Michael Taussig > Quotes

“Magical beliefs are revelatory and fascinating not because they are ill-conceived instruments of utility but because they are poetic echoes of the cadences that guide the innermost course of the world. Magic takes language, symbols, and intelligibility to their outermost limits, to explore life and thereby to change its destination.”
― Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

“The cure is to become a curer. In being healed he is also becoming a healer. In becoming one the option is whether he will succumb to the encroachment of death subsequent to soul loss, or whether he will allow the sickness-causing trauma and the healer's ministrations to reweave the creative forces in his personality and life experience into a force that bestows life upon himself and upon others through that bestowal. In the journey undertaken by the healer and the sick man into an underworld and up into the mountains across the sacred landscape of space and time, it is this option that is being traversed.”
― Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing

“Instead of man being the aim of production, production is the aim of man and wealth the aim of production, instead of tools and the productive mechanism in general liberating man from the slavery of toil, man has become the slave of tools and the industry has become synonymous with business and people have been duped into asking, “what’s good for business?” instead of, “what is business good for?”
― Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America

“I then tell myself that the result is pitiful but the struggle worth it because I looked at color and I looked at the night and the river like I never had before and saw what I take so for granted with new eyes. Is there any activity that so rewards failure? These are toads that become flowers.”
― Michael Taussig, I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own