Michael Taussig

Michael Taussig is an anthropologist known for his provocative ethnographic studies and unconventional style as an academic. He was born in Australia and later studied medicine at the University of Sydney. He earned a PhD in anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City.

Strongly influenced by both the Frankfurt School of critical theory and French post-structuralism, Taussig was a part of the shift during the 1980s within the field of anthropology. His work contributed to an increasing mistrust of cultural analyses from the perspective of the dominant culture, i.e. Western capitalist culture. It was his early experiences as a doctor in Colombia in the late 1960s that influenced a fundamental change in his conception of the role of stories and narratives—over and against objective scholarship—in cultural formation. Ethnography became a conscious positive force in culture, as no account was intrinsically innocent or objective any longer. This led Michael Taussig to begin intermixing fact and fiction in his ethnographic studies, thus his status as a controversial figure in the field of anthropology.

Taussig has innumerable books and publications, perhaps most acclaimed are his commentaries on Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin. In recent years, he has been writing plays: experimental in nature and exploring the idea of performance as ritual through a mix of philosophy, politics, and poetry. His first play, “The Berlin Sun Theater: The Mastery of Non-Mastery,” premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC in 2013.