X-Nico

Michael Taussig

Taussig studies this phenomenon through ethnographical accounts of the Cuna, and through the ideas of Walter Benjamin.

•

He argues that we live in a state of emergency, citing Walter Benjamin, that is not ‘an exception but the rule.’ To show the universality of the nervous system he takes his reader through the heights of Macchu Picchu, the world of Cuna shamans, and the pale world of New York’s hospital system.

Sillero

In his work "Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man", anthropologist Michael Taussig describes the practice of using silleros to cross the Andes as part of the colonial tendency to see and treat the indigenous people as subhuman wild creatures.

see also