The magic of the state

by Michael T. Taussig

Enter an ethnographically surreal work located in a fictive Latin American country: The Magic of the State focuses on the theater of spirit possession at a Spirit Queen's enchanted mountain where the dead - Blacks and Indians, Europe's fetishized others - pass into the bodies of the living, creating a circulation of ecstatic bodily power. Employing Bataille's concept of the sacred, Taussig draws on his extensive fieldwork to create his own theater of spirit possession. He then traces the circulation of power, along with its dada-like transformations between spirit and matter, everywhere - through popular shrines, official monuments and slogans, money, the police, automobiles, taxis, the freeway system, and the stealing of the sword of state.