My Cocaine Museum

My Cocaine Museum PDF Author: Michael Taussig
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226790150
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book 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.

My Cocaine Museum

My Cocaine Museum PDF Author: Michael Taussig
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226790150
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Get Book

Book 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.

What Color Is the Sacred?

What Color Is the Sacred? PDF Author: Michael Taussig
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226789993
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Over the past thirty years, visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig has crafted a highly distinctive body of work. Playful, enthralling, and whip-smart, his writing makes ingenious connections between ideas, thinkers, and things. An extended meditation on the mysteries of color and the fascination they provoke, What Color Is the Sacred? is the next step on Taussig’s remarkable intellectual path. Following his interest in magic and surrealism, his earlier work on mimesis, and his recent discussion of heat, gold, and cocaine in My Cocaine Museum,this book uses color to explore further dimensions of what Taussig calls “the bodily unconscious” in an age of global warming. Drawing on classic ethnography as well as the work of Benjamin, Burroughs, and Proust, he takes up the notion that color invites the viewer into images and into the world. Yet, as Taussig makes clear, color has a history—a manifestly colonial history rooted in the West’s discomfort with color, especially bright color, and its associations with the so-called primitive. He begins by noting Goethe’s belief that Europeans are physically averse to vivid color while the uncivilized revel in it, which prompts Taussig to reconsider colonialism as a tension between chromophobes and chromophiliacs. And he ends with the strange story of coal, which, he argues, displaced colonial color by giving birth to synthetic colors, organic chemistry, and IG Farben, the giant chemical corporation behind the Third Reich. Nietzsche once wrote, “So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history.” With What Color Is the Sacred? Taussig has taken up that challenge with all the radiant intelligence and inspiration we’ve come to expect from him.

The School of the Americas

The School of the Americas PDF Author: Lesley Gill
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822333920
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
DIVTransnational ethnography and history of the School of the Americas, analyzing the military, peasant, and activist cultures that are linked by this institution. /div

Midnight Robber

Midnight Robber PDF Author: Nalo Hopkinson
Publisher: Aspect
ISBN: 0759521123
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
"Deeply satisfying...succeeds on a grand scale...best of all is the language....Hopkinson's narrative voice has a way of getting under the skin."--The New York Times Book Review "Caribbean patois adorns this novel with graceful rhythms...Beneath it lie complex, clearly evoked characters, haunting descriptions of exotic planets, and a stirring story...[This book] ought to elevate Hopkinson to star status." --Seattle Times It's Carnival time and the Caribbean-colonized planet of Toussaint is celebrating with music, dance, and pageantry. Masked "Midnight Robbers" waylay revelers with brandished weapons and spellbinding words. To young Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen is simply a favorite costume to wear at the festival--until her power-corrupted father commits an unforgiveable crime. Suddenly, both father and daughter are thrust into the brutal world of New Half-Way Tree. Here monstrous creatures from folklore are real, and the humans are violent outcasts in the wilds. Tan-Tan must reach into the heart of myth and become the Robber Queen herself. For only the Robber Queen's legendary powers can save her life . . . and set her free.

I Swear I Saw This

I Swear I Saw This PDF Author: Michael Taussig
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226789845
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
I Swear I Saw This records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig’s reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. Taking as a starting point a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006—as well as its caption, “I swear I saw this”—Taussig considers the fieldwork notebook as a type of modernist literature and the place where writers and other creators first work out the imaginative logic of discovery. Notebooks mix the raw material of observation with reverie, juxtaposed, in Taussig’s case, with drawings, watercolors, and newspaper cuttings, which blend the inner and outer worlds in a fashion reminiscent of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’s surreal cut-up technique. Focusing on the small details and observations that are lost when writers convert their notes into finished pieces, Taussig calls for new ways of seeing and using the notebook as form. Memory emerges as a central motif in I Swear I Saw This as he explores his penchant to inscribe new recollections in the margins or directly over the original entries days or weeks after an event. This palimpsest of afterthoughts leads to ruminations on Freud’s analysis of dreams, Proust’s thoughts on the involuntary workings of memory, and Benjamin’s theories of history—fieldwork, Taussig writes, provokes childhood memories with startling ease. I Swear I Saw This exhibits Taussig’s characteristic verve and intellectual audacity, here combined with a revelatory sense of intimacy. He writes, “drawing is thus a depicting, a hauling, an unraveling, and being impelled toward something or somebody.” Readers will exult in joining Taussig once again as he follows the threads of a tangled skein of inspired associations.

The Magic of the State

The Magic of the State PDF Author: Michael Taussig
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135249040
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Set in the enchanted mountain of a spirit-queen presiding over an unnamed, postcolonial country, this ethnographic work of ficto-criticism recreates in written form the shrines by which the dead--notably the fetishized forms of Europe's Others, Indians and Blacks--generate the magical powers of the modern state.

Walter Benjamin's Grave

Walter Benjamin's Grave PDF Author: Michael Taussig
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226790002
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
In September 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Port Bou on the Spanish-French border when it appeared that he and his travelling partners would be denied passage into Spain in their attempt to escape the Nazis. In 2002, one of anthropology’s—and indeed today’s—most distinctive writers, Michael Taussig, visited Benjamin’s grave in Port Bou. The result is “Walter Benjamin’s Grave,” a moving essay about the cemetery, eyewitness accounts of Benjamin’s border travails, and the circumstances of his demise. It is the most recent of eight revelatory essays collected in this volume of the same name. “Looking over these essays written over the past decade,” writes Taussig, “I think what they share is a love of muted and defective storytelling as a form of analysis. Strange love indeed; love of the wound, love of the last gasp.” Although thematically these essays run the gamut—covering the monument and graveyard at Port Bou, discussions of peasant poetry in Colombia, a pact with the devil, the peculiarities of a shaman’s body, transgression, the disappearance of the sea, New York City cops, and the relationship between flowers and violence—each shares Taussig’s highly individual brand of storytelling, one that depends on a deep appreciation of objects and things as a way to retrieve even deeper philosophical and anthropological meanings. Whether he finds himself in Australia, Colombia, Manhattan, or Spain, in the midst of a book or a beach, whether talking to friends or staring at a monument, Taussig makes clear through these marvelous essays that materialist knowledge offers a crucial alternative to the increasingly abstract, globalized, homogenized, and digitized world we inhabit. Pursuing an adventure that is part ethnography, part autobiography, and part cultural criticism refracted through the object that is Walter Benjamin’s grave, Taussig, with this collection, provides his own literary memorial to the twentieth century’s greatest cultural critic.

Snowblind

Snowblind PDF Author: Robert Sabbag
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802197655
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
A look at the supercharged life of American drug smuggler Zachary Swan. “An extremely rare cut of dry wit, poetry, rock-hard fact and relentless insight” (Rolling Stone). Robbert Sabbag’s Snowblind, the true story of an American smuggler whose intricate, ingenious scams made him a legendary figure in the cocaine world of the late sixties and early seventies, is a modern classic. In this “witty, intelligent, fiercely stylish, drug-induced exemplary tale” (Los Angeles Times), Sabbag masterfully traces Zachary Swan’s Roman-candle career, from his first forays into smuggling marijuana to his jaunts to Colombia to buy pure cocaine, and his ever more elaborate plans to outwit the police and customs officials. Updated by the author, this captivating portrait of a dashing antihero and enthralling look at a turbulent age is sure to reach a new generation of readers. “A flat-out ball buster. It moves like a threshing machine with a fuel tank of ether.” —Hunter S. Thompson

Hope, Faith & Courage

Hope, Faith & Courage PDF Author: Cocaine Anonymous World Services, Inc
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780963819314
Category : Cocaine abuse
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description


I Lived to Tell It All

I Lived to Tell It All PDF Author: George Jones
Publisher: Dell
ISBN: 0804180865
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
Boozing. Womanizing. Brawling. Singing. For the last forty years George Jones has reigned as the country's king--the singer many have called the Frank Sinatra of country. And for most of that time, his career has been marked by hard-living, hard-loving, and hard luck. From his early east Texas recordings through his marriage with Tammy Wynette to his latest acclaim as a solid citizen and "high-tech red-neck," Americans have been fascinated with Jones, never even knowing whether he's going to show up for his next concert. Now, in I Lived To Tell It All, George Jones supplies a no-holds-barred account of his excesses and ecstasies. How alcohol ruled his life and performances. How violence marred many friendships and relationships. How money was something to be made but never held on to. And, finally, how the love of a good woman can ultimately change a man, redeem him, and save his life.