I Swear I Saw This Analysis

I Swear I Saw This is a record as visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig quotes in his own book ‘...you feel impelled to write in your fieldwork diary a few hours or days after a diary entry.’ This is a combination of fieldwork notebooks that also have a series of sketches in them which constitute Taussig’s impressions kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. The book tees off from a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006,as well as its caption, “I swear I saw this” Taussig has always been seen as having written books both visceral and visually rooted in experiencing fieldwork as it unfolds into a ‘fable’ in the lived reality. Most of the fieldwork that he has conducted has been in Columbia; his methodology is fresh and embodies
He considers the fieldwork notebook as he himself uses in the book to be part of modernist literature and the place where writers and other creators first work out the imaginative logic of discovery. The nature of the work is simultaneously unique and has contributed to the already existing bodt of literature on ethnographic fieldwork where the author has critically emphasized the mediation upon sketches in the fieldwork notebook. For an anthropologist, the field notebook is a private, rather personal archive of research, but also, it has also been an established literary form which this work tries to deconstruct with shorter work
It runs through and sews everything together within it, just as the first image, of the woman, who sews the man in the sleeping bag of nylon, which emanates from the fieldwork in Colombia, “terror” as an idea and in actuality is one thread that runs throughout. Taussig has kept much of his take on terror at the corner of the major discourse. I believe for him, the idea of violence and to talk about it as such may actually turn things for the worse. One really cannot objectify violence, and measure it, rather Taussig has left it to the reader to feel freely about it. He has taken a stance; he treats the idea of violence with respect, and builds upon the idea of its dialectic opposite. Healing; The book has both aspects of violence and the practice of consuming Yage’ , the hallucinogenic drug, shamanistic practices and how these have been together playing a part in the life of people. Thus Tausig proves a point, no matter what the style; fables of violence and healing are a sure shot success story for any writer. The politics behind this is revelation is profound, as it is most cases, we tend to visualize the world through the lenses of Freudian repression or maybe the sheer idea of capitalistic surfeit which Marx predicts may precede a revolutionary stage in society. We probelmatize the ordinary, or sometimes there is truth to the feeling