num_pages: 304
description:  Over the past thirty years visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig has crafted a highly distinctive body of work. Playful enthralling and whip-smart his writing makes ingenious connections between ideas thinkers and things. An extended meditation on the mysteries of color and the fascination they provoke What Color Is the Sacred? is the next step on Taussigs remarkable intellectual path. Following his interest in magic and surrealism his earlier work on mimesis and his recent discussion of heat gold and cocaine in My Cocaine Museum this book uses color to explore further dimensions of what Taussig calls the bodily unconscious in an age of global warming. Drawing on classic ethnography as well as the work of Benjamin Burroughs and Proust he takes up the notion that color invites the viewer into images and into the world. Yet as Taussig makes clear color has a historya manifestly colonial history rooted in the Wests discomfort with color especially bright color and its associations with the so-called primitive. He begins by noting Goethes belief that Europeans are physically averse to vivid color while the uncivilized revel in it which prompts Taussig to reconsider colonialism as a tension between chromophobes and chromophiliacs. And he ends with the strange story of coal which he argues displaced colonial color by giving birth to synthetic colors organic chemistry and IG Farben the giant chemical corporation behind the Third Reich. Nietzsche once wrote So far all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history. With What Color Is the Sacred? Taussig has taken up that challenge with all the radiant intelligence and inspiration weve come to expect from him. 
language: English
title: What Color Is the Sacred?
publisher: University of Chicago Press