Introduction

While Michael Taussig writes a book-length account in Istanbul of his time in a village in northern Colombia besieged by paramilitaries, he draws what is happening outside his window. How these two channels of image and text come, don’t come, and partially come together is the elusive subject of this talk, resonant with the precarity of the villagers in such a situation no less than of the images emitted through the interstices of the text. How could these different states of awareness coexist, intermingle, and even feed off one another? In this regard, one thought came to stand out and that was his becoming aware of scale.

Michael Taussig is Class of 1933 Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Columbia University, NYC, and is known through his several idiosyncratic books from 1980 onwards concerning The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, The Nervous System, Mimesis and Alterity, The Magic of the State, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia, I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown, And the Garden is You, and Corpse Magic: Ecoes Active in the Slayer-Slain Nexus.