| My Cocaine Museum Contributor(s): Taussig, Michael (Author) |
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ISBN: 0226790096 ISBN-13: 9780226790091 Publisher: University of Chicago Press OUR PRICE: $36.63 Product Type: Paperback Published: May 2004 Annotation: In this book, a make-believe cocaine museum becomes a vantage point from which to assess the lives of Afro-Colombian gold miners drawn into the dangerous world of cocaine production in the rain forest of Colombia's Pacific Coast. Although modeled on the famous Gold Museum in Colombia's central bank, the Banco de la Republica, Taussig's museum is also a parody aimed at the museum's failure to acknowledge the African slaves who mined the country's wealth for almost four hundred years. Combining natural history with political history in a filmic, montage style, Taussig deploys the show-and-tell modality of a museum to engage with the inner life of heat, rain, stone, and swamp, no less than with the life of gold and cocaine. This effort to find a poetry of words becoming things is brought to a head by the explosive qualities of those sublime fetishes of evil beauty, gold and cocaine. At its core, Taussig's museum is about the lure of forbidden things, charged substances that transgress moral codes, the distinctions we use to make sense of the world, and above all the conventional way we write stories. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Anthropology - General - History | Latin America - South America |
| Dewey: 986.153 |
| LCCN: 2003021831 |
| Series: Carpenter Lectures |
| Physical Information: 1.05" H x 6.04" W x 9.04" (1.33 lbs) 336 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Latin America |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In this book, a make-believe cocaine museum becomes a vantage point from which to assess the lives of Afro-Colombian gold miners drawn into the dangerous world of cocaine production in the rain forest of Colombia's Pacific Coast. Although modeled on the famous Gold Museum in Colombia's central bank, the Banco de la República, Taussig's museum is also a parody aimed at the museum's failure to acknowledge the African slaves who mined the country's wealth for almost four hundred years. Combining natural history with political history in a filmic, montage style, Taussig deploys the show-and-tell modality of a museum to engage with the inner life of heat, rain, stone, and swamp, no less than with the life of gold and cocaine. This effort to find a poetry of words becoming things is brought to a head by the explosive qualities of those sublime fetishes of evil beauty, gold and cocaine. At its core, Taussig's museum is about the lure of forbidden things, charged substances that transgress moral codes, the distinctions we use to make sense of the world, and above all the conventional way we write stories. |
Contributor Bio(s): Taussig, Michael: - Michael Taussig is the Class of 1933 Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of several books, including The Corn Wolf and Beauty and the Beast, both published by the University of Chicago Press. |
