The Magic of the State

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.