The Corn Wolf

Collecting a decade of work from iconic anthropologist and

writer Michael Taussig, The Corn Wolf pinpoints a moment of

intellectual development for the master stylist, exemplifying

the “nervous system” approach to writing and truth that has characterized

his trajectory. Pressured by the permanent state of emergency

that imbues our times, this approach marries storytelling with theory,

thickening spiraling analysis with ethnography and putting the study

of so-called primitive societies back on the anthropological agenda as

a way of better understanding the sacred in everyday life.

The leading figure of these projects is the corn wolf, whom Wittgenstein

used in his fierce polemic on Frazer’s Golden Bough. For just as

the corn wolf slips through the magic of language in fields of danger

and disaster, so we are emboldened to take on the widespread culture

of academic—or what he deems “agribusiness”—writing, which strips

ethnography from its capacity to surprise and connect with other

worlds, whether peasant farmers in Colombia, Palestinians in Israel,

protestors in Zuccotti Park, or eccentric yet fundamental aspects of our

condition such as animism, humming, or the acceleration of time.

A glance at the chapter titles—such as “The Stories Things Tell”

or “Iconoclasm Dictionary”—along with his zany drawings, testifies to

the resonant sensibility of these works, which lope like the corn wolf

through the boundaries of writing and understanding.