Working with the image of the Indian shaman as Wild Man, Taussig reveals not the magic of the shaman but that of the politicizing fictions creating the effect of the real. "This extraordinary book . . . will encourage ever more critical and creative explorations."--Fernando Coronil, I]American Journal of Sociology /I] "Taussig has brought a formidable collection of data from arcane literary, journalistic, and biographical sources to bear on . . . questions of evil, torture, and politically institutionalized hatred and terror. His intent is laudable, and much of the book is brilliant,...
Working with the image of the Indian shaman as Wild Man, Taussig reveals not the magic of the shaman but that of the politicizing fictions creating th...
In a series of intriguing essays ranging over terror, State fetishism, shamanic healing in Latin America, homesickness, and the place of the tactile eye in both magic and modernity, anthropologist Michael Taussig puts into representational practice a curious type of engaged writing. Based on a paranoiac vision of social control and its understanding as in a permanent state of emergency leaving no room for contemplation between signs and things, these essays hover between story-telling and high theory and thus create strange new modes of critical discourse. The...
In a series of intriguing essays ranging over terror, State fetishism, shamanic healing in Latin America, homesickness, and the place of the tactile e...
The author describes how through theatres of ecstasy, the State, for the perpetuation of its spiritual authority, needs to tell about itself. Developing concepts of the sacred from Bataille, the post-Surreal College of Sociology, Canetti, Marx, Hobbes and Walter Benjamin, Taussig creates his own theatre of spirit-possession utitlizing popular shrines, official monuments and slogans, money, the police, the freeway system, automobiles, taxis, the stealing of the sword of the state and, through fetishization of Europe's (dead) others, Native Americans and people of African descent.
The author describes how through theatres of ecstasy, the State, for the perpetuation of its spiritual authority, needs to tell about itself. Developi...
Part field diary, part art critique, and part cultural anthropology-- the book offers a glimpse of an aesthetic "other" (the Ishir [Chamacoco] of Parguay), causing us to reexamine Western perspectives on the interpretation of art, religion, and Native American culture.
Part field diary, part art critique, and part cultural anthropology-- the book offers a glimpse of an aesthetic "other" (the Ishir [Chamacoco] of Parg...
In this classic book, Michael Taussig explores the social significance of the devil in the folklore of contemporary plantation workers and miners in South America. Grounding his analysis in Marxist theory, Taussig finds that the fetishization of evil, in the image of the devil, mediates the conflict between precapitalist and capitalist modes of objectifying the human condition. He links traditional narratives of the devil-pact, in which the soul is bartered for illusory or transitory power, with the way in which production in capitalist economies causes workers to become alienated from the...
In this classic book, Michael Taussig explores the social significance of the devil in the folklore of contemporary plantation workers and miners in S...
"I Swear I Saw This" records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig s reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. Taking as a starting point a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006 as well as its caption, I swear I saw this Taussig considers the fieldwork notebook as a type of modernist literature and the place where writers and other creators first work out the imaginative logic of discovery.Notebooks mix the raw material of observation with reverie, juxtaposed, in Taussig s case, with drawings, watercolors, and newspaper cuttings, which blend...
"I Swear I Saw This" records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig s reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels ...
Beauty and the Beastbegins with the question: Is beauty destined to end in tragedy? Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, Michael Taussig scrutinizes the anxious, audacious, and sometimes destructive attempts people make to transform their bodies through cosmetic surgery and liposuction. He balances an examination of surgeries meant to enhance an individual s beauty with an often overlooked counterpart, surgeries performed often on high profile criminals to disguise one s identity. Situating this globally shared phenomenon within the economic, cultural, and political history...
Beauty and the Beastbegins with the question: Is beauty destined to end in tragedy? Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, Michael Taus...
Beauty and the Beastbegins with the question: Is beauty destined to end in tragedy? Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, Michael Taussig scrutinizes the anxious, audacious, and sometimes destructive attempts people make to transform their bodies through cosmetic surgery and liposuction. He balances an examination of surgeries meant to enhance an individual s beauty with an often overlooked counterpart, surgeries performed often on high profile criminals to disguise one s identity. Situating this globally shared phenomenon within the economic, cultural, and political history...
Beauty and the Beastbegins with the question: Is beauty destined to end in tragedy? Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, Michael Taus...
"Mic check Mic check " Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In "Occupy," W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors' lead and perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide. "You break...
"Mic check Mic check " Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches ...
Mic check Mic check Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In Occupy, W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors' lead and perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide....
Mic check Mic check Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing spee...
