If terror thrives on the production of epistemic murk and metamorphosis, it nevertheless requires the hermeneutic violence that creates feeble fictions in the guise of realism, objectivity, and the like, flattening contradiction and systematizing chaos.
Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987)
All societies live by fictions taken as real. What distinguishes cultures of terror is that the epistemological, ontological, and otherwise philosophical problem of representation–reality and illusion, certainty and doubt […] becomes a high-powered medium of domination…
Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987)
Before there can be a science of man there has to be the long-awaited demythification and reenchantment of Western man in a quite different confluence of self and otherness.
Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987)
