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Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man

A Study in Terror and Healing

Working with the image of the Indian shaman as Wild Man, Taussig reveals not the magic of the shaman but that of the politicizing fictions creating the effect of the real.

"This extraordinary book . . . will encourage ever more critical and creative explorations."—Fernando Coronil, [I]American Journal of Sociology[/I]

"Taussig has brought a formidable collection of data from arcane literary, journalistic, and biographical sources to bear on . . . questions of evil, torture, and politically institutionalized hatred and terror. His intent is laudable, and much of the book is brilliant, both in its discovery of how particular people perpetrated evil and others interpreted it."—Stehen G. Bunker, Social Science Quarterly

538 pages | 104 halftones, 3 maps | 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 | © 1987

Anthropology: Cultural and Social Anthropology

Latin American Studies

Table of Contents

Maps
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Part One: Terror
1. Culture of Terror, Space of Death
2. Casement to Grey
3. The Economy of Terror
4. Jungle and Savagery
5. The Image of the Auca: Ur-Mythology and Colonial Modernism
6. The Colonial Mirror of Production
Part Two: Healing
7. A Case of Fortune and Misfortune
8. Magical Realism
9. Las Tres Potencias: The Magic of the Races
10. The Wild Woman of the Forest Becomes Our Lady of Remedies
11. Wildness
12. Indian Fat
13. Surplus Value
14. Hunting Magic
15. The Book of Magia
16. Filth and the Magic of the Modern
17. Revolutionary Plants
18. On the Indian’s Back: The Moral Topography of the Andes and Its Conquest
19. Even the Dogs Were Crying
20. The Old Soldier Remembers
21. Toughness and Tenderness in the Wild Man’s Lair: The Everyday as Impenetrable, the Impenetrable as Everyday
22. Casemiro and the Tiger
23. Priests and Shamans
24. History as Sorcery
25. Envy and Implicit Social Knowledge
26. The Whirlpool
27. Montage
28. To Become a Healer
29. Marlene
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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