Research Catalog

Title

Mimesis and alterity : a particular history of the senses / Michael Taussig.

Author

Taussig, Michael T.

Publication

New York : Routlege, 1993.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xix, 299 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

"Mimesis: the idea of imitation. Alterity: the idea of difference, the opposition of Self and Other. In his most accomplished work to date, Michael Taussig explores these complex and often interwoven concepts. Arguing that mimesis is the nature that culture uses to create second nature, he maintains that mimesis - variously experienced in different societies - is not only a faculty but also a history. That history, Taussig writes, is deeply tied to "Euroamerican colonialism, the felt relation of the civilizing process to savagery, to aping, sensateness caught in the net of passionful images spun for several centuries by the colonial trade with wildness."" "For anthropologists, social scientists, cultural critics, artists and everyone else caught up in the enigma of the postmodern, framing the question "What is Reality" is crucial to gaining an understanding of what it is we know and who we are. Why is it important to understand that traditions are inventions and that social life is a construction when they grip us with all the force of the "natural"? And how is it that we understand reality as both real and really made up?" "In Mimesis and Alterity Taussig undertakes an eccentric history of the mimetic faculty. He moves easily from the nineteenth-century invention of mimetically capacious machines, such as the camera, backwards to the fable of colonial "first-contact" and alleged mimetic prowess of "primitives," and then forward to contemporary time, when the idea of alterity is increasingly unstable. Utilizing anthropological theory, Taussig blends Latin American ethnography and colonial history with the insights of Walter Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer. Vigorous and unorthodox, Taussig's understanding of mimesis in different cultures deepens our meanings of ethnography, racism and society."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects

• Ethnology > Philosophy
• Mimesis in art
• Imitation > Cross-cultural studies
• Difference (Philosophy) > Cross-cultural studies

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 283-290) and index.

Contents

1. In Some Way or Another One Can Protect Oneself From Evil Spirits by Portraying Them -- 2. Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds -- 3. Spacing Out -- 4. The Golden Bough: The Magic of Mimesis -- 5. The Golden Army: The Organization of Mimesis -- 6. With the Wind of World History in Our Sails -- 7. Spirit of the Mime, Spirit of the Gift -- 8. Mimetic Worlds: Invisible Counterparts -- 9. The Origin of the World -- 10. Alterity -- 11. The Color of Alterity -- 12. The Search For the White Indian -- 13. America as Woman: The Magic of Western Gear -- 14. The Talking Machine -- 15. His Master's Voice -- 16. Reflection -- 17. Sympathetic Magic In A Post-Colonial Age.

ISBN

• 0415906865 (hb) :
• 0415906873 (pb) :

LCCN

92035584

OCLC

• 26719038
• ocm26719038

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries