School of English, Communication and Performance Studies Inaugural Interdisciplinary Research Seminar
School of English, Communication and Performance Studies Inaugural Interdisciplinary Research Seminar
15 July 2008
“I Swear I Saw That”: A talk on the act of giving witness
Professor Michael Taussig (Columbia University)
This talk will gather together different disciplinary interests across literature, performance, visual media and communication. It concerns drawings in fieldwork notebooks (Taussig’s own), the relation of text to image, drawing, and the act of giving witness.
Michael Taussig is a distinguished anthropologist and cultural theorist, best known for his engagement with Marx´s idea of commodity fetishism, especially in terms of the work of Walter Benjamin. His highly innovative writing pays primary attention to textual construction as a form of analysis in itself, involving a mixture of ethnography, story-telling, meta-ethnography, performance and theory.
Taussig has spent over ten years cumulatively doing fieldwork in Colombia, Putumayo, and Venezuela. His work has investigated the history of African slavery, abolition in Western Colombia, popular manifestations of the working of commodity fetishism, the sociology of malnutrition, the impact of colonialism on shamanism and folk healing, the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual, especially shamanic healing, the making, talking, and writing of terror, mimesis in relation to sympathetic magic, state fetishism and secrecy.
Currently a professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, he has been a faculty member at distinguished universities around the world, including professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and professor of Performance Studies at New York University. He has been guest lecturer, visiting professor, and keynote speaker at distinguished centres of learning around the world. In addition, Taussig has published numerous articles, written and publicly performed two scripts, and has been awarded many honours, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. His most recent book is Walter Benjamin’s Grave (2006). Other Representative Publications: The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980); Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987); The Nervous System (1992); Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (1993); The Magic of the State (1997); Defacement (1997); Law in a Lawless Land (2003); My Cocaine Museum (2004).
- Tuesday 15 July @ 4pm
- S/Link Theatre*, Caulfield Campus
- Followed by drinks at 6 pm at Mama Dukes Bar (on campus)