Michael Taussig

The author begins by studying the rubber trade in the Putumayo river area of Colombia of the late 19th and early 20th century. The British violently pressured the indigenous population, who still lived under an economy based upon gift exchange, to extract rubber from the rubber trees of the area. The barons' reactions to indigenous resistance was to carry out violence the local population, which Taussig documents through providing firsthand accounts from the time.

He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 and a Berlin Prize in 2007 from the American Academy in Berlin.

Published in 1992, The Nervous System comprises nine essays. Michael Taussig sets out on a journey to explore and describe various forces that shape and mold our present society. He tries to explore the process through which we commodify the state and in that way transfer the power to it. Taussig attempts to show how the state uses forces such as violence or media control to consolidate its power over the people. He argues that we live in a state of emergency, citing Walter Benjamin, that is not 'an exception but the rule.' To show the universality of the nervous system he takes his reader through the heights of Machu Picchu, the world of Cuna shamans, and the pale world of New York's hospital system.

In his section on healing, Taussig relates his ethnographic work with José García, an Indian shaman of the Putumayo, during the 1970s. He describes how the shaman harnessed the "mystery" and "wildness" projected onto him by the West in his practice as a shaman.

Taussig was born in Sydney to parents of German and Czech-Jewish ancestry. He completed his secondary education in 1958 at North Sydney Boys High School. He later earned a medical degree from the University of Sydney as well as a PhD in anthropology at the London School of Economics.

Michael T. Taussig (born 3 April 1940 in Sydney) is an Australian anthropologist and professor at Columbia University. He is best known for his engagement with Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, especially in terms of the work of Walter Benjamin. Taussig has also published texts on medical anthropology.