The Magic of the State

by Michael Taussig

Set in the enchanted mountain of a spirit-queen presiding over an unnamed, postcolonial country, this ethnographic work of ficto-criticism recreates in written form the shrines by which the dead-notably the fetishized forms of Europe's Others, Indians and Blacks-generate the magical powers of the modern state.

Genres: Anthropology, Philosophy, Ethnography, Theory, Sociology, Nonfiction, Literature

216 pages, Paperback

First published November 4, 1996

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

[Stephanie McGarrah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Taussig has a way with words that transports me, his storytelling weaves myth and reality until you don't know which is which. He is a Marxist, anthropologist, historian, and yet he is none of these things. You can't place him in a single box. I'll have to come back and do more thorough reviews of his work because he makes the most convincing case for the state being a magic ritual we all perform both willingly and unwillingly. Stunning! Taussig is onto something and I can't wait to read more...

Recommended for people critical of anthropology and other academic pursuits, are interested in rituals, Marxists critical of Marx, anybody who loves non-linear, mythological writing.

[Matthew Petti · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really weird work of anthropology in the best sense of the term. Michael Taussig goes on a pilgrimage to the mountain of the Spirit Queen, an occult ritual center in Venezuela. He shows how cult of the Spirit Queen and her entourage parallels the Venezuelan nationalist cult around Simon Bolívar. Taussig's thesis, which he also lays out in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, is that syncretic Latin American peasant religions have something quite perceptive to say about capitalism and modernity.

Unlike The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, however, the Magic of the State is written in a mystical stream-of-consciousness style. It's a trippy piece of writing, not least because Taussig tries very hard not to tell you that he's talking about Venezuela, using symbolic pseudonyms for all of the places and people involved, including Bolívar himself. The writing style takes a lot of getting used to, and at some points feels overdone and pretentious. But Michael Taussig wouldn't be Michael Taussig without it; in the end, he demonstrates his thought process a lot better than it he had just written a dry theory text.

[Zesje · Rating 4 out of 5]

meer ficto-kritiek! deze wereld heeft meer ficto-kritiek nodig!

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun ethnography of spirit possession and idolatry.

[Catherine Joudas · Rating 5 out of 5]

"For the task of much of cultural anthropology, no less than of certain branches of historiography, has been, and will increasingly continue to be, the storing in modernity of what are taken to be pre-modern practices such as spirit possession and magic, thereby contributing, for good or for bad, to the reservoir of authoritative, estranging, literalities on which so much of our contemporary language is based in its conjuring of the back-then and the over-there for contemporary purpose if not profane illumination."

[Ale Ech · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hay cosas que de repente tenía que releer para entender mejor. Fuera de eso me parece un texto fenomenal en el que se identifican elementos mágicos del Estado, un ente que puede parecer una creación bien estructurada, pero que a final de cuentas tiene mucho de absurdo y contradicciones que chocan constantemente entre sí.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thought-experiment is where it's at. Agamben discusses this in his new book, where as asks the enlightenment question, What is A Paradigm?" In like with Goethe's Urphenomenon, he proposes the experiment, neither universal nor particular, as the meeting place of object and subject. Taussig is writing at this crossroads. Working neither inductively upward nor deductively downward to give us a view of South American which is constructed out of neither pure method or raw data, Taussig presents that region in the form of pure analogue one he can only make available by becoming it and then pointing to himself. If this is narcissism - and certain reviewers have charged Taussig with as much - at least it's a form of narcissism which knows, thanks to a careful reading of Callois, what narcissism is - a form of becoming other.

[Gage Wente · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting ideas, great play on form, but needed a stronger editor - not to make it more normal, because that'd go against the intent of the book, but just to help organize and relate some of the ideas in a more available way. Would've worked better as a multimedia text, rather than just a book with pictures.

[Mills College Library]

320.98 T228m 1997