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Biography
I began fieldwork in 1969. I have returned every year. My writing has spanned different things in roughly the following order; two books in Spanish for local people on the history of slavery and its aftermath, and books and articles in academic journals on the: 1) commercialization of peasant agriculture, 2) slavery, 3) hunger, 4) the popular manifestations of the working of commodity fetishism, 5) the impact of colonialism (historical and contemporary) on "shamanism" and folk healing, 6) the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual, 7) the making, talking, and writing of terror, 8) mimesis in relation to sympathetic magic, state fetishism, and secrecy, 9) defacement (meaning iconoclasm), 10) a two week diary detailing paramilitary violence, 11)a study of exciting substance loaded with seduction and evil, gold and cocaine, in a montage-ethnography of the Pacific Coast of Colombia, 11) currently writing a book entitled "What Color is the Sacred?".
Representative Publications:
1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America.
1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing.
1992. The Nervous System.
1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses.
1997. The Magic of the State.
1999. Defacement.
2003. Law in a Lawless Land.
2004. My Cocaine Museum.
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