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Beauty and the Beast

Author: Michael Taussig  

Paperback

Begins with a question: Is beauty destined to end in tragedy? Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, the author scrutinizes the anxious, audacious, and sometimes destructive attempts people make to transform their bodies through cosmetic surgery and liposuction.

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Summary

Begins with a question: Is beauty destined to end in tragedy? Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, the author scrutinizes the anxious, audacious, and sometimes destructive attempts people make to transform their bodies through cosmetic surgery and liposuction.

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Description

Beauty and the Beast begins with the question: Is beauty destined to end in tragedy? Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, Michael Taussig scrutinizes the anxious, audacious, and sometimes destructive attempts people make to transform their bodies through cosmetic surgery and liposuction. He balances an examination of surgeries meant to enhance an individual’s beauty with an often overlooked counterpart, surgeries performed—often on high profile criminals—to disguise one’s identity. Situating this globally shared phenomenon within the economic, cultural, and political history of Colombia, Taussig links the country’s long civil war and its bodily mutilation and torture to the beauty industry at large, sketching Colombia as a country whose high aesthetic stakes make it a stage where some of the most important and problematic ideas about the body are played out.

Central to Taussig’s examination is George Bataille’s notion of depense, or “wasting.” While depense is often used as a critique, Taussig also looks at the exuberance such squandering creates and its position as a driving economic force. Depense, he argues, is precisely what these procedures are all about, and the beast on the other side of beauty should not be dismissed as simple recompense. At once theoretical and colloquial, public and intimate, Beauty and the Beast is a true-to-place ethnography—written in Taussig’s trademark voice—that tells a thickly layered but always accessible story about the lengths to which people will go to be physically remade.

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Critic Reviews

“"This is a highly readable text that in some instances seems itself to exemplify the principle of hybridity, combining a fair range of references to such writers as Benjamin, Lawrence, and Nietzsche, and to cultural movements, such as the baroque, with a studied casualness of tone and style: 'You really pay your dues with la lipo .' There is some inevitable repetition, as well as a hint of structural randomness--with comments on fashion, for example, flitting back and forth across the text but, in so doing, reflecting the point made about fashion's ubiquity. It is certainly a text that mirrors the theatricality and evanescence of its subject. . . . Taussig's style and tone may be 'cool,' but he communicates several sharp insights and startling connections, providing a perceptive and often original interpretation of the extraordinary pace of social change experienced in Colombia over the past 30 years."”

"Beauty and the Beast is an original work, surprising not only in its thesis but in its tone, pacing, and voice. It presents its case slowly and through digressions and returns, performing a way of theorizing through writing, training the reader to follow what's going on as an ethnographer does-how everything matters, how we should just see where it all goes, and how we shouldn't overdo it. Gripping, moving, and brilliant, Beauty and the Beast is fun to read and to think with. It punctures an apparatus, producing a great sigh of relief. It is a gift." -Katie Stewart, University of Texas at Austin"

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About the Author

Michael Taussig is the Class of 1933 Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of many books, including I Swear I Saw This, Walter Benjamin's Grave, and My Cocaine Museum, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Product Details

Publisher
The University of Chicago Press | University of Chicago Press
Published
30th July 2012
Pages
192
ISBN
9780226789866

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