivate relationships with “special dead,” including La Santa Muerte, a female personification of death whose popularity has grown alongside escalating violence across Mexico. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork, Myriam Lamrani explores how people engage intimately with these images of death and the dead, from saintly effigies to photographs, reconsidering Mexico’s intimate association with death amid ongoing violence. Through the concept of intimacy, she asks what an image is and what it can do, what these encounters reveal about how people live with death and violence, and what they might teach us about the practice of anthropology itself.

ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKER

Myriam Lamrani is a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, where she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow. She is co-editor-in-chief of Visual Anthropology Review. Her interdisciplinary work in visual anthropology examines the anthropology of the state, religion, and violence, and has appeared in The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, American Ethnologist, and Anthropological Quarterly. She co-won the JB Donne Essay Prize in the Anthropology of Art. Her monograph, The Intimacy of Images: Saints, Death, and Devotion to La Santa Muerte in Oaxaca, was co-awarded the 2026 Edie Turner First Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology.

This event is co-organized with the Department of Anthropology.