eBook - ePub
The Corn Wolf
About this book
Collecting a decade of work from iconic anthropologist and writer Michael Taussig, The Corn Wolf pinpoints a moment of intellectual development for the master stylist, exemplifying the "nervous system" approach to writing and truth that has characterized his trajectory. Pressured by the permanent state of emergency that imbues our times, this approach marries storytelling with theory, thickening spiraling analysis with ethnography and putting the study of so-called primitive societies back on the anthropological agenda as a way of better understanding the sacred in everyday life.
The leading figure of these projects is the corn wolf, whom Wittgenstein used in his fierce polemic on Frazer's Golden Bough. For just as the corn wolf slips through the magic of language in fields of danger and disaster, so we are emboldened to take on the widespread culture of academic—or what he deems "agribusiness"—writing, which strips ethnography from its capacity to surprise and connect with other worlds, whether peasant farmers in Colombia, Palestinians in Israel, protestors in Zuccotti Park, or eccentric yet fundamental aspects of our condition such as animism, humming, or the acceleration of time.
A glance at the chapter titles—such as "The Stories Things Tell" or "Iconoclasm Dictionary"—along with his zany drawings, testifies to the resonant sensibility of these works, which lope like the corn wolf through the boundaries of writing and understanding.
The leading figure of these projects is the corn wolf, whom Wittgenstein used in his fierce polemic on Frazer's Golden Bough. For just as the corn wolf slips through the magic of language in fields of danger and disaster, so we are emboldened to take on the widespread culture of academic—or what he deems "agribusiness"—writing, which strips ethnography from its capacity to surprise and connect with other worlds, whether peasant farmers in Colombia, Palestinians in Israel, protestors in Zuccotti Park, or eccentric yet fundamental aspects of our condition such as animism, humming, or the acceleration of time.
A glance at the chapter titles—such as "The Stories Things Tell" or "Iconoclasm Dictionary"—along with his zany drawings, testifies to the resonant sensibility of these works, which lope like the corn wolf through the boundaries of writing and understanding.
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Yes, you can access The Corn Wolf by Michael Taussig in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Latin American & Caribbean History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Publisher
University of Chicago PressYear
2015Print ISBN
9780226310855, 9780226310718eBook ISBN
9780226310992Index
abattoir, 169
Abufarha, Nasser (author of The Making of a Human Bomb), 126
Abu Nidal (Palestinian “organic communist” peasant farmer), 124–25, 128–29
Adamo, Ayesha, 78, 79
Adorno, Theodor, 5, 34, 42, 99
Afifi, Alex, 78, 85
Agee, James, 118
Al-Azza, Mohammad (Palestinian photographer), 121–22, 130–31
Alonso, Danny, 78, 94, 106, 109
Alvear, Efraín, 64–66
animation, 12–14, 27
animism and transgression, 160
ANUC (peasant organization in Colombia), 195
apotropaic magic, 7–8, 178
Assali, Hadeel, 114
Balbungu, Allan, 37
Baragan, Yesenia, 78
Barthes, Roland, 9, 158–59
Bataille, Georges, 9, 49, 73, 118, 144, 145–46, 149, 163, 169
Battir village, West Bank of Palestine, 123
Beckett, Samuel, 142
bees, 31–32
Benjamin, Walter, 16, 21, 26, 35, 38, 45, 54, 87, 104, 107, 117, 126, 143, 157
Berman, Marshall, 92
Bey, Hakim (“temporary autonomous zone”), 83
Bishara, Amahl (anthropologist of West Bank, Palestine), 130
Bohannan, Laura, 47
Brecht, Berthold, 1, 18, 172
Bright, Alec (director of the Gold Museum), 183, 187
Brown, Norman O., 107
Bucher, Karl, 48
Burroughs, William, 8, 35, 75
Bush Christmas (Australian film), 164
Cage, John, 31, 108, 111
Canetti, Elias, 45
Casement, Roger, 8, 58
Cavafy, Constantine, 55–56
Chamberlain, Leslie, 37
Clifford, James, 55, 75
Colombian violencia, 180, 182, 190
Communist Manifesto, The, 92
Concorde, Place de la, 159
conjurors, 29–30
Conrad, Joseph, 117, 131
contagion and proliferation, 160
Cowan, Michael, 48
craft, 16, 25–26
Cramer, Louise, 47
Deas, Malcolm, 188
Death Ship, The, 17–27
Denkbilden, 117. See also Benjamin, Walter
Deren, Maya, 45
devil in the cane fields, 46
dialectical image, 35, 122. See also Benjamin, Walter
Dickinson, Emily, 172, 179
Dionysian states, 36
Dolan, Clare, 36
Downey, Juan, 15–16
Durkheim, Emile (Elementary Forms of Religious Life), 171
Echeverri, Juan Alvaro, 57–58
Eisenstein, Sergei, 33, 38
erotic materialism, 106
fairy tale, 26
Fals-Borda, Orlando, 62, 189
Faulkner, William, 56–57
fieldwork, 1–2, 181, 194. See also participant-observation; writing: and writingwork
Foucault and lightning of transgression, 157–58
Fourier, Charles, 32
Fox News, 82
Frazer, Sir James George, 2
Gandy Dancer, 48
García, Juan Felipe (human Rights lawyer in Colombia), 55
Genet, Jean, 13
G...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Author’s Drawings
- The Corn Wolf: Writing Apotropaic Texts
- Animism and the Philosophy of Everyday Life
- The Stories Things Tell and Why They Tell Them
- Humming
- Excelente Zona Social
- I’m So Angry I Made a Sign
- Two Weeks in Palestine: My First Visit
- The Go Slow Party
- Iconoclasm Dictionary
- The Obscene in Everyday Life
- Syllable and Sound
- Don Miguel
- Index