I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own

by Michael Taussig

I Swear I Saw This records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig’s reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. Taking as a starting point a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006—as well as its caption, “I swear I saw this”—Taussig considers the fieldwork notebook as a type of modernist literature and the place where writers and other creators first work out the imaginative logic of discovery. Notebooks mix the raw material of observation with reverie, juxtaposed, in Taussig’s case, with drawings, watercolors, and newspaper cuttings, which blend the inner and outer worlds in a fashion reminiscent of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’s surreal cut-up technique. Focusing on the small details and observations that are lost when writers convert their notes into finished pieces, Taussig calls for new ways of seeing and using the notebook as form. Memory emerges as a central motif in I Swear I Saw This as he explores his penchant to inscribe new recollections in the margins or directly over the original entries days or weeks after an event. This palimpsest of afterthoughts leads to ruminations on Freud’s analysis of dreams, Proust’s thoughts on the involuntary workings of memory, and Benjamin’s theories of history—fieldwork, Taussig writes, provokes childhood memories with startling ease. 
I Swear I Saw This exhibits Taussig’s characteristic verve and intellectual audacity, here combined with a revelatory sense of intimacy. He writes, “drawing is thus a depicting, a hauling, an unraveling, and being impelled toward something or somebody.” Readers will exult in joining Taussig once again as he follows the threads of a tangled skein of inspired associations.

Genres: Anthropology, Art, Nonfiction, Writing

173 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2011

About the author

Michael Taussig (born 1940) earned a medical degree from the University of Sydney, received his PhD. in anthropology from the London School of Economics and is a professor at Columbia University and European Graduate School. Although he has published on medical anthropology, he is best known for his engagement with Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, especially in terms of the work of Walter Benjamin.

Reviews

[Jennifer J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone currently keeping a field journal while doing ethnographic research, I found this book to be a dream to fall into. Every time I read a new essay, I ran back to my notebooks to write, make drawings, sketch out ideas. This was sort of like food for my analytical ideas. It's my new caffeine.

[Connor Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brings me back to those drawings I made while living in France... and those notebooks I kept...

I really love Michael Taussig's writing.

[Maja · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chaotic and at times quite difficult to follow, but has a lot of good points and valuable quotes.

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I swear I saw this," is Michael Taussig's maxim, and it serves the eponymous book well. For Taussig, it means on the one hand that he's not sure whether what he has seen is really real, it seems so unlikely or improbable. On the other hand, he is questioning to whom he is talking when making such utterances. His writing draws us into a world choked by greed and animosity, and passionately yet calmly describes the glaring inequalities in global politics and local power. What he swears that he saw was two people, a man and a woman ("I think it was a man and a women" he ponders), sewing each other into a nylon bag in a freeway tunnel in Medellin. Adjust your eyes to the light in the tunnel, and you see many more people (hundreds of people) secreting themselves inside it. And what a funny place to seek warmth and protection (to our eyes at least). This is Taussig's way in to a fascinating reflection on how and why it is important to describe the world ethnographically, with particular attention to the fieldwork notebooks (the contact point of observing being like a gateway to a certain form of consciousness, akin perhaps to that experienced when taking yage or other psychedelic drugs). His eloquent prose and breathtaking ethnographic descriptions tell us in the first instance why hundreds of people in a tunnel show ethereal calm and desperation in making a home in a horrendous place. And that hideous place is chosen exactly because it is hideous. Because these people have to hide, to protect themselves and those who they love from an international system and structures of power that renders them, for the most part, untenable. I think that the fact that they choose a nowhere place (Rem Koolhaas?) created out of global capitalism which could equally be anywhere else, simply in order to facilitate movement of commodities, is an intensely fascinating and strange fact (this also reminded me of Will Self's ketamine addict who loses his sense of scale on the motorway in London one night, which connects to Self's later criticisms of global capitalisms non-places such as airports, freeways and the industrial estates between them). This is a disgraceful and pitiful reality, which is why I swear I saw this is an urgent call (note that the former Columbian President Ulribe is still successfully doing the rounds of international political elites, feted by the West despite his role in supporting paramilitaries which have killed thousands of villagers in the countryside). "Look at this!" the anthropologist has to say, we can see through an exploration and interpretation of small and peculiar events, the injustice and cruelty of capitalist imperialism.

Theoretically his primary influence remains critical theory, but I really enjoyed his references to other anthropologists, particularly the reference to ways of turning the fact of discovery into a discovery of ourselves, as in Laura Bohannan's fieldwork based on which she wrote Shakespeare in the bush in 1961. Through this discussion, he reflects on the role of the possibility of contingent experiences in anthropological research, that one must always be open to. In showing that it was a particular set of coincidences that led Bohannan to her rather remarkable analysis which provided an rigorous and early understanding of themes which later became a tour de force in post-structuralism, it is clear that not everything that is valuable or might lead to a more fruitful understanding can be quantified or predicted. The unpredictability of human existence precludes it.

I swear I saw this offers a chance to understand just what is observed and interpreted in the world as seen and the writing and drawing used to capture it. This is a reflective work, and offers something of a methodological intervention in anthropology. There are many not-so-subtle digs at more conservative peers in the academy who Taussig says, would turn the discipline into a pseudo-science. Which Taussig says it can never be - it is a humanistic, philosophical and creative endeavour, which requires a sharp attentiveness to overheard half-truths and funny stories. In doing so, interpreted against its historical context, ethnography provides an extraordinary rich picture of understanding why is it this particular way of doing something, as opposed to that. This is all nothing new - James Clifford, Edward Said and Clifford Geertz have all argued for a better understanding of reflexivity and interpretation in academic studies. Michael Taussig's argument is that it is the almost exclusive attention given to text and writing that now needs to be deconstructed and challenged. "The writing machine was actually an erasing machine," Taussig suggests, "the closer they were to writing the less interesting they were." In doing so, moving from a description of the fieldwork notebook as a "mystic writing pad" to follow Freud, Taussig presents his argument that in their unfinished form of sketches and scribbles, fieldwork notebooks could be a template for a closer analysis of events in the world.

Starting with a discussion of examples of drawings in notebooks by William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, Taussig adeptly introduces theoretical positions from critical theory and anthropology alike, Walter Benjamin (about whom he has written a book) chief among them. He moves through a number of quite incredibly disparate sources (at one point quoting Joan Didion in a lovely digression!) But as the book reveals itself with reference to these authors, we see a picture being drawn of the importance of poetic descriptions as a way towards effective political critique. As with most of Taussig's impressive body of work (I'm a big fan of the devil and commodity fetishism) I enjoy most his vivid ethnographic descriptions of events that he saw (or maybe he didn't?) In a way, the excellence of the ethnographic descriptions contradict Taussig's argument that the closer to writing something is the less of its aura remains. I'm not sure about that, but his descriptions of paramilitaries in Columbia and the reasons for violence and conflict are touching and compelling, a triumph of an anthropology of a desperately competitive age born of liberalism and free enterprise in the developing world. By nice coincidence I saw a film by the Argentine filmmaker Patricio Guzman, Nostalgia for the light, which shared the method of I swear I saw this in poetic descriptions and a literary approach to describing a world of corruption and greed caused by imperialism and corruption in Latin America - the desert of the disappeared. What a wonderful way to ask for demand justice! To reject the method of the patriarchal hegemony and its noisy calls for a "rational scientific approach" and regain a sense of the human, is the only way to start to build something of a world that is fair, just and humane.

[Gabby R · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the ideas he discusses, especially the differentiation between photographs and drawing and witnessing versus seeing. I’m a fan of Taussig’s writing, though I found the themes discussed to be disorganized at times. I think the mic of chaos, randomness, humour, and theoretical insight is what he was going for though.

[Soup · Rating 3 out of 5]

Will b thinking abt a lot. 3.5 stars

[pattrice · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You pick up a stray book, open it up, start to read, and bang! There is a launching pad."

Heaven knows why the buyer for a small bookstore in rural Vermont had procured this book and shelved it with art books, but there it was and I couldn't resist, despite the hefty handwritten price tag. It seemed likely to speak to some emerging preoccupations about how to break out --in both thought and expression-- of the linearity and limitations imposed by words. Also I keep a notebook myself and am always curious about those of others.

I brought the book home and it waited until the impulse to read it hit, which it did yesterday morning outside: A sudden visual image of the cover of this particular book (among all others in the teetering piles of books to be read).

It's not for everyone, but it's not only for anthropologists or keepers of notebooks either. I'm guessing the only way you'll know if it's for you (if you haven't been gripped by the physical object) is by browsing it a bit.

For me, it turned out to go to my preoccupations in an entirely different way than I had imagined it might. Taussig is grappling here with how to think about the unthinkable and speak about (or maybe draw?) the unspeakable -- which we must figure out how to do, whether the atrocities in question are those of paramilitaries. pipelines, or factory farms.

[Lynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book made me think...reflect on those powerful images that you can't get out of your head, and you're not sure why. Yes, they are arresting, loaded with information, even symbolism, but their significance goes beyond that into another realm. Drawings (in his case in a field notebook, since he is a working anthropologist) are a way to capture this. It occurs to me this is captured in a few rare haiku. Another interesting direction...the going back over notebooks, images, layering on memories, experience, etc: "afterthoughts."

[Lisa Poggiali · Rating 4 out of 5]

so many great nuggets on the ways in which which thoughts, images, and the process of recording [in language and drawings] and making sense of them all fold into and out from one another. a must read for anyone who keeps a notebook as a means of processing the world around them...

[Nicklas Karlsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What is released by this drawing is not catharsis but a spewing forth of "the negative sacred" with swarms of spirits unleashed - invisible crowd of the dead - alongside the spirits of the river and the forest, from where these displaced peasants have been driven."

It's good!

[Joycelin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really insightful read that helped inform my own ethnographic fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon. I never realized the deeper intrinsic value of field notes before reading this and seeing Taussig's insights to his own experiences in Colombia.

[Vuk Trifkovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic stuff from Taussig. Very accessible, without losing much of the depth. If anything, I wish it was tiny bit longer and with even stranger tales from Colombia.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure that this book completely holds together, or maybe it is somewhat forced in the way it holds together, but it is so filled with brilliant insights that that hardly matters.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marvellously fertile. Imaginatively rich. Exactingly accurate. A dream.