Michael Taussig (b. 1940) is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University. His ethnography The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America draws upon Marxist theories and explores the views of labourers working under an imposed capitalist system.

Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987)

In Michael Taussig's seminal work, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, he leads us down a path that examines the project of Colonialism as it was carried out in South America. He first creates a space of an all too real and present terror followed by a process of healing that we as the reader are ourselves supposed to follow. Through the weaving and interlocking of literature, first-hand accounts, and his ethnographic work Taussig creates, “a mode of perception-a way of seeing through a way of talking- figuring the world through dialogue that comes alive with sudden transformative force in the crannies of everyday life’s pauses and juxtapositions…It is an irregular, quavering image of hope, this inscription on the edge of official history” (p. 209). In both following his text and allowing ourselves to be absorbed into it as it develops, Taussig himself comes to take on the role as the shaman, and we readers the role of the patient.

Taussig introduces his subject matter in his author’s note, stating that the purpose of his text is to examine, "the politics of epistemic murk and the fiction of the real, in the creation of Indians, in the role of the myth and magic in colonial violence as much as in its healing, and in the way that healing, and in the way that healing can mobilize terror in order to subvert it…through the tripping up of power in its own disorderliness. That is why my subject is not the truth of being but the social being of truth, not whether facts are real but what the politics of their interpretation and representation are" (xiii, italics added). As stated above the author begins this discussion first by looking at acts of terror and the “space of death” created there within. His case of terror is that of the rubber trade in the Putumayo river area of Colombia of the late 19th and early 20th century. Much of these acts of terror stemmed from British rubber barons of the time trying to impose a capitalist mode of production onto an indigenous, “Wild”, population still living under an economy based upon a gift/exchange system. In the eyes of the British, who violently pressured the natives to extract rubber from the rubber trees of the area, the Indians, “would not work appropriately”. The baron’s reaction to indigenous resistance was to carry out horrific acts of terror on the minds and bodies of the local population, which Taussig thoroughly documents through providing first-hand accounts from the time. Within the “space of death” created in the Putumayo also came the death of communal memory and objectivity. Terror resulted in a, “society shrouded in an order so orderly that its chaos was far more intense than anything that had preceded it- a death-space in the land of the living where torture’s certain uncertainty fed the great machinery of the arbitrariness of power” (4).

Interestingly enough the powerful force of healing develops from the same space created by the other powerful force of terror: “Shamanic healing…like the culture of terror, also develops its force from the colonially generated wildness of the epistemic murk of the space of death” (127). In his section on healing Taussig relates his ethnographic work with José García, an Indian shaman of the Putumayo, during the 1970’s. Taussig is particularly compelled by the fact that many peasant colonists seek out José García to be healed. He notes that to the magic already possessed by shamans like García, “colonialism fused its own magic, the magic of primitivism” (216). Here Taussig is speaking on how the shaman has been able to harness the “mystery” and “wildness” projected onto him by Western “civilization” in his practice as a shaman. He goes on to write that this, “folding of the underworld of the conquering society into the culture of the conquered not as an organic synthesis or ‘syncretism’…but as a chamber of mirrors reflecting each stream’s perception of the other” (218). In what does the healing power of wildness lie? Taussig answers this question, stating, "Wildness challenges the unity of the symbol, the transcendent totalization binding the image to that which it represents. Wildness pries open this unity and in its place creates slippage…Wildness is the death space of signification.” (219)

“So it has been through the sweep of colonial history where the colonizers provided the colonized with the left-handed gift of the image of the wild man- a gift whose powers the colonizers would be blind to, were it not for the reciprocation of the colonized, bringing together in the dialogical imagination of colonization an image that wrests from civilization its demonic power.” (467)

The Nervous System (1992)

Written in 1992, the Nervous System is an insightful anthropological work comprised of nine essays. Michael Taussing sets out on a journey to explore and describe various forces that shape and mold our present society. He tries to explore the process through which we commodify the state and in that way transfer the power to it. Taussig shows how the state uses forces such as violence or media control to consolidate its power over the people. He persuasively argues that we live in a state of emergency that is not ‘an exception but the rule’. To show the universality of the nervous system he takes his reader through the heights of Macchu Picchu, the world of Cuna shamans and through the pale world of New York’s hospital.

Mimesis and Alterity (1993)

Mimesis and Alterity looks primarily at the way that people from different cultures experience the two themes of the book – how we come to adopt or assimilate another’s nature or culture (mimesis), and also how we come to distance ourselves from it (alterity). The primary object of study is the "legendary white indian," a population also known as the Cuna. The Cuna have adopted a set of wooden figurines for magical ritual that look remarkably like white colonists, to the point of sometimes being recognizable as figures from history that traveled through those parts. If you asked one of the Cuna about it, they would likely deny all connection between the two, creating an epistemic dilemma where something that may appear obvious to Anthropologists is anything but obvious to those they study. Another noteworthy peculiarity of Cuna culture that Michael Taussig mentions is the way in which the Cuna have adopted, in their traditional molas, images from western pop culture, including a distorted reflection of the Jack Daniel’s bottle, and also a popular iconic image from the early twentieth century, The Talking Dog, used in advertising gramophones. Taussig criticizes Anthropology for simply reducing another culture's history to one in which the Cuna had simply come across the white colonists in the past, were impressed by their large ships and exotic technologies, and mistook them for Gods. For Michael Taussig, this very reduction of the Other is suspect in itself, and through Mimesis and Alterity, argues from both sides, demonstrating why exactly Anthropologists have come to reduce the Cuna culture in this way, and the value of this perspective, at the same time as defending the independence of lived culture from Anthropological reductionism.

Publications

• The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, 1980
• Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man : A Study in Terror and Healing, 1987
• The Nervous System, 1992
• Mimesis and Alterity; A Particular History of the Senses, 1993
• The Magic of the State, 1997
• Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative, 1999
• Law in a Lawless Land : Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia, 2003
• My Cocaine Museum, 2004
• Walter Benjamin's Grave, 2006

External links

• Taussig Bio page at Columbia University

Living people | Anthropologists