Beauty and the Beast

ISBN: 0226789861

Author: Taussig, Michael

Condition: New

Beauty and the Beast begins with the 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 individuals beauty with an often overlooked counterpart, surgeries performed-often on high profile criminals-to disguise ones identity. Situating this globally shared phenomenon within the economic, cultural, and political history of Colombia, Taussig links the countrys 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 Taussigs examination is George Batailles 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 Taussigs trademark voice-that tells a thickly layered but always accessible story about the lengths to which people will go to be physically remade.