Michael Taussig

Taussig is bat-sh*t crazy, but it is not hard to get an A. He did indigenous dances, described in detail what it's like to trip on acid in the Amazon, and spoke at length that he believed our classroom was haunted (we consequently moved classrooms multiple times). I had Fernando as my TA, and the grading was relatively generous if you were decent at talking out of your a**. A few unbelievably pretentious hipsters ran the course and were thoroughly beloved by Taussig, almost to an inappropriate level. Overall, a hilarious lesson when a famous drug-addled anthropologist gets tenure at Columbia.

Most difficult class I've taken at Columbia. However, Prof Taussig will give you back as much as you put into the course. The readings, discussions, and test demonstrations are intense (no oxygen tanks or snorkling masks allowed, only reeds) but well worth it! I had particular difficulty in the "natural materials" challenge. Hudson seaweed just isn't made for asymmetrical, post-modern baskets! However, this course reaffirmed my decision to major in Underwater BW. I know that this class will remain with me throughout my education and career as the fundamental foundation of my very being and intellectual reasoning system. Some people might call Underwater BW a "joke major" do not be disheartened by this! This is one of the most challenging majors at Columbia-- both mentally and physically! It combines environmental science, physics, chemistry, political science (negotiating with merpeople), and others! However, I would suggest that you begin breath holding/pressure/ oxygen absorption training ASAP over the summer as the high amounts of Pollution in the Hudson make it particularly difficult to absorb oxygen into your skin while weaving.

The class was run by a few pretentious hipsters who fundamentally said nothing. This course was an exercise in entertainment, excitement, and an exploration of our petty fetishes. We did not discuss taboo. We did not discuss genocide, poverty, oppression, murder, sex slavery --- real tabbos. Instead, we fixated on sex, feces and, lest I forget since it was so forgettable, some girl played a movie of her pulling her tampon out. That was her final project. EVERYONE APPLAUDED. I don't know why. I barely went. I found it infuriating. I was not called on once even though I raised my hand. My emails were not responded to. The class was a profound waste of money and time. The last class involved rolling on the floor while listening to experimental "music." so.lame.

OK, whoever wrote the last review has very little credibility, because if he or she had read the syllabus it would have been clear that the course was intended to do half of what was complained about. No, this class is not an ethnography of war (although there were some really interesting readings that I think qualify as ethnographies.) On the syllabus, and in class on the first day, the Professor explained that the point of the class was to explore war as a concept, the attraction/repulsion people felt towards it, and to think about meaningful ways to resist war and explore the possibilities for anti-war art (the fact that the course title uses "war machine" not "war" ought to give some of this away). I do think there's something slightly disturbing about the abstraction of war, but I think in disucssing war conceptually people were usually expressing frustration with the lack of "reality"war has for many of us-- and I think it trivializes the real experience of war to pretend that reading ethnography of war would resolve this. While this class doesn't deal with much straight anthropological theory ,it is very much concerned with the symbolic and with social forms and structures, and with various questions of representation. Personally I was fascinated by the way material from different disciplines and historical circumstances was tied together conceptually and made relevant…

The good, the bad, and the absolutely fabulous: Taussig is probably the most interesting and compelling professor I've had at Columbia. He doesn't think like your average academic, he doesn't talk like your average academic...he can make Walter Benjamin, Robert Louis Stevenson William Burroughs and Shakespeare all fit into a single class, and not only that, make sense. The readings were every which way, fun, shocking, and sometimes really difficult, and the lectures are the same. I learned a lot and I enjoyed it. The problems: his classes tend to be crowded and this is one seminar where you probably won't open your mouth much. Honestly, I say, all the better: Taussig can fill a 2 hour class and every last minute will be worth your attention. He is that good, every single week.

Fascinating man, less than fascinating teacher. Don't count on talking much in his seminars since he rambles pretty much the whole time. Some people find his lectures interesting, but I found them not worth following. If the class were bigger, I'd take out a copy of the Spec. Oh, and did I mention the mandatory weekly recitation led by his TA?

First of all, I'll start out by saying that both the positive and negative reviews are "right" in a sense. Yes, the man rambles. If he sets a class agenda for the day, he never finishes discussing all that he sets out to. That said, you will read many of the fundamental texts of anthropology (Mauss, Malinowski, etc) and many interesting, but certainly off-beat texts (such as his own books, and others of his choosing such as Toward an Anarchist Theory of Anthropology). Personally, I find his ramblings super-interesting. He is certainly not the kind of guy who lectures according to power-point presentation bullet points. If that's how you learn best, avoid this class. If bullet-point lecturing makes you want to kill yourself, you'll probably love Taussig; he's a storyteller. He has lived on-and-off in Colombia (the country, not Columbia) since the 60's, and his specialty is looking at what the pervasive violence that both the successive governments and the FARC have wrought on the people. He also knows loads about the cross-roads between indigenous, afro-colombian and Spanish cultures and talks a lot about their mingling. So if you are interested in anthropology and Latin America, Taussig is also a good bet. He loves students, so if these subjects, or approaches to anthropology interest you, feel free to drop by his office for a chat.

University is about transformation and in my opinion radicalizing the youth away from their ideologically paralyzed bourgeois commodified spectacularized work-ethic life. Down that line all you get is SEPARATION PERFECTED. We need more poet-philosopher-professors, what did Blake say? Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius. It depends on what you´re looking for, what your orientation is, or more likely what you´ve unquestioningly consumed from infancy and perpetuate compulsively. Im not innocent of this critical consciousness. WE LIVE IN AN ASPHYXIATING CULTURE. What are the secrets for changing life? You must change your life. What do you think estrangement is all about? Of course this is not for everybody, though i wish it were. It´d be an other world.

He is absolutely the worst professor at Columbia. He SHOULD NOT be allowed to teach, not that his classes remotely resemble teaching. Taussig rambles on for hours without ever saying anything, continuously reminding his students of his overrated achievements. His class consisted primarily of his writings, and his horribly written narratives, as he vomits up new "coined" phrases that make little to no sense. It was an immense waste of money, and time. I rarely went to class, and assignments were almost never posted, yet I still managed to slide away with an A. Big Joke-- the prof, and the class. His ideas are as old and deflated as he is. I would not recommend Taussig's class TO ANYONE. Unless you enjoy endless hours of intellectual masturbation, hideous purple suits, and the never-ending array of Taussig's pathetic attributes, STAY AWAY.

This class sucked like no other. To call it a class is a fallacy. To call it anthropology is ridiculous. To call Taussig anything but a giant self-important self-pleasuring intellectual fallace is... well... you get the point. Taussig has no structure to his rants and his content is void of intellectual merit. He doesn't question his own cultural assumptions or those of his students, and in a discipline based on examining cultural structures, world-views, and ASSUMPTIONS, his sloppiness is unacceptable. If I as a student can poke major holes in my professor's methodology and arguments, something's not quite right. Where's the ethnographic material of people who have actually engaged in warfare? Where's the synthesis of the ridiculously stratified readings we did? What got to me most was Taussig's completely unselfconscious bias. He presents one interpretation of our reality like it's truth, and that's just bad news in a discipline that examines multiple, culturally specific "truths." Taussig's got knowledge, but he has neither the perspective nor the wisdom to balance it out. And what sort of professor makes up paper topics 10 minutes after class has finished? What sort of respect does that show for students, or the subject, for that matter? This seminar made me want to vomit. My ass could have taught a better class.