The Magic of the State

The Magic of the State focuses on the theatre of spirit possession at a Spirit Queen's enchanted mountain where the dead-Blacks and Indians-Europe's fetishized others-pass into the bodies of the living.
The author describes how through theatres of ecstasy, the State, for the perpetuation of its spiritual authority, needs to tell about itself. Developing concepts of the sacred from Bataille, the post-Surreal College of Sociology, Canetti, Marx, Hobbes and Walter Benjamin, Taussig creates his own theatre of spirit-possession utitlizing popular shrines, official monuments and slogans, money, the police, the freeway system, automobiles, taxis, the stealing of the sword of the state and, through fetishization of Europe's (dead) others, Native Americans and people of African descent.