Corpse Magic examines beliefs about vengeance the slain magically enact on their killers, focusing on lethal violence in Colombia and the United States.

Corpse Magic is a response to the global ubiquity of violence. In this bracing new work, the influential anthropologist Michael Taussig puts killings in Colombia, by gangs and guerrillas, police and the military, and agents of agribusiness, in conversation with mass shootings and police killings, disproportionately of Black people, in the United States. In both contexts, he examines the effects of violent killing on its victims, its perpetrators, and those who witness and relive it through media footage.

Drawing from literature, religion, philosophy, and anthropology, Taussig traces the idea that the act of killing “infects” the killer and spreads outward,  then connects this concept of contagion to beliefs in Colombia and elsewhere that the souls of the slain possess those of their slayers and that magic can be used to empower or thwart corpses as agents of vengeance. In this powerful and imaginative work, Taussig asks what kind of power the dead continue to have; what kinds of magic can manage that power; and what, if anything, can stop seemingly endless cycles of violence.
 

Michael Taussig is emeritus professor of anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of many books, including And the Garden Is You and Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

List of Illustrations

Method in the Madness and Vice Versa

The Living and the Dead
1. Thickening
2. Hollowing
3. Some Anthropology of Slaying

The Break-In
4. The Break-In
5. Fetishistic Fastidiousness
6. Who Does the Killing?
7. Realignment of Landscape
8. God Spots and the No-Go Zones
9. From Corpse Magic to Corpse Montage

Hence the Problem Facing the Writer
10. How to Kill a Corpse
11. Reenchantment
12. Corpse and Temple
13. The Funeral March
14. Disappearance of the Death Watch
15. State Execution
16. Vengeance and Repentance

Preposterous Equations
17. A Jesuit Seminar Room in Bogotá
18. Gun Fetishism
19. Statistical Legerdemain
20. Auto-Mobilized Death-Space
21. Killing Animals versus Killing Humans
22. The Taboo on Portraying Killing
23. Nuer-Effect: Present or Absent or Both?

Notes
Index