#  Myriam Lamrani | The Intimacy of Images 

 





May 15, 2025

 

 

The Department of Anthropology at Harvard University is pleased to share that [Myriam Lamrani](https://anthropology.fas.harvard.edu/people/myriam-lamrani) has a new publication!

   ![Photo of Myriam Lamrani. Photo credit noted in bottom right of image.](/sites/g/files/omnuum6776/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2025-05/Myriam%20Portrait.jpg?itok=j2mQdSDz) 

 

  
Lamrani's newly published book, *The Intimacy of Images*, is based on extensive fieldwork in Mexico. It examines Oaxacan devotees’ close relationships with death and their “special dead”—saints and dear departed—through devotion to La Santa Muerte and how people engage with what Lamrani calls their “intimate images”: effigies, photographs, films, art, tattoos, dreams, and visions. She traces the trajectories of these images in comparison with the cult of the saints in Orthodox Greece and the Muslim world, following their indigenous and colonial roots into transnational circuits. Drawing from anthropology, visual studies, and affect theory, Lamrani considers how this death imagery fosters intimate, shifting ties across personal, political, and religious life in a context of violence. She theorizes this as transintimacy—a multiscalar lens on images, devotion, politics, and the practice of anthropology itself.  
  
[**Learn more.**](https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477330029/)



 

 

 



 

 

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