01The devil and the commodity
Taussig's lifelong subject is the place where the economic and the magical meet. He took Marx's idea of commodity fetishism — the way a made thing comes to seem to have a life and a power of its own — and read it through Walter Benjamin, looking for where that magic surfaces in lived experience rather than in theory alone.
The orientation behind all of it is plain in his own statement of purpose: the principal concern of anthropology should be to critique Western capitalist culture. He does not study other worlds to leave ours unexamined. He studies them to see ours.
02The culture of terror
In Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man he turns to the Putumayo rubber boom — the atrocities committed against Indigenous people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the rush to extract rubber from the Amazon. He gives the violence two names: the culture of terror and the space of death.
The terror is not incidental to the extraction. It is the medium of it. The labor was forced, and the force was atrocity, and the atrocity was not a breakdown of the colonial enterprise but a working part of it.
03The wild man is a projection
Here is the move that makes Taussig matter for this book. The same colonial relation that produced the terror also produced an image — the wild man, the savage and the magical other onto whom the West projected everything it could not face in itself. The wildness attributed to the colonized was manufactured by the colonizer and then pinned back onto its victims.
The extraction and the image are one process. The colony does not encounter a wild man already in the forest. It makes him, in the act of plundering the forest, and calls its own violence his nature.
04The shaman turns it back
The second half of the book follows an Indigenous shaman — named in the book as José García — and his healing practices in the 1970s, decades after the rubber boom. Taussig's argument is that the shaman's power is not separate from the history of terror. It runs through it.
The shaman harnessed the mysterious and "wild" image the West had projected onto him — and made it a source of healing. The colonizer's own projection, turned back. The wildness was manufactured to justify the atrocity; in the shaman's hands it becomes a power the colonizer can neither own nor explain. The spell is taken back by the one it was cast against.
05What the colony makes
This is why Taussig belongs in the chapter on the colony. The book's account of colonialism is that extraction is never only material — it remakes the people it plunders, in the world's eyes and in their own. Fanon found this in the mind of the colonized. Taussig finds it in the image: the colony manufactures the terror and the magical other in the same motion, and names the second the cause of the first.
The wildness was an enclosure — a story told over the colonized to justify what was done to them. Taussig's shaman is the case that the story can be seized and re-cast: the image the colonizer projected becomes, in other hands, a power he never intended to give. Every tool of power is two-faced. Even the lie told over a people can be turned, by that people, into a ground to stand on.