Michael Taussig

November 11-14

Raymond F. West Memorial Lecture Series

http://shc.stanford.edu/shc/1996-1997/96-97events/taussig/taussig.html


Professor Michael Taussig

Department of Anthropology

Columbia University

Presents 3 Talks on:

Defacement:

Where Faciality and Sacrilege Merge

This series of three talks concerns the face and sacrilege as art forms, sacrilege itself being understood as the inverse of sacrifice. Growing out of Profesor Taussig's recent work--on mimesis and on the magic of the state--this concern with defacement raises the following basic questions: What is the force of the negative that bursts forth with sacrilege? Is sacrilege the most potent form of the sacred in modernity? Why are both faciality and secrecy important to this discussion? Does unmasking as a form of defacement further the mystery of the mask and, if so, what does this imply for a general strategy of social critique no less than of its writing. Is criticism a form of defacement?

Michael Taussig is a distinguished anthropologist whose work has investigated the history of African slavery, abolition in Western Colombia, popular manifestations of the working of commodity fetishism, the sociology of malnutrition, the impact of colonialism on shamanism and folk healing, the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual, especially shamanic healing, the making, talking, and writing of terror, mimesis in relation to sympathetic magic, state fetishism and secrecy. His writing pays primary attention to textual construction as a form of analysis in itself, involving a mixture of ethnography, story-telling, meta-ethnography, and theory.

After graduating in 1964 in Medicine from the University of Sydney, Australia and working for a year as a house-physician in the University's main teaching hospital (Royal Prince Alfred) and later in general practice for six months, Taussig read for a Master's degree in sociology at the London School of Economics. At the same time he worked as a psychiatric resident in mental hospitals in and around London. He was appointed Research Fellow in the Institute of Latin American Studies of London University in 1969 and began fieldwork on the Violencia in Columbia, South America. This resulted in a PhD dissertation chaired by Julian Pitt-Rivers, which examined the sociocultural impact of the commercialization of agriculture, (published in 1975 as Esclavitud y libertad en el valle del rio Cauca).

Taussig has spent over seven years cumulatively doing fieldwork in Columbia, Putumayo, and Venezuela. Currently a professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, he has been a faculty member at distinguished univerisities around the world, including professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and professor of Performance Studies at New York University. He has been guest lecturer, visiting professor, and keynote speaker at distinguished centers of learning around the world. In addition, Taussig has published numerous articles, written and publically performed two scripts, and has been awarded many honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. Since 1975 he has published six books (four in English, two in Spanish). His publications include The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (U of North Carolina Press, 1980); Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (U of Chicago Press, 1987); The Nervous System (Routledge, 1993); Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (Routledge); and, forthcoming, Magic of the State (Routledge).

Return to Stanford Humanities Center Home Page