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What Color Is the Sacred?
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What Color Is the Sacred? Hardback - 2009 - 1st Edition

by Michael Taussig

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Reader reviews for What Color Is the Sacred?

From the publisher

Over the past thirty years, visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig has crafted a highly distinctive body of work. Playful, enthralling, and whip-smart, his writing makes ingenious connections between ideas, thinkers, and things. An extended meditation on the mysteries of color and the fascination they provoke, What Color Is the Sacred? is the next step on Taussig's remarkable intellectual path.

Following his interest in magic and surrealism, his earlier work on mimesis, and his recent discussion of heat, gold, and cocaine in My Cocaine Museum, this book uses color to explore further dimensions of what Taussig calls "the bodily unconscious" in an age of global warming. Drawing on classic ethnography as well as the work of Benjamin, Burroughs, and Proust, he takes up the notion that color invites the viewer into images and into the world. Yet, as Taussig makes clear, color has a history--a manifestly colonial history rooted in the West's discomfort with color, especially bright color, and its associations with the so-called primitive. He begins by noting Goethe's belief that Europeans are physically averse to vivid color while the uncivilized revel in it, which prompts Taussig to reconsider colonialism as a tension between chromophobes and chromophiliacs. And he ends with the strange story of coal, which, he argues, displaced colonial color by giving birth to synthetic colors, organic chemistry, and IG Farben, the giant chemical corporation behind the Third Reich.

Nietzsche once wrote, "So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history." With What Color Is the Sacred? Taussig has taken up that challenge with all the radiant intelligence and inspiration we've come to expect from him.

Details

  • Title What Color Is the Sacred?
  • Author Michael Taussig
  • Binding Hardback
  • Edition number 1st
  • Edition 1
  • Pages 304
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher University of Chicago Press
  • Publication date 2009-05-01
  • Illustrated Yes
  • Features Bibliography, Illustrated, Index, Table of Contents
  • ISBN 9780226790053 / 0226790053
  • Weight 1.15 lbs (0.52 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 in (23.11 x 15.49 x 2.29 cm)
  • Category Archaeology / Anthropology
  • Library of Congress subjects Color, Color (Philosophy)
  • Library of Congress Catalogue Number 2008040243
  • Dewey Decimal Code 390

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Citations

  • Chronicle of Higher Education, 04/17/2009, Page 19

About the author

Michael Taussig is professor of anthropology at Columbia University and the author of several books, including Walter Benjamin's Grave and My Cocaine Museum, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

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What Color Is the Sacred?
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What Color Is the Sacred?

by Taussig, Michael

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What Color Is the Sacred?
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What Color Is the Sacred?

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Hardback. New. A meditation on the mysteries of color and the fascination they provoke. It uses color to explore further dimensions of what the author calls 'the bodily unconscious' in an age of global warming. Drawing on classic ethnography as well as the work of Benjamin, Burroughs, and Proust, it takes up the notion that color invites the viewer into images.
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A$168.20
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What Color Is the Sacred?
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What Color Is the Sacred?
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by Taussig, Michael

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What Color Is the Sacred?
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What Color Is the Sacred?
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What Color Is the Sacred?

by Taussig, Michael

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ISBN 10 / ISBN 13
9780226790053 / 0226790053
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University of Chicago Press, 2009-05-01. Illustrated. hardcover. New. 6.00x1.00x9.00. Buy with confidence. Excellent Customer Service & Return policy.
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