Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses / Edition 1

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More About This Textbook

Overview

Mimesis: the idea of imitation. Alterity: the idea of difference, the opposition of Self and Other. In his most accomplished work to date, Michael Taussig explores these complex and often interwoven concepts. Arguing that mimesis is the nature that culture uses to create second nature, he maintains that mimesis - variously experienced in different societies - is not only a faculty but also a history. That history, Taussig writes, is deeply tied to "Euroamerican colonialism, the felt relation of the civilizing process to savagery, to aping, sensateness caught in the net of passionful images spun for several centuries by the colonial trade with wildness." For anthropologists, social scientists, cultural critics, artists and everyone else caught up in the enigma of the postmodern, framing the question "What is Reality" is crucial to gaining an understanding of what it is we know and who we are. Why is it important to understand that traditions are inventions and that social life is a construction when they grip us with all the force of the "natural"? And how is it that we understand reality as both real and really made up? In Mimesis and Alterity Taussig undertakes an eccentric history of the mimetic faculty. He moves easily from the nineteenth-century invention of mimetically capacious machines, such as the camera, backwards to the fable of colonial "first-contact" and alleged mimetic prowess of "primitives," and then forward to contemporary time, when the idea of alterity is increasingly unstable. Utilizing anthropological theory, Taussig blends Latin American ethnography and colonial history with the insights of Walter Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer. Vigorous and unorthodox, Taussig's understanding of mimesis in different cultures deepens our meanings of ethnography, racism and society.
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Editorial Reviews

Booknews
Taussig draws on anthropological theory to expound on the evidence and implications of imitation (mimesis) and difference, or self and other (alterity). His study is farflung and unorthodox, blending Latin American ethnography and colonial history with the insights of Walter Benjamin, Adorno, and Horkheimer, reaching for deeper understanding of ethnography, racism, and society. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780415906876
  • Publisher: Taylor & Francis
  • Publication date: 12/28/1992
  • Edition description: New Edition
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 320
  • Sales rank: 1,267,339
  • Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 8.90 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
A Report to the Academy
1 In Some Way or Another One Can Protect Oneself From Evil Spirits by Portraying Them 1
2 Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds 19
3 Spacing Out 33
4 The Golden Bough: The Magic of Mimesis 44
5 The Golden Army: The Organization of Mimesis 59
6 With the Wind of World History in Our Sails 70
7 Spirit of the Mime, Spirit of the Gift 88
8 Mimetic Worlds: Invisible Counterparts 100
9 The Origin of the World 112
10 Alterity 129
11 The Color of Alterity 144
12 The Search For the White Indian 162
13 America as Woman: The Magic of Western Gear 176
14 The Talking Machine 193
15 His Master's Voice 212
16 Reflection 236
17 Sympathetic Magic In A Post-Colonial Age 250
Notes 257
Bibliography 283
Index 291
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