JCRT 5.1 DECEMBER 2003 84 DARLENE M. JUSCHKA University of Regina T HE WRITING OF E THNOGRAPHY : MAGICAL R EALISM AND MICHAEL T AUSSIG 1 Language is not a medium; it is a constitutive element of material social practice… Language is in fact a special kind of material practice: that of human sociality. —Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature Introduction: Establishing the Ground of Contestation HE CURRENT EPISTEMOLOGICAL CRISIS IN THE WEST has had an interesting and productive affect on the writing of ethnography. Ethnography, a method of knowledge acquisition, development, and dissemination has become suspect under the pressure of this challenge and many have risen to address it. Scholars from such disciplines as Anthropology, Religious Studies, Sociology and Women’s Studies who employ the ethnographic method, must engage fully the crisis but in this engagement there is much to gain. Toward examining the impact of the epistemological crisis, this paper first explicates the problem, some of the issues related to the problem, and then intersects with the genre of Magical Realism through one ethnographer’s critically creative reply to the crisis of the “posts”: Michael Taussig’s magical realist ethnography, The Magic of the State (1997). The crisis in knowledge has affected all disciplines, or at least those disciplines that are self-consciousabout the production of knowledge. This current crisis is of course a product of the rise of feminisms, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcoloniality. Noticeably three of these epistemological locations claim the “post” or after-modernity position. They self-consciously engage in the paradigm of thinking found in modernism, structuralism,and colonialism, but deconstruct their 1 This paper was given on a panel for the Canadian Women’s Studies Association and Canadian Sociological and Anthropological Association at the Canadian Congress May 29, 2002. T