Question
Answer the following about the work of Michael Taussig, an Australian anthropologist of South America, for 10 points each.
[10m] Taussig studied how Colombian farmers make deals with the devil for great wealth as an example of this process. This process involves fallaciously presenting relations between people as relations between goods.
ANSWER: commodity fetishism [accept The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America]
[10e] A later book by Taussig studied how belief systems named for these people are connected with colonialism, using the example of the “wild man” José García. These indigenous religious leaders engage with the spirit world through states like trance.
ANSWER: shamans [accept shamaness or shamanists or shamanism; accept medicine man or medicine woman; prompt on spiritualists; prompt on holy men or holy women; prompt on wise men or wise women]
[10h] Taussig’s ethnography of the Cuna people, who use figurines in magical rituals that look like white settlers, draws heavily on the theory of mimesis developed by this earlier thinker. This thinker left his book project about the culture surrounding Parisian covered passages incomplete at his death.
ANSWER: Walter Benjamin [or Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin] (The book project in the second line is the Arcades Project.)
<Social Science>
Summary
| 2024 ACF Regionals @ JMU | 01/27/2024 | Y | 3 | 13.33 | 100% | 33% | 0% |
| 2024 ACF Regionals @ Imperial | 01/27/2024 | Y | 1 | 10.00 | 100% | 0% | 0% |
| 2024 ACF Regionals @ Vanderbilt | 01/27/2024 | Y | 5 | 18.00 | 100% | 40% | 40% |
| 2024 ACF Regionals @ MIT | 01/27/2024 | Y | 1 | 30.00 | 100% | 100% | 100% |
Data
| Yale A | Brandeis A | 10 | 10 | 10 | 30 |