Taussig Shamanism, Colonialism

Unos de mis etnografias predilectas, que marcan algo de lo que estuve pensando desde que estoy en cana. Este comentario es del momento en que lo lei a ppios del 2006.

In this book Taussig takes a dialectical thinking into the totality of its possibilities. Shamanism is not only a case study on the colonization of the southwest of Colombia, of the violence during the rubber boom and the contemporary practices of shamanism. His work is an intense epistemological exploration.

The topics I will discuss in this commentary are the result of the arbitrary questions and thoughts I had reading this book. From all of them I also chose to discuss a few. I am interested in discussing what type of epistemological asseveration underlying this work. I will only superficially address the main tension of the book that arises between terror and healing. Finally, I will finish with some specific questions in relation to a topic that opens and closes the book; this is the notion of death space.

1. knowledge
The work of Taussig shows the operation of contradictions not by enunciation but through direct analysis on the production of terror and healing. The author deconstructs objectivism in its understanding of the world as a system of delimited logically interconnected, classifiable and measurable subjects and objects. He agrees with Foucault in the non-existence of an objective truth “out there” but in its social production as systems of power construction. Even not drawing in Niesztche’s work he seems to imply the division between apolinear and dionisiac views, were he discharges any apolinear attempt as veiling the real contradictory changing reality.

He analyses the logic of the concrete contradictions in the constitution of epistemic murk, a concept he uses to synthesis points of sedimented tensions. This is, for example the idea of terror as mimesis, of how the imagined fears of colonizers on the monstrosity of Indians and of the environment, produce the colonizers as the monsters they fear, inflicting the violence they imagine into the others, mainly the Indians. The epistemic murk is the area of tensions were fiction is reality and vice-versa, manifests that violence is not caused by a social or an economic “need”, it has no utility. So, knowledge cannot be produced by distinguishing conditions, causes, and results. Rather Taussig is claiming in the praxis of writing that only in the contradictions processes, subjects and objects take temporal shape. Also processes and subjects in themselves are contradictory. One of the first examples of this is the figure of the muchachos during the Putuamayo rubber boom. Muchachos are young “indians” in charge of policing and controlling the work of other indians, they are the object of very strong control but at the same time are the authors of the biggest acts of violence against indians.

2. Terror and Healing
Turning to the main theme of the book, it can considered that the tension showed between the two parts of the book are both a way of understanding the particular processes he analyses. It can also be taken as a path for understanding some underlying processes in other points of Latin American (but probably also other colonial context from South Africa to Ireland or Thailand). In the line of what has been discussed, the conquest cannot be understood as the contact of two separate worlds (as for example Marshall Salhins would argue, see Sahlins 1999). Rather Colonization is a huge clash that destroys and re builds reality, societies and people. Against culturalist, functionalist and structural takes, the author makes visible that there is no stable essence that prevails, no redefinition of a system, and no deep universal structure that finds its way to manifest through a new shape.

Terror and healing are two of the surfacing aspects of colonialism. Terror is the result of fear and the representations of wilderness of the Indian and nature. Terror is a productive force shaping both indians and colonizers. Is the nightmare of the civilized world living their worst imagined horrors. Terror brings unpredictable torture and death to indians, at the same time it constitutes an un-measurable, feared power in them. In the same process colonizers are constituted through the exercise of banal terror. Death is inflicted for the never fulfilled pursuit of controlling what cannot be controlled. Violence is the intent of putting order into a reality that is never organized. One of the origins of horror is the mysterious powers of indians, powers to heal and also power to damage. Therefore terror cannot be understood without understanding healing.

Healing is not just the opposite movement from terror, is not the instauration of a new harmony. Healing deals with the open scars of the violence, and uses images of terror as a power to deal with this. This process is related to the practice of shamans and the use of yague, as an alucinogetic that helps to project the images of what cannot be seen otherwise. In this sense healing does not provide order but allows to represent and so interact with and within contradictions. Healing is also a practice that empowers indians. White fear of un known powers of indians and in this they produce this power. As a aresult the effectiveness of healing is not in the action or knowledge of the shaman but rather in the relation patient – healer. The illness the patient brings makes possible to the shaman to see and cure his own scars. The patient can not express nor represent his illness, however he has the certainty of pain and suffering, while the shaman has a diffuse suffering but the possibility of approaching it through yague. Healing is then the dialectical relation between patient and shaman and between illness or ignorance and the power of representing it.

Terror and healing are then mutually constituted, one could not operate without the other.

3. Death space

The death space is one of contradictions, of life and death, of chaos that lies beneath order, of illumination and obscurity of reason, of hope and despair. Is a space ruled by terror of the certainty of death as a imminent possibility yet the uncertainty of when, how and if it is even really going to happen. Terror in the space of death is not the result of the functional need of conquest, but rather is originated in the culture of evil as opposed to space of God’s order.

If we take Lefebvre’s definition of absolute space as the religious one that follows the organization and the control of a totalitarian God, the origin of the space of death is the counter part of this space. Absolute space is organized, logic, fair, where suffering has a cause. While the space of devil or absence of God (Taussig mentions Homer, Dante, Bosch, Rimbaud) is illogic, arbitrary, is where suffering is generalized and unpredictable. In this way the space of death is the result of the Western culture about it, shaping its reality in the encounter with New World. So the death space is the result of a fiction, of the imagination of a space. The space of death is what makes possible a society of terror and torture, is a creative force shaping meaning and consciousness but not creating a totality. It is composed of fragments it dismantles unities and re arranges in a temporal, unstable formation.

Even Taussig is not explicitly defining what he means by death and space he give some clues about it. By death he is not only implying the end of life and its destruction, he is not only referring to the terror resulting form arbitrary murder. But he describes it as the illuminating consciousness of life when death is immanent part of everyday life. In respect to what he means by space I consider is the productive force that through fictions that become and are real, make the social relations of terror something that happens in place, in his case he is thinking of the Putumayo rubber boom at the beginning of the 20th century. Even Taussig does not analyze the problematic of space and does not pose it in this terms we can consider that the death space is produced as a result of social relations of terror, in this case especially the lowlands, and in contradiction to places of healing (cfr. Gordillo 2004).

With this concept Taussig opens and closes the book showing how the knowledge we can have about social relations is in projecting the contradictions within them, inhabiting those contradictions during the research process. Looking through terror Taussig searches to understand healing being both terms unstable forms of montage. Montage implies the destruction and fragmentation of bodies and things and their possible relations. But it implies the generation of meaning form the precarious gathering of the fragments. Montage is what best represents the space of death and in a more general way the actuality of colonization. Thinking through contradictions and avoiding logically organizing social reality is a principle that according to Taussig is applicable to every event.

References

Taussig, Michael 1987 Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967 The Birth of Tragedy Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.

Lefebvre, Henri 2005 [1974] The production of Space. Tans by Donald Nicholson – Smith. London: Blackwell.

Gordillo, Gastón 2004 Landscapes of Devils: Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco. Durham: Duke University Press.