Environment, subsistence, and system Book

I think highly of Taussig's other work - particularly "The Devil and Commodity Fetishism" and "Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man" - which are required reading for anyone interested in the Americas, Marxist cultural theory and ethnography. I also enjoyed his collection of occasional essays, "Walter Benjamin's Grave."

However, I was disappointed with this book.

The purported task that Taussig sets for himself is to study the "public secret" - which he defines as that which one must know not to know - through a "labor of the negative" (Hegel) that draws on anthropology, Walter Benjamin, Adorno and other sources. He is interested in public lies, unmasking, and the persistence of the secret in its unveiling. Another of his prime interests is the link between the sacred and sacrilege - following Bataille, he argues that sacrilege enacts the sacred, completes it; in a sense, the sacred presupposes sacrilege. Anyway, sounds exciting, doesn't it?

Part I was interesting, but fairly anodyne - an examination of an outrage over controversial art in Australia in the late 90's. His reading struck me as a not especially inspired cultural studies take.

Part II was much better - it follows an ethnography of an Andalusian town, carried out in the 1950's at the height of the Francoist regime, and the ethnographer's study of the practice of lying. The twist is that the ethnographer himself withheld the truth, in the name of protecting his informants, thus erasing the town's long entanglement in the proud tradition of Spanish anarchism. This section also has an extended discussion of Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" which is less compelling.

Part III is an interminable discussion of the initiation ceremonies practiced by the peoples of the Tierra del Fuego, and the rituals' theatrical use of public secrecy. This section "breaks" with the rest of the book as it examines a "tribal" society whereas the rest of Taussig's book takes "modern" societies as its object.

Part IV returns to our contemporary cultural moment, and takes as its subject the "unmasking" of EZLN spokesman Subcommandante Marcos by the Mexican federal police. A much more interesting discussion of public secrecy and unmasking than Part III.

The book has its moments of brilliance, but over all it suffers from a sort of deconstructive logorrhea. I hesitate to even attempt to count the number of commas, asides, digressions, "what I means" and hanging phrases in this book. Supposedly this book was based on a series of lectures at Stanford, and aspects of the style make more sense in an oral environment, but read they are extraordinarily annoying.

Also, he never quite pulls together his inspirations - Hegel, Benjamin, Adorno, Bataille - into a coherent account of unmasking, public secrecy and sacrilege.

A solid book, but below Taussig's ordinary standards.