- Titel
- Devotion in the Making
- Untertitel
- An Ethnography of the Veneration of La Santa Muerte in Los Angeles
- Zitierfähige Url:
- https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-1063998
- Datum der Einreichung
- 07.03.2023
- Datum der Verteidigung
- 16.10.2023
- Abstract (EN)
- Shifting away from normative and prescriptive interpretative frameworks as well as nebulous notions of open eclecticism, this thesis gives centre stage to marginalized religious actors’ positionality and agency, their quotidian struggles and negotiations, their commitment in the face of adversity and in the pursuit of their aspirations. La Santa Muerte is the female personification of death venerated as a Catholic saint. Rejected by the Catholic Church as blasphemy, this devotion rose from the margins of Mexico's urban centres during the late twentieth century. With the turn of the millennium, the comparatively obscure set of devotional practices dedicated to this saint exploded into a religious group with transnational reach and visibility. Over the course of the early 2000s, Los Angeles emerged as one of the most important centres for the devotion outside of Mexico, home to several religious spaces dedicated to the saint of death. Throughout its trans-local proliferation, the devotion to La Santa Muerte has revealed itself as a remarkable religious group. It casts Death as a caring protectress of life, remains entrenched within Catholic Christianity yet is shunned as its “other,” focuses on the individual adherent yet thrives in congregation. Even La Santa Muerte herself is both one and many – she is the single constant that binds this devotion together yet stands out as an elusive figure, a morally ambivalent Grim Reaperess invested with a multitude of divergent meanings. Her veneration has proven to be exceptionally malleable, easily adaptable to local conditions and the needs of the moment, reinforced further through a characteristic absence of centralized doctrine or hierarchy, formal institutional frameworks or organizational ties. And yet, in spite of its rapid expansion and open heterogeneity, it has managed to retain a strong sense of community, a unity of purpose and meaning, and a notable consistency in its practices and imaginations. This peculiar conjunction of plurality and consistency is key to understanding the devotion to La Santa Muerte. A rapidly growing body of academic publications has emerged in response to the saint's spectacular rise to popularity and public visibility. However, again and again, the group's characteristic ambiguities have proven to be a unique challenge for scholars that seek to explain what this devotion is and why it rose to popularity. The devotion to La Santa Muerte defies analyses that rely on prescriptive and normative frameworks for the study of religion, and it irritates any attempt to grasp it as a single, externally bounded and internally homogeneous group. Throughout existing scholarly contributions, the saint of death remains elusive and protean, and her veneration both captivates and confounds in its awkward multiplicity. Meeting the challenge this devotion embodies calls for a different approach to its lived plurality, a step away from the search for clear identities and causal explanations. This thesis shifts away from attempts at discerning what the veneration of La Santa Muerte is or why it rose to popularity. Instead, it investigates how this devotion happens and becomes tangible as event, through the quotidian practices of the saint's adherents. In the pursuit of this goal, the ethnography follows La Santa Muerte's trans-local proliferation into the urban expanse of Los Angeles, and moves between four different religious spaces dedicated to her veneration, giving centre stage to resident religious professionals and fledgeling congregations. At first glance, these templos (“temples”) can seem as protean as their patron saint. They are not only storefront churches and public shrines, but also places of business, stores and healers' offices. The devotion to La Santa Muerte binds these otherwise emphatically independent religious spaces together, and at the heart of each of them stands a principal altar with a lavishly decorated statue of their saint. These are the material and social spaces where devotees congregate to forge and nurture their relationship with the saint of death, to seek her aid and support, to express their gratitude and ask for her mercy. The proprietors of the templos are vital gatekeepers for newcomers and guides for congregating adherents. Their most commonly used title was “Profesor/a” (“teacher” or “instructor”), and they were at once local leaders, immigrant entrepreneurs, teachers, healers, store owners, ritual specialists, and counsellors. Focusing on the templos of Los Angeles, their local congregations and the mediations of their Profesores, this thesis foregrounds adherents' everyday practices, their “art of doing” that creates and shapes the locally situated assemblages of their devotion. It shows how adherents come together and enact their devotion as something tangible and sense-able, even if their endeavours always remain precarious, susceptible to ongoing contestations and compromises. Through this lens, this ethnography locates the crucible of this devotion in the personal commitment of adherents, their dedication and solidarity in the pursuit of their aspirations and in the face of everyday adversity. The findings of this ethnography underscore the need for a shift in perspective that gives emphasis to marginalized actors' positionality, agency, and creativity, and they call for a keen sensitivity towards relationships of power and intersecting ascriptions of identity, alterity, and belonging. This challenges scholars to divest analyses from a reliance on prescriptive notions of fidelity and piety, to avoid taking as a given any a priori-differentiations between “official” and “folk religion.” Established liturgy, doctrine, and tradition had significant impact on the emergent formations of this devotion in Los Angeles. However, rather than inviolable prescriptions, the adherents of La Santa Muerte engaged with them as shared and malleable frameworks that they adapted, amended, discarded and returned to as needed, always in accordance with their own sense of devotion, their convictions, hopes, aspirations, problems, and concrete needs. Its only from the specific vantage point of entrenched and normative claims to authority and fidelity that their practices can appear puzzling or contradictory. These insights contribute directly to academic debates that stress the increasing visibility and diversity of religious actors, and highlight their inextricable entanglements with political, societal, and economic conditions. It speaks to the contemporary pluralization of religious life within complex urban settings, particularly in relation to trans-local mobility and the proliferation of digital media. Grasping locally situated religious formations as the contingent and transient outcome of actors’ active positionings, everyday interactions and negotiations, offers a valuable shift of perspective to the scholarly engagement with this rising multiplicity of religious groups and movements. Thinking through the working arrangements of everyday practice gives prominence to the ways how marginalized actors actively engage with majority groups and existing hierarchies, entrenched notions of tradition and fidelity, as well as the political and economic conditions of their lives.
- Freie Schlagwörter (EN)
- Santa Muerte, urban religion, everyday practice, lived religion, Catholicism
- Klassifikation (DDC)
- 900
- Den akademischen Grad verleihende / prüfende Institution
- Universität Leipzig, Leipzig
- Version / Begutachtungsstatus
- angenommene Version / Postprint / Autorenversion
- URN Qucosa
- urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-1063998
- Veröffentlichungsdatum Qucosa
- 05.08.2026
- Dokumenttyp
- Dissertation
- Sprache des Dokumentes
- Englisch
- Lizenz / Rechtehinweis
CC BY 4.0