The Magic of the State


Manufacturer: Routledge
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Authors:
  • Michael Taussig

Description:



The Magic of the State
Reviews:

starsA fine example of Taussig's
Taussig, as his career has progressed, has embraced more and more Nietzsche's dictum that cultural representation must - absolutely must - be inherently radical. The Magic of the State perhaps exemplifies this best - being of a different conceptual order than just about anything out there in large-press anthropology. However unorthodox Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man or Defacement may have been with their incorporation of the more literary voices in ethnography and cultural studies, The Magic of the State slips between orthodox and heterodox altogether - as it simply abandons anything resembling an enthographic model, and instead takes the form of a fictional narrative that might be called anthropological literature or, more accurately, surrealist anthropology...

If you can suspend your standard expectations of what state-theory should be all about, you will find Taussig's book extremely rewarding and even humorous in spots. If you remove the historical, traditional, and methodical bases of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, and inject a generous helping of hallucinatory imagery, dada-esque playfulness, and representational experimentation (and maybe some steriods), you MIGHT come within several kilometers of describing Taussig's masterful book. But in this case, to describe would be to "write around," and this is certainly a work that should be "written with" and celebrated for the vistas from which it enables us mere mortals to see.


starsThe modern state as voodoo ceremony
Taussig starts with an impressionist analysis of a Latin-American worship and then uses of possesion of spirit it as model to explain how the modern state is based on various mysterious incarnations as bases of its legal system, economic sciences, official history, even its roads. Mix the ethnography, the political theory and cultural criticism in often shaking but convincing the execution finally. You to believe in the phantoms!



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--end of The Magic of the State