The Devil And Commodity Fetishism In South America

Author : Michael T. Taussig
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 0807898414
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America written by Michael T. Taussig and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-03-15 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this classic book, Michael Taussig explores the social significance of the devil in the folklore of contemporary plantation workers and miners in South America. Grounding his analysis in Marxist theory, Taussig finds that the fetishization of evil, in the image of the devil, mediates the conflict between precapitalist and capitalist modes of objectifying the human condition. He links traditional narratives of the devil-pact, in which the soul is bartered for illusory or transitory power, with the way in which production in capitalist economies causes workers to become alienated from the commodities they produce. A new chapter for this anniversary edition features a discussion of Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille that extends Taussig's ideas about the devil-pact metaphor.

Author : Michael Taussig
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226790002
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Walter Benjamin's Grave written by Michael Taussig and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-04-13 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In September 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou on the Spanish-French border when it appeared that he and his travelling partners would be denied passage into Spain in their attempt to escape the Nazis. In 2002, one of anthropology’s—and indeed today’s—most distinctive writers, Michael Taussig, visited Benjamin’s grave in Port Bou. The result is “Walter Benjamin’s Grave,” a moving essay about the cemetery, eyewitness accounts of Benjamin’s border travails, and the circumstances of his demise. It is the most recent of eight revelatory essays collected in this volume of the same name. “Looking over these essays written over the past decade,” writes Taussig, “I think what they share is a love of muted and defective storytelling as a form of analysis. Strange love indeed; love of the wound, love of the last gasp.” Although thematically these essays run the gamut—covering the monument and graveyard at Port Bou, discussions of peasant poetry in Colombia, a pact with the devil, the peculiarities of a shaman’s body, transgression, the disappearance of the sea, New York City cops, and the relationship between flowers and violence—each shares Taussig’s highly individual brand of storytelling, one that depends on a deep appreciation of objects and things as a way to retrieve even deeper philosophical and anthropological meanings. Whether he finds himself in Australia, Colombia, Manhattan, or Spain, in the midst of a book or a beach, whether talking to friends or staring at a monument, Taussig makes clear through these marvelous essays that materialist knowledge offers a crucial alternative to the increasingly abstract, globalized, homogenized, and digitized world we inhabit. Pursuing an adventure that is part ethnography, part autobiography, and part cultural criticism refracted through the object that is Walter Benjamin’s grave, Taussig, with this collection, provides his own literary memorial to the twentieth century’s greatest cultural critic.

Author : Michael Taussig
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226790150
Total Pages : 359 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book My Cocaine Museum written by Michael Taussig and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-12-19 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 República, 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.

Author : June C. Nash
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780231080514
Total Pages : 414 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us written by June C. Nash and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this powerful anthropological study of a Bolivian tin mining town, Nash explores the influence of modern industrialization on the traditional culture of Quechua-and-Aymara-speaking Indians.

Author : Rosemary-Claire Collard
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478012463
Total Pages : 122 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Animal Traffic written by Rosemary-Claire Collard and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-24 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parrots and snakes, wild cats and monkeys---exotic pets can now be found everywhere from skyscraper apartments and fenced suburban backyards to roadside petting zoos. In Animal Traffic Rosemary-Claire Collard investigates the multibillion-dollar global exotic pet trade and the largely hidden processes through which exotic pets are produced and traded as lively capital. Tracking the capture of animals in biosphere reserves in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize; their exchange at exotic animal auctions in the United States; and the attempted rehabilitation of former exotic pets at a wildlife center in Guatemala, Collard shows how exotic pets are fetishized both as commodities and as objects. Their capture and sale sever their ties to complex socio-ecological networks in ways that make them appear as if they do not have lives of their own. Collard demonstrates that the enclosure of animals in the exotic pet trade is part of a bioeconomic trend in which life is increasingly commodified and objectified under capitalism. Ultimately, she calls for a “wild life” politics in which animals are no longer enclosed, retain their autonomy, and can live for the sake of themselves.

Author : Michael Taussig
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226790142
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Law in a Lawless Land written by Michael Taussig and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-11-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A modern nation in a state of total disorder, Colombia is an international flashpoint—wracked by more than half a century of civil war, political conflict, and drug-trade related violence—despite a multibillion dollar American commitment that makes it the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. Law in a Lawless Land offers a rare and penetrating insight into the nature of Colombia's present peril. In a nuanced account of the human consequences of a disintegrating state, anthropologist Michael Taussig chronicles two weeks in a small town in Colombia's Cauca Valley taken over by paramilitaries that brazenly assassinate adolescent gang members. Armed with automatic weapons and computer-generated lists of names and photographs, the paramilitaries have the tacit support of the police and even many of the desperate townspeople, who are seeking any solution to the crushing uncertainty of violence in their lives. Concentrating on everyday experience, Taussig forces readers to confront a kind of terror to which they have become numb and complacent. "If you want to know what it is like to live in a country where the state has disintegrated, this moving book by an anthropologist well known for his writings on murderous Colombia will tell you."—Eric Hobsbawm

Author : Mark Poffenberger
Publisher : Westview Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 132 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Patterns Of Change In The Nepal Himalaya written by Mark Poffenberger and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 1981-09-07 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Guy Debord
Publisher : Bread and Circuses Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1617508306
Total Pages : 164 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Society Of The Spectacle written by Guy Debord and published by Bread and Circuses Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Das Kapital of the 20th century,Society of the Spectacle is an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's, in particular the May 1968 uprisings in France, up to the present day, with global capitalism seemingly staggering around in it’s Zombie end-phase, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This ‘Red and Black’ translation from 1977 is Introduced by Notting Hill armchair insurrectionary Tom Vague with a galloping time line and pop-situ verve, and given a more analytical over view by young upstart thinker Sam Cooper.

Author : Andrew Norman
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 1476616701
Total Pages : 189 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Robert Mugabe and the Betrayal of Zimbabwe written by Andrew Norman and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-04-22 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Instead of leading his people to the “promised land,” Mugabe, the first prime minister of the newly-named Zimbabwe, has amassed a fortune for himself, his family and followers and has presided over the murder, torture and starvation of those who oppose him. This biography offers some explanations for Mugabe’s behavior. With the death of his wife in 1992, a moderating influence was lost, and as the years go by, he continues to show himself intolerant of any opposition as he proceeds toward the creation of a one-party state, even though evidence suggests that his country is in terminal decline.

Author : Jean Comaroff
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226114430
Total Pages : 613 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2 written by Jean Comaroff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: V. 1. Christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in South Afric -- v. 2. The dialectics of modernity on a South African frontier.