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My Cocaine Museum
In this book, a make-believe cocaine museum becomes a vantage point from which to assess the lives of Afro-Colombian gold miners drawn into the dangerous world of cocaine production in the rain forest of Colombia's Pacific Coast. Although modeled on the famous Gold Museum in Colombia's central bank, the Banco de la Republica, Taussig's museum is also a parody aimed at the museum's failure to acknowledge the African slaves who mined the country's wealth for almost four hundred years.
Combining natural history with political history in a filmic, montage style, Taussig deploys the show-and-tell modality of a museum to engage with the inner life of heat, rain, stone, and swamp, no less than with the life of gold and cocaine.
This effort to find a poetry of words becoming things is brought to a head by the explosive qualities of those sublime fetishes of evil beauty, gold and cocaine. At its core, Taussig's museum is about the lure of forbidden things, charged substances that transgress moral codes, the distinctions we use to make sense of the world, and above all the conventional way we write stories.
Combining natural history with political history in a filmic, montage style, Taussig deploys the show-and-tell modality of a museum to engage with the inner life of heat, rain, stone, and swamp, no less than with the life of gold and cocaine.
This effort to find a poetry of words becoming things is brought to a head by the explosive qualities of those sublime fetishes of evil beauty, gold and cocaine. At its core, Taussig's museum is about the lure of forbidden things, charged substances that transgress moral codes, the distinctions we use to make sense of the world, and above all the conventional way we write stories.
336 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 11, 2004
13 people are currently reading
443 people want to read
About the author
Michael Taussig
54 books118 followersMichael 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.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 13, 2010
This book is not fun to read, but it did teach me how to read academically.
My Cocaine Museum seeks to present the story by providing only the anecdotal evidence and leaving the narrative incomplete, allowing readers to construct this on their own. As an anthropologist, Taussig has ‘collected’ hundreds of separate, but related ‘artifacts,’ all of which pertain to the history of cocaine. However, very few of these deal directly with cocaine itself. For example, his chapters occur in random order, and include such diverse titles as “The Coast Is No Longer Boring,” “A Dog Growls,” “Miasma,” “Water in Water,” and “Evil Eye.” This is not accidental in his work, since on the page facing the table of contents, he places the following quote by Walter Benjamin: “Right from the start, the great collector is struck by the confusion, by the scatter, in which the things of the world are found.” Taussig intends this random presentation.
Why does he present these chapters randomly? It is all part of his aim to de-familiarize the history of cocaine and force us to critically assess the way history and anthropology is traditionally written.
This attempt at de-familiarization is also evident in his descriptions, since he often speaks metaphorically using fantastical and mythical imagery to describe everyday items, such as the very un-mythical act of writing a book. This is especially obvious in the afterward, where he is slightly more open about his purpose. His cryptic style is still very dominant, since he “can only hope that the gods asleep in the museum . . . will awaken and come to life with the tinkling of glass.” His intention is for the objects in his “cocaine museum” to speak for themselves, and he draws back the curtain on his method by stating that “this [awakening of the gods] is my magic and this is why we write and why we write strange apotropaic texts like My Cocaine Museum.” He seeks to ward of the evil – hence the term apotropaic – of ceasing to think outside the box. He argues that we need to start with the “smashing of vitrines,” or display cases, which necessitate the viewing of “captured objects from the outside.” Essentially, he presents the historian with a collection of facts which could be used to construct an overall narrative about cocaine, but refrains from creating that narrative in the book.
This is a book in which it is necessary to skip around. Not very much fun to sit and read, but if you are forced to read it and create an opinion about it, you will never read in the same way again. Every history student should read it, if only for the discussion value and mental exercise.
No pain, no gain.
My Cocaine Museum seeks to present the story by providing only the anecdotal evidence and leaving the narrative incomplete, allowing readers to construct this on their own. As an anthropologist, Taussig has ‘collected’ hundreds of separate, but related ‘artifacts,’ all of which pertain to the history of cocaine. However, very few of these deal directly with cocaine itself. For example, his chapters occur in random order, and include such diverse titles as “The Coast Is No Longer Boring,” “A Dog Growls,” “Miasma,” “Water in Water,” and “Evil Eye.” This is not accidental in his work, since on the page facing the table of contents, he places the following quote by Walter Benjamin: “Right from the start, the great collector is struck by the confusion, by the scatter, in which the things of the world are found.” Taussig intends this random presentation.
Why does he present these chapters randomly? It is all part of his aim to de-familiarize the history of cocaine and force us to critically assess the way history and anthropology is traditionally written.
This attempt at de-familiarization is also evident in his descriptions, since he often speaks metaphorically using fantastical and mythical imagery to describe everyday items, such as the very un-mythical act of writing a book. This is especially obvious in the afterward, where he is slightly more open about his purpose. His cryptic style is still very dominant, since he “can only hope that the gods asleep in the museum . . . will awaken and come to life with the tinkling of glass.” His intention is for the objects in his “cocaine museum” to speak for themselves, and he draws back the curtain on his method by stating that “this [awakening of the gods] is my magic and this is why we write and why we write strange apotropaic texts like My Cocaine Museum.” He seeks to ward of the evil – hence the term apotropaic – of ceasing to think outside the box. He argues that we need to start with the “smashing of vitrines,” or display cases, which necessitate the viewing of “captured objects from the outside.” Essentially, he presents the historian with a collection of facts which could be used to construct an overall narrative about cocaine, but refrains from creating that narrative in the book.
This is a book in which it is necessary to skip around. Not very much fun to sit and read, but if you are forced to read it and create an opinion about it, you will never read in the same way again. Every history student should read it, if only for the discussion value and mental exercise.
No pain, no gain.
November 3, 2009
This book is very self-indulgent, but full of gems. The man is obsessed with Walter Benjamin, you should probably read about him first.
January 29, 2021
Michael Taussig’s 2003 book My Cocaine Museum uses the Gold Museum in Bogota, one of Colombia's most important museums, as a case study to reflect on curatorial practices in the Museum and museums in general. He addresses these practices by interweaving the history of Colombia and its current position in international geopolitics with the social and material world of the Museum's artefacts, with gold, coca and cocaine as the commodities at the centre of his study. Laying out the background of Colombia’s gold industry and its violent colonial past, and its social and historical parallels with its current most valuable cash crop cocaine, Taussig presents what he calls a “human history as natural history”.
Taussig's central argument and his core contention with the Gold Museum's museological practices is a valuable one. He criticizes the museum for fixating on a clean, aseptic display of artefacts devoid of the context and marker of their usage by the cultures that these artefacts belonged to, therefore depriving them of the rich texture of their cultural meanings. As an alternative he proposes an imaginary cocaine museum, to explore stories narrated by objects that can be traced historically, which cannot otherwise be fully comprehended if only viewed as an object in isolation. Taussig's study converges history and ethnography to make a case for a more connected understanding of the social life of objects and how commodities emerge out of the everyday.
Taussig's central argument and his core contention with the Gold Museum's museological practices is a valuable one. He criticizes the museum for fixating on a clean, aseptic display of artefacts devoid of the context and marker of their usage by the cultures that these artefacts belonged to, therefore depriving them of the rich texture of their cultural meanings. As an alternative he proposes an imaginary cocaine museum, to explore stories narrated by objects that can be traced historically, which cannot otherwise be fully comprehended if only viewed as an object in isolation. Taussig's study converges history and ethnography to make a case for a more connected understanding of the social life of objects and how commodities emerge out of the everyday.
June 6, 2023
I had never really understood immanence or its opposition to transcendence, but Taussig connected a few neurons via his Cocaine Museum's exhibits: cocaine, mud, sloths, mangroves all glowing in their display cases next to miniaturized pirate ships in glass bottles, all of them somehow exceeding the constraints of their scientific or physical categories and taking on lives of their own. I get lost, admittedly, in pages on ancient Greek philosophy, and have to start the page from the top again, but I snap back to attention in the chapters on Colombian history, prison islands and scuba diving for gold. Taussig writes seriously and convincingly, yet his descriptions of place and materials, their formation and procurement/ reification, come across so uncannily that they become almost laughable, entertainingly uncanny.
May 11, 2021
This review will definitely lack something for the years I am removed from the text, but it made a big impact on me. Read as part of a sociology class in the early 90s, this book, while full of interesting fragments, taught me one useful skill above all else - how to pick my conclusion ahead of time, set out a few waypoints and spin bullshit to connect the points along the way.
My Cocaine Museum is beautiful in its way, but not meaningful in any respect, in fact it acts as an impediment to any kind of analysis. In it I can now see shades of what was to come in liberal arts universities and especially in the humanities departments. I suppose it depends upon what you want from the book, but it's best to approach it as a book of poetry. It's not how it was presented to me, and the experience educated me in how to fake my viewpoint to get through school, although I don't feel as though it's fair to place all of that at Taussig's feet. In the end, it could have been so much better and so much more coherent.
My Cocaine Museum is beautiful in its way, but not meaningful in any respect, in fact it acts as an impediment to any kind of analysis. In it I can now see shades of what was to come in liberal arts universities and especially in the humanities departments. I suppose it depends upon what you want from the book, but it's best to approach it as a book of poetry. It's not how it was presented to me, and the experience educated me in how to fake my viewpoint to get through school, although I don't feel as though it's fair to place all of that at Taussig's feet. In the end, it could have been so much better and so much more coherent.
February 27, 2021
" A dire la verità, poche persone adulte sanno vedere la natura. La maggioranza di essi non sa vedere il sole".
R.W. Emerson
Libro straordinario, forse poco attinente alle tematiche e alle narrazioni in voga attualmente.
Uno studio antropologico fuori dai canoni tradizionali.
Taussig è un medico e antropologo australiano, docente alla Columbia University, che ha vissuto a fasi alterne per anni nella parte più sconosciuta della foresta pluviale colombiana, costruendo poco a poco un libro-cronaca della vita di minatori, contadini, indigeni e sciamani disseminando il racconto di frammenti luminosi di filosofia, sociologia, psicologia, etnologia.
Vi chiederete cosa c'entra la cocaina con l'oro, la saliva, la giustizia, Walter Benjamin, Platone, William Burroughs, Nietzsche....
R.W. Emerson
Libro straordinario, forse poco attinente alle tematiche e alle narrazioni in voga attualmente.
Uno studio antropologico fuori dai canoni tradizionali.
Taussig è un medico e antropologo australiano, docente alla Columbia University, che ha vissuto a fasi alterne per anni nella parte più sconosciuta della foresta pluviale colombiana, costruendo poco a poco un libro-cronaca della vita di minatori, contadini, indigeni e sciamani disseminando il racconto di frammenti luminosi di filosofia, sociologia, psicologia, etnologia.
Vi chiederete cosa c'entra la cocaina con l'oro, la saliva, la giustizia, Walter Benjamin, Platone, William Burroughs, Nietzsche....
May 28, 2025
Un estudio antropológico narrado en una prosa que tiene una calidad literaria asombrosa. Narra las vivencias y observaciones del autor en la región dle pacífico caucano de Colombia, la relación de los habitantes de esta zona con el fenómeno de la siembre de la coca, como el dinero conseguido por la coca ha transformado las dinámicas sociales de estas poblaciones. Como habitante del Cauca esta obra te da nuevas perspéctivas acerca de esta región.
July 8, 2023
School
February 9, 2012
it is really hard to summarize or talk about "My Cocaine Museum" as a book, as it is really more a series of loosely connected thematic aphorisms with an undercurrent of Walter Benjamin; as a novel attempt the book really is interesting and phenomenally written, if you are attempting to learn about the interaction of cocaine and gold in more global and less anthropological terms it won't be particularly helpful. Still, worth a read.
Want to read
August 4, 2012Travel Book Recommended by Sean Peters @ Unreasonable
July 10, 2015
Juicy academic writing
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews