Taussig introduces his subject matter in his author's note, stating that the purpose of his text is to examine, "the politics of epistemic murk and the fiction of the real, in the creation of Indians, in the role of the myth and magic in colonial violence as much as in its healing, and in the way that healing can mobilize terror in order to subvert it ... through the tripping up of power in its own disorderliness. That is why my subject is not the truth of being but the "social being" of truth, not whether facts are real but what the politics of their interpretation and representation are" (xiii, italics added).