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My Cocaine Museum. Michael Taussig, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. 336 pp.
This is a wonderful and thick ethnography of Pacific Lowland Afro-Colombian gold miners, some of which (quite logically-one could say after having read this book) got involved in the processes of cocaine production in the rainforest of the coastal region where they live. The ethnography is "thick," in Clifford Geertz's sense, because in addition to giving great importance to the everyday routines of the gold diggers and to the socio-cultural, economic, political, and climatic landscape in which they live, Taussig continues to discuss a theme that has been of great interest for him for quite some time: commodity fetishism (see Taussig 1980). His ethnographic descriptions/analyses make sense of local realities (in which we find port docks, Russian sailors and gold workers, guerrilleros, etc.) by incorporating in the narrative about them relevant information from the regional, national, and transnational dimensions of things. The book adopts different narrative styles at different moments or, in other words, the ethnographic narrative per se is interspersed with, and sometimes weaved into, fragments of conversations with the work of a variety of historians, Cultural Studies scholars, anthropologists, philosophers, and, most particularly, with Walter Benjamin, who authored the book's epigraph: "Right from the start, the great collector is struck by the confusion, by the scatter, in which the things of the world are found" (vi).
The book begins with an "Author's Note: A User's Guide," in which Taussig explains his project: designing or imagining a "cocaine museum" which would...