The Nervous System / Edition 1

by Michael Taussig

Overview

In a series of intriguing essays ranging over terror, State fetishism, shamanic healing in Latin America, homesickness, and the place of the tactile eye in both magic and modernity, anthropologist Michael Taussig puts into representational practice a curious type of engaged writing. Based on a paranoiac vision of social control and its understanding as in a permanent state of emergency leaving no room for contemplation between signs and things, these essays hover between story-telling and high theory and thus create strange new modes of critical discourse. The Nervous System will appeal to writers, scholars, artists, film makers, and readers interested in critical theory, aesthetics, and politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415904452
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/20/1991
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	218
Sales rank:	782,390
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Michael Taussig is Professor at Columbia University.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Why the Nervous System?; Chapter 2 Terror as Usual: Walter Benjamin's Theory of History as State of Siege; Chapter 3 Violence And Resistance In The Americas: The Legacy Of Conquest; Chapter 4 An Australian Hero; Chapter 5 Cane Toads: an Unnatural History; Chapter 6 Reification and The Consciousness of The Patient; Chapter 7 Maleficium :State Fetishism; Chapter 8 Tactility and Distraction; Chapter 9 Homesickness & Dada;

Editorial Reviews

"Taussig's masterful essays should be read by any scholar and in any class concerned with an anthropology of the present." -- American Anthropologist

From the Publisher