And the Garden Is You: Essays on Fieldwork, Writingwork, and Readingwork

by Michael Taussig

A new collection of essays reflecting on the centrality of writing anthropological practice from one of the discipline’s most influential thinkers.

 

Michael Taussig’s work is known for its critical insights and bold, experimental style. In the eleven essays in this new collection, Taussig reflects on the act of writing itself, demonstrating its importance for anthropological practice and calling for the discipline to keep experiential knowledge from being extinguished as fieldnotes become scholarship.

 

Setting out to show how this can be done, And the Garden Is You exemplifies a form of exploratory writing that preserves the spontaneity of notes scribbled down in haste. In these essays, the author’s reflections take us from his childhood in Sydney to trips to Afghanistan, Colombia, Finland, Italy, Turkey, and Syria. Along the way, Taussig explores themes of fabulation and provocation that are central to his life’s work, in addition to the thinkers dearest to him—Bataille, Benjamin, Burroughs, and Nietzsche, among others. This collection is vintage Taussig, bound to interest longtime readers and newcomers alike.

 

200 pages, Paperback

Published August 26, 2024

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

[Geo Dowdy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m positive I’m not the intended audience for this book, made glaringly clear by the number of times I had to pause halfway through a sentence to look up definitions and references. Despite that this book was shockingly good and I intend to keep rereading it until I do finally understand everything he’s trying to say to its fullest extent… There were multiple times this book blew me away, and the way the author effortlessly weaves ideas in an out of these unrelated (or should I say “unrelated”) essays shows brilliance. On top of the ideas he presents in this book, which were many and each more revelatory than the last, his writing style is one of the most engaging I’ve read in any scholarly(??) work that has ever made its way into my hands.