Michael Taussig

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[About a year ago I began reading about Colombia's indigenous peoples in an
attempt to analyze the tragic murder of 3 USA activists by the FARC. This
would have been a chapter in an ongoing project about Marxism and the
American Indian. When I posted a query on a scholarly mailing list for
sources, Michael Taussig's "Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A
Study in Terror and Healing" was recommended. I read the book in its
entirety, only out of morbid fascination. While starting off plausibly
enough about the heroic efforts of gay Irish revolutionary Roger Casement
on behalf of the Indians of Putumayo, the book soon descended into
something very closely resembling the elaborate hoax perpetrated by Carlos
Casteñada in "Teachings of Don Juan". Both Taussig and Casteñada attempted
to get into the "primitive mind" in typical 1960s fashion with predictable
results.]

NY Times, April 21, 2001

Anthropology's Alternative Radical

By EMILY EAKIN

Among students at Columbia University, Michael Taussig has a glamorous
reputation. An anthropologist who specializes in South America, he has hung
out with shamans and tripped on yagé, a potent hallucinogen, dozens of
times. He keeps an enormous rainbow-colored hammock in his campus office.
And his lectures are famous for their dramatic flourishes; he once gave a
talk with his head in a paper bag (a homage to a Dadaist artist). Not
surprisingly, his classes are always filled to capacity. "He's like a rock
star," said one graduate student in anthropology. "He's the professor that
all the students think is cool."

Among his colleagues in anthropology, however, there is no such consensus.
Mr. Taussig owes his academic reputation to a body of highly unconventional
work on topics like devil worship, shamanism and state terror. Ominous and
otherworldly, his subject matter is inherently provocative. Yet it is his
experimental approach to ethnography, or case studies of other cultures, as
well as his occasional diatribes against the work of more traditional
colleagues that have made him a polarizing figure in the field. . .

For the most part anthropologists were impressed. "He was trying to infect
you with the ideology of terror, to give you a case of it," said Renato
Rosaldo, a professor of anthropology at Stanford University. "He was
talking about the world as we know it, the culture terror in Argentina and
Chile and in the background the Nazi period. He was saying that people get
off on terror. They get addicted to it. And most efforts to comment on it
fail to account for the grip it has on us."

Implicit in Mr. Taussig's visceral take on terror, however, was an attack
on his field's obsession with meaning. For anthropologists who had not
gotten that message, he published a long, harshly negative review of books
by two of the discipline's most respected scholars, Sidney W. Mintz and
Eric R. Wolf. But that did little to diminish Mr. Taussig's reputation as a
rising star. In 1988 New York University wooed him away from the University
of Michigan, and in 1993 Columbia lured him uptown, hoping he would help
revitalize its foundering anthropology program.

His presence proved divisive, which some say Columbia should have
predicted. "There's a danger in hiring a person who is a critic of the
discipline as a key scholar in your department," observed Katherine E.
Hoffman, who received her Ph.D. from Columbia last year and is now a
professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Though
many say tension in the department has lately abated ? the hiring of five
new senior faculty members has helped ? Mr. Taussig's scholarly
provocations have not.

Not long ago, for instance, he recruited local artists and poets to take
part in a yearlong series of performances inspired by a report on
corruption in the New York City police force.

Mr. Taussig said his latest book project, tentatively titled "My Cocaine
Museum," would focus on the Pacific coast of Colombia, the world's rainiest
region. Each chapter will be devoted to a different aspect of the
landscape: mud, rain, heat, humidity, gold and the cocaine that has largely
replaced it. "I want to give a nature a voice which is not the clichéd
voice of environmental science," he said. "I don't know if it will work."

Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/21/arts/21TAUS.html


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/