What Color Is the Sacred?

by Michael Taussig

Over the past thirty years, visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig has crafted a highly distinctive body of work. Playful, enthralling, and whip-smart, his writing makes ingenious connections between ideas, thinkers, and things. An extended meditation on the mysteries of color and the fascination they provoke, What Color Is the Sacred? is the next step on Taussig’s remarkable intellectual path.

Following his interest in magic and surrealism, his earlier work on mimesis, and his recent discussion of heat, gold, and cocaine in My Cocaine Museum , this book uses color to explore further dimensions of what Taussig calls “the bodily unconscious” in an age of global warming. Drawing on classic ethnography as well as the work of Benjamin, Burroughs, and Proust, he takes up the notion that color invites the viewer into images and into the world. Yet, as Taussig makes clear, color has a history—a manifestly colonial history rooted in the West’s discomfort with color, especially bright color, and its associations with the so-called primitive. He begins by noting Goethe’s belief that Europeans are physically averse to vivid color while the uncivilized revel in it, which prompts Taussig to reconsider colonialism as a tension between chromophobes and chromophiliacs. And he ends with the strange story of coal, which, he argues, displaced colonial color by giving birth to synthetic colors, organic chemistry, and IG Farben, the giant chemical corporation behind the Third Reich.

Nietzsche once wrote, “So far, all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history.” With What Color Is the Sacred? Taussig has taken up that challenge with all the radiant intelligence and inspiration we’ve come to expect from him.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Theory, Art, History, Spirituality, Religion

304 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2009

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

[Jess · Rating 2 out of 5]

I only got halfway through this book. Mostly because I kept getting frustrated that as soon as the author seemed like he was close to making a point, he'd veer off and start talking about something else. I'm not sure if the problem is that I don't like the writing style or if I really wanted something that talked more about the science or (social) psychology or religious aspects of color. It's billed as a hybrid of anthropology and literary criticism, but I've read a fair amount of litcrit, and it didn't really work for me that way either.

I also have to wonder at how often the author described the phenomenon of synesthesia , yet never actually used the word -- was that a stylistic choice or is he unaware of the concept?

The other thing that really bugged me was the perspective he took. He used and referenced Goethe several times, comparing mostly upper-class, Anglo-Saxon "people of refinement" who have a fear of color versus children, drug addicts, and primitives who have a love of color. I'm sorry, but really? That's some pretty broad stripes there.

On the other hand, there were passages in the book that beautifully invoked the senses, in which the author vividly described the tone and texture of the colors in a particular place and time. Those moments were what kept me reading as long as I did.

I know some people absolutely loved this book, though, so ymmv. One thing I did get from reading it is a desire to give Swann's Way another go, so it wasn't a total waste of time.

[Meghan Fidler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book currently tops my list of academic works which have deeply influenced my understanding of the world.

Taussig traces color through the colonial trade, through Othering, through WWII and Nazi chemists who discovered synthetic dyes, through literature, memory, shamans and anthropologists. I finished the book and re-read it immediately, drawn in wonder at "that color of the sacred that Malinowski wrought to auratic perfection in his standoff with the bewigged sorcerer of some repute years before by the side if a faraway lagoon in the southwestern Pacfic," drawn into discussions of color as a fetish (I now know of four fetishes, all delightfully steeped in forgetting), drawn into Proust's colored memory.

The names if dyes and the names of famous scholars dance together in a descriptive style that only a senior--and infamous--member of the field is allowed to write. This acknowledgement troubles some of Taussig's assertions, but not many.

Mostly it troubles me: what is the color of my sacred? While my journal and ethnographic notes have always been one, when, if ever, can (or should) my literary publications rhyme with my academic aspirations?

[Kathleen Quaintance · Rating 2 out of 5]

anthropologists stop being so weird about materials challenge: failed

[Alex Lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

I recall that when this book came out, it was highly acclaimed. There was much discussion. But it doesn't seem particularly startling to me. Much of the "color" of the book comes from vivid phrasing and verbose literary remarks. The author certainly cares about his subject matter but doesn't care to pigeon-hole it into a tightly composed theory. He doesn't extract much in the way of making sense. He is more concerned with presenting a roundabout exploration of the topic. I gleamed more from his collection of notes than from anything much else he said.

I did find it an interesting contrast with Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages in that Guy was more interested in what makes color: its meaning and sensation than an exploration of what other people have said about it. Deutscher is able to pull through an interesting observation that the experience of color is tied very strongly to its linguistic difference... which originates from a discovery of the technological production of that color. Taussig sort of talks about that, but doesn't really make much in the way of any "point". He just vacillates around and presents flair in place of any firm discussion.

I found it ironic that his "polymorphous magical substance" as an alternate term for color separates it from the object of coloring -- marking him in his category as that eurocentric class that would place color as being exterior to objects they color, but then again, I could be overanalysing, trying to make something of his book... since he wrote so many pages talking about not much of anything.

If you are interested in a colorful summation of other writers, I think this book would be for you.

[Matty Boca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great fun! Freewheelin' critical theory with a lot of spiritual/metaphysical reflection. Definitely refreshing to read something in this style: literate far-reaching reflection on the soul and color.

That said, it probably not for those who are looking for a more serious study the role of colors in culture and human perception.

[Jonathan Frederick Walz · Rating 5 out of 5]

E X C E L L E N T

[Liz]

as referenced in this cool article: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/color...