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My Cocaine Museum. Michael Taussig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 360 pages.
Deep in the Bolivian province of Chapare, the U.S. Army operates a cocaine museum on a military base. The museum features displays of weapons seized from drug traffickers, photographs of alleged smugglers looking disheveled and disoriented, and cocaine-smuggling devices. There is even a pit lined with plastic and filled with coca leaves used to explain how cocaine is manufactured. Although 30,000 Quechua-speaking peasant families live in the Chapare, few ever visit the museum. Most come to the military base only as prisoners captured for refusing to abandon the cultivation of coca, their only viable cash crop (Gill 2004:170-171). Michael Taussig's cocaine museum is neither in Bolivia nor is it real. It is imaginary-something that "you can find when you face the sun, close your eyes, and watch the colored lines dance" (p. ix) and that is representative of Taussig's particular approach to anthropology. Thirty-one chapter titles label the museum exhibits, which include "gold," "color," "heat," "rain," "boredom," "sloth," "entropy," and "miasma." Each chapter then presents a pastiche of Taussig's observations of life and nature in Colombia's humid...