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"Palma africana represents the latest attempt by anthropologist Michael Taussig to make sense of the threat to life, human and nonhuman, that characterizes the contemporary moment. In Colombia, where Taussig has worked for decades, palm oil plantations are spreading in areas that were once cornucopias of animal, bird, and plant life. Deforestation and habitat loss are the first effects."--Provided by publisher

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- A Report to the Academy -- 1 In Some Way or Another One Can Protect Oneself From Evil Spirits by Portraying Them -- 2 Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds -- 3 Spacing Out -- 4 The Golden Bough: The Magic of Mimesis -- 5 The Golden Army: The Organization of Mimesis -- 6 With the Wind of World History in Our Sails -- 7 Spirit of the Mime, Spirit of the Gift -- 8 Mimetic Worlds, Invisible Counterparts -- 9 The Origin of the World -- 10 Alterity -- 11 The Color of Alterity -- 12 The Search for the White Indian -- 13 America as Woman: The Magic of Western Gear -- 14 The Talking Machine -- 15 His Master's Voice -- 16 Reflection -- 17 Sympathetic Magic in a Post-Colonial Age -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

I Swear I Saw This records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig's reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. Taking as a starting point a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006--as well as its caption, "I swear I saw this"--Taussig considers the fieldwork notebook as a type of modernist literature and the place where writers and other creators first work out the imaginative logic of discovery. Notebooks mix the raw material of observation with reverie, juxtaposed, in Taussig's case, with drawings, watercolors, and newspaper cuttings, which blend t.

In September 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou on the Spanish-French border when it appeared that he and his travelling partners would be denied passage into Spain in their attempt to escape the Nazis. In 2002, one of anthropology's-and indeed today's-most distinctive writers, Michael Taussig, visited Benjamin's grave in Port Bou. The result is "Walter Benjamin's Grave," a moving essay about the cemetery, eyewitness accounts of Benjamin's border travails, and the circumstances of his demise. It is the most recent of eight revelatory essays collected in this volume of the same

Resumo Este texto é uma tradução parcial da primeira parte do livro de Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labour of the Negative (1999). A tradução traz uma seção inédita ao texto, além de ajustes realizados pelo próprio autor, duas décadas depois da primeira publicação.

This essay is about torture and the culture of terror, which for most of us, including myself, are known only through the words of others. Thus my concern is with the mediation of the culture of terror through narration—and with the problems of writing effectively against terror.

What does wage labor and capital mean to a peasantry that is subjected to rapid rural proletarianization and what is the basis of that meaning?I wish to discuss an aspect of this question in the light of certain ideological reactions manifested by a South American lowland peasantry as expanding sugar plantations absorb their lands and peasants are converted into landless wage laborers. In the southern extremities of the Cauca Valley, Colombia, it is commonly thought that male plantation workers can increase their output, and hence their wage, through entering into a secret contract with the devil. However, the local peasants, no matter how needy they may be, never make such a contract when working their own plots or those of their peasant neighbors for wages. It is also thought that by illicitly baptizing money instead of a child in the Catholic church, that money can become interest bearing capital, while the child will be deprived of its rightful chance of entering heaven.