I Swear I Saw This
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€28.50
A01=Michael Taussig
afterthoughts
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anthropology
Author_Michael Taussig
autobiography
automatic-update
benjamin
biography
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=JHM
colombia
COP=United States
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discovery
drawings
dreams
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fieldwork
freud
history
illustrations
Language_English
literature
medellin
memoir
memory
methodology
multimedia
nonfiction
notebooks
observation
PA=Available
palimpsest
Price_€20 to €50
proust
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recollection
rumination
science
scientist
softlaunch
stream of consciousness
watercolors
Product details
- ISBN 9780226789835
- Weight: 284g
- Dimensions: 14 x 22mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2011
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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"I Swear I Saw This" records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig's reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. Taking as a starting point a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006 - as well as its caption, "I Swear I Saw This" - Taussig considers the fieldwork notebook as a type of modernist literature and the place where writers and other creators first work out the imaginative logic of discovery. Notebooks mix the raw material of observation with reverie, juxtaposed, in Taussig's case, with drawings, watercolors, and newspaper cuttings, which blend the inner and outer worlds in a fashion reminiscent of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs' surreal cut-up technique. Focusing on the small details and observations that are lost when writers convert their notes into finished pieces, Taussig calls for new ways of seeing and using the notebook as form. Memory emerges as a central motif in "I Swear I Saw This" as he explores his penchant to inscribe new recollections in the margins or directly over the original entries days or weeks after an event.
This palimpsest of after thoughts leads to ruminations on Freud's analysis of dreams, Proust's thoughts on the involuntary workings of memory, and Benjamin's theories of history-fieldwork, Taussig writes, provokes childhood memories with startling ease. "I Swear I Saw This" exhibits Taussig's characteristic verve and intellectual audacity, here combined with a revelatory sense of intimacy. He writes, "drawing is thus a depicting, a hauling, an unravelling, and being impelled toward something or somebody." Readers will exult in joining Taussig once again as he follows the threads of a tangled skein of inspired associations.
Michael Taussig is the Class of 1933 Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of ten books, including What Color Is the Sacred?, Walter Benjamin's Grave, and My Cocaine Museum, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
