(Tina)Theresa Hannah-Munns
Book Review
Leona Anderson
August 17, 2006
Taussig, Michael. (1987). Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing.
Michael Taussig uses a mixture of colonial critique and active ethnographic participation in the culture of the Putumayo Indians of the Colombian Andes to analyze and uncover the multiple dialectic relationships constructed between Eurocultural “studied realism” (97) and the “magical realism” (73) of a derived insider relationship as a white anthropologist. Using a variety of sources from colonial records, traveler’s expedition journals and reports, and academic presentations, Michael Taussig portrays the colonial image of the wild Indian and the European idea of the wild man as “other” intermingling with another Eurocultural idea of the passive Indian within the first section of his book. This section on “Terror” shows how the colonial construction, and the academic construction within that colonial model, has set the stage for reciprocal appropriation of crosscultural representations that informs the various relationships in Colombia today and has created a “culture of terror” constructed through the use of colonial violence and informed by the “death-space.”
Besides published sources that represent the Indians of South America and what Eurocultural people (mostly men) think the Indians think of the white men, Taussig also uses a variety of emic sources from within the various linguistic groups, not only from the Colombian geography, but also from the neighbouring indigenous cultures. While it is unfortunate that he does not expose his methodology for extracting these narratives besides a few mentions of his own notes taken after his encounters, and many seem based on opinion rather than related within an ethnographic relationship with the author, it is in the use of these sources that the various class, race and ethnic positions and perspectives are exposed. It is this exposure that rounds out the flattened dialectical nature of academic writing to show that dualistic relationships between colonizer and colonized are actually pluralistic, with white colonizers attending to Indian beliefs and Christian Indians attending to Eurocultural beliefs in varying degrees. While the intellectual didactic is necessary in order to “think and analyze” the relationships occurring in Colombia, let alone any relationships crossculturally, the reality is that many various groups are coexisting within the colonial construction of humanity within this geopolitical arena.
It is the use of these sources that contrast the standard academic representations within section two on healing. Centered around the perspective of the curacas, the spiritual practitioners who take yagé (a vine with hallucinogenic properties) in ritual, Taussig intertwines the dual categories of academia into each other: healing consists of vomiting, shitting, and pain in order to see “the devil” and then meet “God”; Christian Indians see “devils work” in the ceremony while white colonists participate and want to become curacas; the highland Indians “evoke” the lowland Indians, as well as the Catholic saints; the Catholic icons intermingle with the tiger-tooth necklace and the curing fan in the room and on the altar; and, most importantly, the mixture of Christian and Indigenous representations that show up in the different visions seen in the “drunken” state.
Not only is this intermingling represented by Taussig within the indigenous religious climate, but also in the Christian climate as well. Narratives on the saints, even of the “crossculturally accepted” Roman Saint Michael, show how the Indian gave the whites their iconic images. For example, Our Lady of Remedies is the indigenous “Wild Woman of the
The latter chapters of part two expands on his theory of magical realism by twisting magic with medicine, magic with moral topography, magic with everything. His key caption of “The Everyday as Impenetrable, the Impenetrable as Everyday” (342) summarizes his breaking of structural categories imposed onto the indigenous knowledge formations from eurocultural theoretics. The insider views are tested against the theoretical assumptions, and the theoretical assumptions are then tested and/or justified by the indigenous theoretics. Shamanism and history are brought together as sorcery while envy is theoretically postulated as a social theory of knowledge. Theories of landscape infuse the psychological model of the hero and are then blown apart by the analysis of the shaman’s journey. All are interlaced together through the concept of the “colonial montage” (91). Montage is a concept introduced by Taussig from epic theatre. Rather than the structured order of the dramatic plotline, montage consists of abrupt scene changes, alternating situations of a group and the representations involving the group (or groups as in the case of the colonial stage), and the plurality of difference that sits in its own “‘ordered disorder’ and ‘continuous discontinuity’” (443). It is this concept that works as the structure of Michael Taussig’s representation of the curacas and their relationship within the colonial discourse of
