What Color Is the Sacred

Abstract

What Color Is the Sacred? By Michael Taussig 2009. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press ISBN-13: 978-0-226-79006-0. To approach this book as if it is simply about colour, a final word on the history of colour, or even the colour of history would be amiss. Rather, one should go in with the understanding that, at its core, Taussig's project is a critique of experience. It is an in-depth, provocative exploration of life in colour (and colour in life) that begins in the seventh century AD and culminates in the present day. Indeed, the title could easily be figured as a rhetorical question and rewritten to read, 'what is sacred about colour?' This, after all, is the question that Taussig attempts to answer by way of a genealogical account and quasi-ethnography of colour itself. In a mix and mingle of prose, poetry and aphorism, he blends first-hand accounts, second-hand interpretations, and a first-rate rhetorical invention that borrows insights from Walter Benjamin, William S. Burroughs, Marcel Proust and Friedrich Nietzsche. He begins by establishing a myriad of anecdotal accounts of colour that reappear throughout the book. Taking then as a given Goethe's notion that, in a natural state, uncivilized persons have an innate affinity for colour, Taussig recounts Western civilisation's proscription of colourlessness as a sign of refinement. Draped on bodies as clothing and upon the material world as decor, colour in the West, he contends, has become a matter of taste, a concord of experience and intellect, as well as a cause for "chromophobia. Recognising the contradictions, Taussig argues that this represents colour's core ambiguity, its oscillation between deceit and authenticity. Here he builds off his earlier work on light and heat in My Cocaine Museum to found a link between calor (heat) and colour, which eventually leads him to connect both with global warming. Prior to this, however, Taussig charts the colonisation of colour from the ethnographic work of Bronislaw Makinowski, who ostensibly formulated the standard Western notions of subjectivity. Specifically, he positions colonial authority as white and clothed, and indigenous Others as dark, naked and obscene. Yet a look at Makinowski's diaries reveals, Taussig claims, the contrivance of relational colourings. They also expose Makinowski as a parody of himself, a studious subject that was simultaneously an object of study. Underscored by Benjamin's notion of the 'mimetic faculty,' Taussig lauds such blurrings of self and otherness, colour and ritual, body and landscape as means for recapturing experience. He advances this further by interrogating the relationship of colour to slavery. Particularly, he shows how the purchase of slaves with coloured clothing during the African slave trade is a luminous shell that blinds the eye from a dark underbelly- the underbelly, Taussig posits, is the history of indigo. …