The Corn Wolf

Michael Taussig

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226310992
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Collecting a decade of work from iconic anthropologist and writer Michael Taussig, The Corn Wolf pinpoints a moment of intellectual development for the master stylist, exemplifying the "nervous system" approach to writing and truth that has characterized his trajectory. Pressured by the permanent state of emergency that imbues our times, this approach marries storytelling with theory, thickening spiraling analysis with ethnography and putting the study of so-called primitive societies back on the anthropological agenda as a way of better understanding the sacred in everyday life.The leading figure of these projects is the corn wolf, whom Wittgenstein used in his fierce polemic on Frazer's Golden Bough. For just as the corn wolf slips through the magic of language in fields of danger and disaster, so we are emboldened to take on the widespread culture of academic—or what he deems "agribusiness"—writing, which strips ethnography from its capacity to surprise and connect with other worlds, whether peasant farmers in Colombia, Palestinians in Israel, protestors in Zuccotti Park, or eccentric yet fundamental aspects of our condition such as animism, humming, or the acceleration of time. A glance at the chapter titles—such as "The Stories Things Tell" or "Iconoclasm Dictionary"—along with his zany drawings, testifies to the resonant sensibility of these works, which lope like the corn wolf through the boundaries of writing and understanding.

Index

abattoir, 169

Abufarha, Nasser (author of The Making of a Human Bomb), 126

Abu Nidal (Palestinian “organic communist” peasant farmer), 124–25, 128–29

Adamo, Ayesha, 78, 79

Adorno, Theodor, 5, 34, 42, 99

Afifi, Alex, 78, 85

Agee, James, 118

Al-Azza, Mohammad (Palestinian photographer), 121–22, 130–31

Alonso, Danny, 78, 94, 106, 109

Alvear, Efraín, 64–66

animation, 12–14, 27

animism and transgression, 160

ANUC (peasant organization in Colombia), 195

apotropaic magic, 7–8, 178

Assali, Hadeel, 114

Balbungu, Allan, 37

Baragan, Yesenia, 78

Barthes, Roland, 9, 158–59

Bataille, Georges, 9, 49, 73, 118, 144, 145–46, 149, 163, 169

Battir village, West Bank of Palestine, 123

Beckett, Samuel, 142

bees, 31–32

Benjamin, Walter, 16, 21, 26, 35, 38, 45, 54, 87, 104, 107, 117, 126, 143, 157

Berman, Marshall, 92

Bey, Hakim (“temporary autonomous zone”), 83

Bishara, Amahl (anthropologist of West Bank, Palestine), 130

Bohannan, Laura, 47

Brecht, Berthold, 1, 18, 172

Bright, Alec (director of the Gold Museum), 183, 187

Brown, Norman O., 107

Bucher, Karl, 48

Burroughs, William, 8, 35, 75

Bush Christmas (Australian film), 164

Cage, John, 31, 108, 111

Canetti, Elias, 45

Casement, Roger, 8, 58

Cavafy, Constantine, 55–56

Chamberlain, Leslie, 37

Clifford, James, 55, 75

Colombian violencia, 180, 182, 190

Communist Manifesto, The, 92

Concorde, Place de la, 159

conjurors, 29–30

Conrad, Joseph, 117, 131

contagion and proliferation, 160

Cowan, Michael, 48

craft, 16, 25–26

Cramer, Louise, 47

Deas, Malcolm, 188

Death Ship, The, 17–27

Denkbilden, 117. See also Benjamin, Walter

Deren, Maya, 45

devil in the cane fields, 46

dialectical image, 35, 122. See also Benjamin, Walter

Dickinson, Emily, 172, 179

Dionysian states, 36

Dolan, Clare, 36

Downey, Juan, 15–16

Durkheim, Emile (Elementary Forms of Religious Life), 171

Echeverri, Juan Alvaro, 57–58

Eisenstein, Sergei, 33, 38

erotic materialism, 106

fairy tale, 26

Fals-Borda, Orlando, 62, 189

Faulkner, William, 56–57

fieldwork, 1–2, 181, 194. See also participant-observation; writing: and writingwork

Foucault and lightning of transgression, 157–58

Fourier, Charles, 32

Fox News, 82

Frazer, Sir James George, 2

Gandy Dancer, 48

García, Juan Felipe (human Rights lawyer in Colombia), 55

Genet, Jean, 13

G...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Author’s Drawings
• The Corn Wolf: Writing Apotropaic Texts
• Animism and the Philosophy of Everyday Life
• The Stories Things Tell and Why They Tell Them
• Humming
• Excelente Zona Social
• I’m So Angry I Made a Sign
• Two Weeks in Palestine: My First Visit
• The Go Slow Party
• Iconoclasm Dictionary
• The Obscene in Everyday Life
• Syllable and Sound
• Don Miguel
• Index