The University of Wisconsin-Madison
VISUAL CULTURE CLUSTER
Visiting Speaker Michael Taussig
Michael Taussig is a distinguished anthropologist whose work is
based on
extensive fieldwork in South and Central America. His writing
incorporates ethnography, story-telling, and theory, and since 1975 he
has published nine books, including: Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild
Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (University of Chicago Press, 1987);
The Nervous System (Routledge, 1993); Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular
History of the Senses (Routledge, 1992); The Magic of the State
(Routledge, 1996), and, most recently, My Cocaine Museum (University of
Chicago Press, 2004). Taussig earned a degree in medicine in 1964 from
the University of Sydney, a MA in sociology from the London School of
Economics and a PhD in anthropology from the University of London.
In his own words:
"Since I began fieldwork in 1969 in Colombia my writing has spanned
different things in roughly the following order; two books in Spanish
for local people on the history of slavery and its aftermath, and books
and articles in academic journals on the : 1) commercialization of
agriculture, 2) slavery, 3) hunger, 4) the popular manifestations of
the working of commodity fetishism, 5) the impact of colonialism
(historical and contemporary) on "shamanism" and folk healing,
6) the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the
understanding of ritual, 7) the making, talking, and writing of
terror, 8) and mimesis in relation to sympathetic magic, state
fetishism, and secrecy, and 9) defacement. Much of my work is an
attempt to develop new forms of cultural artifactuality in the writing
itself."
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