End-Times 101.(The Talk of the Town)(professor Michael Taussig's seminar on the apocalypse)

It was a sunny spring day when Michael Taussig, a professor of anthropology at Columbia, wrapped up his graduate seminar on the apocalypse (official title: "Preemptive Apocalyptic Thought: The Angel of History Reconsidered in Light of Climate Change, the War on Terror, and Financial Meltdown"). Meanwhile, the World Health Organization was warning of an imminent swine-flu pandemic, the gross domestic product shrivelled for the third quarter in a row, and Senator Arlen Specter became a Democrat.

Inside the seminar room, students were discussing Hurricane Katrina and African-American science fiction. Lance Thurner, a candidate for a master's degree in oral history, was about to show the class a low-budget 2008 film called "The Fullness of Time." In the movie, Gigi, a woman on a mission from another planet, lands in New Orleans two years after Katrina, with the Mardi Gras Indians and a New Orleans brass band as her spiritual guides. When the screening was over, Taussig, who is sixty-nine, declared it to be "one of the greatest pieces of ethnography I've ever seen in my entire life!" He said, "I can't believe how wonderfully unreal this reality is."

Taussig, who is the author of such texts as "My Cocaine Museum" and "What Color Is the Sacred?," is the foremost practitioner of a technique called "fictocriticism," which the Times has called "gonzo anthropology." Trained as a physician in Australia, Taussig discovered his calling in the jungles of Colombia, where he travelled in 1969, inspired by the struggles of Marxist guerrillas. (He also discovered there the hallucinogenic properties of yage.) He is tall, with steel-gray hair, and he had on a jungle-print shirt and linen pants.

He decided to teach a class on the apocalypse, he said, because "now seemed like a good time." He had to turn away more than a dozen students. Halfway through the semester, he abolished final papers, replacing them with "apo diaries," in which students were to note omens of the apocalypse around them, using the scrapbooks of William S. Burroughs as a model. One student's included an image of the wrestler Jake (The Snake) Roberts, snake in hand, juxtaposed with a glaring Jesus, also snake in hand, who is saying, "Don't fuck with the Apocalypse."

Topics during the semester have included Glenn Beck, an R.V. that can ...