14 african appropriations
CONTACT AND COPYIn his book Mimesis and Alterity, Michael Taussig (1993: xiii) defines the
human mimetic faculty as “the nature that culture uses to create second
nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield
into and become other.” He goes on to explain that the “wonder of mime-
sis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to
the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and
that power” (xiii). Inspired by Benjamin, Taussig broadens the former’s
theme of the surfacing of the primitive within modernity to some extent
by showing that the complex dialectics of mimesis and alterity have gov-
erned “primitive” encounters with alterity no less than “civilized” ones,
with anthropology being the most prominent among the latter. Taussig
traces the logic of contact and copy back and forth between Cuna healing
figurines, Frazer’s sympathetic magic, mimetically capacious machinery
(such as the phonograph and the camera), situations of first contact, and
both ethnographic writing and film. The all-too human idea that contact
with something may be established by means of its copy may likely be
traced back to physics and physiology, and is therefore grounded in nature.
Contact and copy turn out to be steps in the process of sensing. Taussig
(1993: 21) writes: “A ray of light, for example, moves from the rising sun
into the human eye where it makes contact with the retinal rods and cones
to form, via the circuits of the central nervous system, a (culturally at-
tuned) copy of the rising sun. On this line of reasoning, contact and copy
merge to become virtually identical, different moments of the one process
of sensi ng ; seei ng somet h i ng or hea r i ng somet h i ng is to be i n contac t w it h
that something.” Media, especially those producing image and sound, are
“mimetically capacious machines” (243). They can make copies of physical
realities appear, which are then sensed by human spectators or audiences.
Thei r m i met ic capac it y combi nes w it h t hat of t he hu ma n users. “A ca mera
copies a physical reality through a form of contact with it (light reflected
by an object makes an impression on film); this copy—the film image—
contacts the retinal rods of the eye and forms a second copy that connects
the spectator with the invisible original” (Yanoshak 2008: 1052). Insofar
as media can create copies of absent originals, they connect such copies
with their originals through the eyes of the beholder. Therefore, obtaining