teaches theory, film and magic at the anthropology department of Columbia University. He has written over ten books, including Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, A study in Terror and Healing (1987); Mimesis and Alterity (1993); What Color is the Sacred? (2006); and forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, Palma Africana. Taussig studied medicine in Australia at the University of Sydney, and he earned a PhD in anthropology at the London School of Economics in 1974. He has taught at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia, the University of Michigan New York University and elsewhere. In addition to his many contributions to international conferences and a number of distinguished visiting professorships, he has pursued intensive and exhaustive fieldwork every year since 1969, geographically focussing mostly on Colombia and Venezuela. His research interest and writings have spanned different subject areas, such as the history of African slavery and of abolition in Western Colombia; popular manifestations of the working of commodity fetishism; the sociology of malnutrition; the impact of colonialism on ‘shamanism’ and folk healing; the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual; mimesis in relation to sympathetic magic; state fetishism; secrecy; beauty and violence; or the sun in our age of global warming.