"The clear allusions to the South American local of Taussig's fieldwork and the spooky accompanying photographs
and drawings give the whole an eerie verisimilitude. He seems to be saying, "You think this is fantasy, but
it is and is not." Taussig's style of truthtelling roams in the fantasists privileged territory."
-- American Journal of Sociology, July, 1998
Routledge Web Site, May, 2000
Summary
Anthropologist Michael Taussig portrays the postmodern state in terms of spirit possession. This unusual book
of ficto-criticism begins with a conversation with the spirit queen as to the nourishment of the state by the dead--notably
the spirits of those whose blood was spilled during the European conquest and the anti-colonial Wars of Independence.
Taussig describes how through theaters of ecstasy, composed of fragments of the great story that the State,
for the perpetuation of its spiritual authority, needs to tell about itself, these spirits are provided a reservoir
of magical powers. Developing concepts of the sacred from Bataille, the post-Surreal College of Sociology, Canetti,
Marx, Hobbes, and Walter Benjamin, Taussig creates his own whirlwind theater of spirit-possession, utilizing popular
shrines, official monuments and slogans, money, the police, the freeway system, automobiles, taxis, the stealing
of the sword of the state and, last but not least, through fetishization of Europe's (dead) Others--Native Americans
and people of African descent.
