“Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man” by Michael T. Taussig

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Analysis
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

The book “Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man” (1987) is written by Michael T. Taussig, Professor of Anthropology at the Columbia University who has acquired great academic reputation due to his seminal works on highly unconventional topics like devil worship, shamanism and state terror. His subject matter is inherently provocative by dealing with both evil and supernatural. He is also known for his unique style of writing called fictocriticism also known as ‘gonzo anthropology’ (Eakin 1). Fictocriticism blends “fact and fiction, ethnographic observation, archival history, literary theory and memoir” (Eakin 1) and Taussig’s books are more like novels than academic works. His first book appeared in 1980 and it was titled “The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America”. He later published “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” (1999); “Law in a Lawless Land” (2003); and “My Cocaine Museum” (2004). Michael Taussig is basically an anthropologist specializing in South America. In the book “Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man”, Taussig explores and explains the atrocities committed by the early-20th-century rubber traders in the Putumayo Valley by studying the phenomena of terror and shamanic healing in the region.

Analysis

Michael Taussig, an Australian by birth, studied medicine at the University of Sydney and sociology at the London School of Economics. He was deputed on duty to Columbia in 1969 to serve as doctor for rural Marxist guerillas during which time he took up writing and started keeping an account of his experiences. His first two books were ethnographies tinged with Marxist theory. He was motivated to write this book by a revelation he had while reading archival reports about the atrocities committed by early-20th-century rubber traders in the Putamayo Valley including the maiming and murder of dozens of Indians. He was both fascinated and repulsed by the violence and it is this dual conflicting reactions in him that made him write “Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man”. “Taussig by pairing terror in his title with healing, insists that the two may be found together, that where there is terror there healing will also be found-in the powers of shamans” (Pratt, p., 249). Taussig notes that the rubber companies indulged in murder and torture to keep the Indians in control but ultimately this move backfired as it cut off their labor supply. According to Mr. Taussig, the terror might have been caused due to deep rooted fears about savage Indians: “The uncertainty surrounding the possibility of Indian treachery fed a colonially paranoid mythology in which dismemberment, cannibalism… body parts and skulls grinned wickedly” (Taussig, p.104). But that fear alone cannot explain the madness at Putumayo and an adequate explanation is possible only by exploring deeper and understanding what is at stake. Mr. Taussig has depended on detailed reports of witnesses and investigators as well as some gruesome archival photographs to recreate the atmosphere in which the violence took place. Hence the book is quite authentic in approach.

The book is structured into two parts – the first part dealing with terror and the second part dealing with the healing rituals performed by the Indian shamans with whom he had studied. He observes that the white population perpetrated atrocities on the Indians and also depended on them for magical cures. While the first section of Taussig’s book is a straightforward evocation making use of many and contradictory documents of the Putumayo terror, the second section is more focused on hallucinatory reality, which is expressed in its discussions on impoverished mestizos about Indians, folk Catholic rituals and hallucinatory yage’ experience of native healers and patients (Lewellen 196). The book embodies many elements common to postmodern ethnography: “it is evocative rather than rationalist; it has a fragmentary disordered style and it blends multiple disciplines such as history, literature, anthropology, philosophy, poetry and biography” (Lewellen, p. 196). It explores Foucaldian notions of discourse, power and knowledge and is both self reflective and self referential (Lewellen, p. 194).

In this book, Michael Taussig, analyzes the “culture of terror” that gripped the Putumayo region of Colombia and suggests that when one tries to understand the practices and semiotics of terror one finds that they are constructed mostly out of what people do not know, what people have heard from others and from other third party accounts. Because of this the cultural and ideological engine of terror runs not just on distorted conceptions each side holds of the enemy but on the distorted conceptions each side holds about the distorted conceptions enemy holds about it (Hinton 140). The book aims at removing some of those distortions and helps the people see things both from the viewpoint of the colonizers and the colonized.

In the context of terror, the book interprets the atrocities committed against the natives of the rubber collecting regions of early twentieth-century Colombia (1984) through accounts of other journalists. For example Taussig says: “From the accounts of Casement and Timerman it is also obvious that torture and terror are ritualized art forms and that, far from being spontaneous, sui generis, and an abandonment of what are often called the values of civilization, such rites of terror have a deep history deriving power and meaning from those very values”. This interprets terror as a ritualized art form with a history and not some spontaneous event. Taussig analyzes colonialist discourse and concludes that forms of violence practiced in Putumayo can be considered as logical extensions of the ideological and normative patterns of colonizing culture (Hinton, p. 140).

In the second part of the book, Mr. Taussig points out that the colonizers of Latin America sought healing from the colonized and sometimes they sought such cures from even the victims of prior colonial violence – the Indian and the African ex-slaves. Taussig says that rites are associated generally with solidarity, but in the case of shamanic healing, the rites are based on otherness of the participants: “what are we to make of rites such as this wherein the Indian heals the souls of the colonist? Surely the healing here depends far more on the existence, the reproduction, and the artistry of difference as otherness and as oppression than it does on solidarity?… the colonized turning back to the colonizer the underside of this hate and fear congealed in the imagery of savagery”. Taussig links the healers’ prior exposure to violence to the events of colonial conquest and structural oppression. He also sees the descendants of the colonizer expressing postcolonial contradiction in illness and disease. The colonizer seeks emblematic victims for his healing and also implicit historical resolution. Taussig describes this idea as “healing through hallucinogenic creation of the anti-self” by which the “colonizer gains release from the civilization that so assails him”. In the words of Kathleen Biddick, “The turn to the “native” for healing can repeat the colonialist desire for redemption from the Other”.

He says that the ghosts of domination from the past such as the slave master, the ex-slave, the abolitionist, the ill colonizer, and the curing colonized are all linked to the present day violence and they cannot be just considered as belonging to a pre-human rights past. Taussig’s ethnography suggests that there is colonialism has had its impact on the postcolonial projects of “historical clarification and civilizational cure”. Thus Taussig links the postcolonial shamanistic healing project with a complicated history of violence between the colonizers and the colonized and this link “remains tacit but unacknowledged” (Feldman). The overall finding of Mr. Taussig is that the relationship between the colonizers and the colonized was very complex and full of contradictions and only something like fictocriticism can convey it (Eakin, p. 1).

Conclusion

I personally found that the book offers a great deal of insight in the context of increasing violence and terrorism in the present times. Colonialism can be redefined in the context of the oppressing nations versus the oppressed nations, and terrorism can be then understood as a phenomenon having its roots in the oppression. Thus, the book is bound to be interesting to socially and politically aware people from all walks of life.

Works Cited

Biddick, Kathleen (1998). The Shock of Medievalism. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1998
Eakin, Emily (2001). Anthropology’s Alternative Radical. New York Times, 2001. Web.
Feldman, Allen (2004). Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing and the Trauma-Aesthetic. Biography, 2004, Vol. 27, Issue 1, p. 163+
Hinton, Laban Alexander (2002). Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, p. 140
Pratt, Louise Mary (1992). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge Publishers, New York, 1992, p. 249.
Taussig, Michael (1987). Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wildman. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987.

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