Cover; Half Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Table of Contents; Preface: A Note on Names and Naming; PART ONE THE SPIRIT QUEEN'S COURT; 1 The Spirit Queen; 2 The Mountain; 3 The Shrines; 4 Waiting for Ofelia: The Chief Justice is Possessed by Captain Mission; 5 Billy the Kid andthe Break-Through Economy; 6 Holy Torpor; 7 Mimesis Unto Death; 8 Spiritual Treachery; PART TWO THE LIBERATOR'S COURT; 9 The Infinite Melancholy; 10 Mucoid Ignominy: State-Making as Spirit Possession; 11 Kitsch is Where Fear Locks with the Mute Absurd; 12 The Accursed Share
13 Money and Spirit Possession in Karl Marx14 Art Adrift in the Passing Crowd Floating Wave-Like on a Freeway; 15 Faith in Marble; PART THREE THE THEATER OF DIVINE JUSTICE; 16 Adventures in Musculature: Taximetry and Dada Cinema; 17 Stealing the Sword; 18 Pilgrimage as Method; Bibliography
Summary
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
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-206) and ind
