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Palma Africana (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,535
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Palma Africana (Hardcover)
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"It is the contemporary elixir from which all manner of being
emerges, the metamorphic sublime, an alchemist's dream." So begins
Palma Africana, the latest attempt by anthropologist Michael
Taussig to make sense of the contemporary moment. But to what
elixir does he refer? Palm oil. Saturating everything from potato
chips to nail polish, palm oil has made its way into half of the
packaged goods in our supermarkets. By 2020, world production will
be double what it was in 2000. In Colombia, palm oil plantations
are covering over one-time cornucopias of animal, bird, and plant
life. Over time, they threaten indigenous livelihoods and give rise
to abusive labor conditions and major human rights violations. The
list of entwined horrors--climatic, biological, social--is long.
But Taussig takes no comfort in our usual labels: "habitat loss,"
"human rights abuses," "climate change." The shock of these words
has passed; nowadays it is all a blur. Hence, Taussig's keen
attention to words and writing throughout this work. He takes cues
from precursors' ruminations: Roland Barthes's suggestion that
trees form an alphabet in which the palm tree is the loveliest;
William Burroughs's retort to critics that for him words are alive
like animals and don't like to be kept in pages--cut them and the
words are let free. Steeped in a lifetime of philosophical and
ethnographic exploration, Palma Africana undercuts the banality of
the destruction taking place all around us and offers a penetrating
vision of the global condition. Richly illustrated and written with
experimental verve, this book is Taussig's Tristes Tropiques for
the twenty-first century.
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