14 Facts About Michael Taussig

Michael Taussig is best known for his engagement with Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, especially in terms of the work of Walter Benjamin.

Michael Taussig was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 and a Berlin Prize in 2007 from the American Academy in Berlin.

Michael Taussig completed his secondary education in 1958 at North Sydney Boys High School.

Michael Taussig later earned a medical degree from the University of Sydney as well as a PhD in anthropology at the London School of Economics.

Michael Taussig's polemic is that the principal concern of anthropology should be to critique Western culture.

Michael Taussig further argues that people living in the periphery of the world capitalist economy have a critical vantage point on capitalism, and articulate their critiques of capitalism in terms of their own cultural idioms.

Michael Taussig thus concludes that anthropologists should study peoples living on the periphery of the world capitalist economy as a way of gaining critical insight into the anthropologists' own culture.

Michael Taussig suggests that earlier anthropologists might have argued that this belief is a hold-over from pre-capitalist culture, or serves as a leveling mechanism.

Michael Taussig argues that through the devil, peasants express their recognition that capitalism is based on the magic belief that capital is productive, when in fact capitalism breeds poverty, disease, and death.

Michael Taussig uses firsthand accounts and his own ethnographic work.

Michael Taussig describes how the shaman harnessed the "mystery" and "wildness" projected onto him by the West in his practice as a shaman.

Michael Taussig tries to explore the process through which we commodify the state and in that way transfer the power to it.

Michael Taussig argues that we live in a state of emergency, citing Walter Benjamin, that is not 'an exception but the rule.

Michael Taussig criticises anthropology for reducing the Cuna culture to one in which the Cuna had simply come across the white colonists in the past, were impressed by their large ships and exotic technologies, and mistook them for Gods.