Michael Taussig

Michael T. Taussig is an Australian anthropologist of Austrian refugee descent, born in Sydney in 1940, who trained first in medicine before earning a master's degree in sociology from the London School of Economics and a doctorate from the University of London; he is a professor at Columbia University. He is best known for applying Karl Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, read through the work of Walter Benjamin, to ethnographic research in South America, examining how peripheral populations critique capitalist systems through their own cultural frameworks. His best known book, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987), documents colonial violence and indigenous healing practices in the Putumayo region of Colombia. He has also contributed significantly to medical anthropology and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998.