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

Abstract

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.