La Santa Muerte in Mexico: History, Devotion and Society ed. by Wil G. Pansters (review)

This collection of scholarly essays assessing the history, meaning, and impact of the Santa Muerte cult in Mexico is a welcome addition to the burgeoning field of Santa Muerte studies. The outgrowth of a 2014 conference hosted at the University of Groningen, the papers treat a variety of topics focused on the saint’s Mexican presence—from tattoos as altars made of human flesh to the way that those who are most vulnerable “use” the dead to reassert a measure of control over their lives. Although only two of the contributors are Mexican, the rest coming from Europe and the United States, the book is informed throughout by fieldwork and ethnographic observation. An afterword provides a helpful summation of the authors’ arguments. The introduction, however, written by editor Wil Pansters, is really the book’s heart and soul, making up more than a quarter of the text. In it he presents a general overview of Santa Muerte along with a helpful historiographical discussion that notes points of conflict in research, past and present. He assesses current membership figures—if we can call loose commitment or devotion to the saint “membership”—at a modest 1.5 million in Central America and the United States, far less than the 10 to 12 million figure offered by others. Perhaps one of the most contentious issues is the presumed genealogical connection between the current cult and precolonial indigenous traditions, which Pansters and other contributors deny, or at least downplay and put into a more complicated framework of revitalization movements, occult economics, and/or sociopolitical conditions. Although the book may strike some readers as narrow in scope, it actually opens up reflection upon new religions with its considerations of material religion, millennial capitalism, production of meaning, and visual cultures of terror. Highly recommended.