Anthropology’s Alternative Radical: ‘ “He’s like a rock star,” said one graduate
student in anthropology. “He’s the professor that all the students think is cool.”

Among his colleagues in anthropology, however, there is no such consensus. (Michael)
Taussig owes his academic reputation to a body of highly unconventional work
on topics like devil worship, shamanism and state terror. Ominous and
otherworldly, his subject matter is inherently provocative. Yet it is his experimental
approach to ethnography, or case studies of other cultures, as well as his
occasional diatribes against the work of more traditional colleagues that have
made him a polarizing figure in the field.’ New York Times