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    What Color Is the Sacred?
    What Color Is the Sacred?
    What Color Is the Sacred?
    Ebook266 pages6 hours

    What Color Is the Sacred?

    By Michael Taussig

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateJul 1, 2010
    ISBN9780226789996
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    3.5/5

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    • 2/5
      So, I didn't actually finish 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/understand the writing style or if I really wanted something that talked more about the science or (social) psychology of color. I've read a fair amount of literary criticism as well, 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.

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