Myriam Lamrani | The Conversation: ‘Only death can protect us’: How the folk saint La Santa Muerte reflects violence in Mexico
The Department of Anthropology at Harvard University is pleased to share a recent publication in The Conversation by Postdoctoral Fellow Myriam Lamrani.
Lamrani's piece, titled “‘Only death can protect us’: How the folk saint La Santa Muerte reflects violence in Mexico,” explores the growing devotion to La Santa Muerte and what it reveals about contemporary understandings of death, belief, and security in Mexico. It examines the saint’s cultural history, her expanding role among diverse communities, and the broader social conditions that shape her significance today.
This piece is also available in Spanish here.
Myriam Lamrani is a visual anthropologist and anthropologist of religion of Moroccan, Portuguese, and Spanish heritage. Her research lies at the intersection of political violence, visual anthropology, and religious devotion, with a particular focus on the affective power of images. She is the incoming co-editor of Visual Anthropology Review and, currently, an Associate in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. She was awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute’s J.B. Donne Prize Essay Prize on the Anthropology of Art (2019). Her first monograph, The Intimacy of Images: Saints, Death, and Devotion to La Santa Muerte in Oaxaca (University of Texas Press, 2025), is the first ethnographic study in English dedicated to the cult of La Santa Muerte.