Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing

by Michael Taussig

Working with the image of the Indian shaman as Wild Man, Taussig reveals not the magic of the shaman but that of the politicizing fictions creating the effect of the real.

"This extraordinary book . . . will encourage ever more critical and creative explorations."—Fernando Coronil, [I]American Journal of Sociology[/I]

"Taussig has brought a formidable collection of data from arcane literary, journalistic, and biographical sources to bear on . . . questions of evil, torture, and politically institutionalized hatred and terror. His intent is laudable, and much of the book is brilliant, both in its discovery of how particular people perpetrated evil and others interpreted it."—Stehen G. Bunker, Social Science Quarterly

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, History, Philosophy, Ethnography, Social Science, Literature

538 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

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

[Andrew Bourne · Rating 5 out of 5]

The many wonderful, and often also absolutely gruesome, quotes and stories are so human and so conflicted and so vivid that they can almost add up on their own without the fingers of interpretation reaching in between. A thousand portraits of the South America Colonial situation and its players—rubber running from a tree, the stockade, the curse of a neighbor, the lie become truth...

The bigger picture, all-time and all-globe picture, is how facts are created and sat upon us, not from the raw material of what truthfully happens, but from their own little lives as a stories, politicizations, interpretations.

[Ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Healing terror? Can that be possible? I am afraid not for Colombia. We have missed our chance every time we try. What is this space of death? Taussig's speaking out of his personal yagé experience or Colombia's endemic culture of terror where the dead are speaking to the living? I would prefer to think is the former instead of the later, just because I refuse to use the word endemic.

However, we do need to pay more attention to what our dead are saying. Even if active and selective forgetfulness is my personal motif, memory cannot be left aside as inexistent, or as a casual disappearance. Putumayo's rubber boom is one of the worst atrocities I have ever read about. First through Rivera's la voragine, now I encounter it again in Taussig's book through Casement's and Rocha's vivid and contradictory accounts. It is one of those haunting images of human kind I cannot stop thinking about.

[Gary Bruff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this one 20 years ago and I still think about it from time to time. Clearly one of the messiest ethnographies ever made, which isn't a criticism. Culture is itself something very messy and can be downright chaotic when things go wrong.

This is a book about things gone wrong. A rubber company by colonial mandate sets up an operation in the heart of the jungle. Through Christian Western arrogance and even more through fear of being surrounded by savages, the colonials became the real savages. The Devil was projected everywhere the colonials ventured to go, and he ultimately was the victor of the conflict. Dialectically, cultural categories stemming from indigenous beliefs, missionary propaganda, and a sense of commodity fetishism (why did the white people come so far for tree sap?) engendered a situation where culture was created in the act of its own destruction. Such is capitalism.

This book is more literary, experimental, and less Marxist than his earlier Devil and Commodity Fetishism, a book which is quite good as well.

[Katarzyna Boo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Taussig's book is a masterpiece taking you on a vivid hallucinogenic journey though Colombian Putumayo's land of savagery. An anthropological classic distinguished from others by its magnetic pull, which draws you to its poetic and full of life description of the space of death. A pull so strong, you are happy to bury yourself within to read it again and again and again without ceasing to be ensorcelled.

[David Martínez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taussig created what may be called a work in postmodern anthropology, not just because of the references to Walter Benjamin and the indirect references to Jean Baudrillard, but because of its poststructuralist approach to ethnography. The Indians of Putomayo, especially the medicine men, are not a part of a system of signs evoking the power relations between colonizer and colonized, in which Indigenous communities and rituals embody the marks of conquest. Instead, through the ritual use of yage, also known as ayahuasca, Indigenous and Spanish people encounter, not the "devil's work," as missionaries would say, but rather the legacy of terror that has influenced generations of Putomayans. Hence, Taussig's reference to Baudrillard's 'The Mirror of Production', in which Marx's political economy was criticized for simply showing the reverse of capitalist labor-value, calling it alienated labor, as opposed to liberating the oppressed classes from being merely regarded as a source of labor in the first place. Particularly in the chapter titled "History as Sorcery," Taussig shows a contemporary Indigenous community living the legacy of colonization, complete with race-based class differences, and the exploitation of, not only Indian labor, but also the exploitation of yage as an antidote to the class struggle.

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devastating.

I read this during the rainy season along the Ucayali River. In the first section, the episodic nature of the histories helped me begin to understand the genocide and environmental exploitation that white people brought to this country 110 years ago with the rubber boom. That said, there were a lot of chapters I couldn't finish. Not yet. It's just devastating.

But it's not moralistic, not like a lot of anthropolgical history. The stories are full of contradiction and complexity and don't tell a clear theoretical story the way Taussig's other work does - notably in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism.

Section two, focusing on healing, shamanism and especially stories around yage' in the 20th century, was easier going.

The writing is so, so good - even the multi-page run on sentence that constitutes the acknowledgements. Just beautiful, and absorbing. This is brilliant academic work, but unlike that genre it's really written for readers. It's really good with avoiding jargon and abstruse argumentation, and easy for anyone to read if you just accept that it does't follow consumer-friendly conventions of the popular press.

[Lindy]

As an anthropologist, I have been besotted with the work of Michael Taussig since his book, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism came out.

Both the Devil and most of his books, including Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man are against-the-grain anthropology. Why? Because now that I am writing novels myself I can see that his work imports as it interprets the magically real. He explores this, explains it and writes about it with such compassion that I cite him all the time in my blogs. www.wattletales.com.au

[Cristina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Torture porn

[Briana Cediel · Rating 4 out of 5]

lo del fetichismo de las mercancías según la mano obrera es todo en cuanto a la mano obrera actual

[Harry · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are some of the wildest and most gruesome stories I have read (especially from the first section), and the writing is so illuminating on a range of subjects like colonialism and race and belief and society and capital and ownership and magic and truth and power. I super recommend this to anyone who can stomach some difficult descriptions.

There are so many ideas from this book that will stick with me for a long time and a lot of frameworks that I will adopt in my own thinking. The idea of the “metabolism of power” as an undeniable force that can make people do horrific things to other people and generally create terrible suffering.

It was also a wild coincidence for the news story about the four children who survived forty days alone in the Colombian jungle to come out while I was reading this book. They were from the huitoto group that is featured in many parts of this book, and one account I read quoted the kids’ grandmother saying a duende had help guide them and aid in their survival as well as a search party had performed a yage ritual the night before finding the kids, it was engaging to have a lot of context for that news coming from the book.

Also nice to have an older/earlier perspective on hallucinogens written about in this book. Yage/ayahuasca rituals will put you through your own death, puking and shitting yourself the whole while before giving you any revelations.

Anyway, a really great read

Edit: The concepts in this book have stayed in my mind, and there has been a bump in ayahuasca media with some FDA study preliminary results and a new book ‘Trippy’ and that author going on tour. And multiple interviews with the author popped up in my podcast feed and have been enjoyable to listen to. And it makes me think… I wonder if the yagé called to him to tell its story to a wider audience, he is a good communicator. And I’ve wondered since I read this book, does tea tell us to make a ceremony for it? Does the dope tell some of us to smoke it & check out and others to do mob shit?

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comprising documentary vignettes of the quasi-feudal colonization of Colombia through the terror-tactics of a baronial rubber industry at the dawn of the twentieth century, followed by an abrupt leap into the author's first-person recollections of his interlocutors and their recollections in the same places three-quarters of a century later, Taussig's study is in many ways about how the phenomenal experience of reality is a product of its (often politicized) social representations. It shows how what Taussig sees as a specifically colonial culture arises from colonists' construction of a semiotics dependent upon meanings they assume to be held by the natives, and vice versa. In this culture, Indians and non-Indians draw socially-mediated power from the figure of the 'wild' Indian, a metonym of the dialectical opposition of highland and jungle, Christian and heathen. This figure embodying disordered otherness, a simulacrum of the colonial psyche, is called upon by the inhabitants of that shared world to cure them of sorcery – which is (also) to defuse the implicit socially-predicated order underlying and motivating envy, the discursive medium through which arbitrary misfortunes are framed as socially intelligible. Encompassing the entire colonial history of Colombia, drawing upon and intertextualizing sources as diverse as inquest transcripts from the British House of Commons and personal accounts of phantasmagoric – not to mention comical and visceral – yagé sessions, the substance of this book can seem fragmented and difficult for a reader to navigate; given what Taussig comes to say about the destabilizing power of imagistic montage in the work of the shaman, however, this structural effect may very well have been a conscious choice.

[Tracey Duncan · Rating 5 out of 5]

an instant classic.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

the first true anthropology book about humans

[LA Brower · Rating 5 out of 5]

definitely one of the strangest books I've ever read

[Shelley · Rating 2 out of 5]

bloody and weird and also dry. too much happening here. Not my textbook of choice, but important to someone that I respect, does that count?

[Dominic · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book does what it talks about to a certain degree.
i like that.