Michael Taussig was born in Sydney, Australia, where he studied and practiced medicine, then sociology in the London School of Economics in London in the late sixties, and started fieldwork in Colombia in 1969 on the role of commodity fetishism in expanding agribusiness. He currently teaches writing-and-anthropology in New York City, has written and directed two plays (The Sun Theater, and The Sea Theater), and authored some twelve books including The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America; Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing; The Nervous System; Mimesis and Alterity; Law In A Lawless Land; My Cocaine Museum; and Beauty and the Beast. Just about every summer he hosts with ex-students a writing and ideas at workshop in High Falls, upstate New York.
//
Michael Taussig Avusturalya’nın Sidney şehrinde doğmuştur. Burada tıp okuduktan ve alanında çalıştıktan sonra 1960’larda Londra Ekonomi Okulu’nda sosyoloji okumuş, daha sonra 1969 yılında Colombia’da tarım ticaretinde büyüyen mülk fetişizmi üzerine saha çalışmalarına başlamıştır. Şu anda New York şehrinde yazma ve antropoloji dersleri vermektedir. İki oyun(The Sun Theater ve The Sea Theater) yazıp yönetmiştir. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America; Shamanizm, Colonialism ve the Wild Man: A study in Terror ve Healing; The Nervous System; Mimesis ve Alterity; Law In a Lawless Land; My Cocaine Museum ve Beauty and the Beast kitaplarının yazarıdır. Her yaz eski öğrencileriyle birlikte, New York’un kuzeyindeki High Falls bölgesinde bir yazı ve fikir atölyesi düzenler.
ANIMISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
LE TOUR DE TIERGARTEN
I am cycling through the Tiergarten in Berlin behind Britta and followed by Thomas. It is a cold and rainy day in November. Yellow leaves lie thick on the ground. The way we sit upright but relaxed, breathing easy with our hats of different colors and angles, we are more like machines than people, a collection of levers and joints like the bike itself. Where does the bike bit stop and the human bit begin? We are unified, this machine and I, like the Incan Indians in the Andes of South America were supposed to think of the Spaniards mounted on their horses not as a man on a horse but as a man-horse.
The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, 1980
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 commodities they produce. A new chapter for this anniversary edition features a discussion of Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille that extends Taussig’s ideas about the devil-pact metaphor.
Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man : A Study in Terror and Healing, 1987
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, both in its discovery of how particular people perpetrated evil and others interpreted it."—Stehen G. Bunker, Social Science Quarterly
Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, 1993
In his most ambitious and accomplished work to date, Michael Taussig undertakes a history of mimesis, the practice of imitation, and its relation to alterity, the opposition of Self and Other. Drawing upon such diverse sources as theories of Benjamin, Adorno and Horckheimer, research on the Cuna Indians, and theories of colonialism and postcolonialism, Taussig shows that the history of mimesis is deeply tied to colonialism, and more specifically, to the colonial trade's construction of "savages." With analysis that is vigorous, unorthodox, and often breathtaking, Taussig's cross-cultural discussion of mimesis deepens our understanding of the relationship between ethnography, racism and society.
The Nervous System, 1992
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 Nervous System will appeal to writers, scholars, artists, film makers, and readers interested in critical theory, aesthetics, and politics.
My Cocaine Museum, 2004
In this book, a make-believe cocaine museum becomes a vantage point from which to assess the lives of Afro-Colombian gold miners drawn into the dangerous world of cocaine production in the rain forest of Colombia's Pacific Coast. Although modeled on the famous Gold Museum in Colombia's central bank, the Banco de la República, Taussig's museum is also a parody aimed at the museum's failure to acknowledge the African slaves who mined the country's wealth for almost four hundred years.
TwitterFacebookInstagramYoutubeSpotify