Death in the Flesh: Santa Muerte Tattoos and the Anthropology of Mortality (Anthropology Colloquium Series)
This lecture examines the significance of tattooing Santa Muerte, Mexico’s folk saint often dubbed Holy Death in English, onto the flesh of her devotees. With an estimated 12 million devotees worldwide, Santa Muerte, who resembles the Grim Reaper, is among the fastest-growing new religious movements in the Americas. Drawing on ethnographic accounts of migration, imprisonment, poverty, and bereavement, this lecture explores tattoos not only as flesh offerings to the Saint of Death and expressions of devotion, but also as embodied philosophies of mortality. Through a decolonial lens, the tattooed body becomes a living shrine to Santa Muerte, in which death is understood not as separate from life, but as ever-present within it and within us.
Bio:
Dr. Kate Kingsbury is a socio-cultural anthropologist who earned her doctorate from Oxford University and is currently a lecturer at the University of British Columbia. Her research explores religion, gender, sexuality, violence, and death. Her current ethnographic work focuses on Santa Muerte devotion and Mexican folk religion through a decolonial approach to the study of death and the sacred.
- Date:
- Wednesday, October 7, 2026
- Time:
- 11:00am - 12:30pm
- Room:
- 548 and 552 - Presentation Room
- Location:
- Koerner Library
- Audience:
- All Faculty Graduate Undergraduate
- Categories:
- Presentations Research Commons Series
- Presenter(s):
- Dr. Kate Kingsbury