In this book, a make-believe cocaine museum becomes a vantage point from which to assess the lives of Afro-Colombian
gold miners drawn into the dangerous world of cocaine production in the rain forest of Colombia's Pacific Coast.
Although modeled on the famous Gold Museum in Colombia's central bank, the Banco de la República, Taussig's
museum is also a parody aimed at the museum's failure to acknowledge the African slaves who mined the country's
wealth for almost four hundred years.
Combining natural history with political history in a filmic, montage style, Taussig deploys the show-and-tell
modality of a museum to engage with the inner life of heat, rain, stone, and swamp, no less than with the life
of gold and cocaine.
This effort to find a poetry of words becoming things is brought to a head by the explosive qualities of those
sublime fetishes of evil beauty, gold and cocaine. At its core, Taussig's museum is about the lure of forbidden
things, charged substances that transgress moral codes, the distinctions we use to make sense of the world, and
above all the conventional way we write stories.
