At its best, anthropology confounds us. It confronts and defamiliarizes, using its global, comparative purview to bring us face-to-face with the exotic only to reveal our own strangeness.
No contemporary anthropologist practices this maxim with greater verve than Michael Taussig. In a career spanning 40 years, the Columbia University Professor has produced some of the most startling and influential writings to ever come out of the discipline.
Michael Taussig, One of Anthropology's Great Lecturers
In The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, the book that made him a star in 1980, he explored the contradictions of capitalism from the vantage point of its indigenous response, a radical intervention that upended more conventional approaches to globalization and started a prolonged debate about the intersection of anthropology and Marxist analysis.
He followed this up with another classic, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987), in which he postulated South America’s colonial history as an ongoing form of terror and shamanism as a resistive form of healing. Taussig did so with what has become his trademark, an unmatched literary style that freely mixes personal experience with critical analysis and ethnographic observation with philosophical reflection.
Michael Taussig with Don Pedro in his Garden, Columbia 1977
It’s a style whose mesmerizing effects are hard to describe. Fortunately, I don’t have to attempt it, since I can just invite the CHF audience to what promises to be one of the true highlights of the 2011 Festival on tech·knowledgē: a lecture by Michael Taussig with a typically provocative title: “Beauty and the Beast: The Monstrous Side of Plastic Surgery.”
The talk is drawn from a book he is currently writing on one of the more puzzling phenomena in contemporary South America, the morbid fascination with, even delight in, plastic surgeries that end up disfiguring or killing the patient. Rather than chalking it up to the sadism of a perverted culture, Taussig proposes to see it as a complex response to larger geopolitical constellations – a notion he approaches through his term “cosmic surgery.” I can’t wait to hear his elucidation of this tantalizing idea.
But I am delighted about Taussig’s appearance for yet another reason. It is the first in a new collaboration with the University of Chicago Press. Taussig is one of the star authors of the publishing house, which has issued Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man along with such other provocations (in the best sense) as My Cocaine Museum, Law in a Lawless Land, Walter Benjamin's Grave, What Color Is the Sacred?, and the forthcoming I Swear I Saw This.
Charles Bernstein
There is no finer academic publishing house in the country than the University of Chicago Press. A local gem, it is also a national and international powerhouse – something that will also be in evidence in a second program the press is co-presenting: the appearance of poet Charles Bernstein, another star author. (Check out his just-released Attack of the Difficult Poems.)
It’s a fabulous lineup – and the first in what I hope will be a long-standing collaboration!
Lecture
409: Sat, Nov. 5 1:30 - 2:30 PM
Tags: Michael Taussig, Anthropology, Philosophy, South America, plastic surgery
