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My Cocaine Museum | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Taussig
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Category: Book
List Price: $22.50
Buy New: $20.25
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New (19) Used (9) from $16.66
Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 198749
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6 x 1.1
ISBN: 0226790096
Dewey Decimal Number: 986.153
EAN: 9780226790091
ASIN: 0226790096
Publication Date: May 11, 2004
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Product Description
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. (20040605)
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| Customer Reviews:
 Taussig's fetishism about Taussig October 2, 2004
T.:.L.:.Andrews (NYC)
13 out of 43 found this review helpful
Mick Taussig's fetishism with fetishism is shown at new levels in this book. This pomo work of fantasy is almost a parody of the stupidity with which anthropology has retreated from a world inhabited by real people with real problems to a never ending exercise in self exploration. This book shows Taussig to care only about himself and his whims in ways betraying not only his own narcissism, but that of contemporary anthropology as it praises such self important musings while ignoring the voices of other cultures.
 a postmodern delight April 4, 2005
T. Duncan (nyc)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
this book is fantastic. i found the previous reviewer's commentary to be disingenuous and bad-humured. taussig's self-consciousness is refreshing coming from a writing tradition that is dominated by academic-omniscient narration.
this work is politically and personally engaged and engaging. it is also, hopefully, evidence of contemporary anthropology's dedication to talking to people instead of simply about them.
if you would like a visceral imagining of the history and reality of colombia's cocaine production, you should read this book. if you are interested in ethnography that transgresses the traditional, then again, you should read this book.
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