1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910823551303321

Autore

Taussig Michael T

Titolo

My cocaine museum / / Michael Taussig

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, 2004

ISBN

0-226-79015-0

1-282-64648-6

9786612646485

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (360 p.)

Collana

Carpenter Lectures

Disciplina

986.1/53

Soggetti

Indians of South America - Colombia - Santa Maria (Cauca) - Social conditions

Indians of South America - Colombia - Santa Maria (Cauca) - Economic conditions

Indians, Treatment of - Colombia - Santa Maria (Cauca)

Slavery - Colombia - Santa Maria (Cauca) - History

Gold mines and mining - Colombia - Santa Maria (Cauca)

Cocaine industry - Colombia - Santa Maria (Cauca)

Drug traffic - Colombia - Santa Maria (Cauca)

Santa Maria (Cauca, Colombia) Social conditions

Santa Maria (Cauca, Colombia) Economic conditions

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 319-328) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Author's Note: A User's Guide -- Gold -- My Cocaine Museum -- Color -- Heat -- Wind & Weather -- Rain -- Boredom -- Diving -- Water in Water -- Julio Arboleda's Stone -- Mines -- Entropy -- Moonshine -- The Accursed Share -- A Dog Growls -- The Coast Is No Longer Boring -- Paramilitary Lover -- Cement & Speed -- Miasma -- Swamp -- The Right to Be Lazy -- Beaches -- Lightning -- Bocanegra -- Stone -- Evil Eye -- Gorgon -- Gorgona -- Islands -- Underwater Mountains -- Sloth -- Afterword -- Acknowledgments -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

In this book, a make-believe cocaine museum becomes a vantage point from which to assess the lives of Afro-Colombian gold miners drawn



into the dangerous world of cocaine production in the rain forest of Colombia's Pacific Coast. Although modeled on the famous Gold Museum in Colombia's central bank, the Banco de la República, Taussig's museum is also a parody aimed at the museum's failure to acknowledge the African slaves who mined the country's wealth for almost four hundred years. Combining natural history with political history in a filmic, montage style, Taussig deploys the show-and-tell modality of a museum to engage with the inner life of heat, rain, stone, and swamp, no less than with the life of gold and cocaine. This effort to find a poetry of words becoming things is brought to a head by the explosive qualities of those sublime fetishes of evil beauty, gold and cocaine. At its core, Taussig's museum is about the lure of forbidden things, charged substances that transgress moral codes, the distinctions we use to make sense of the world, and above all the conventional way we write stories.