Course description

Popular Catholicism is alive and well in Mexico, where devotees often talk about the supernatural beings present in their daily lives, often saints, simply as their images. This course examines devotion to and through images—three-dimensional effigies, prayer cards, dreams, visions, art, and representations in popular culture. By examining what an image is and how it operates for devotees and other audiences, the students of this course are encouraged to explore visual methodologies and alternative modes of anthropological thinking to consider devotion in Mexico and Latin America. Such a focus on images grounds our examination in a framework where the image becomes an ethnographic object and a mode of anthropological inquiry. It also considers other types of images to ask how popular religion connects to other social issues, thus reflecting political dynamics. In an era of proliferation of visual content, the question becomes: what can an anthropology of images bring to our understanding of devotion in connection to other domains of social life? What can an anthropology of the visual offer to the anthropological study of popular religion? Foregrounding a scholarship that traverses visual, cultural, religious studies, and anthropology, this course explores themes such as popular religion, intimacy, nationalism, and political violence in Latin America. Readings draw mainly from anthropology and ethnographic works on popular Catholicism, nationalism, politics, visual studies, and cultural theory.

Instructors

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