Abstract
Over the last decade and a half, the cult of La Santa Muerte has grown rapidly in Mexico and the USA. Today, tens of thousands of people share a somewhat uniform approach to La Santa Muerte. They widely agree on approaching death, in the form of a generous Catholic-like saint, through popular forms of vows (mandas in Spanish), by attending public rosaries and Masses at street altars, and by constructing and maintaining home altars. But how did this worship take these by-and-large popular Catholic approaches to saints and combine them in a rather uniform body of religious practice? And why has the cult not yet developed into an organized congregation with a central authority and approved doctrines, given that so many believers regularly meet and worship the same image in similar ways?
In this article, I delve into the popular Catholic nature of the cult and explore the whys and wherefores of this religious uniformity and lack of organizational coherence from the inside. Instead of confirming the common tale among devotees that the images of La Santa Muerte were brought out of the cupboard and into the street in 2001 after decades in hiding, I argue that the popular image of her moved simultaneously out into the streets and into devotees’ homes. This exploration is principally ethnographically-driven,1 but draws as well on both classic and more recent anthropological research on exchange (Sahlins 1974, Lomnitz 2005b, and Graeber 2014) and popular Catholicism (Foster 1979, Gudeman 1988, Coleman and Eade 2004, Mayblin 2010, Lebner 2012, Bandak 2017). The main finding is that the dyadic exchanges (also called mandas) between devotees and saints, practiced throughout Latin America in popular Catholicism, have developed into an unusually strong family commitment within this cult. I suggest that this popular Catholic ‘socialization’ of the saint into the family has extended to the organization of the cult itself, thus distinguishing it from cults devoted to other saints. The familial form upon which devotees have built their centers of worship also entails family conflicts that continuously split these centers, only to see them blossom into similar centers of worship elsewhere.
In this article, I delve into the popular Catholic nature of the cult and explore the whys and wherefores of this religious uniformity and lack of organizational coherence from the inside. Instead of confirming the common tale among devotees that the images of La Santa Muerte were brought out of the cupboard and into the street in 2001 after decades in hiding, I argue that the popular image of her moved simultaneously out into the streets and into devotees’ homes. This exploration is principally ethnographically-driven,1 but draws as well on both classic and more recent anthropological research on exchange (Sahlins 1974, Lomnitz 2005b, and Graeber 2014) and popular Catholicism (Foster 1979, Gudeman 1988, Coleman and Eade 2004, Mayblin 2010, Lebner 2012, Bandak 2017). The main finding is that the dyadic exchanges (also called mandas) between devotees and saints, practiced throughout Latin America in popular Catholicism, have developed into an unusually strong family commitment within this cult. I suggest that this popular Catholic ‘socialization’ of the saint into the family has extended to the organization of the cult itself, thus distinguishing it from cults devoted to other saints. The familial form upon which devotees have built their centers of worship also entails family conflicts that continuously split these centers, only to see them blossom into similar centers of worship elsewhere.
| Original language | Danish |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | La Santa Muerte in Mexico : History; Devotion and Society |
| Editors | Wil G. Pansters |
| Number of pages | 157 |
| Place of Publication | Albuquerque |
| Publisher | University of New Mexico Press |
| Publication date | 10 Aug 2019 |
| Pages | 136 |
| Chapter | 5 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-0-8263-6081-6 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-0-8263-6082-3 |
| Publication status | Published - 10 Aug 2019 |