Michael T. Taussig

A Study in Colonialism, and Terror and the Wild Man Healing

Shamanism

In this classic book, Taussig explores the social significance of the devil in the folklore of contemporary plantation workers and miners in South America. A new chapter for this anniversary edition features a discussion of Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille that extends some of the ideas discussed in the original text.

The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

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.

Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative

Defacement

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A Particular History of the Senses

Mimesis and Alterity

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

A Study in Terror and Healing

Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man

Laurence Kardish

Aernout Mik

Edited by Laurence Kardish. Text by Laurence Kardish, Kelly Sidley, Michael T. Taussig.

Simryn Gill

"Becoming Palm is the outcome of a conversation between two friends, artist Simryn Gill and anthropologist Michael Taussig, addressing the complexities of palm oil and "the enormous transformations, human, and ecological, that this crop engenders" (Taussig) in two disparate geographical locations, Southeast Asia and South America"--Publisher's website.

Simryn Gill, Michael Taussig ; Editors: Ute Meta Bauer, Anca Rujoiu

Becoming Palm

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.

Michael T. Taussig

Books

Your next favorite book is out there