Bøker av 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.

A picture book to be shared and savored by both children and adults: a journey into a wondrous world colored by the stories we might choose to tell about it.A full moon after a wasp attack, poppies from a train, panning for gold in the River Cesecito, a bountiful pumpkin harvest . . . . Postcards for Mia is a joyful collection of hand-drawn and -painted postcards sent by anthropologist Michael Taussig to his granddaughter, Mia. From airports in New York to cemeteries in Colombia, confrontations with wild boars to conversations with well-dressed koalas, Postcards for Mia is a picture book to be shared and savored by both children and adults, a journey into a wondrous world colored by the stories we might choose to tell about it. Anthropologist Michael Taussig is renowned for his visionary explorations of color, magic, and myth, founded upon over forty years’ experience with communities in Colombia and Venezuela as well as research visits to Palestine, Kurdish Syria, Kabul, Alice Springs, Sydney, Venice, and Paris. This, his first fully illustrated picture book, provides a remarkably personal insight into Taussig’s unique way of seeing and responding to the world. Drawing observation and reverie into vibrant and humorous acts of vivid storytelling, this delightful scrapbook documents the warmth and excitement of an inter-generational exchange, inspired by the simple pleasure of recounting the excitement of one’s travels.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.