T W E: M R M T: Introduction: Establishing The Ground of Contestation
T W E: M R M T: Introduction: Establishing The Ground of Contestation
JU SCHKA
U n i v e r si ty of R e g i n a
T
HE CURRENT EPISTEMOLOGICAL CRISIS IN THE WEST has had an interesting and
productive affect on the writing of ethnography. Ethnography, a method
of knowledge acquisition, development, and dissemination has become
suspect under the pressure of this challenge and many have risen to address it.
Scholars from such disciplines as Anthropology, Religious Studies, Sociology and
Women’s Studies who employ the ethnographic method, must engage fully the
crisis but in this engagement there is much to gain. Toward examining the impact
of the epistemological crisis, this paper first explicates the problem, some of the
issues related to the problem, and then intersects with the genre of Magical
Realism through one ethnographer’s critically creative reply to the crisis of the
“posts”: Michael Taussig’s magical realist ethnography, The Magic of the State
(1997).
The crisis in knowledge has affected all disciplines, or at least those disciplines that
are self-conscious about the production of knowledge. This current crisis is of course
a product of the rise of feminisms, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and
postcoloniality. Noticeably three of these epistemological locations claim the “post”
or after-modernity position. They self-consciously engage in the paradigm of
thinking found in modernism, structuralism, and colonialism, but deconstruct their
1This paper was given on a panel for the Canadian Women’s Studies Association and Canadian
Sociological and Anthropological Association at the Canadian Congress May 29, 2002.
2 For a discussion of knowers, knowing and known in the feminist paradigm see Mary Hawkesworth,
“Knowers, Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth.” Signs, vol. 14 no. 3, 1989: 533-
557.
3 In terms of the dissemination of something called “normative knowledge,” knowledge grounded in
a positivistic scientific paradigm, I follow Sandra Harding in arguing that this kind of tunnel vision
produced in and by the West has only been called into question in the last few decades. See Sandra
Harding, Is Science Multicultural?: Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies. (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 21-38.
inherent to it. Ethnography assumed that inductive reasoning, the moving from
the particular to the general to the universal in terms of the production of
knowledge, was unproblematic4 and did not in any significant way call into
question the issue of the subject and object division: ethnography did not self-
reflectively understand that the discipline’s act of writing the other into existence
was a colonizing act.
The writing of ethnography made clearly visible the subject and object distinction.
Under the influence of the previously mentioned “posts,” the potential to colonize
the other in the writing of the ethnographic text became evident. Ethnographers
of the early 20th century did not address this problem; indeed, part of the problem
that many sought to address was the issue of authenticity. To write ethnography
was problematic when never having been among those peoples about whom one
purported to be an expert. The issue of inductive reasoning used in scientific study
was a form of reasoning seen as most appropriate for studying people and making
that study relevant to the academic community. Drawing methodology from
natural sciences, social sciences introduced the conceptualization of a rule-based
study that would provide a necessary veracity to the study of peoples. These
studies could not only contribute to the study of cultures and societies, but could
also act as the definitive means by which to understand and predict human
behaviour. The logic of deductive reasoning, beginning with a generalization and
seeking to apply it to particulars was seen to be problematic. In this kind of
formulation, it was felt that the ethnographer would distort the data so that the data
would conform to his or her theoretical premises. This did not mean that the
ethnographer did not have questions in mind; rather, she/he should not have
answers in mind. Then, like the archival historian, the ethnographer would enter
the field (archives) and learn about whatever phenomenon she/he had in mind
to study. In this way, she/he documented the phenomenon in action, thereby
providing an authentic study. But with the rise of feminist, postmodern,
poststructural, or postcolonial challenges to the epistemological problems of
4For a discussion of the rise of and problems with inductive reasoning see Mary Poovey, History of the
Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. (Chicago and London:
knower, known, and knowing, the ethnographic method was seen to be complicit
in objectifying the focus of one’s study. As Michel de Certeau has argued:
In terms of writing, the process was one of bringing the other (them) into the frame
of the same (us), although they remained other (them) and under control of the
same (us). Writing brought into consciousness what was deemed unconscious,
inscribing and locating what was ephemeral and always in the present (lacking
history) and ultimately allowed what was other to remain as such but clearly under
the control of the same. In this writing of alterity it becomes apparent that the
colonizing of the other, be it the “south-worlds,” the “primitive,” or the female—all
those marked in some fashion within a hegemonic discourse—is effected. In the
writing of ethnography the knower, known, and knowing are in the hands of the
ethnographer. Although she/he may engage an informant, the knowledge is
always transcribed by the ethnographer who has the knowledge to know the
other in a way they could never know themselves. Clearly the subject location
belongs to the master narrator—the ethnographer—and clearly the object location
belongs to that of the observed, the ethnographer’s datum. In terms of
appropriation of voice (feminism), of re-colonization (postcolonialism), of the
mediation through language (poststructuralism) and Archimedean point or the
unsituated theorist (postmodernism), the writing of ethnography, like western
epistemology, faced a crisis.
Several attempts have been made in the fields of Religious Studies and
Anthropology to address this problem.6 Some thought that if the product of their
study was co-authored with their informant, that in turn, this could address the
problem of appropriation and colonization; however, the unsituated theorist
remained a problem. Others thought to address the issue of speaking from
nowhere (Archimedean point) by situating themselves in terms of the locality of
the study (in the field) or in terms of a locality of the ethnographer (in the
university), or both. A certain reflexivity was introduced into the writing of the
ethnography. No longer was the ethnographer absent. Rather her/his thoughts,
interactions, insights, problems, and day-to-day experiences were introduced in the
Edward Said, Trinh T. Minh-Ha,8 and Michel de Certeau, among others, have
effectively laid bare the process of “otherfication” in terms of knowledge
production. In his various writings, Certeau has demonstrated an abiding interest
in the concept of alterity. Alterity, according to the OED is defined as “[t]he state
of being other or different; diversity, ‘otherness.’” As an ideological concept acting
as an epistemological unit, alterity is in an oppositional binary relationship with
ipseity (self) and in an analogical relationship with them (vs. us), margin (vs.
center), primitive (vs. civilized), nature (vs. culture), and orality (vs. written), to
name but a few. Ipseity, according to the OED, is defined as “personal identity and
individuality; selfhood.” To some theorists alterity appears to be positively
charged. This is due, I think, to it being paradoxical in that it is both empty, empty
in terms of absence (it lacks self), and full, full of otherness (all that which the
category of the same cannot contain).9 Nonetheless, it does not exist other than in
a binary relationship with ipseity as self/other or ipseity/alterity. Without self, the
other (alterity) does not exist and, equally, without the other, self (ipseity) does not
exist.10 Alterity is a concept that currently operates in relation to the logic of
7 For a variety of ways to write ethnography and discussions about autoethnography and other forms
of authorial reflexivity see Irma McClaurin, ed., Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis and
Poetics. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers 2001) or Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner, eds.,
Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing. (Walnut Creek, London, New Dehli:
Altamira Press, 1996).
8 Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. (Bloomington: Indiana
“The stranger, like other tropes, is a politically informed account of alternative subjectivity” Elizabeth
Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists. (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989), xiv.
10 “The ‘Other’ in the work of Michel Foucault, for instance, consists of those who are excluded from
positions of power, and are often victimized within a predominantly liberal humanist view of the
subject.” (Stewart Sim, ed. The Routledge Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought. [New York:
Routledge, 1999], 181.) And “[A]ll cultures thus create a division of humanity between themselves
on the one hand, a representation par excellence of the human, and the others, which only
participate in humanity to a lesser degree. The discourse that primitive societies use for themselves, a
discourse condensed in the names they confer upon themselves [Ava, men; Ache, persons;
In terms of hegemony, alterity is the other against which the dominant group
recognizes itself as dominant. Therefore, the category of alterity is a double-edged
sword, one that can cut both ways: the same is dependent upon the other to exist
as the same. Those who have resisted colonization, many of the marginalized and
some who occupy the position of the center, have recognized this and have taken
up the category of alterity in order to subvert the category of ipseity, and in the
process underscore the inherent power in the category of the other. However,
hegemonic powers typically contain many means by which to maintain their
position of power. The absorption of alterity in order to nuance ipseity has been
one of these means. For example, an appropriative movement that has occurred
in the last several decades has been multiculturalism (the reverse of melting pot
ideology). Although seen as a positive move, wherein difference throughout the
demographic body of the state is embraced, this act is simply a symbolic gesture
of inclusion at its best. In terms of order and structure of the state, the same (or
hegemony/homogeneity) operates as an umbrella overseeing, neutralizing and
therefore controlling the differences in the entirety of the state. Difference is
allowed only insofar as it works toward empowering hegemony. In this manner,
multiculturalism is seen to enrich the state in its body (culture seen in food, colour,
or literature), but is never present in terms of its head (operative governmental
power, economic power, or epistemological power)—alterity, in this instance, is in
service of the state.
Yanomami, people; Inuit, men], is thus ethnocentric through and through … It is part of a culture’s
essence to be ethnocentric, precisely to the degree to which every culture considers itself the culture
par excellence. In other words, cultural alterity is never thought of as positive difference, but always
as inferiority on a hierarchical axis.” (Pierre Clastres, Archeology of Violence in Semiotext(e). Jeanine
Herman, trans. [MIT Press, 1994], 46.)
11 Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual and
Classification. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1989), 159.
12 For an extended discussion on the subject of European travelogues see Certeau, The Writing of
History, 209-243.
13 For a complete discussion of this binarism see Certeau, The Writing of History, 209-243.
14 Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative, Discourse and Historical Representation. (Baltimore
Does the narration of past events, which, in our culture from the time of the Greeks
onwards, has generally been subject to the sanction of historical ‘science,’ bound
to the underlying standard of the “real,” and justified by the principles of
“rational” exposition—does this form of narration really differ, in some specific
trait, in some indubitably distinctive feature, from imaginary narration, as we find
it in the epic, the novel, and the drama?17
15 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. (Baltimore and
London: the John Hopkins University Press, 1973), 7.
16 See White, Metahistory, 6-31 for an extended discussion.
17 Barthes in White, The Content of the Form, 35.
18 There have, however, been exceptions, e.g., Zora Neale Hurston.
Magical Realism is possibly a genre19 of writing that blurs the line between the
“real” and the fantastic and so may offer a solution to the conundrum of narrative
otherfication, as I will argue shortly. Franz Roh, a German Art critic who felt it to
be an art category, introduced the term in 1929. Theoretically developed by Alejo
Carpentier as lo real-marvilloso20 and used by a number of “south world” writers
such as Ben Okri, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Anna Castillo, as well as Southern
Black American writers such as Toni Morrison, it is a form of writing that employs
paradoxes in relation to time, reality, and space. The past, present, and future run
alongside each other, interwoven and at times undifferentiated; space is a montage
in which the center and periphery are overlaid or overlapping; reality and truth
are separated and their inherent relationship called into question by the revelation
of fantasy and desire residing between the two. In magical realism, irony and
tragedy operate as the face behind the mask of the comedy that underscores tragic
futility. In this equation, the real is the colonialist overlay that imperils life and
culture, while the fantastic is that which operates in direct antithesis to the
European super-civilization in an attempt to negotiate the persistence of colonial
memory,21 in the hope of creating a future that neither represses the past nor is
permanently mutilated by it. Rather, freedom is potentialized by simultaneously
19 There is some discussion as to whether magical realism is an actual genre of writing differentiated
from fantasy. Because of its use of historical events and its obvious political critique I believe it to be a
genre unto itself and not fantasy. But because I am not a literary critic and do not operate in the field
of English or Literature, I would be disinclined to attempt a definitive statement in regard to its
genre status.
20 Edwin Williams, “Magical Realism and the Theme of Incest in One Hundred Years of Solitude.” In
Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell eds., Gabriel García Màrquez: New Readings. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 45–64.
21 For an interesting discussion of the disabling persistence of colonial memory see Jeremy Adelman ,
ed., Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History. (New York and London:
Routledge, 1999).
Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved (1987), exemplifies quite wonderfully the challenge
to the binary opposition of inner and outer space. In this novel, one encounters the
character Sethe who is locked in her house and tormented by the ghost of her
child, Beloved, whom she murdered in a desperate act to keep her from re-
enslavement. This ghost-child dominates the inner-world of the house, but the
ghost-child has come into existence because of the outer-world of American slavery.
Sethe, in a long and arduous journey has escaped to freedom, but those who would
own her and her children have arrived to return her and the children to the
condition of slavery. Sethe attempts to kill all the children for she believes death
is a preferred state to enslavement:
The outer-world, or the real world, is one of injustice and horror for Blacks during
the period of slavery in the United States. This injustice and horror slipped into
Sethe’s inner-world, into her home and mind that were both at one time a
sanctuary—an injustice; horror manifested by the petulant and highly destructive
ghost-child. Sethe is held hostage in her home, overwhelmed by her guilt for the
murder and attempted murder of her children. However, the outer-world will step
in again, but this time in a restorative manner, as it is only through the actions of
the women of the Black community, who exorcise the ghost-child, that the home
and mind of Sethe are freed from the horror, injustice, and guilt produced by
slavery and signified by a hurtful ghost-child. The space or boundary between
outer and inner is merged in the novel so that the inner-world is understood as
conditional to the outer-world. This leads to an awareness that the two cannot be
separated. The binary opposition between the inner and outer is a boundary
referring to all boundaries that are, in Magical Realism, “fold[ed] and refold[ed]
like quicksilver, … superimpos[ing] themselves upon one another.”23 In the binary
opposition of inner and outer what is not visible is that they are coextensive: each
lies hidden in the other. The separation imposed by the concept of boundary,
generated by the inside/outside binary, is the illusion that magical realism makes
visible as an illusion.
Like inner and outer space, the space of periphery and center is also illusory, and
like inner and outer space has ideological imperatives. The center is established
in terms of power and powerlessness,but in magical realism, the distance between
center and periphery is diffused and displacement occurs. How this occurs is, on
the one hand, through the recognition and underscoring of the agency of those
who are socially and historically located on the periphery and seen to be
powerless, and, on the other hand, through a diminishment of the hegemonic
power of those socially and historically located at the center.
In the first technique, those who are typically represented as weak, vulnerable,
and lacking are often those who understand and fully engage both the magical
and the real. Azaro, the spirit child of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1992), is such
a figure. Although buffeted by the world of adults, the child is nonetheless more
of an agent in his life than the adult characters of the novel. The technique of
diminishing hegemonic power is achieved by the simple act of calling into
question the concept of causality. Those who stand at the center are assumed to be
powerful/active, and therefore the center is a place of power. (Equally, those who
stand at the periphery are assumed to be powerless/passive, and therefore the
periphery is a place of powerlessness.) The logic here is one of causality wherein
there is a perceived cause and effect relationship between the center and power.
The issue is not whether power creates centers and centers create power, rather it
is the logic assuming a law-like connection between the two. Once an immutable
law is introduced, power, the center, and the law that binds them are reified—they
are things for which people long for, seek after, die and kill for.
In magical realism, agency is available to those who would enact it while causality
is a mere question mark; causal links are wishful thinking. In Anna Castillo’s So
Far From God (1993), Caridad’s brutal rape has left her a mutilated woman: “Sofi
was told that her daughter’s nipples had been bitten off. She had also been
scourged with something, branded like cattle. Worst of all, a tracheotomy was
performed because she had also been stabbed in the throat.”24 Caridad remains in
the hospital for three months until she is returned home comatose and mutilated,
but one evening a miracle occurs. After La Loca, the youngest daughter who
operates in the magical realm, has a seizure Caridad walks across the dining room,
23 Rawdon Wilson “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism.” Magical Realism, 210.
24 Ana Castillo, So Far From God. (New York: Plume, 1993), 33.
but “it wasn’t the Caridad that had been brought back from the hospital, but a
whole and once again beautiful Caridad…”25 La Loca’s infrequent seizures are
never established in a causal relationship with the miraculous events that typically
follow close on the heels of the seizures. The seizure and miracle are never
explicitly linked, but by their close spatial association in the text there is an
inference that they could be linked in a causal relationship if one so chooses.
However, the author does not, either through narrative voice or through the
characters, make such a link; the choice to construct one belongs to the reader.
In terms of agency, after Caridad’s “holy resurrection,” she meets a healer named
Donña Felicia who recognizes and explains to her that she, Caridad, is a healer
and indeed had healed herself through an act of will.26 Caridad, who prior to her
rape had little agency, claims agency and begins to live her life actively, thereafter
becoming a center of power located on the periphery of the community: “So it was
that during that Holy Week, instead of going to Mass at their local parishes,
hundreds of people made their way up the mountain to la Caridad’s cave in hopes
of obtaining her blessing and just as many with hopes of being cured of some
ailment or another.”27 Throughout the novel, the patterns of the taking up of
agency and the disruption of the “laws” of causality are repeated, both of which
alter space so that it “folds and refolds” and the center becomes the periphery and
periphery the center. Each resides in the other.
The space of the text is itself magical. The exterior space of the text, front and back
cover, the spine, and the papers glued between, is small and can indeed fit into
a pocket or a bag. But the space in the text is a world with skies that open up unto
infinity. This world of the text can be limited in order to mirror the finiteness
imposed on the exterior world of the text, or it can foreground the infinite that
exists simultaneously alongside the finite. In this play between the worlds—outside
and inside the text, between the finite and infinite—the text as text is self-
consciously presented. The magic that is part of the everyday and the mundane
in magical realism brings to the reader an awareness that this is a text, a novel, or,
in the case to be discussed, an ethnography. Further, the text itself can be
represented in the text as in Gabriel García Màrquez’s One Hundred Years of
Solitude (1971). García Màrquez’s textual character Melquíades is the writer of the
novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which another character in the novel,
Aureliano, is working on deciphering. Locked in Melquíades’ room is the book
that Aureliano decodes: the story of his family written in Sanskrit.28 Scott Simpkins
indicates that García Màrquez “correlates the two events as though it were a textual
possibility—which ultimately it may be. By doing this, he manages to go beyond
25 Ibid., 37.
26 Ibid., 55.
27 Ibid., 87.
28 Gabriel García Màrquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Gregory Rabassa, trans. (New York: Harper
the bounds of realistic texts (mentioned earlier: ‘However good or bad they may
be, they are books which finish on the last page’) as his text ends both literally and
magically within itself.”29 In this self-consciousness of text, what one might call the
artful meta-knowledge exhibited in the text, reification of the text as text is not
possible; text is after all not a thing in-and-of-itself even if it has the material form
of a book. This play between text and book, infinite and finite, is part of the play
between the magical and real that allows for a persistence of vision where one is
superimposed upon the other—folded and refolded.
The concept of time is another aspect that is folded and refolded in the writing
strategy of magical realism. Time in the magical realist text is a fluid, continuous,
and patterned affair. Like the names and stories repeated throughout the family
genealogy in One Hundred years of Solitude, time turns in on itself or is like a
house of mirrors reflecting the past, present, and future simultaneously: “[i]t was
the history of the family, written by Melquíades, down to the most trivial details,
one hundred years ahead of time … Melquíades had not put events in the order
of man’s conventional time [a final protection for the coded text], but had
concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one
instant.”30 Time does not flow in one direction, but rather spills out, spreading in
all directions.
Lastly, the issue of reality, linked as it is to space and time, is another category that
is reshaped in the magical realist text. In the magical realist text, reality and magic
operate side-by-side, like the past, present, and future. In One Hundred Years of
Solitude one reads of a banana strike that lead to the slaughter of thousands—three
thousand according to the shocked and traumatized José Aracadio Segunda, a
member of the genealogized family of the text who woke up in a boxcar on the
death train that carried the slaughtered workers. Escaping, he returns to Macondo
only to find out that the event did not happen. “The official version, repeated a
thousand times and mangled out all over the country by every means of
communication the government found at hand, was finally accepted: there were
no dead, the satisfied workers had gone back to their families, and the banana
company was suspending all activity until the rains stopped.”31 Like the actual
slaughter of banana strikers by the government of Columbia in December 1928,
at the town of Ciénaga (thirty miles north of Aracataca), the event is erased. But
more than this, the people of the Macondo wilfully choose this version of reality:
“[i]n the three kitchens where José Arcadio Segundo stopped before reaching home
they told him the same thing: ‘There weren’t any dead.’”32 José Arcadio Segundo
retreats to the room of Melquíades to gaze again and again at the encoded text of
Melquíades until the soldiers come looking for him. Entering the room, the soldier
in command searches the room but fails to see José Arcadio Segundo sitting on the
cot. Like the massacre, he too has become invisible to the naked eye.
Space, time, and reality—three constants each with their own particular laws are
nebulous within the magical realist text. No longer fixed, static, and concrete, they
slip across the mind leaving in their wake wonderment, wonderment as to how it
was that we believed reason and rationality had moored space, time, and reality
to human intention. Magical realism is a form of writing employing paradoxes in
relation to space, time, and reality; it is precisely this kind of play that emerges in
the ethnography of Michael Taussig.
From the outset, Taussig’s ethnographic writings challenge colonialist linearity and
history. From his first ethnography to The Magic of the State, the emplacement of the
south in relation to the north reverses polarities so that the north (a.k.a. the West)
is seen as enmeshed in barbarous civility (e.g., enslavement34 or the debt peonage
of Latin American Indians35), negotiations with the devil (e.g., capitalism and its
consumption36), pseudo cannibalism (e.g., the Kharisiri,37), and sexual
licentiousness.38 The binaries engaged by earlier texts about South America, as
33 The texts I am referring to are Mimesis and Alterity. (New York: Routledge, 1993), The Nervous
System. (New York: Routledge, 1992), and Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative.
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999).
34 See Michael Taussig The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. (Chapel Hill: University of
Latin America by various names, e.g. nakaq from the southern highlands of Peru) is a vampire-like
figure that has had an interesting history in Latin America. Currently the Kharisiri takes the form of
gringo doctors who drive around in jeeps scooping up the children of Indians and Mestizo in order to
harvest and sell their organs. The Kharisiri is a wonderful metaphor that represents literally western
capitalism and its consumption of the peoples and resources of Latin America. The Kharisiri is
referred to in Michael Taussig The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, 143 and Shamanism,
Colonialism, and the Wild Man, 237-238.
38 See Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, 46-48.
Taussig’s second ethnographic effort, Shamanism and the Wildman, begins the
shift toward the use of magical realism as a genre for writing ethnography. In this
text, one encounters a resistance to explanation or to dispelling what might appear
to be fantastic. Time moves forward and backward, pre-history and history are
merged, and the present and the past are seen as operative in the same moment.
The ethnographer, Taussig, is enclosed by the ethnography, although he has yet
to become simply a “character” of his own scripting. In this text, stories and
actualities are merged so that holding to a difference/binary between myth and
history, ritual and episode, symbol and utensil are made impossible. Therefore,
the shaman is a tiger who is also a potential or realized revolutionary.41 The
drinking of yage under the shaman’s tutelage reveals a vision (pinto) while one
uncontrollably vomits and evacuates the bowels42; the books of magia are both
symbol and instrument of magic.43 In this second effort of ethnographic writing,
the ethnographer, Taussig, is both narrator and character in the ethnographic
story. As a result, Taussig is both subject and object and, to a small degree, is able
to neutralize this binary at least in terms of himself; however, he is not as
successful in giving subjectivity to those who are the objects of his study, although
he struggles to do so. The act of writing, he as writer and his subjects as written,
How naturally we entify and give life to such. Take the case of God, the
economy, and the state, abstract entities we credit with Being, species of
things awesome with life-force of their own, transcendent over mere
mortals. Clearly they are fetishes, invented wholes of materialized
artifice into whose woeful insufficiency of being we have placed
soulstuff. Hence the big S of the State. Hence its magic of attraction and
repulsion, tied to the Nation, to more than a whiff of a certain sexuality
reminiscent of the Law of the Father and, lest we forget, to the specter of
death, human death in that soul-stirring insufficiency of Being. It is
with this, then, with the magical harnessing of the dead for stately
purpose, that I wish, on admittedly unsure and naive footing, to begin.44
Taussig’s ethnographic work, The Magic of the State (1997), fully manifests the
discursive aspects of magical realism. This text draws no lines between the sacred
and the profane, as both are the same, nor between the past and present for each
is the moment of the other—the past is always written from the moment of the
present and therefore the past is the present—nor between here and there, south
and north. Two opposed but dependent concepts such as here and there, operating
as a binary, are revealed to be singular, for the one cannot operate without the
other. Equally, things that appear to exist in time and space, such as a national
border, are both real and imaginary—real in that authorized persons with guns
can shoot you if you cross over outside of the rules, but imaginary in that the
border did not exist and could not exist for four and half billion years.
Furthermore, one finds in Taussig’s ethnography the dissolution of the binary of
ipseity/alterity. In the “genre” of magical realism no fixity can be located, because
all positions, whether spatial or temporal, are fluid. There is no certainty to hold
onto as time and geography shift, and as these shift so do the characters of the text.
In Taussig’s writing of The Magic of the State, his position as narrator is transgressed
by his role as a character (Captain Mission) in the ethnographic text:
44 Micheal Taussig, The Magic of the State. (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 3.
vibrating intensity.45
Captain Mission, a character in Taussig’s ethnographic text, holds the same position
as the others in the text. Magical realism is a tool that does not allow the author to
seek asylum in the safe role of objective narrator, but nor is the main protagonist
(the author) allowed to disappear inside the character. Elsewhere he states:
Perhaps what I discerned was that mill and mountain [the mountain of
the spirit queen] served to reflect each other and thereby bring out
something otherwise inaccessible and important to each other, the
interesting and maybe important thing being that while the mountain,
of course, leapt forth as a brilliant work of the imagination, a spectacle
and awesome work of art, the lofty sugar mill at its base did not at first
glance appear that way at all. Instead it appeared as something natural
or at least as something mundane, secular, and taken for granted. While
nature was celebrated on the mountain as part of the enchanted domain
of the spirit queen, mistress of the serpents and dragons, the sugar mill
was natural in that it belonged to utility, efficiency, the world of waged
labor and modern commerce. But then you started to sense something
else going on with the mill—perhaps because of the sharpness of its
juxtaposition with this mist-laden mountain dedicated to profitless
expenditure. For the mountain emitted a contagion across the
boundaries set by the river, the wavy line of the sugarcane, and the
high-voltage pylons strung along its base. Its presence hung as a pall
pulsating across the countryside and right there as if preordained
where all the world passed through Immigration Control to get to the
mountain, right there at the point defined by the shrine of the Indio
Macho and the entrance to the mill, the mountain demanded payment.
For the owner of the Mill, the Cuban, has a contract with the spirit
queen: she demands human life, otherwise production comes to a
standstill.46
45 Ibid., 53.
46 Ibid., 27.
47 For an interesting discussion of ironical distance see Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris,
is fantasy replaced by the real. Both are held in tension by the fact that they are
each other. Taussig relates his crossing of the border:
Conclusion
The writing experiment that produced an ethnographic text bounded and limited
by magical realism produced a text that is somehow freer and with fewer limits.
Although it is quite certain ethnographers will resist such a blurring of fiction and
reality, truth and the fantastic, the past, present and future,50 the question remains
how one might take seriously the challenge to Western epistemology, and in
association with this, the binary of ipseity/alterity, that the “posts”—
postcolonialism, postmodernism, poststructuralism,and postpatriarch-ialism—have
underscored over the last several decades. Like others who have used
autoethnography, and have engaged the genre of detective fiction (such as Nathan
Wachtel), there is an attempt to be mindful of the multiplicities and shifting
ground of contexts and webs of signification. Toward this end, Taussig’s use of
magical realism in The Magic of the State has sought to address such problems—to
make apparent the shifting ground between ipseity/alterity. Although certainly
other problems arise, the most important one, as Gabriel Gracía Màrquez
commented, “you cannot invent or imagine whatever you like because you run
the risk of telling lies…Even within what appears to be the utmost arbitrariness,
there are laws. You can divest yourself of the fig-leaf of rationality, so long as you
do not lapse into chaos, into total irrationality.”51 The question is: although
Taussig’s ethnography clearly operates within the laws of magical realism in The
Magic of The State—his writing is not pure invention—what happens to
ethnography as it is currently understood when his ethnography transgresses the
laws of ethnographic writing? What happens to the facts the ethnographer is to
report with greater or lesser objectivity?; Or need one be concerned with the facts
considering where the obsession with naming and disseminating facts has lead in
the past? It is clear that Taussig’s Magic of the State transgresses the boundaries of
legitimate ethnographic pursuit. It is also clear that this text makes apparent the
narrativization of ethnography. But more than this, Taussig in this text challenges
the boundaries between the real (facts) and imaginary (interpretation) by making
recourse to the genre of magical realism. In this, he spills the ethnographic project
so that it flows in all directions. In terms of writing traditional ethnography,
narrative genres associated with fiction such as Romance, Epic, Comedy, and so
forth are rejected (repressed?) and a proper mix of first-hand reporting
(observation) and analysis (participation) must be engaged. In terms of the laws of
50 For a vitriolic review of Taussig’s The Magic of the State see Micaela di Leonardo’s review in The
Nation, March 17, 1997 vol. 264 n.10: 35-38. For example she states: “Enter anthropologist Michael
Taussig, a favourite on the Cultural Studies lecture circuit. His latest production, The Magic of the
State, is a terrible book, badly written and embarrassingly banal. But it is bad and banal in very
particular ways that have everything to do with contemporary culture wars and with the strange
liminal status of American anthropology….” Leonardo rejects Taussig’s work and considers him to be
a charlatan anthropologist and academic, panning all of the work he has produced thus far. Others,
however, have considered the book to be an excellent and interesting engagement with the writing
of ethnography. For example, see Sally Falk Moore’s review in The American Journal of Sociology, July
1998 vol. 104 n.1 264-265.
51 In Williams, “Magical Realism and the Theme of Incest in One Hundred Years of Solitude,” 63 n5.
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