From The Magic of the State, by Columbia anthropologist Michael Taussig, published by Routledge in 1997. The New York Times reports that Taussig has come under criticism from other anthropologists for jettisoning traditional enthographic accounts, blending factual and fictional elements. The following is a fictionalized ethnography of a place Taussig refers to as "European Elsewhere" but which the Times says resembles contemporary Venezuela:

The decay. The gloom descending. The rain dripping from the haze on the mountain where life and death ferment in the dankness of plastic everywhere, holy and unclean, garbage everywhere, rocks painted with the national colors, caves with interiors painted with the national colors, people lying still in front of their shrines under giant trees in the stillness of the night.

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