Mastery of Non–Mastery in the Age of Meltdown

Michael Taussig is the Class of 1933 Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of several books, including The Corn Wolf, Beauty and the Beast, and Palma Africana, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

“Anthropologists (and those in allied disciplines) know Taussig as a stylistic innovator.”—Times Literary Supplement  “Above all, he is interested in individual stories and experiences, unique tales that cannot be reduced to rational explanation or bland report. . . . At the center of Taussig’s method is the anthropologist’s desire to bear witness to what he cannot understand.”—Los Angeles Review of Books  “One of the most accomplished writers that anthropology has produced.”—Choice  “Iconoclastic, experimental, and poetic, refusing ‘theory’ even as he makes it do his work.”—Hugh Raffles, The New School  “[This is] what anthropology is for: the art or science that shows fish the water. Taussig is renowned as one of its dizziest dialectical conjurors.”—Times Higher Education  “ [Taussig’s] late career unfolds with vitality, ingenuity, and surprises—with the storytelling voice, finally, of a Marlowe.”—George Marcus, University of California, Irvine