What Color is the Sacred?

在過去的三十年中，有遠見的人類學家邁克爾·陶西格（Michael Taussig）創造了一個非常獨特的工作體系。俏皮、迷人，他的寫作在思想，思想家和事物之間建立了巧妙的聯繫。對顏色的奧秘和他們引起的迷戀進行了長時間的冥想：“神聖的顏色是什麼？”是Taussig卓越的智力道路上的下一步。

本書使用顏色探索Taussig稱之為“身體無意識”的更多維度。一個全球變暖的時代。借鑒經典民族志以及Benjamin，Burroughs和Proust的作品，他認為色彩吸引觀眾進入圖像和世界。然而，正如Taussig明確指出的那樣，色彩有一段歷史 - 一種明顯的殖民歷史，根源於西方對色彩的不適，尤其是鮮豔的色彩，以及它與所謂的原始色彩的聯繫。

他首先記錄了Goethe 的觀點，即歐洲人對生動的色彩不滿意，而不開化的陶醉，這促使陶西格重新考慮殖民主義，認為它是色微生物和髮色生物之間的張力。他以煤炭的奇怪故事告終，他認為，通過生成合成色素，有機化學和第三帝國背後的巨型化學公司IG Farben來取代殖民色彩。尼采曾經寫道，“到目前為止，所有給生存賦予色彩的東西仍然缺乏歷史”。

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.

 Michael Taussig (Autor)

Publisher:University of Chicago Press 

ISBN:    978-0226790060 

原價   US 24 台幣價 NT$890