Beauty and the Beast

by Michael Taussig

Beauty and the Beast  begins with the Is beauty destined to end in tragedy? Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, Michael Taussig scrutinizes the anxious, audacious, and sometimes destructive attempts people make to transform their bodies through cosmetic surgery and liposuction. He balances an examination of surgeries meant to enhance an individual’s beauty with an often overlooked counterpart, surgeries performed—often on high profile criminals—to disguise one’s identity. Situating this globally shared phenomenon within the economic, cultural, and political history of Colombia, Taussig links the country’s long civil war and its bodily mutilation and torture to the beauty industry at large, sketching Colombia as a country whose high aesthetic stakes make it a stage where some of the most important and problematic ideas about the body are played out.

Central to Taussig’s examination is George Bataille’s notion of  depense , or “wasting.” While depense is often used as a critique, Taussig also looks at the exuberance such squandering creates and its position as a driving economic force. Depense, he argues, is precisely what these procedures are all about, and the beast on the other side of beauty should not be dismissed as simple recompense. At once theoretical and colloquial, public and intimate,  Beauty and the Beast  is a true-to-place ethnography—written in Taussig’s trademark voice—that tells a thickly layered but always accessible story about the lengths to which people will go to be physically remade.

Genres: Anthropology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Cultural

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Michael Taussig (born 1940) earned a medical degree from the University of Sydney, received his PhD. in anthropology from the London School of Economics and is a professor at Columbia University and European Graduate School. Although he has published on medical anthropology, he is best known for his engagement with Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, especially in terms of the work of Walter Benjamin.

Reviews

[luce · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5…
if you write about women’s bodies u should kinda look into literature made by them but maybe that’s me…
kinda cute

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oops, I forgot to update here when I finished this book awhile back. I don't think this is one of Taussig's best--it goes flying around with grand pronouncements a bit too much for me--but the tales of cosmetic surgery in Colombia are fascinating & disturbing, & it's insightful to link the huge surgical-beautification fad to ongoing paramilitary violence in the country.

[Mills College Library]

EBOOK

[Maria Crespo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is ethnography with a modern bend. Sometimes, ethnographic exposition can be taken as too local and particular to be of use in building overarching theories, and given the way they tend to be wrriten, leaving more expansive conclusions to be tiny appendixes at the end, writers unwittingly perpetuate the stereotype. Taussig transforms this old limitation by taking everything he sees (casual observations while riding the bus, conversations with his 'Colombian family' and friends) as an opportunity to ellaborate on his study of beauty and its transcultural, fundamental value to the human race as a whole. Imagine that: a bus ride, the way the driver's rolls of fat curve over his abdomen as he rides, a story of how vain Jacobo Arenas was, a conversation with a cab driver who once picked up a woman going home from having a lyposuction, all somehow threaded together to expound on our perception of bodies and the human reverence for beauty.