The Magic of the State($41.50Value)

Description

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. "Taussig offer[s] much of value for us to think about." -- Religious Studies Review "The clear allusions to the South American local of Taussig's fieldwork and the spooky accompanying photographs and drawings give the whole an errie 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 The Magic Of The State focuses on the theater of spirit possession at a Spirit Queen's enchanted mountain where the dead--Blacks and Indians, Europe's fetishized others--pass into the bodies of the living, creating a circulation of ecstatic bodily power. The Magic Of The State envisions power's violence, but also its adjection and attraction. This work is, in the surrealist tradition, a kind of defacement of power, and of the sacred underpinnings of modern sovereignty. Michael Taussig teaches in the Anthropology Department at Columbia University. He is the author, most recently, of The Nervous System and Mimesis and Alterity, both published by Routledge.