Retired Professor
Ph.D. Cambridge University, 1993
My original research was focused on popular religion in relation to processes of social, political and cultural change in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, especially the cultural and symbolic dimensions of religious practice and performance. Since then my work has developed along two main research lines related to the institutional Roman Catholic Church: the first focus is the Indigenous Theology movement in Mexico as propelled by both conservative and so-called progressive, liberation theological wings of the Church. The second is on dynamics of mediation and the intervention of media technologies in contemporary Church evangelizing strategies, as seen in the celebrations of the Virgen de Guadalupe in Mexico City, and the Señor de los Milagros in Lima, Peru. This project explored the mediatization of Catholicism in terms of how Church framings of Catholicism shape people’s ways of seeing and relating to sacred images and representations—all this in the context of the social and political role of the institutional church at both local, national and global levels. In my thinking about these themes I attend to theoretical frameworks related to the mediation and the politics of knowledge, indigeneity and cultural mixing; ethnography; media and materiality; aesthetic and other cultural dimensions of religious practices; and religion and subjectivity. In addition, building on a long-standing interest in transcultural psychiatry I completed an MA program in counseling psychology in 2017.
Representative Publications:
Books
2022 Eric Hoenes, Marc Loustau, Kristin Norget (eds.) Mediating Catholicism: Religion and Media in Global Catholic Imaginaries (forthcoming, Bloomsbury Press).
2017 Norget, Kristin, Valentina Napolitano and Maya Mayblin (eds.) The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2006 Norget, Kristin. Days of Death, Days of Life: Ritual in the Popular Culture of Oaxaca. NY: Columbia University Press.
Book Chapters
2017 ‘The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Spectacle of Catholic Evangelism in Mexico’. In The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader (University of California Press); 184-200.
2011 ‘Surviving Conservation: La Madre Tierra and Indigenous Moral Ecologies in Oaxaca, Mexico’. In New Natures: Critical Intersections for Environmental Management and Conservation in Latin America, C. Tucker, (ed.), Santa Fe: School of American Research, 87-108.
Articles in Refereed Journals
2021 ‘Mediat(iz)ing Catholicism: Saint, spectacle, and theopolitics in Lima, Peru’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI), 27.4 (December).
2021 ‘Popular-Indigenous Catholicism in southern Mexico’, in Special Issue: ‘Material Religion, Popular Belief and Catholic Devotional Practice in the Age of Vatican II (c. 1948–c.1998): Global Perspectives’, Religions 12: 531.
2021 ‘Blood, Wax and Papal Potencies: Neo-Baroque Catholic Relics in Mexico’. Material Religion, 17(3): 355-380.
2010 ‘A Cacophony of Autochthony: Representing Indigeneity in Oaxacan, Popular Mobilization’, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 15(1); 115-143.