Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing

Rating:
Summary: Much more than a simple ethnographic investigation...
Review: Arguably one of the most accomplished anthropologists working today, Michael Taussig provides an intensely individualistic bricolage of literary, historical, and ethnological interpretations of his many years of fieldwork in the Upper Amazon. One of the most detailed and poignant accounts of shamanism in its cultural context - will very soon be regarded as a classic.

Rating:
Summary: Taussig takes one on a terrifying, gut churning, horrifying
Review: trip through the rubber boom of the 1800's in South America. From detailed historical survey to his first hand accounts of life around the Amazon, he never ceases to confront the reader with reality. His study is comprehensive in that he brings attention to all different aspects of the European, Indian and African people who live there. The study helps integrate the anthropological view of society to consider the religious, political, economic and moral as part of the collective consciousness of a community. Powerful book.