Beauty and the Beast - Tapa dura

"Beauty and the Beast is an original work, surprising not only in its thesis but in its tone, pacing, and voice. It presents its case slowly and through digressions and returns, performing a way of theorizing through writing, training the reader to follow what's going on as an ethnographer does-how everything matters, how we should just see where it all goes, and how we shouldn't overdo it. Gripping, moving, and brilliant, Beauty and the Beast is fun to read and to think with. It punctures an apparatus, producing a great sigh of relief. It is a gift." -Katie Stewart, University of Texas at Austin"

"Beauty and the Beast" begins with a question: Is beauty destined to end in tragedy? Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, Michael Taussig scrutinizes the anxious, audacious, and sometimes destructive attempts people make to transform their bodies through cosmetic surgery and liposuction. He balances an examination of surgeries meant to enhance an individual's beauty with an often overlooked counterpart, surgeries performed - often on high-profile criminals - to disguise one's identity. Situating this globally shared phenomenon within the economic, cultural, and political history of Colombia, Taussig links the country's long civil war and its bodily mutilation and torture to the beauty industry at large, sketching Colombia as a country whose high aesthetic stakes make it a stage where some of the most important and problematic ideas about the body are played out. Central to Taussig's examination is George Bataille's notion of depense, or "wasting." While depense is often used as a critique, Taussig also looks at the exuberance such squandering creates and its position as a driving economic force. Depense, he argues, is precisely what these procedures are all about, and the beast on the other side of beauty should not be dismissed as simple recompense. At once theoretical and colloquial, public and intimate, "Beauty and the Beast" is a true-to-place ethnography-written in Taussig's trademark voice-that tells a thickly layered but always accessible story about the lengths to which people will go to be physically remade.