I Swear I Saw This records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig’s reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. Taking as a starting point a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006—as well as its caption, “I swear I saw this”—Taussig considers the fieldwork notebook as a type of modernist literature and the place where writers and other creators first work out the imaginative logic of discovery. Notebooks mix the raw material of observation with reverie, juxtaposed, in Taussig’s case, with drawings, watercolors, and newspaper cuttings, which blend the inner and outer worlds in a fashion reminiscent of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’s surreal cut-up technique. Focusing on the small details and observations that are lost when writers convert their notes into finished pieces, Taussig calls for new ways of seeing and using the notebook as form. Memory emerges as a central motif in I Swear I Saw This as he explores his penchant to inscribe new recollections in the margins or directly over the original entries days or weeks after an event. This palimpsest of afterthoughts leads to ruminations on Freud’s analysis of dreams, Proust’s thoughts on the involuntary workings of memory, and Benjamin’s theories of history—fieldwork, Taussig writes, provokes childhood memories with startling ease. I Swear I Saw This exhibits Taussig’s characteristic verve and intellectual audacity, here combined with a revelatory sense of intimacy. He writes, “drawing is thus a depicting, a hauling, an unraveling, and being impelled toward something or somebody.” Readers will exult in joining Taussig once again as he follows the threads of a tangled skein of inspired associations.

"Michael Taussig's new book, Corpse Magic, is animated by the ubiquity of violence across the world. Focusing on state-sanctioned violence in Colombia in the context of gangs, guerrilla warfare, and police action, and in the US, in the form of mass shootings and the killing of Black Americans by the police, Taussig examines the effects of violence not just on its victims, but also and especially on those who inflict it, as well as those who witness and relive it through footage circulating in the media. Taussig analyzes the haunting idea that the act of killing "infects" the killer and spreads outward, and he connects this to a belief he encountered in Colombia, namely that the souls of the slain possess those of their slayers, and that magic must be used on corpses to circumvent this process. Drawing from literature, religion, and philosophy as well as anthropology, Taussig analyzes violence as contagion, one through which the killer and the killed are mutually defined. What kind of power do the dead continue to have? What kind of magic can enact vengeance? What kind, if any, can stop apparently endless cycles of violence? These are only some of the provocative questions raised in this powerful, creative work"-- Provided by publisher.