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Reading Taussig's more naive and/or over-the-top speculations (he uses too many exclamation points for those of us who wear muted colors!) it occurs to me that it would be good if theorists of fantasy literature and art critics joined anthropologists in discussions of design and fashion.
The aforementioned Karim Rashid, and another still-hot philosophically minded fashion designer, Hussein Chalayan, share the neither-here-nor-thereness I had mentioned previously in re Malinowski: Rashid's father was the only member of the family to leave Egypt and move to Italy (and France, and eventually to Canada), and Chalayan hails from Turkish Cyprus and is linked to London by virtue of profession, personal choice, and colonial history as modified by later geopolitics.
Chalayan, and Rashid to a lesser degree, create designs that are implicitly or explicitly narrative, and their sense of play and speculation seem more congruent to those of fantasy and sci-fi than of standard narrative fiction. Their what-ifs play out as dresses that embody technology but are unsuitable for street wear, or environments that can be lived in, quite happily, but look like sets for some science fiction movie not yet imagined. And the narratives within which these objects make sense are not the stories we read in the daily news reports, online or in print.
And Taussig needs to make his own sources clearer (as do I, sometimes) or else admit that he is figuring out on his own what art critics figured out long ago regarding visual cues, though the critics figured them out by following the same hints that Taussig is following as regards photography and chromophobia and chromophilia (on which books have been written that I assume Taussig knows but is suppressing for the sake of maintaining a breathlessly paced narrative).
The aforementioned Karim Rashid, and another still-hot philosophically minded fashion designer, Hussein Chalayan, share the neither-here-nor-thereness I had mentioned previously in re Malinowski: Rashid's father was the only member of the family to leave Egypt and move to Italy (and France, and eventually to Canada), and Chalayan hails from Turkish Cyprus and is linked to London by virtue of profession, personal choice, and colonial history as modified by later geopolitics.
Chalayan, and Rashid to a lesser degree, create designs that are implicitly or explicitly narrative, and their sense of play and speculation seem more congruent to those of fantasy and sci-fi than of standard narrative fiction. Their what-ifs play out as dresses that embody technology but are unsuitable for street wear, or environments that can be lived in, quite happily, but look like sets for some science fiction movie not yet imagined. And the narratives within which these objects make sense are not the stories we read in the daily news reports, online or in print.
And Taussig needs to make his own sources clearer (as do I, sometimes) or else admit that he is figuring out on his own what art critics figured out long ago regarding visual cues, though the critics figured them out by following the same hints that Taussig is following as regards photography and chromophobia and chromophilia (on which books have been written that I assume Taussig knows but is suppressing for the sake of maintaining a breathlessly paced narrative).
