Stanley Brandes examines the Day of the Dead in Mexico in order to show that what seems to be a fundamental response to a universal predicament is subject to the vagaries of time and place. Mexicans have promoted the Day of the Dead as exhibiting the carefree and jocular attitudes to death you might expect among peoples for whom death is an everyday part of life, and increasingly so as the incidence of premature death among them has fallen precipitously. North Americans have colluded with this view, and even adopted the Day of the Dead for themselves as a counterweight to the hushing up of death in North America as a purely private matter. It is supposed that down there, on the other side of the Rio Grande del Norte, they celebrate death publicly, whereas in the United States they suppress it and allow grief to fester. Down there you find a wisdom and therapeutically efficacious rituals lost to contemporary sophisticates.

In other words the Mexican Day of the Dead, with roots maybe in pre-Columbian times, is advertised as "authentic" folklore, both by Mexicans, among them intellectuals and journalists, and North Americans, who yearn for the untainted expressions found in an older culture than their own.

Stanley Brandes was himself just that kind of North American when he first went to Mexico as a budding ethnographer. At one and the same time he shied away from cadavers and was shocked at the way commerce had taken over and promoted an authentic folk ritual for profit and as a tourist attraction. This, he thought then, was cultural sacrilege.

Now he concludes there is no authentic core of the Day of the Dead to be located and suitably purified of adventitious accretions. The ritual has always adapted itself to different political and economic circumstances, and just as pilgrimage in the past mingled with money making, so does the Day of the Dead. It is what you expect in a global society where borders are porous and tourists ubiquitous. Who would begrudge local Mexican artisans a quick buck made selling the sweets that accompany the ritual, along with the figurines, skulls, and skeletons?

At the same time the delusion of authenticity and the pursuit of purity serve a purpose. So too does the stereotype of the macho Mexican, indifferent alike to life and death. Though both the idea of the authentic and the promotion of the stereotype are misleading, they define a national identity, marking off what it is to be Mexican rather than North American. It seems the more relentlessly identities are threatened by globalization and by the tourist gaze, the more insistently the idea of a genuine core to culture and a specific national identity has to be promoted, however stereotypical and remote from life—and death—as actually experienced.

Brandes shows that even within Mexico attitudes to the Day of the Dead vary enormously, for example among the different groups of indigenous peoples. He also shows that when it comes to personal deaths and the rituals that accompany and express taking leave of loved ones, Mexicans are just as grief-stricken as North Americans. It is only on these two (or three) days at the end of October and the beginning of November that the semblance of an easy and jocular acquaintance with death is cultivated. At that time the Day (or Days) of the Dead becomes the badge of Mexican national and cultural identity, especially by way of contrast to the overweening identity north of the border. That is why journalists and archbishops alike defend the Day of the Dead against elements borrowed from the United States, in particular the rituals of Halloween. One archbishop denounced Halloween as a pagan intrusion into a Roman Catholic festival, even though in practice the masses prescribed for All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day are not all that central to what is in effect a Mexican national celebration.

That underlines an important feature of religion outside Protestant cultures, where going to church for set services and knowing one's Bible are not always core features of religious identity, or what the French call appartenance. In the Catholic south, whether in the Mediterranean or in Latin America, as well as in the Orthodox east, religious feeling and "belief" (if that is the right word) often elude the questions and the statistical apparatus of the sociologist. Thus in Russia, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania, where there is clearly a substantial revival even according to standard sociological criteria, it is not to be measured by adherence to dogma or knowledge of what that dogma teaches. The institutional Church may have dogmatic criteria and a strict sense of priestly character and authority, but much of the appropriation of Christianity takes place extramurally, often away from any clerical supervision, and includes all kinds of "sacred" elements mixed in with the appropriation of Christianity. As in the east and south of Europe, so in central and south America.

However, something of the sterner Protestant understanding of what it is to be Christian emerges in Brandes' extensive discussion of the dissemination and appropriation of the Day of the Dead in North America, in particular as part of the multicultural agenda promoted in the schools. Whereas religion in schools may be banned as divisive and contrary to the separation of Church and state, "culture" may be promoted as part of a proper acquaintance with other ways of life. The result is the appearance in schools of a cultural mélange offensive to Protestants, and especially to evangelicals who take their religion seriously. In England at least that means the religious inheritance of the majority is occluded to make way for sundry colorful exotica. Brandes characterizes evangelicals as trying to turn back the tide, and (I guess) has little sympathy with their protest or with their kind of Protestantism. Yet the underlying issues raised by such versions of the multiculturalist agenda need more rigorous analysis than they currently receive. The smuggling in of a religious relativism under the guise of cultural studies or anthropology lacks philosophical warrants to say the least.

Another aspect of Latin cultures illustrated by the Day of the Dead is anti-clericalism and political cynicism. The ritual is the occasion for political and anti-clerical poems and satire, hence a useful vehicle for peaceful political protest. Indeed, in an important sense the Day of the Dead is an anti-rite. The theme of death the equalizer has never lacked a political overtone, as is very clear from the medieval iconography of the Dance of Death.

In this copiously illustrated book Brandes presents an ethnography based on many years of field work. It lies firmly in the ethnographic tradition of the local study, in this case of the role of religious ritual in the liturgical calendar of Mexican national identity. That kind of strategic choice means that he mostly eschews comparison, even the obvious internal comparison with the role of the Virgin of Guadalupe in sustaining Mexican unity and identity. Beyond that there is no treatment of a highly relevant cult of the dead in relation to social power in Andean societies. Occasionally Brandes glances in the direction of historical studies, for example, Ariès on death in the Middle Ages, or anthropological classics such as Maurice Bloch on the treatment of death in Madagascar, and he briefly touches on the monuments and ceremonies commemorating the war dead in the two world wars and since. But these glancing asides do not go on to raise the question as to how close or distant such comparisons may be.

Picking up on Brandes' transatlantic aside, as an Englishman I couldn't help reflecting on how different post-Protestant England is in these matters of identity and religion from either Mexico or the United States. Remembrance Day on November 11 is celebrated with religious ceremonies in Whitehall and in every local community as a kind of national elegy for the pity and waste of war, but has little to do with national identity, at least nowadays. That can be left to the recent efflorescence of St. George's red cross flag against the background of the Football World Cup. As for All Hallows' Eve and All Saints' Day, there are solemn requiems in some English churches to recollect the communion of saints, and very much apart from that, the growth of some quasi-pagan practices with an unpleasantly exploitative undercurrent. My own childhood and that of my children did not include "trick or treat," but it seems we have to a large extent imported Halloween from the United States just as the Mexicans have, though without much consequent resentment over a loss of identity. As ever, the invention and re-invention of tradition goes on apace.

In England we also lag behind in mortuary chic. The New York Times for July 27, 2006, described what it headlined as "the Heyday of the Dead" where (I quote) "with the full force of the American consumer marketing establishment, the skull has lost virtually all of its fearsome outsider meaning to become the Happy Face of the 2000s." Our contribution seems to be what the same article advertises as a forthcoming skull cast in platinum by Damien Hurst and studded with eight thousand diamonds. So far as I know psychologists in England have not solemnly pondered the role of Halloween in assisting child development, and lesbians and gays have not seized the opportunity to have a special Halloween parade. Yet. But who knows what "tradition" has in store for us?

David Martin is honorary professor in the Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, and emeritus professor of sociology at the London School of Economics. He is the author most recently of On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Ashgate).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.