Skip to content

Booksellers & Trade Customers: Sign up for online bulk buying at trade.atlanticbooks.com for wholesale discounts

Booksellers: Create Account on our B2B Portal for wholesale discounts

I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own

by Michael Taussig
Save 8% Save 8%
Current price ₹2,656.00
Original price ₹2,898.00
Original price ₹2,898.00
Original price ₹2,898.00
(-8%)
₹2,656.00
Current price ₹2,656.00

Imported Edition - Ships in 12-14 Days

Free Shipping in India on orders above Rs. 500

Request Bulk Quantity Quote
+91
Book cover type: Paperback
  • ISBN13: 9780226789835
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: University of Chicago Press
  • Publisher Imprint: University of Chicago Press
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 173
  • Original Price: GBP 23.0
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 236 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): Anthropology / Cultural & Social and Latin America / General

I Swear I Saw This records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig's reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. Taking as a starting point a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006--as well as its caption, "I swear I saw this"--Taussig considers the fieldwork notebook as a type of modernist literature and the place where writers and other creators first work out the imaginative logic of discovery. Notebooks mix the raw material of observation with reverie, juxtaposed, in Taussig's case, with drawings, watercolors, and newspaper cuttings, which blend the inner and outer worlds in a fashion reminiscent of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs's surreal cut-up technique. Focusing on the small details and observations that are lost when writers convert their notes into finished pieces, Taussig calls for new ways of seeing and using the notebook as form. Memory emerges as a central motif in I Swear I Saw This as he explores his penchant to inscribe new recollections in the margins or directly over the original entries days or weeks after an event. This palimpsest of afterthoughts leads to ruminations on Freud's analysis of dreams, Proust's thoughts on the involuntary workings of memory, and Benjamin's theories of history--fieldwork, Taussig writes, provokes childhood memories with startling ease. I Swear I Saw This exhibits Taussig's characteristic verve and intellectual audacity, here combined with a revelatory sense of intimacy. He writes, "drawing is thus a depicting, a hauling, an unraveling, and being impelled toward something or somebody." Readers will exult in joining Taussig once again as he follows the threads of a tangled skein of inspired associations.

Taussig, Michael: -

Michael Taussig is emeritus professor of anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of many books, including And the Garden Is You and Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Trusted for over 49 years

Family Owned Company

Secure Payment

All Major Credit Cards/Debit Cards/UPI & More Accepted

New & Authentic Products

India's Largest Distributor

Need Support?

Whatsapp Us