Books by Michael Taussig

In his usual incantatory style, Taussig takes on palm oil, one of the most perniciously exploitative commodities in our world today.

Offers a penetrating insight into the nature of Colombia's peril. In a nuanced account of the human consequences of a disintegrating state, the author chronicles two weeks in a small town in Colombia's Cauca Valley taken over by paramilitaries that brazenly assassinate adolescent gang members.

Begins with a question: Is beauty destined to end in tragedy? Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, the author scrutinizes the anxious, audacious, and sometimes destructive attempts people make to transform their bodies through cosmetic surgery and liposuction.

Defacement asks what happens when something precious is despoiled. In specifying the human face as the ideal type for thinking through such violation, this book raises the issue of secrecy as the depth that seems to surface with the tearing of surface.

A meditation on the mysteries of color and the fascination they provoke. It uses color to explore further dimensions of what the author calls 'the bodily unconscious' in an age of global warming. Drawing on classic ethnography as well as the work of Benjamin, Burroughs, and Proust, it takes up the notion that color invites the viewer into images.

Records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig's reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. This title exhibits Taussig's characteristic verve and intellectual audacity, that is combined with a revelatory sense of intimacy.

Looks at the interaction between civilized and primitive people in Colombia, examines the role of the shaman, and discusses healing practices in the jungle.

In a series of intriguing essays, Taussig hovers between story-telling and high theory and thus creating strange new modes of critical discourse.

The Magic of the State focuses on the theatre of spirit possession at a Spirit Queen's enchanted mountain where the dead-Blacks and Indians-Europe's fetishized others-pass into the bodies of the living.