![]() Since then, a once-dismissive attitude to considerations of aesthetic and narrative forms has clearly changed. Much lauded today, then reviewers called Taussig’s approach “lapidary,” “capricious,” or “untidy.” At best, form, and especially narrative form, was seen as epiphenomenal to the true purpose of ethnographic labour: critiquing power, exposing the real. ![]() In transposing forms that emerged in the visual realm to narrative and writing, Taussig sought to convey the terror-ridden charges of living in and with violence. In tracing the violent excess of colonialism and the promise of healing among Indigenous women and men in Columbia, Taussig (1986) draws on the cinematic aesthetics of early Soviet directors Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, who sought to disrupt habitual ways of seeing, as well as surrealist techniques of juxtaposition and montage. ![]() ![]() Consider, for example, the fervent debate that swirled around Michael Taussig’s (1986) form-shifting ethnography Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. Why a theme issue on ethnography and form? Why think about form at all? For many years anthropologists, especially politically oriented anthropologists, have been suspicious of questions of genre, narrative, and form. ![]()
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