Full Description
A new collection of essays reflecting on the centrality of writing anthropological practice from one of the discipline's most influential thinkers.
Michael Taussig's work is known for its critical insights and bold, experimental style. In the eleven essays in this new collection, Taussig reflects on the act of writing itself, demonstrating its importance for anthropological practice and calling for the discipline to keep experiential knowledge from being extinguished as fieldnotes become scholarship.
Setting out to show how this can be done, And the Garden Is You exemplifies a form of exploratory writing that preserves the spontaneity of notes scribbled down in haste. In these essays, the author's reflections take us from his childhood in Sydney to trips to Afghanistan, Colombia, Finland, Italy, Turkey, and Syria. Along the way, Taussig explores themes of fabulation and provocation that are central to his life's work, in addition to the thinkers dearest to him—Bataille, Benjamin, Burroughs, and Nietzsche, among others. This collection is vintage Taussig, bound to interest longtime readers and newcomers alike.
Contents
Author's Note
1 The Manglewort: In Which the Content Becomes the Form
2 Mooning Texas
3 Tom the Naturalist
4 Darkness at Noon
5 Kobane: Mastery of Non-Mastery
6 War Games
7 Unpacking My Library
8 Lost & Found
9 And the Garden Is You: A Sketch
10 Cities of Yagé: "Larval Entities Waiting for a Live One"
11 The Cry of the Donkey
Origins & Publication Status of the Essays
Notes
Index
