Palma Africana

Anthropologists (and those in allied disciplines) know Taussig as a stylistic innovator. . . Taussig's fragmentary autobiographical and fieldwork reflections also make it clear that the book is at least as much about language and writing as it is about palm oil. . . Through this book's radical alertness, Taussig chooses examples not for their prestige but for their provocation. -- Times Literary Supplement This is Taussig at the top of his form. Iconoclastic, experimental, and poetic, refusing 'theory' even as he makes it do his work. Magic, metaphor, love, violence, excess, and mimetics--their urgency amplified through the rush of a narrative that is itself a brilliantly sustained reflection on storytelling, writing, and ethnography. -- Hugh Raffles, The New School Taussig's question is always, 'how to write about such things?' In Palma Africana, the palm tree morphs into a figure for writing itself. Taking his cue from Barthes, Taussig records himself producing a text that falls back over the world it describes. To write about the political economy of the palm tree, he invents a genre of palm tree writing. As Taussig brilliantly shows, falling back is a procedure of self-reflection--a way of folding the text back on its world. -- Christopher Bracken, University of Alberta, Canada Taussig takes a phantasmagorical look at an ecological menace. . . . the voices of Colombian peasants, activists, lawyers, and writers are everywhere in Palma Africana: witnessing, recounting, lamenting, joking, fantasizing, and resisting. -- 4columns Palma Africana tells the tale of a swamp thing becoming a plantation thing, but never quite. Taussig's stunning, serpentine ethnography tracks how state and global market forces cannibalize each another to generate the Colombian palm oil plantation complex. Winding through stories of murderous paramilitaries, cattlemen-become-drugmen, and dispossessed subsistence farmers seeking to recompose interspecies intimacies, this vital book opens our senses to the ongoing work of human-animal-plant resistance in the age of dark biocapital. -- Stefan Helmreich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology