Smoky Trails: On Taussig's 'Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man'
David Stoll
Anthropology Today December 1, 1987 DOI: 10.2307/3033060 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Shamanism |
| Citations | 2 |
| Key points | The text introduces an ethnographic account of anthropologist Michael Taussig training to be a shaman, noting that he went to southwestern Colombia in 1970 and was not initially focused on yage while doing fieldwork in the Cauca Valley. |
Abstract
David Stoll is author of Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire? , a history of the Wycliffe Bible Translators published by Zed Press and Cultural Survival in 1982, and is a graduate student in the anthropology department, Stanford University. Ethnography often has an autobiographical note: here1 we have the story of an anthropologist training to be a shaman. Michael Taussig was a refugee from the medical profession when he went to southwestern Colombia in 1970. His mind was not on yage, the hallucinogenic vine of the Amazon, as he settled down to fieldwork in the Cauca Valley.