A book about Colombia's forgotten poor, February 29, 2004

Michael Taussig offers a glimpse of the possibilities in his book Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia--limpieza being the term the paramilitaries use to refer to "cleansing" a region of its undesirable elements. Taussig, an anthropologist at the other Columbia (the one on the Upper West Side of New York City) has been doing fieldwork since 1969 in a small city in the Cauca River Valley, a few miles from Cali. Some time around the year 2000, a tax-free, free-trade industrial zone was established just outside town. In February of the following year, a group of paramilitaries move in, hired--Taussig's informants tell him--by the "town's business elite." In the 1990s, in other regions of Colombia, the style of the paramilitaries would have been to move into a town such as Taussig's, identify the supposed guerrilla sympathizers and massacre them all at once, thereby creating headlines and embarrassing human rights inquiries. But in the new millennium the paramilitaries...

Michael Taussig is acclaimed in the New York Times as "one of the brightest and most original thinkers in anthropology." I would like to add that Taussig is also a profound student of philosophical anthropology, "the study of the nature and essence of humankind." To this end, "Law in a Lawless Land," is an enormous opening into the minds of Colombia's forgotten poor.