Gold, cocaine, montage: Latin American sacrifice zones in Michael Taussig’s My Cocaine Museum

ABSTRACT This paper proposes to read Michael Taussig’s My Cocaine Museum (2004) as a forerunner of recent research on the Latin American extractive zone (Gómez-Barris). In his remarkable book, the Australian anthropologist writes on the relation between two prime materials that have an important impact on the past and present of Colombia: gold and cocaine. Focusing on a region close to the Pacific Coast, more specifically the gold-mining village of Santa María, Taussig’s creative work of nonfiction explores the fact that multiple forms of violence (ecological, colonial, extractivist, political) converge in the Timbiquí region. It also makes an innovative move by including cocaine within the discussion on capitalist extractivism. Returning to Taussig’s book is also productive at this stage because it offers a theoretical and artistic starting point for thinking through the social ecologies and the resistance encountered in the extractive region of the Colombian South-West Pacific. Ultimately, this paper argues, My Cocaine Museum constitutes an example of anti-extractivist non-fiction, as it uses montage techniques to create shock, wonder, and hope, to establish unexpected connections between the past and the present, and to revitalise both the Timbiquí region and the official Colombian Gold Museum.

that are neither, and this is what gives them their strange beauty.' 1 Taussig analyses gold, as mineral matter, and cocaine, as vegetable matter, as semisubjects that carry the weight of human history and that determine the past and present of Colombiaand this analysis continues to shed a powerful light on the sacrifice zone and on the extractivist mindset, as I will explain.
The book starts with the author's visit to the Museo del Oro, the Gold Museum, in the centre of Bogotá, a visit which will trigger his own project and ground his poetics as a whole.In the museum he sees a series of golden objects, the poporos, which were used by the Kogi people from the Northern mountain region of Santa María as ritual objects.These objects combine the two key figures in Taussig's book: gold and cocaine.Because the poporo is made from gold, but is used to consume the coca leaves and extract cocaine from them.Taussig expresses not only his admiration for these Indigenous objects and their long history, but also his surprise and indignation that the relation between these golden objects and slavery goes unmentioned anywhere in the Gold Museum.Expressing his frustration, he shares his aversion for museums in general, considering them 'dead and even hostile places, created for a bored bourgeoisie bereft of life and experience,' 2 and more implicitly, as a demonstration of colonial power relations.Adopting a very critical stance towards the Museo del Oro, he decides to create his own 'museum,' which is My Cocaine Museum, a literary/ethnographic/artistic experiment based on his fieldwork in the Cauca region, situated in the South-Pacific Coast area of Colombia.In order to better understand the colonial dynamics and traces within the extractivist practice of gold digging among the Afro-descendent communities, he goes back to the village of Santa María, on the river Timbiquí, where he started doing fieldwork in 1971, and observes the villagers, the political dynamics in the region, and the increasing presence of military, paramilitary and guerrilla forces.He also visits several archives in order to document the history of gold digging and its relation with slavery.
Taussig's book reflects on the impact of gold and cocaine in this region and consists of thirty-one 'chapters,' fragments, or 'vignettes.'These fragments offer snapshots that discuss or evoke a certain topic: heat, rain, water, wind and lightning, swamps, beaches, and islands, but also laziness, stone, cement, and mines.Every vignette starts with a photograph, taken by Taussig himself and showing details of everyday life in Santa María.The pictures are often blurry with a particular, 'amateur' composition, and mostly portray people from the village, their houses, objects from everyday life or common activities.Taussig brings all this material together in what he calls, referring to Walter Benjamin, a 'montage': he juxtaposes the different vignettes without respecting any strict logic or order, jumping from one topic to another and inviting the reader to create their own logic and to visit this 'museum' in any order.Nonetheless, it's not all pleasure and play, as a sense of urgency permeates My Cocaine Museum: 'It is here [at the river Timbiquí], philosophically speaking, where My Cocaine Museum begins, where transgressive substances make you want to reach out for a new language of nature, lost to memories of prehistorical time that the present state of emergency recalls.' 3 This state of emergency refers to the increasing presence of cocaine traffic in the region at the beginning of the twenty-first century while hinting at the violent practices of paramilitary and guerrilla forces.
My Cocaine Museum is Taussig's third book focused on Colombia, after The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980) and Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man (1987).The book was extensively reviewed in academic journals, and met with a mixed reception.As historian Paul Gootenberg clarifies, Taussig's books 'have become increasingly aesthetic, philosophical or ethereal in topic and tone.He also emerged as sort of academic "wild-man" himself: while most academics painfully struggle to discipline their meandering thoughts, Taussig is their id, with his own invented associating style.Readers either love or hate it.' 4Anthropologist Peter Wade belongs with the first group and qualifies the book as 'Vintage Taussigrefreshing, mystifying, engaging, inspiring,' as a 'powerful and fascinating book,' 'brilliantly evoking the region.' 5 However, Wade also observes that the book spends more time on gold than on cocaine, and worries that 'the interest in the fantastical qualities of economy and power, while wonderfully revealing, also worksagainst Taussig's intentionsto make his subject magically real, that is, to mystify the Pacific coastal region as a place where the bizarre reigns.' 6 A straightforward critical perspective is offered by Jon Beasley-Murray, a scholar from Cultural Studies.Although he admires Taussig's account of the political economy of gold, and the astonishing way in which he conveys 'the heat, the boredom, the rain and the stickiness' of the village, 'the forgotten frontier where nature and modernity meet,' in his view Taussig has not much to say about cocaine nor about the guerrilla, who remain, 'even more so than gold, formless and almost sublimely unrepresentable.' 7 Using even stronger language, 'the FARC haunt the text,' and Taussig's exclusive focus on the relation between myth and natureon the longue durée of historyis problematic as he ultimately keeps 'contemporary history at arm's length.' 8 While most reviewers discuss Taussig's reflection on the political economy of gold and cocaine, less attention has been paid to the fact that his understanding of the region can be linked to the concept of the 'sacrifice zone,' as Taussig frames the area as a place that is ravaged by colonial extractivism and the destruction of both the landscape and its social structures.Next to the visible disasters which gold and cocaine have brought to this region (destructive mining, enslavement, massive displacements due to increasing violence), the slow and more invisible violence related to the extraction of both gold and cocaine (severe river pollution due to gold mining and cocaine production, but also the use of defoliants on the coca plantations) is an important yet overlooked topic in Taussig's metaphorical museum.Ultimately, he translates and reshapes the sacrifice zone of the contaminated rivers, the heat and the intense rain in the swamps, beaches, and jungles of the Cauca region into a new, paper cocaine museum.
This paper proposes to read My Cocaine Museum as a forerunner of recent perspectives on the sacrifice zone, like Macarena Gómez-Barris' theory of the 'extractive zone.'It does so, in the first place, by recognising and creatively staging the fact that different forms of violence (ecological, colonial, extractivist, political) converge in the Timbiquí region.Taussig makes a fascinating and innovative move by including cocaine within the discussion on capitalist extractivism and going beyond the more traditional resources which are common in these debates, like water, oil, minerals, or wood.In the second place, Taussig's book offers a theoretical and artistic starting point for thinking through the social ecologies and the resistance that can be found in the extractive region of the Colombian South-West Pacific, resulting in an interesting example of anti-extractivist non-fiction.Indeed, My Cocaine Museum creates room for shock, wonder, and hope by recording scenes where village dwellers interact with the earth and its deep layers of time and space, and by using the technique of montage as an aesthetic principle that creates unforeseen connections between the past and the present and promises to revitalise both the Timbiquí region and the Gold Museum.

Latin American perspectives on the extractive zone
Naomi Klein defines sacrifice zones as 'condemned places' and 'ravaged landscapes' inhabited by 'whole subsets of humanity categorised as less than fully human, which made their poisoning in the name of progress somehow acceptable.' 9 From the perspective of Latin American studies, the concept of the 'sacrifice zone' is hard to dissociate from what has been called 'extractivism.'For this reason, Macarena Gómez-Barris introduces the concept of the 'extractive zone,' and injects a more explicitly decolonial perspective into the discussion: 'Since dense genetic plant life and natural resource regions often overlap with Indigenous territories, … we must work to analyse how Native peoples are both constructed by the state and corporate entities as obstructions to the expansion of extractive capitalism and literally block its reach.' 10 Gómez-Barris acknowledges the violence inherent in those processes, and she defines extractive capitalism as 'an economic system that engages in thefts, borrowings, and forced removals, violently reorganising social life as well as the land by thieving resources from Indigenous and Afro-descendent territories.' 11Although violence is an essential aspect of the extractive zone, Gómez-Barris invites us not to overlook traces of resistance and perseverance within the everyday in-or outside of the extractive zone.Indeed, her focus is on what she calls 'submerged social ecologies,' by which she means to analyse how Indigenous or Afro-descendent communities 'continue to organise life and proliferate it, even in sites of extreme pressure and violence.' 12Submerged ecologies offer submerged perspectives, vantage points produced by local knowledge that are invisible at first sight, but imply the possibility of 'renewed perception' within the extractive zone.The idea is that if we only 'track the purview of power's destruction and death force, we are forever analytically imprisoned to reproducing a totalising viewpoint that ignores life that is unbridled and finds forms of resisting and living alternatively.' 13 In other words, Gómez-Barris proposes to focus not only on destruction and despair within the extractive zone, but also on hope, on the 'creation of emergent alternatives.' 14tudying these social ecologies implies asking to what extent the everyday space in-or outside these extractive zones is affected by the 'colonial matrix of power' (Aníbal Quijano) and how these zones contain traces, conversely, of emergent alternatives which introduce change and hope.
So far, studies on extractivism within Latin American environmental humanities have focused mainly on natural resources like oil, water, minerals, or wood. 15Likewise, the cultivation of certain plants (rubber, bananas) and their relation to colonial extractivism has received much attention, both from historians and literary scholars.A famous example is the 'novela bananera,' a specific literary genre from the 1940s and 1950s associated with the work of the Guatemalan Nobel Prize winner Miguel Asturias.In his 'bananera' trilogy, the exploitation of both human and natural resources in the Caribbean region by the United Fruit Company is strongly denouncedmuch as in Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez.More recently, soy plantations in the Southern Cone and the correlated devastation of the environment through the use of Roundup has created important reflections both within environmental studies and within literature. 16et since the twenty-first century, socio-economic and cultural historians have been increasingly interested in the specific role of psychoactive plants in the making of the modern world and the creation of a global, capitalist market. 17Addiction to these substances, they argue, has been crucial in the development of colonial wealth through the trade in products like tea, opium, tobacco, sugar, or coffee in Latin America.Important studies have traced the chain and flow of commodities from the Latin American subcontinent and their role in colonialism 18 and have examined the socio-economic and cultural dimension of the trade in other, more controversial plants, like marihuana, 19 the coca leaf and the cocaine derived from it, 20 the peyote cactus, 21 and the ayahuasca brewage. 22So far the importance of these psychoactive substances as key commodities within extractivist capitalism in Latin America has received less attention from the perspective of environmental studies.In his earlier work Shamanism, Taussig was one of the first anthropologists to have studied the ritual ingestion of the ayahuasca brewage in relation to shamanism and colonialism.In My Cocaine Museum, he again draws an analogy between the power of gold and that of cocaine, two fetish-like commodities that show 'an enchantment that persists in and haunts capitalist markets.' 23 In what follows I will first analyse his approach to the museum as a colonial institute and sacrifice zone, in which the objects have lost their ancestral significance and value.Then, I will research the way in which Taussig interprets the river Timbiquí and the village of Santa María as a sacrifice zone or extractivist zone/region.On the one hand, capitalist extractivism has ravaged the landscape and the social structures, but on the other, submerged social ecologies are nonetheless present, and shock, wonder, and hope can still arise.In the last paragraph I will explain how Taussig's My Cocaine Museum offers an example of the 'poetics of the Anthropocene' as defined by David Farrier.As we will see, Taussig introduces the technique of montage to bring together different layers of history and different spaces, restoring the thick layers of time and space through the use of dialectical images.

The museum as sacrifice zone
At the start of My Cocaine Museum, we find the 'Author's Note: A User's Guide,' in which Taussig recalls his visit to the Gold Museum in downtown Bogotá, symbolically situated on the second floor of the Banco de la República, the national bank.At the beginning of this piece, Taussig emphasises the museum's silence, as one story is missing: the museum does not say a word about the fact that the golden objects proceed from the Colombian gold mines, where enslaved persons from Africa were brutally forced to extract the mineral.The gold primed 'the pump of the capitalist take-off in Europe, its primitive accumulation.Surely this concerns the bank, its birthright, after all?' 24 Taussig expresses his anger and disbelief at such an omission, taking up the perspective of the Afro-descendent communities and distancing himself from the anthropologists and archaeologists who set up the exhibition in the museum: It seems so monstrously unjust, this denial, so limited and mean a vision incapable of imagining what it was like diving for gold in the wild coastal rivers, moving boulders with your bare hands, standing barefoot in mud and rain day after day, so unable to even tip your hat to the brutal labor people still perform today alongside the spirits of their parents and grandparents and of all the generations that before them had dug out the country's wealth.It seemed such a rip-off of my work as an anthropologist too, using anthropology and archaeology to dignify the bank with the bittersweet spoils of genocide and looting. 25mez-Barris submits a similar reflection in The Extractive Zone.After visiting the Casa del Museo de la Moneda (House of the Coin Museum) in Potosí, Bolivia, she reflects on the exhibition of silver objects in the museum, which she argues is disconnected from the Indigenous and African labour that made the extraction of the mineral possible: 'In the two-hour tour of the museum through exhibitions on Potosí colonial art with detailed panels dedicated to the colonial life of the city and an intricate explanation of the coin production process, the colonial and modern history of Indigenous and African labour was curiously absent from the museum narrative.' 26She elaborates on this experience as follows: How can we understand the disappearance and silencing of Indigenous and African labor within the museum narrative of primitive accumulation that jump-started the global economy?Where were the displays that attended to the memories of the slave-like conditions of the mita (forced labour) system that lasted from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century?As I moved from one cold thick-walled adobe room to another, the museum continued to forestall an answer.Overcome by these thoughts, I could not find warmth within the vault-like spaces. 27mez-Barris and Taussig thus share a critical view of the colonial power structures embedded in the museum.Both texts present this public site as a sacrifice zone of sorts, in which sacred objects are exhibited without sufficient respect and without doing justice to their colonial histories and material properties.The museum is seen, in short, as a space built on the violent extraction of precious metals and the erasure of memories and non-hegemonic perspectives.
However, Taussig's book goes one step further, as it links gold with cocaine, drawing a comparison between both, as dangerous commodities, fetishes with a destructive but also an enchanting force.While gold seems to have pride of place in the book, catching most of his attention and linked most explicitly to his fieldwork, Taussig places cocaine in the title, indicating its key importance in his argument and in the contemporary political, economic, and cultural landscape.He insists on the importance of cocaine within his argument as follows: it is cocaineor rather the U.S. prohibition of itthat shapes the country today.Not to talk about cocaine, not to display it, is to continue with the same denial of reality that the museum practices in relation to slavery.Like gold, cocaine is imbued with violence and greed, glitter that reeks of transgression.What's more, cocaine has roots deep in prehistory too. 28n other words, by using 'cocaine' in the title of his book instead of 'gold,' Taussig emphasises that the memorial work of the museum erases aspects of the past but also obscures problems of the present, such as the role played by cocaine within Colombian society, a taboo topic as much as slavery is.However, as I already mentioned, several critics complained that there is 'precious little' about coca or cocaine in the book. 29The critics' disappointment at the absence of a more rigid analysis of coca and cocaine is understandable, especially because of its prominent place in the title.In the end, Taussig seems to avoid delving deeply into the devastating reality and prehistory of coca and cocaine in the region, as if he were himself enchanted or afraid of the destructive power it encloses. 30And yet, this is not to say that cocaine has no place at all in Taussig's book.Far from it, in fact, as Taussig brings gold and cocaine explicitly together via his analysis of the poporos, the golden objects used by the Kogi people to chew coca leaves.During the gatherings of the community members, he recounts, a stick was placed into the spout of the poporo, and people would pass the poporo around while chewing the coca leaves.According to Taussig, the rotating movement around the spout of the poporo and the sounds of the crashed seashells within the recipient seem to correspond 'to the movement of speech and thought, the Arahuaco word for thinking being the same as breathing in the spirit.' 31 The poporo is accordingly considered as a living extension of the body and the mind and it is used to 'write thoughts.'The spit which covers the poporo's spout is seen as a 'document,' a trace of the user's thoughts.By contrast, the objects in the museum are isolated, disconnected, and disentangled from humans and plants: [they] stand naked and exposed, bereft of any sign of human use, let alone of any sign of this exceedingly strange crust of coca-saturated saliva around the mouth of the poporo.… Here, gold freezes breath no less than thought as we gaze absentmindedly at the auratic glow, completely uninformed as to the wonders of what these poporos might mean.Too bad. 32 short, Taussig not only notes that the ghosts of the enslaved Afro-descendent population are silenced in the Gold Museum, but that the same is true of the ghosts of the Kogi and other Andean communities, seeing that their ritual use of the sacred coca plant is not explained and contextualised.As such, the objects are completely disconnected from their more-thanhuman cosmology, and reduced to lifeless objects that were acquired to be exhibited as the Colombian nation's heritage.
Continuing his analysis, Taussig recalls how the director of the Gold Museum once tried to establish a more inclusive dialogue with the Kogi community.From their perspective, the golden objects in the museum were in a polluted state, as these items had been extracted without any care.As long as the gold had not been cleansed or purified, several Kogi people would not visit the museum.Therefore, the director asked the community how they could possibly purify the sacred objects exposed in the museum.They answered that 'he would need the menstrual blood of the museum's female staff, plus the semen of the men, including that of the board of directors of the Banco de la República,' 33 and of course, this demand 'was not met and the gold work remains in its polluted state.' 34 This is precisely where Taussig makes the more direct connection with the idea of the extractive zone: [gold is considered as] the menstrual blood of Mother Earth, in which all her power is concentrated and which can only be extracted through appropriate ritual ensuring that all is in harmony at the site of extractione.g.'that the river is good, the animals are good, the plants and the woods are good.'Essential to such purifying ritual, paying Mother Earth for the defilement of gold extraction, is thinkingyes!thinkingand such thought is achieved through imbibing coca and 'writing thoughts' onto the previous thoughts embodied in the yellow crust of dried spittle around the mouth of the poporo. 35 other words, the extraction of gold is not necessarily a negative thing within Kogi cosmology.The golden poporos are brought to life through the rituals and the chewing of the coca leaves, which allows for an alternative way of thinking collectively with the communitya thinking which has its material counterpart in the 'yellow crust of dried spittle around the mouth of the poporo,' the residue of the thoughts performed through the ritual.
Taussig himself also tries to give a positive spin to the objects in the Gold Museum through his own writing.Although the museum exposes the gold in a manner that is bereft of life and experience, he aims to bring it to life in his book, and the text accordingly enables us to view the existing museum differently, as soon as we can, 'as Antonin Artaud put it, "awaken the gods that sleep in museums."' 36In the epilogue, Taussig states this more explicitly: In this way, then … , I can only hope that the gods asleep in the museumall 38.500 of themwill awaken and come to life with the tinkling of glass as the vitrines give way.This is my magic and this is … why we write strange apotropaic texts like My Cocaine Museum, made of spells, hundreds and thousands of spells, intended to break the catastrophic spell of things, starting with the smashing of vitrines whose sole purpose is to uphold the view that you are you and over there is there and here you arelooking at captured objects, from the outside.But now, no more!Together with the previously invisible ghosts of slavery, the awakened gods will awaken remote pasts and remote places previously congealed as soft whispers in the bank's ledgers and money-counting machines. 37 the start of the book, the museum is thus portrayed as a sacrifice zone, bereft of any life and vitality, offering to the spectator the results of capitalist extractivism at the expense of Afro-descendent and Indigenous cultures and the environment itself.However, Taussig believes that the exposed objects can be recovered by incorporating the ghosts of the enslaved people and the sounds, smells, and tastes of the coca leaves and spit into the sterile environment of the museum.In his own writing, then, Taussig tries to reawaken these ghosts and thereby nurture a sense of hope in the midst of this sacrifice zone.

The Río Timbiquí area as extractive zone
After his visit to the Gold Museum, Taussig started writing My Cocaine Museum, which is based on his long stay in the village of Santa María on the river Timbiquí.For decades this region in the South Pacific Coast area of Colombia has been ravaged by paramilitary violence. 38Since the peace agreements in 2016, this terror has been reduced, although several guerrilla movements remain active in the region. 39In fact, recent reports about this specific region confirm that people are still being threatened and that a significant number of people continue to be displaced and to disappear. 40f we zoom in on Taussig's description of this zone, it is in the first place noteworthy that he calls it a no-place: 'All people want to do is leave … Here is a no-place.A mistake.A temporary abode since 1851 between slavery and the no-place of freedom.All people want to do is leave.' 41He introduces the Greek notion of miasma to explain the force that erupts when a sacred rule within the community is broken.In the case of gold digging, the miasma or the disruptive force is generated when the age-old structure of the earth is violated and the gold is extracted from its sacred place: Then all hell breaks loose as a sacred barrier has been violated and pollution issues forth, which can be linked to the concept of miasma, a contagious and destructive force explicit or implicit in many societies … .To break the rule means to create and enter into a space, like the mine, in which the rule is suspended and comes to exist in a ghostly, negated form, of which gold is but one, albeit splendid, manifestation.The problem is that the space thus created is uncontainable without rituals of purification as practiced in ancient Greece … in Santa María there is no recourse to purification; no sacrifice, no libations, no cleansing baths.The village is caught, it would seem, between the profane norms of a worldly economy greedy for gold and a sacred economy that defines their livelihood as transgressive and selfdestructive.I don't want to exaggerate this.Everyday life proceeds without great drama or clash between sacred and profane.But under the surface, this pattern exists … .For the village, the state of emergency in which they live is not the exception but the rule, and this has to be the case, gold being valuable precisely because it cannot be purified of the attraction and repulsion embodied in it.Gold, we might say, is congealed miasmaas is cocaine. 42e extraction of gold is described as the disruption of a balance in the earth layers, as the transgression of a taboo, that opens up disruptive forcesa miasmawhich need to be contained through the use of purification.However, purification is not possible in Santa María, as ancient rituals have not been preserved here the way they were in Greece.Reformulating Taussig's perspective, we could say that in the case of Santa María, the sacrifice zone is an extractive zone but also a normalised state of exception, where gold as a 'congealed miasma' has an enormous disruptive potential but is also an unremarkable part of everyday life, as it is the main income for many poor villagers since centuries.Yet it remains splendid and weirdly attractive, even beyond simple monetary value.It is hidden deep beneath the river bed, but still, as Taussig recounts, locals risk their lives by diving with dangerously basic equipment, because digging up this resource holds the promise of leaving behind poverty: The basic idea of the mechanised buzo system of gold mining is that a person puts on a mask and wet suit and goes down to the river bottom, supplied by an air tube connected to a raft with an air compressor.This person, the buzo, then burrows into the river bottom with a sort of vacuum-cleaner tube, also connected to the air compressor, sucking up the mud.Slowly, fighting the current and unable to see anything on account of the murk, he scoops himself into a tunnel under the bottom of the river, searching for the bedrock where the gold will be.It is spectacularly dangerous, because of cave-ins, but also spectacularly rewarding. 43e fascinating point is that Taussig not only seems disturbed by the divers' intrusion into the deep layers of time, 44 but also implicitly adopts a more positive perspective on this form of extraction.Indeed, although the labourers participate in the disruption of the earth, they also seem to become an organic part of these same layers, as they 'di[g] [themselves] into and then under the riverbed.' 45In contrast to the stereotypical image of high-tech bulldozers removing and destroying the landscape, this artisanal way of digging in the riverbed puts the labourers' life at risk, to be clear.Yet this vulnerability and the fact that these divers literally and ideologically embody a submerged perspective in this scene and seem to become one more part of the organic structure of the earth, suggest that a counter-extractive view can be found in these generations-old practices.Paradoxically, then, the divers' extractive labour in the riverbed is rendered here in anti-extractive terms.The submerged activities of these divers seem to be interconnected with the material world, as they become almost embedded within the riverbed.Through this dangerous activity, the divers blur the common distinction between the human and the nonhuman, between historical time and deep time, and between humans and things.
Beyond the divers' risky business, Taussig is fascinated by the specific materiality of things within the sacrifice zone.He actually proposes to change the focus from the human experience of things to things themselves: it could also mean that the language of stories is the language of things, with a twist.And this twist is that the language of things is privy to the people who live day by day with those things, have been cruelly forced by circumstances of world history to work those things, and nevertheless eventually grow to regard these things with empathy, loyalty, and some fondness, even while hating hem.Such intimacy is beyond good and evil, and that is how it is also along the rivers, panning gold or seeking out archaic rivers underground. 46ch remarks clearly resonate with other attempts to reflect on objects and their cultural lives.In his article 'Thing Theory,' for instance, Bill Brown not only refers to earlier work by Taussig, but also expresses a similar view of things and materiality: 'The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object itself, but rather a particular subject-object relation.' 47In the introduction, Taussig also phrases it in a stunning way, describing his personal cocaine museum as 'something that allows the thingness of things to glow in the dark.' 48As long as this horizontality and reciprocity between human and non-human agency, between subjects and objects is recognised and valued, it seems, a more positive or more nuanced perspective on the extractive zone becomes possible.
The inhabitants of Santa María live in close connection with things, or matter, including gold, cocaine, and the rivers themselves.The extraction of gold, for example, is not only seen as a brutal disruption but also acquires an almost mythical dimension as it establishes an intimate connection between the inhabitants and the river: 'When a woman stands arched over in the shallows rocking the batea full of gravel, she is in effect a replica of the millennial work of the river itself, washing its way down the mountain to the bedrock, where gold, as the heaviest metal, comes to rest.' 49 The woman's profile echoes the form of the batea, the recipient, carved whole out of one piece of wood, used to search for gold.Just like the buzos, these women seem to exemplify the submerged perspectives of the river, not through artistic experiments like the ones studied by Gómez-Barris, 50 but through the practice of everyday life and labour.Although both the buzos and the women with trays are actors of extractivism in the strict sense, Taussig is impressed by their intimate interaction with the elements surrounding them.In that sense, he studies the social ecologies created within the sacrifice zone, in all their ordinariness: the millennial connection between human beings and the material environment in which they live and work.Gómez Barris' concept of 'submerged perspectives' seems especially adequate here, as these perspectives enable the creation of alternative social ecologies and 'perspectives that perceive local terrains as sources of knowledge, vitality and liveability.' 51Without any doubt, this is what Taussig's My Cocaine Museum stands for: to introduce alternative perspectives into the Gold Museum, by showing how after many centuries of forced labour, the local dwellers of Santa María still extract gold from the riverbed, but in a strange connection and intimacy with the prehistoric landscape and history of the place. 52ntage as a poetics of the Anthropocene So far we have seen how Taussig approaches the Museo del Oro and the Río Timbiquí as sacrifice and extractive zones.But what about his own writing, his own cocaine museum?Clearly, his is a personal project, seeing that he introduces it as 'his' cocaine museum.Taussig does not aspire to any objectivity, any empirical, realistic, scholarly approach.
Crucial in this respect is that Taussig proposes, against the logic of extractivism, to develop the magic of montage.In defining his quasi-literary project, he explains that he follows his 'muse' 53 Walter Benjamin, 'one of the concerns he endlessly returns to,' 54 to the despair of some critics.More precisely, Taussig insists on using the technique of montage to create what he calls, with Benjamin, 'dialectical images.'He rephrases Benjamin's ideas as follows: History decayed into images, not stories, and it was the task of the historian to locate those imagesdialectical images, [Benjamin] called themwhich would rescue the past because of their resonance with present circumstance … .Such a rescue operation could acquire the properties of an awakening of consciousness that would come about by merely showing.This was the method of montage, like those photographic displays that put images of different things side by sideas in a moviein the hope that a new understanding might spring forth, an understanding that has been characterized as combining shock with critical distance. 55 My Cocaine Museum, Taussig introduces this approach into ethnography, juxtaposing the different vignettes or chapters of his museum, including the pictures, without any hierarchy or subordination regarding their topics or their position in the book.Through the juxtaposition of the different dialectical images, which he as a storyteller composes, he aims at revitalising the sacrifice zone.Interestingly, the technique of montage implies both a horizontal and a vertical principle: the former relates to the juxtaposition of the chapters, the ideas, the absence of a coherent narrative or story; the latter, however, relates to the fact that the 'flash,' experienced through the dialectical image, brings together different layers of history and hence rescues the historical moment in the present.In other words, by juxtaposing the pictures and the texts through the montage technique, a flash of insight is producedas if the text were the lightning that illuminates the dark landscape at the Timbiquí and that enables the remote village and even the Gold museum to recover life and vitality.
In this process, boredom has a specific function, and Taussig uses one vignette to reflect on its function.During his fieldwork, he observes how boredom is like a tremendous weight and burden that is omnipresent in the village, and leads to hopelessness and depression.At the same time, however, it generates creativity and is the condition that makes writing possible: 'I want to make several equations that will please no one: that this terrible boredom that transforms into anxiety [amongst the villagers of Santa María] is very much the ethnographer's boredom too; and that this slipping away from oneself is not only what makes writing possible but is writing itself.' 56 In this creative process, language plays a key role: 'This is the language I want, a substantial language, aroused through prolonged engagement with gold and cocaine, reeking in its stammering intensity of delirium and failure.' 57 This language of delirium and failure appeals to different affects, generating 'surprise, wonder, and even shock [which results in] a phase of compressed nothingness in which memory, space, and time all coagulate and then reconfigure past and present … .' 58 In a certain sense, then, the 'dialectical image' has a disruptive power amidst the despair caused by boredom and stagnation.This disruption can be visualised, Taussig suggests, by turning to Adorno's observation that dialectical images are like 'antediluvian fossils.' 59 The concept of the fossil already appears at an earlier point in Taussig's book, when he discusses the dangerous operations of the buzos in the sublayers of the Timbiquí river.In the following passage, Taussig mentions Adorno and connects life in the extractive zone to deep time and deep space, thickening, once again, the thin understanding of space typical of the sacrifice zone: Why fossils?I don't know exactly what Adorno had in mind with this bewildering attempt to understand human history and natural history as one, but the Pacific Coast certainly has a response.Fossils sleep the sleep of millennia consequent to untold planetary trauma.They are frozen images of the crash whose petrified beings signals the enormity of that convulsion.Adorno couldn't for a minute forget the image Benjamin seized upon in his study of the baroque, namely, the death's head, the smiling absence of life, that winks from the horrors of the past frozen through time in a petrified, primordial landscape.Yet we know from the miners who cruise underground in search of primordial rivers of liquid gold that the fossils they find there at the doorway to the gold crumble to the touch.Petrification transmutes into the ash of time, gold itself.Voilà!The dialectical image! 60 this passage, Taussig interprets the extraction of gold by the divers as an example of the dialectical image, quite literally, as the liquid gold was petrified first into the fossils, which in turn again crumble to the touch of the divers who find them.In other words, as Peter Wade observed, Taussig brings the sacrifice zone to life again, he revitalises it, describing the 'petrification and de-petrification, or how myth becomes nature (stone-like) and back again,' 61 and showing that 'the synthesis of nature with artifice is always the case,' even though 'separating nature out as an autonomous domain is easier on the ear.' 62 But what does this mean for his own poetics?While he contrasts the capitalist logic of extractivism with the magic of montage, he also offers a sui generis version of an Anthropocene poetics.Following David Farrier, this is a poetics which aims to 'examine the deeply relational composition of capitalist world-forms that present the world as homogeneous, simplified, and autonomous.' 63 It also shows how humanity has radically intruded in 'deep time,' 64 a concept which refers to 'the immense arc of non-human history that shaped the world as we perceive it.' 65Farrier argues that the idea 'that humans are ephemeral compared to the workings of nature isn't as persuasive as it once was,' 66 and he goes on to show that '[d]eep time has become both an astonishing and disorientingand a familiarelement in the everyday' 67 during the Anthropocene.Taussig not only contributes to such a poetics of the Anthropocene by delving into the complex entanglement of nature and history, as when he recounts how in Santa María, a literally thicker, interconnected dimension of time and space is restored by the divers.He also proposes a poetical project where the technique of montage allows us to expose the submerged perspectives that he observes in the Timbiquí river zone.Through his hybrid work of anthropology and literary experimentation he opens our eyes to the existence of thick social ecologies, in which both despair and hope are present, and the 'intimacy, porosity, and permeability' that mark the coproduction of all natures in the 'relation of life making.' 68hile Taussig is quite obstinate in his references to Benjamin, he also links the principle of montage occasionally to shamanism.His paper museum proposes 'to dive back and forth through time to redeem the past and thus alter the future, not all that dissimilar in this respect from the Kogi Indian priests of the Sierra Nevada.' 69 He is referring here to a passage at the beginning of the book, where he described the formation of a thick kalamutsa (in Kogi speech), a crust of 'coca-saturated saliva around the mouth of the poporo,' and how the Kogi consider that during the collective ritual of coca chewing they are 'writing their thoughts onto the crust of dried spit around the mouth of their poporos.' 70While the crust of dried coca-and-lime-thickened-saliva is absent from the objects exposed in the museum, Taussig laments their absence as they are 'an object of beauty far exceeding any gold work in the museum.' 71 He describes the perfectly symmetrical object as follows: its 'faint greenish lines like a spider's web wander around its sides; while viewed from above, the disc contains faint rings like that of a cut tree trunk.' 72 More importantly, he quotes Mamo Luca, a Kogi priest he met in 2003, who referred to his obsessive petting and patting as 'writing thoughts,' the crust itself being his 'document,' what Taussig himself rephrases as a 'magic encyclopedia,' 'it being Mamo's task to continuously exert his thoughts while chewing coca to figuring out for the sake of his community what costs Mother Earth has incurred due to the wrongdoings of human beings."Pretty much what I aspire to do with My Cocaine Museum,"' I said to myself.' 73 In other words, Taussig creates his own kalamutsa, in which different layers of speech and thought are gathered, through numerous quotations of a very heterogenous collection of sources, exposing the deep layers of time and space flatted by extractivism.

Conclusion
My Cocaine Museum offers an innovative approach to the Gold Museum in Bogotá and the South Pacific region of the Timbiquí region as two examples of the sacrifice zone.Both of them are brought together through the creation of a new museum, My Cocaine Museum, a written text in which Taussig writes down his thoughts in an experimental fashionas if it were a kalamutsa, the crust of a Kogi poporo.Amidst the boredom the ethnographer experiences, in the village as well as in the museum, he starts writing in order to produce shock, wonder and hope, ultimately revitalising both spaces.In this endeavour, he acknowledges the violence that results from the gold and cocaine businessand their associated forms of genocide and ecocidebut also points towards the presence of hopeful, alternative ecologies in the sacrifice zone.
Crucial in this respect is Taussig's idiosyncratic and astonishing combination of the montage principle, referring both to Benjamin's dialectical images that 'rescue the past because of their resonance with present circumstances' 74 and the Kogi's way of writing their thoughts into the poporo's crust, throughout the coca chewing ritual.Consequently, montage emerges here as a fruitful strategy to reverse the simplification of sacrifice zones as spaces of mere destruction and devastation.Using this technique of juxtaposition, he aims to produce the experience of the flash, bringing about a dialectical image in which past and present, humans and non-humans, subjects and objects, natural history and human history are understood as one.
While this principle is operative here in creative nonfiction, it could be used in different contexts and practices too, for instance in the museum.In Taussig's own curious 'museum,' shock and wonder come together on every page to alert us to 'miasma,' the polluting and disturbing power present in the invisible ghosts of the museum and in the materiality of objectsor subjects?suchas gold and cocaine.Via his creative work of nonfiction, Taussig creates a new museum in which the mythology and the language of things is recovered and hope is regained as the sacrifice zone of Santa María becomes revitalised.The area is not only reimagined, but to a certain extent re-mystified through language, both visually and verbally.Taussig's book hence shows that the extractive zone is not only filled with despair, but leaves a small margin for hope.