Michael Taussig - Biography

Michael Taussig, Ph.D., (b. 1940) is an Australian-born anthropologist known for his provocative ethnographic studies and unconventional style as an academic. He studied medicine in Australia at the University of Sydney, and he earned a Ph.D. in anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is currently a professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York.

Strongly influenced by both the Frankfurt School of critical theory and French poststructuralism, Michael Taussig was part of the shift during the 1980s within the field of anthropology toward an increasing mistrust of cultural analyses from the perspective of the dominant culture, i.e. Western capitalist culture. It was his early experiences as a doctor in Colombia in the late 1960s that influenced a fundamental change in his conception of the role of stories and narratives, over and against objective scholarship, in cultural formation. Ethnography became a conscious positive force in culture, as no account was intrinsically innocent or objective any longer. This led Michael Taussig to begin intermixing fact and fiction in his ethnographic studies, thus his status as a figure of controversy in the field of anthropology.

The style and message of Michael Taussig's work derive from the impressions formed from his early experiences with conflicting cultural narratives in the struggle between the guerrillas and the paramilitaries in Colombia. This came across in the early book The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), which is a radical reverse analysis of capitalist culture through the viewpoint of the culture of indigenous people in Colombia and Bolivia. Through the analysis of the magical beliefs of indigenous proletarianized peasants about striking a deal with the devil and baptizing money, he finds in these stories not the cultural sediment of a pre-capitalist belief system, but rather an explanation of the workings of capitalism from the perspective of the exploited class.

Michael Taussig's second book, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987), went further in the application of the ethnographic case study model which he was fashioning. In this work, Michael Taussig attempts an exploration of the 'epistemic murk' and 'the fiction of the real' in the interrelation between colonialist terror and shamanistic healing in Colombia from the nineteenth through the twentieth century. Michael Taussig finds in these two cultural forces neither an opposition nor a dialectical synthesis, but a kind of reflective co-creation within the 'space of death' of colonialist terror, opening up forces of order and chaos which did not exist hitherto in these regions (Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man).

Michael Taussig is the author of: The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980), Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987), The Nervous System (1992), Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (1993), The Magic of the State (1997), Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (1999), Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia (2003), My Cocaine Museum (2004), Walter Benjamin's Grave (2006), and What Color is the Sacred? (2009).