Bøger af Michael Taussig

A new collection of essays reflecting on the centrality of writing anthropological practice from one of the discipline's most influential thinkers. Michael Taussig's work is known for its critical insights and bold, experimental style. In the eleven essays in this new collection, Taussig reflects on the act of writing itself, demonstrating its importance for anthropological practice and calling for the discipline to keep experiential knowledge from being extinguished as fieldnotes become scholarship. Setting out to show how this can be done, And the Garden Is You exemplifies a form of exploratory writing that preserves the spontaneity of notes scribbled down in haste. In these essays, the author's reflections take us from his childhood in Sydney to trips to Afghanistan, Colombia, Finland, Italy, Turkey, and Syria. Along the way, Taussig explores themes of fabulation and provocation that are central to his life's work, in addition to the thinkers dearest to him--Bataille, Benjamin, Burroughs, and Nietzsche, among others. This collection is vintage Taussig, bound to interest longtime readers and newcomers alike.

The town needs to get 300 coffins ready. Heads Up! The priest better be ready to work overtime. -flier from Colombian paramilitaries announcing their arrivalIn January 2003, U.S. troops were sent to Colombia to train army units engaged in a bloody civil war, deepening a multibillion-dollar American commitment that makes that country the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid.Despite the potential for disaster embodied in the U.S.'s looming entanglement with another jungle war, America's role in Colombia has received little critical media attention. The interlacing of terror, drugs and oil with endemic political instability makes the country a likely international flashpoint in the near future.In this stunning account of Colombian violence and disorder, acclaimed anthropologist Michael Taussig recounts two weeks in a village under siege by paramilitaries. Routinely visited by autodefensas brandishing weapons and a laptop containing a list of names, victims are rounded up, tortured, and killed, their bodies left on display as a warning to others. In his diary of the limpieza (the "cleaning"), Taussig offers unusual insight into the nature of Colombia's present peril and a nuanced account of the human consequences of a disintegrating state.

In his usual incantatory style, Taussig takes on palm oil, one of the most perniciously exploitative commodities in our world today.

Features three essays that engage with the extraordinary Occupy Wall Street 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.

Begins with a question: Is beauty destined to end in tragedy? Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, the author scrutinizes the anxious, audacious, and sometimes destructive attempts people make to transform their bodies through cosmetic surgery and liposuction.

Defacement asks what happens when something precious is despoiled. In specifying the human face as the ideal type for thinking through such violation, this book raises the issue of secrecy as the depth that seems to surface with the tearing of surface.

A meditation on the mysteries of color and the fascination they provoke. It uses color to explore further dimensions of what the author calls 'the bodily unconscious' in an age of global warming. Drawing on classic ethnography as well as the work of Benjamin, Burroughs, and Proust, it takes up the notion that color invites the viewer into images.

Records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig's reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. This title exhibits Taussig's characteristic verve and intellectual audacity, that is combined with a revelatory sense of intimacy.

In a series of intriguing essays, Taussig hovers between story-telling and high theory and thus creating strange new modes of critical discourse.

The Magic of the State focuses on the theatre of spirit possession at a Spirit Queen's enchanted mountain where the dead-Blacks and Indians-Europe's fetishized others-pass into the bodies of the living.

Originally published: 1993. With new preface.

Offers a penetrating insight into the nature of Colombia's peril. In a nuanced account of the human consequences of a disintegrating state, the author chronicles two weeks in a small town in Colombia's Cauca Valley taken over by paramilitaries that brazenly assassinate adolescent gang members.

Looks at the interaction between civilized and primitive people in Colombia, examines the role of the shaman, and discusses healing practices in the jungle.

Taussig undertakes a history of the mimetic faculty. Using anthropological theory and the ideas of Benjamin, Adorno and Horckheimer the author analyses mimesis across time and cultures.