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Michael T. Taussig (born 3 April 1940 in Sydney) is an Australian anthropologist and professor at Columbia University. He is best known for his engagement with Karl Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, especially in terms of the work of Walter Benjamin. Taussig has also published texts on medical anthropology.
He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 and a Berlin Prize in 2007 from the American Academy in Berlin.
Taussig applies this approach to two beliefs: one based on both his own field research and that of anthropologist June Nash, the second based solely on his own research. The first is the belief held by semi-proletarianized peasants in Colombia (with an analogous case among Bolivian tin miners) who proletarianized sugar-cane cutters can make a contract with the devil that will cause them to make a good deal of money, but that this money can be spent only on frivolous consumer goods, and that the cutter will die an early and miserable death. Taussig suggests that earlier anthropologists might have argued that this belief is a hold-over from pre-capitalist culture, or serves as a leveling mechanism (ensuring that no individual become significantly wealthier than any of his or her fellows). Taussig, however, argues that through the devil, peasants express their recognition that capitalism is based on the magic belief that capital is productive, when in fact capitalism breeds poverty, disease, and death. The second belief provides another example of peasants representing their own understanding of capitalism's claim that capital is productive: the belief that some people engineer a switch that results in a peso, rather than a baby, being baptized. The consequence is that the money, alive, will return to its original owner no matter how it is spent, and bring more money back with it.
The author begins by studying the rubber trade in the Putumayo river area of Colombia of the late 19th and early 20th century. The British violently pressured the indigenous population, who still lived under an economy based upon gift exchange, to extract rubber from the rubber trees of the area. The barons' reactions to indigenous resistance was to carry out violence against the local population, which Taussig documents through providing firsthand accounts from the time.
In his section on healing, Taussig relates his ethnographic work with José García, an Indian shaman of the Putumayo, during the 1970s. He describes how the shaman harnessed the "mystery" and "wildness" projected onto him by the West in his practice as a shaman.
The Guna have adopted a set of wooden figurines for magical ritual that look remarkably like white colonists, to the point of sometimes being recognizable as figures from history that traveled through those parts. If you asked one of the Guna about the figurines, he would likely deny all connection between the two, creating an epistemic dilemma where something that may appear obvious to anthropologists is anything but obvious to those they study. Another noteworthy peculiarity of Guna culture that Taussig mentions is the way in which the Guna have adopted, in their traditional molas, images from western pop culture, including a distorted reflection of the Jack Daniel's bottle, and also a popular iconic image from the early twentieth century, The Talking Dog, used in advertising gramophones. Taussig criticises anthropology for reducing the Guna culture to one in which the Guna had simply come across the white colonists in the past, were impressed by their large ships and exotic technologies, and mistook them for Gods. For Taussig, this very reduction of the Other is suspect in itself, and through Mimesis and Alterity, he argues from both sides, demonstrating why exactly anthropologists have come to reduce the Guna culture in this way, and the value of this perspective, at the same time as defending the independence of lived culture from Anthropological reductionism.
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