Beauty and the Beast

“Beauty and the Beast is an original work, surprising not only in its thesis but in its tone, pacing, and voice. It presents its case slowly and through digressions and returns, performing a way of theorizing through writing, training the reader to follow what’s going on as an ethnographer does—how everything matters, how we should just see where it all goes, and how we shouldn’t overdo it. Gripping, moving, and brilliant, Beauty and the Beast is fun to read and to think with. It punctures an apparatus, producing a great sigh of relief. It is a gift.”--Katie Stewart, University of Texas at Austin

(Katie Stewart 20111017)

“Against the background of the enormous exploitation and torture of bodies in the course of the war, Michael Taussig, in Beauty and the Beast, seeks to unearth and understand the strange links between the practice of plastic surgery as the ultimate disguise of hunted men and the astonishingly widespread use of plastic surgery for beautification. But he pushes further than that, seeking new understanding of the extraordinary forms and importance of beauty in humans.”—Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University

(Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University )

“Taussig balances balletically above the salacious horror, his elegant commentary drawing on Baudelaire, Georges Bataille and Walter Benjamin. We can be sure that when Taussig is telling tales of the savage and exotic, he’s talking about us, here, now, and what our crazy out-of-control economic system is doing to the rest of the world. There’s no ‘rest of’ any more. That’s what anthropology is for: the art or science that shows fish the water. Taussig is renowned as one of its dizziest dialectical conjurors. Reflecting on Wall Street’s recent lack of ‘libido’—he asks: ‘Are there still people who think that money and sex are not the same?’—he provides delicious throwaways that can satisfy Darwinians and Foucauldians alike.”

(Camilla Power Times Higher Education )