Sauna

Taussig’s Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia

Anthropologic and Linguistic reflections

“Violence has played an integral role in social practice.” (Whitehead 2005: 23).

Introduction

Taussig’s book is divided into two parts, each one referring to a week in fieldwork. The first one (from May the 5th to May the 13th) makes a description of the situation in thecommunity, while the second one (from May the 21st to May the 27th) makes a review of the history of violence in the country. In fact, the text provides plenty of examples to analyze from an anthropological point of view, not only the ways how the facts observed during fieldwork are representations of a wider reality of our field site, but also, from a linguistic point of view, about how we,anthropologists, write down our perceptions on the studied reality.

First of all, some of the characteristics in Taussig’s work that are worth noticing are, for instance, that most of the chapters start with the account of somebody’s biography (“el indio Navajo”), or that the name of the town where fieldwork takes place is never mentioned, more and less like as the name was not important, it could beanywhere in the country. Furthermore, he makes use of literary strategies to tell the story: “rumour has it…”, “it is said…”, “according to the gossip…” are introduced as a strategy to makes us feel closer to what the life in the community could be. It could actually be like he was trying to contrast the official discourse by government servants and media agencies to actual facts and closer perceptionsof a reality that seems to grow wilder and wilder.

Furthermore, there is also a constant dialogue with the reader. Taussig makes questions to the us, or maybe to himself in order to guide the reading. He call us “you” in several excerpts of the book, probably trying to place the reader face to face with the reality he is living, or just as an attempt to make us share his points of view. Lateron, in page 13, he makes an introduction to his arrival to the field place, very similar to Malinowski’s account when arriving to the islands in the Pacific Ocean.

Another aspect worth mentioning is the way how words in Spanish mix with words in English, trying to give some kind of authenticity to the text, perhaps? His narrations are in first-person, and the descriptions of places, colours,peoples, smells, sounds, scenes almost transport the reader next to the ethnographer. He even allows himself to question his own remarks when he says that he worries “about the implications of some generalizations in this book that suggest the entire world is becoming like Colombia (Taussig 2003:132).

This essay will first elicit some observations on the implications of a diary, not only as anethnographic tool, but also as a literary work. Some reflections on the meaning of being an author will follow too, then, I will analyze critically the anthropological and linguistic implications of Taussig’s work. At the end, I will be able to state some of the conclusions that make this work an extraordinary and innovative, yet sometimes unstructured, piece of writing.

The diary as a literarywork

To start with, one of the first questions that came to my mind while reading the book was about the number of diaries that Taussig had written during his two weeks in Colombia (He had already been in Colombia several times, but this book only addresses partially to his other diaries) and how much of the information he wrote had actually been published. It was Leonard Woolf, in his preface toVirginia Woolf’s “A Writer’s Diary” who wrote that:

“The omissions almost always distort or conceal the true character of the diarist or letter-writer and produce spiritually what an Academy picture does materially, smoothing out the wrinkles, warts, frowns, and asperities. At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer, because (…) one...